Small Business SEM

The 2008 World Tour took me to the Big Apple last week for SES New York — one of the most professionally satisfying and personally enjoyable conferences I’ve attended. Oddly, I attended fewer sessions at this conference than at any before. I spent more time doing real work (one day was largely devoted to meeting [...]

For those of you who are new SBS readers & subscribers, here’s a list of noteworthy posts you probably missed from one year ago. I try to put together a post like this each month.

When Local Search Isn’t Really Local
The Slow Growth of Podcasting
The Glacial Rate of Change at Google Maps
Tonight’s Jaw-Droppingly Stunning Statistic [...]

I’m at SES New York this week and enjoyed a really solid session in the Kelsey track called “Video Made the SMB Star” — it really opened my eyes to what’s going on with local search and video content. Best of all, my wife was sitting next to me during the session and is equally [...]

Quick lunchtime post here: My latest Search Engine Land column is online today — it’s a profile/interview of Pink Cake Box, a small business using a blog, Flickr, and other methods to market successfully online.
As I say at the end of the interview, I’m looking for more small businesses to profile like this in the [...]

The best three weeks of the year are about to begin. I’m talking about the NCAA basketball tournament, better known as March Madness. Just like last year, it’s time to show off your basketball smarts in a friendly competition against your fellow search marketers. (And just like last year, I’ll win*.)
Teams and brackets [...]

The 2nd annual SearchFest conference (hosted by SEMpdx) is in the books, and the folks in Portland have a good thing going here.
This year’s conference was held at the Oregon Zoo (thus this photo of a sleeping tiger, which is pretty much how I felt by the end of the day), and the location [...]

Planning is underway for next year’s SEMMY Awards, and I want to share two things in this post: first, an update on what’s going on; and second, a call for help from anyone interested.
Here’s the Latest
As I said all along, next year’s SEMMYs have to use a better method of finding nominated posts. Even though [...]

In light of my weekend post about ratings and reviews not mattering when local listings are shown in the Yahoo! Shortcuts, we had a little dustup today and it turns out the original post needs clarifying. Here’s the real and accurate story:
Ratings (stars) are taken into account, but review text is not.
That’s word-for-word from Yahoo! [...]