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 City.  This [...]

I recently updated a Flash portfolio for one of my clients, a local photographer. Now, before all my SEO buddies jump all over me for building a website entirely done in Flash, keep in mind that I advised the client of the advantages and disadvantages of Flash vs. HTML in advance of development and [...]

With all of the buzz surrounding meta tags, social media, and reciprocal links floating around the small business web community today, it’s important to separate the wheat from the chaff. Small business search engine optimization still boils down to two things:
A) Great content
B) Some links pointing to that content
With that in mind, here are [...]

Nearly all of the Local Search Marketing experts agree that the problem with Local Search is that “It’s too fragmented and too complex.” This post examines why that’s only a part of the problem, and why Google and the other search engines actually WANT small businesses to succeed online.

Here’s a list of all of my SES San Jose 2007 recaps, for quicker reference:

Top Ten Small Business Takeaways
Linkbaiting and Viral Search Success
Local Search Marketing Techniques
The Paid Links Debate
Searcher Behavior Research Update
Universal and Blended Search
Personalization, User Data, and Search
B2B Search Marketing Tactics
Marissa Mayer’s Keynote Interview with Danny Sullivan
Social Scene Recap

After completing my individual recaps of the biggest search conference of the year, I thought it’d be instructive to pare them all down to a Cliffs-Notes version for small business owners and local search marketers.
10. Now is the time to create a video related to your business. With all of the buzz around Google [...]

It’s a good thing unauthorized videotaping isn’t allowed at SES…if it were, the cameras might have caught me drooling with a faraway look in my eye for most of this session.  Three of my absolute favorite SEOs in the world (Rebecca Kelley of SEOmoz, Cameron Olthuis of CameronOlthuis.com, Jennifer Laycock of Search Engine Guide) led [...]

Karen Breen Vogel of ClearGauge, Paul Slack of WebDex, and Patricia Hursh of SmartSearch Marketing presented on this panel, which sadly was focused more on PPC than SEO efforts in the B2B marketing space.
There were some interesting tidbits for B2B marketers and website designers offered by the panel, though.  Unlike B2C websites, where the goal [...]

Having attended this session with great anticipation last year (2006), and having been disappointed in the lack of creative tactics and actionable advice that was presented, I was somewhat pleasantly surprised by the actionable techniques offered by the panel this year.
Justin Sanger of LocalLaunch was up first, starting the panel with an explosive stat: 2.2 [...]

Gord Hotchkiss of Enquiro was the clear ‘rockstar’ on this panel, presenting data from a series of eye-tracking studies his company had completed earlier this year.
His conclusion?  Personalized results do appear to work.  Time spent on each personalized result, as well as fixation, and clicks were all double when compared to ordinary results.
Interestingly, the embedding [...]