Small Business SEM

At the start of the year, I vowed to do a better job of bookmarking and tracking what I felt were the best and most helpful posts or discussion threads. I wasn’t too good about that in 2006, and I think my own writing here on SBS was hurt without the ability to quickly reference [...]

I didn’t take a stance last night when writing about the new Google Maps display in Google’s regular SERPs, aside from questioning if it will ultimately increase use of Google Maps as a local search tool.
Have no fear, WebmasterWorld has a thread about the new display, and the responses are overwhelmingly against it:
Now half the [...]

One of my recent projects at work involved helping to write a report on specific SEO tactics for the retail industry. I was asked to write about 2-3 pages of strategies, but then got on a roll and ended up writing about 7 pages. Whoops! (Me? Wordy? No way…)
Marchex/TrafficLeader published the report today, under the [...]

You have to go see Frank’s blog, locallytype(d), for a clever bit of offline advertising that promotes both Google Maps and the businesses that use it.
(As I’ve been saying for a few months now, nobody’s pushing local like Google.)

Big announcement today on the official Google Blog about the continuing merger of Maps/Local into Google’s regular SERPs. In a nutshell, Google reports that anytime you do a search that it recognizes as local, you’ll get a new “Onebox” that looks like this, with a map and three business listings:

In its post, Google is trumpeting [...]

One of the slides I use in my “Big Ideas for Small Sites” presentation at SES covers some of the SEO training classes/seminars that are available to those looking to learn. I’ll need to add the new SEMPO Institute to that slide for the next presentation.
It’s a web-based program that right now consists only of [...]

Today’s Orange County Register has a profile of local search destination Local.com, and writer Jonathan Lansner does a pretty good job covering all the challenges of local search, esp. considering he’s writing for a general audience that may not even be familiar with the difference between “search” and “local search.”
He hits on:

the challenge of selling [...]

Batten down the hatchets; this might be the biggest link-o-rama ever, since I was on the road last Friday and I have two weeks of stuff to cover.
Shimon Sandler shares thoughts on discovering valuable links: Criteria & Time Period for Link Effectiveness. I think this is a good complement to my recent Building the Perfect [...]