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. [...]

Step-by-step instructions for the small business just trying to get a handle on this whole internet marketing thing.
In honor of the recent passing of the former president of the National Rifle Association, I submit to American small business owners the following ten essential action items for a successful online presence.
Disclaimer: This is NOT a comprehensive [...]

Just a quick semi-live blog from the Opening Keynote address at SMX West:
Danny Sullivan’s opening keynote gave prominent mention for the importance of Local (along with other Vertical search elements) in the coming year, as part of what he refers to alternately as ‘Blended Search’ and ‘Search 3.0′.
Danny featured a slide showing Google’s result for [...]

(N.B., if you’re not subscribed to Mike Blumenthal’s blog, you should be. Do it here.)
Mike Blumenthal’s been all over the recent experimentation with the Google Local OneBox Ten Pack, first made public by Paul Jahn, in the last several days. Mike accurately notes that while displaying a larger number of businesses seems [...]

The honor goes to this post by Tim Coleman of Convert Offline, a Boutique SEM for Local Service Businesses.
Tim 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]