Small Business SEM

(I’m just gonna say it, no sense beating around the bush: This was not a good month for search/marketing posts. Summer doldrums, summer vacation, who knows. But there’s less than 20 links here, and a good chunk are Rants or LOL Funny!)
Here’s my roundup of the best search/marketing posts during July. If you’re new to [...]

I spent some time in St. Louis last week on a client visit. When I got back and settled in this weekend, I decided to head over to Yelp to drop in a couple reviews — one for the hotel where I stayed, and one for the local restaurant where we had lunch.
After I wrote [...]

I’m traveling the rest of this week (looking forward to meeting a new client in St. Louis!), so posting will be light for a while. But before I hit the road, a couple things:
Video continues to become more prominent as a local search/small business marketing tool. Superpages.com announced this week that video ads are now [...]

This post was supposed to be about the most popular local search terms across U.S. cities of all sizes, from New York to Bakersfield. I was planning to show that hotels, dining, and entertainment — what we generally consider the pillars of local search — aren’t universally popular local search terms.
I chose four big [...]

1.) Are you a small business owner or webmaster?
2.) Do you think some exposure from USA Today might be good for your business?
If you answered YES to both of those questions, do what Anita Campbell says. (It’s easy, too!)

Full link-o-rama tonight, which may be an unconscious pre-reaction to knowing there probably won’t be a link-o-rama at all next week, so here we go, peeps….
I’m gonna start with a short list of good articles that have nothing to do with search. Because it’s my blog, and I can.

The 7 Habits of High Successful [...]

The headlines are all you need to see — talk about mixed messages! Here’s a screenshot of the top two stories last weekend in the SEO category on Sphinn:

(Thx to Tamar for noticing it first!)

Talk about great timing: Here I am, burying myself in the land of user reviews and user-generated content (for my SES San Jose presentation next month), and a huge shoe falls right around me:
Wal-Mart is adding user reviews to its Web site.
I’m going to tread lightly with this comment, but what makes this important is [...]