Archive for December, 2007

Tim Coleman lays out a VERY convincing argument for why certain businesses (and certain businesses’ reviews) show up at the top of the Google Local algorithm, and why others don’t. It’s the most salient, actionable piece of advice I’ve ever read for small businesses looking to get a leg up on the competition in the new Map + 3 interface that’s become ubiquitous in Universal Search.

Though on the whole, I found PubCon to be a bit repetitive of many of the presentations I’d seen at other conferences I’d been to this year (SMX Seattle, SES San Jose, SEOmoz Seminar), the social scene in Vegas left nothing to be desired. Monday I arrived in Vegas Monday afternoon, and after wandering around [...]

Gregory Markel: Greg brought to everyone’s attention TubeMogul.com, a site that allows for one upload and automatic submission to 12 video search engines. He still recommends that smaller sites with fewer videos submit on a manual basis to vary their titles and descriptions in order to rank for a broader range of keywords, but for [...]

Unfortunately, I missed the first two presenters on this panel, Jill Whalen of HighRankings and Heather Lloyd-Martin of SuccessWorks, as I was attending a panel on CSS and HTML coding which proved a bit too basic for my skillset. But I’m extremely glad I made the effort to hear Brian Clark’s presentation, which laid out [...]

Jim Boykin: To analyze the effectiveness of a page you’re getting a link on, check Yahoo Site Explorer or use MSN’s tools to determine if there are any inbound links to the EXACT page you’re hoping to receive a link from. Visit this site to find result volumes (and by implication, difficulty of ranking) for [...]

Brian Gil of Yahoo Local mentioned that they are now actively spidering the hCard format to gather information about geographic location. Yahoo in particular is “multi-sourcing” local content; the more sources they find the information, and the higher the quality of those sources, the higher their trust in your small business and the better you’re [...]

Rand Fishkin: Rand brought up a huge list of social media sites that are ripe for picking traffic from. Some I’d heard of, some I hadn’t (Care2, Deviant Art, and QoolSqool). There are also a lot of great sites where you can get your design featured, including CSSBeauty, CSSVault, and the Adobe Showcase. The time [...]

Craig Newmark, the visionary founder of the now ubiquitous local search site Craigslist began the conference with a humble bang, speaking about the history of his company and his plans for the future. Genesis of Craigslist: Craig started a CC email list in 1995 to keep San Franciscans informed about “stuff” going on in the [...]

So here we are nearly 30 days after my last post. November has been a crazily busy, but tremendously rewarding month for me professionally–more on that later this month. Coincidentally enough that last post was also inspired by the same person: Rhea Drysdale. One of Rhea’s most recent entries is part of a thread that [...]