I continue my monthly website design award series, showcasing seven websites I’ve come across recently deserving of special mention. Featured this month are Wilson Miner Live, NexCore Healthcare, Opera Colorado, AllThingsD, the UC-Berkeley Spanish-Portuguese Department, BART, and MacAllan Ridge.

Google may have stopped showing citations within Local Business Listings. If this is indeed a permanent fixture, and not just a technical glitch, it makes the Google Local algorithm MUCH more opaque and makes it much more difficult for Local SEOs like myself to figure out why certain businesses are ranking well.

Just returned from SMX Local in San Francisco and my head is still spinning. Chris Sherman, Greg Sterling, and the rest of the Third Door Media team did an amazing job with this conference, and if you are at all inclined towards Local Search, I’d highly recommend attending next year. Read the rest of this post for my summary of the most amazing tips from the conference (caution: there were A LOT of them!).

In case you missed the announcement last week, ActiveRain, a popular blogging community for Realtors, is launching (or re-launching, I can’t quite figure it out) a subsidiary social news/networking site called Localism.com. Almost on cue from Matt McGee, ActiveRain’s goal is to make this the HyperLocal hub for a vast number of communities around the country. Should Realtors leverage this new opportunity or find other ways of making a name for themselves online?

Eric Enge just posted a remarkably thorough interview with Carter Maslan of Google Local. I’m going to run through the highlights here, but please, please, please read the interview in its entirety. What a fabulous interview. I applaud Carter for his open-ness in talking about the factors their algorithm is looking at, and I applaud Eric, for being so thorough with his questions.

If you’re a Bay Area small business, or work as an SEO that serves businesses with a local focus, I’d highly recommend checking out SMX Local in San Francisco on July 24-25.

Looking at the agenda, there seem to be many more sessions devoted to marketing topics and Local rankings than there were at last year’s event. I have a feeling that Chris Sherman and the rest of the Third Door Team have taken to heart the suggestions of last year’s attendees to focus less on industry-type topics and more on SEO.

I’ve said on this blog before that customer service is one of the most effective marketing strategies that a small business can use.

Well, here’s some more proof.

The Top Small Business Takeaways from SMX Advanced — So apparently the ban on revealing secrets from the “Give It Up” session was lifted this weekend, so I thought it was about damned time for me to publish my recap of what is turning into my favorite search engine marketing conference.