Small Business SEM

I have to say … this was a pretty boring month up until these last couple days. No offense to anyone, of course. But have a look: If not for the current hot news, there wouldn’t even be a RANTS category below. Fortunately, we got some news and several terrific rants. Whew! Blogger of the [...]

There’s a saying in baseball — “It’s just Manny being Manny.” — which is said about Manny Ramirez of the Boston Red Sox, and it’s used whenever he does unusual things (on the field or off). Like, if he skips practice or shows up late, it’s just Manny being Manny. If he thinks the inning [...]

Some of you already know that, and some figure it out when you see me proudly using my electric red Macbook at the conferences … so it’s no surprise I’d love this and have to post about it, off-topic or not.
Steve Jobs and Walt Mossberg at the D: All Things Digital conference this week. [...]

The title of the post says it all, so here they are:
Domain Popularity Tool from LinkVendor. This is essentially a backlink checker, and when they say “domain popularity”, that’s what they mean — it doesn’t check links to a deep directory or URL, just to the domain. Here’s what it looks like:

Ignoring the domain-only limitation, [...]

I wrote a post last week which led to some great discussion, including probably the most contrarian comment I’ve ever received from a reader. The post, When the Web is a Small Business’s Enemy, is about how the Internet is not always sunshine and opportunity for small businesses. My post was mainly about the story [...]

This’ll get you thinking: Jeremiah Owyang writes about irrelevant corporate web sites, and more specifically, how such sites can (and will need to) evolve. In particular, I love this bit here:
The corporate website is an unbelievable collection of hyperbole, artificial branding, and pro-corporate content. As a result, trusted decisions are being made on other locations [...]

Just thinking out loud here…
Bill Slawski just wrote about a new patent application from Google which deals with the local search space, and specifically with how to use “category synonyms” to refine a local search. As Bill explains:
The way that a search engine classifies a business into a category may affect how it is listed [...]

“We all want to be big, big stars … but we got different reasons for that”
Let’s start with a couple from one of my favorite topics: Local Search. First, Greg Sterling has an interesting write-up about an interesting search tool called “Palore” that can add a lot of valuable information to local search business listings. [...]