Small Business SEM

Here’s my roundup of the best search/marketing posts during April. If you’re new to SBS, this is a monthly feature and will lead to something fun later in the year. You can find earlier “Best Of”s for each month in the archives. Only rule is that my own posts are not eligible.
Small Business

Stoney/Search Engine Guide: [...]

Search marketing has been a hot topic in “big media” in recent months, but even more so in the last week.
Elizabeth Holmes wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal last week (article link has expired, sorry) about how some small businesses are choosing not to bother with having a web site.
Many small businesses [...]

No cute lyric tonight; let’s get right to it, shall we?
Yes, it’s still sometimes a challenge to convince small business owners that they need to add great content to their Web sites. Nick Usborne makes the case in nice, simple language: 3 Reasons to Add Articles to your Web Site. Come to think of it [...]

David Wallace gets the “Friday Night Funnies” award for this week with a post that had me LOLing and sharing the URL with my wife today:
10 Signs That You May Be a Blog Addict
Great stuff!
My non-award winning “funny” actually comes courtesy of my mother-in-law, who is so cute that she cuts “Internet stuff” out of [...]

Google has made a few changes to its local search “Onebox” display, and the changes seem like they might be in reply to some of the criticism they received since introducing the new display in late January.
Background: The link above points to a January 29th post I made showing a new Google Maps display which [...]

It’s the only comic I read anymore. Here’s one example why:

Click to see the larger version at Dilbert.com

My latest “Small is Beautiful” column for Search Engine Land is now online:
Meet Your New Employee: Writer, Marketer, Evangelist
It’s essentially an encouragement to small business owners to give thought to the next permanent employee you hire. I’ve worked with so many clients (of all sizes) that just didn’t have the necessary people on staff to [...]

Colin Carmichael, Director of Product Development at TrueLocal.com, dropped by this morning to explain the funny/strange SERPs I noticed — and posted about — a couple nights ago. You can read Colin’s comment here, but here’s the main point:
In a recent data update, we had a wee glitch that was complicated by a simultaneous change [...]