Frequent readers know that for five months a year, I have college basketball on the brain. But while the hardwood is vacant, I happily fix my gaze upon the college gridiron for a few months. My assertion with this article is that the college football BCS serves as a great analogy for Local Search–only in this case BCS stands for “Best Citation Sources.” The post looks at why InfoUSA, SuperPages, Acxiom, Localeze, Yelp and InsiderPages are so important in Local Search.

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]