Greg Sterling reported last week that Google is now asking searchers to tell them their ZIP codes so that they can return geo-relevant results. In this post I take a look at some of the implications of this development, and expand on an earlier hypothesis about why Google introduced the 10-pack to Universal search in the first place. Yes, ZIP code targeting means more relevant results for searchers, but it’s an innovation that might not be entirely altruistic.

A couple of my favorite SEO firms, Distilled UK, of London, England and NetConcepts of Madison, WI have announced efforts in recent days that will help make the world a better place, using SEO and SEM. Here are a couple of brief summaries of those efforts, with an idea of how you can get [...]

In this lengthy post (sorry, it must some kind of delayed reaction to Twitter’s 140-character limitation) I’ll try to explain a hypothesis about optimization for the Google Local algorithm (along with the 10-pack, 3-pack and authoritative OneBox) that’s been brewing in my mind for the past couple of months. It has really crystallized this week in various discussions I’ve had with other Local SEOs, including Mike Blumenthal, EarlPearl, and David Klein, and after reading a blog post by Stephen Espinosa.

Other experts, especially Bill Slawski and Mike Blumenthal (in fact, I think Mike may have been the first person to turn me onto the word “citation” in some of my conversations with him?) have postulated the importance of “citations” for quite awhile, but for whatever reason, the concept never really hit home for me until recently.

With this post, I’m launching a monthly series where eventually I’ll share some link love for impressive website designs. Eventually this will be a showcase for sites I’ve found in the last 30 days, but for the first couple of editions, I’ll be running through a bunch of the sites I’ve tagged in my del.icio.us account.

There’s no official nomination process, so feel free to email sites you’d like me to consider for June. Where possible, I’ll credit both the site and the designer.

May 27th, 2008 Update:
After approximately four weeks under severe Google penalty, it appears that my blog is back in Google’s good graces. I’m back to #2 for search terms like “Flash Vs HTML websites,” which is more or less right where I was before the whole thing started.
When I submitted my request, Google said [...]

Graywolf detailed a terrific collection of Wordpress plugins last week and got me off my kiester to finally post a list of Wordpress plugins that I use frequently, either on my own blog and on my clients’. It’s a lot shorter, but hopefully you’ll find some value from these as well.
1) Plugin to Order [...]

As many of you know, I heart Wordpress. It’s robust, phenomenally easy to customize, and with all of the contributions from the open-source community, “tech support” is never hard to come by. With a few tweaks to the default settings, it’s also quite SEO-friendly. Perhaps best of all, it’s so easy for [...]

For those who hadn’t heard, Marchex and Matt McGee recently decided to part ways. Regardless of any “structural” changes that Marchex was making, I was surprised that they would let such a charismatic and knowledgeable ambassador for their company out of their grasp! But their loss will be someone else’s gain. (It might [...]

Proselytize Your Customers with Exceptional Service
While even casual acquaintances know I’m a big sports fan, and a huge college basketball fan in particular, only the most avid David Mihm fans (read: stalkers :D ) might be aware of my distaste for coffee and coca products, as well as my passion for a certain energy drink [...]

Salk Institute, by TheNose
A Quick and Effective Keyword Research Strategy for Small Businesses
Why you should do keyword research
Without doing keyword research, you might think that “office supply store” is the single most important keyword that you want to show up for in search engines, and that’s where you might throw all of your marketing efforts. [...]