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My worlds are colliding. I mean my “U2 world” and my “SEO world.” I try to keep them separate, but this story makes that impossible. Check it out on the Somerset County Gazette web site.

Apparently, a local/small business owner recently got a job fixing a broken GRAMMY Award that belongs to U2. The article makes several cheesy references to U2 song titles, but here’s the part that matters:

“…one of the band’s management team got in touch after typing in ‘trophy repairs’ into Google.”

SEO FTW!

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

U2 Validates Benefits of SEO

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U2 Validates Benefits of SEO

That was one of the topics of Luther Lowe’s presentation Tuesday at the annual SearchFest conference in Portland. Lowe — Yelp’s Manager of Business Outreach — gave a generally clear description of what the company says are the benefits of advertising on Yelp. I say “generally” because he said that advertising on Yelp gets a business owner “SEO,” but he really meant to say “visibility.”

These are not the same examples he used during the presentation, but they show the same points he made.

1. Visibility on Yelp search result pages

Advertising on Yelp gives a business the opportunity to show up above the regular search results for category/city combinations, like this search for dentists in Los Angeles.

2. Visibility on other business profile pages

A Yelp ad may show up on a competitor’s business profile, like in this example here.

3. No competitor ads on your profile page

Using the example above, no competitors’ ads will show up on the profile page of that dentist because she’s advertising. She’s essentially paying to keep competitors from advertising on her profile page. But note that Yelp still does show other competitors on the page under a “People Who Viewed This Also Viewed” heading.

4. Added content options

Yelp advertisers can also add extra content to their business profiles, such as a photo slideshow and an extra content spot to post alerts or discounts.

5. Promote a “favorite review”

Yelp sponsors can also choose one review of their business and mark it as a “favorite.” In doing so, that review will show up first on the business profile page, as seen here.

Lawsuits: The 800-lb. Gorilla

Before his presentation, Lowe called out the 800-lb. gorilla in the room: the recent lawsuits from small business owners who claim that Yelp has offered to remove negative reviews in exchange for payment. I don’t recall his exact wording, but Lowe rejected the claims of the lawsuit, saying that the alleged behavior — if it were true — would cause Yelp to lose the trust of its users and advertisers.

But from several conversations I’ve had at conferences over the past two weeks, that trust is on shaky ground with some. This isn’t the first time Yelp’s been accused of taking money to remove negative reviews (see Yelp and the Business of Extortion 2.0 from last year), and some are wondering if the phrase “Where there’s smoke, there’s fire” is appropriate.

One suspects that, as long as Yelp offers a way for business owners to manipulate reviews in exchange for advertising (see #5 above), they’ll continue to run the risk of lawsuits — no matter if the lawsuits are justified or just the result of misunderstanding.

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

What Does Advertising on Yelp Get You?

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What Does Advertising on Yelp Get You?

The 4th annual SearchFest conference is in the books, and this one was a lot different than previous SearchFests. The venue was bigger, the crowd filled it, and — for the first time — there were three tracks running concurrently. I’m hoping to do another post on one content-related element from the show, so this post is only going to be a link to my Flickr photoset and an embedded slideshow below. (Disclaimer: The lighting made photography exceptionally difficult, so don’t be alarmed if some of these look … different.)

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

SearchFest 2010 Photos

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SearchFest 2010 Photos

If you’re reading this while at SearchFest 2010, a big welcome to you. Thanks for visiting SmallBusinessSEM.com. In my presentation, I mention a few web sites that you may not have had time to jot down while I was speaking. If that’s the case, here are all the references I made in chronological order:

• Nielsen: Consumers Trust Real Friends and Virtual Strangers the Most
• Local Search Ranking Factors
• Yelp FAQ (most reviews are positive)
• Bazaarvoice Industry Statistics (most reviews are positive)
• Post the good, the bad and the ugly in customer reviews, Dell and evo say

If you have any questions or feedback about my presentation or the session in general, feel free to leave a comment below. There’s also a Contact button at the top of the page. I’d love to hear from you!

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Welcome SearchFest Attendees

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Welcome SearchFest Attendees

Last week’s SMX West conference was a unique one for me. I didn’t get to sit in on many sessions as an attendee because we were a bit short-handed at Search Engine Land, and I was pretty much working constantly on a variety of things for SEL. I live-blogged the keynotes, did the daily coverage roundups, wrote up a bunch of news stories from the conference, and kept up with the daily SearchCap articles.

I also managed to shoot a few photos here and there, and those are now finally on Flickr. You can either see the set on Flickr.com or just use the slideshow embedded below.

This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

SMX West 2010 Photos

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Read the original here: 
SMX West 2010 Photos

If you’re reading this while at SMX West, a big welcome to you. Thanks for visiting SmallBusinessSEM.com. In my presentation, I mention a half-dozen web sites that you may not have had time to jot down while I was speaking. If that’s the case, here are all the references I made in chronological order:

• GetListed.org
• Universal Business Listing
• Localeze
• Google Local Business Center – Category Tool
• Nielsen: Consumers Trust Real Friends and Virtual Strangers the Most
• Local Search Ranking Factors

If you have any questions or feedback about my presentation or the session in general, feel free to leave a comment below. There’s also a Contact button at the top of the page. I’d love to hear from you!

Advertisement: Try Site5 Web Hosting free for 30 days! 99.9% Uptime Guarantee and our customer’s love us!

This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

Welcome SMX West Attendees

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1. Welcome Learn About Web Attendees
2. Welcome GetListed Local University – Spokane Attendees
3. Coordinating 3 Sessions at SMX West

See the original post: 
Welcome SMX West Attendees

It’s sometimes hard to imagine or even quantify the specific SEO benefits of a business blog, but credit the gang at HubSpot for doing a good job of it. If you missed their blog post from a few weeks ago, I think these stats are worth sharing here:

A study of 2,168 HubSpot customers shows that businesses that published at least 5 blog articles in the last 7 days draw 6.9 times more organic search traffic and 1.12 times more referral traffic than those who don’t blog at all.

Here’s all that in a more visual piece of evidence:

You should click through to read the HubSpot post because they have additional stats showing how site traffic goes up the more blog posts you publish.

All of this is a nice complement to HubSpot’s earlier stats, which showed how companies that blog get more traffic, more inbound links, and have more pages indexed in search engines.

A good company blog is an exceptionally powerful SEO weapon.

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

SEO Benefits of Blogging: More Search Traffic

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SEO Benefits of Blogging: More Search Traffic

MIssed this when it came out a week or so ago, but it’s worth posting about after the fact a bit. The Small Business Success Index reports that social media adoption among small businesses has doubled from 12% to 24% in the past year. From reading the release, I gather that “adoption” means a business is actively using social media, as opposed to just having a placeholder profile page.

Here are some of the other findings:

Small business owners use social media to attract new customers:

• 75% surveyed have a company page on a social networking site
• 61% use social media for identifying and attracting new customers
• 57% have built a network through a site like LinkedIn
• 45% expect social media to be profitable in the next twelve months

Small business owners still have concerns with social media:

• 50% of small business social media users say it takes more time than expected
• 17% express that social media gives people a chance to criticize their business on the Internet
• Only 6% feel that social media use has hurt the image of the business more than helped it

The study is sponsored by Network Solutions and the Center for Excellence in Service at the University of Maryland Smith School of Business.

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

More Small Businesses Using Social Media

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More Small Businesses Using Social Media

I sometimes struggle to explain Google’s ranking algorithm to small business owners. I just tried last week during a workshop here in my hometown, and I’m not sure if I did a good job. But fortunately there are other resources out there that do a better job than me.

One is this new article from Wired magazine: Exclusive: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web. Here’s a good portion of it:

Take, for instance, the way Google’s engine learns which words are synonyms. “We discovered a nifty thing very early on,” Singhal says. “People change words in their queries. So someone would say, ‘pictures of dogs,’ and then they’d say, ‘pictures of puppies.’ So that told us that maybe ‘dogs’ and ‘puppies’ were interchangeable. We also learned that when you boil water, it’s hot water. We were relearning semantics from humans, and that was a great advance.”

But there were obstacles. Google’s synonym system understood that a dog was similar to a puppy and that boiling water was hot. But it also concluded that a hot dog was the same as a boiling puppy. The problem was fixed in late 2002 by a breakthrough based on philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s theories about how words are defined by context. As Google crawled and archived billions of documents and Web pages, it analyzed what words were close to each other. “Hot dog” would be found in searches that also contained “bread” and “mustard” and “baseball games” — not poached pooches. That helped the algorithm understand what “hot dog” — and millions of other terms — meant. “Today, if you type ‘Gandhi bio,’ we know that bio means biography,” Singhal says. “And if you type ‘bio warfare,’ it means biological.”

It’s not too technical for me, which means it shouldn’t be too technical for anyone. Highly recommend reading this, not for specific SEO tips but just because the more you understand about how search engines work, the more likely you’ll be able to succeed in increasing search visibility.

One more thing: This Wired article is similar to a series of articles that BusinessWeek ran a couple months ago. I recapped those articles on Search Engine Land, along with links to read each one. Also recommend reading those articles and interviews.

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This is a post from Matt McGee’s blog, Small Business Search Marketing.

How Google’s Algorithm Works

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How Google’s Algorithm Works