Tomorrow morning I’m headed to Chicago for a mostly pleasure mini-vacation, although I hope to meet up with Zach Von Felten from SEM Visibility for some search marketing geek talk. It turns out his work is close to my hotel.

It seems fitting to dedicate this blog post to great blog posts from people in the Chicagoland area.

First, legal marketing expert Larry Bodine writes on how to get new business from online social networks. It focuses on LinkedIn, an e-book from Jill Konrath, and how to use LinkedIn correctly.

Larry probably doesn’t know who the heck I am, but during my stay at FindLaw I had a couple client conference calls with him. I was thinking that he was a competitor, but the calls turned out great and there was a lot of synergy. The sites turned out fantastic!

I’ve always wanted to meet Brad Geddes (aka eWhisper). I haven’t but he provides a great post regarding SEO not being free traffic, the traffic itself, and a great table that shows the pros and cons of conversions, traffic, and conversions from a variety of channels, both on and offline.

I couldn’t find contact info on this one, but a blog post from the legal search marketing blog writes on how to create mini sites regarding legal practice area. From an SEO standpoint, it might be harder to do well with newer niche sites like this, but if social media comes to play, I can definitely see it working.

Yaaayy!!

Just like last year, too bad they’ll still be sitting there in two months. For those who wish to recycle your phone books, Yellowpages.com does have a slick tool to find out where you can do so.

Last October, Radiohead shook up the music industry by allowing potential buyers to download their newest “In Rainbows” album for free.

This time Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails is even taking it further with their new album, “The Slip”. After you provide your email address, they give you the opportunity to send the invitation to up to three friends via email.

I wound up getting two emails before 9:00am from friends who filled out these forms.

This isn’t too much more than what Radiohead has done, but here’s a nice social media suggestion made by Nine Inch Nails.

Here’s another one, right on the nin.com home page.

That’s quite a few Diggs.

Throw in a little user-generated media with their new single, more of a picture with audio, but that’s fine.

…and you have some great social media marketing coverage.

In slightly different news, it’s rumored that both Nine Inch Nails and Radiohead are are on headlining this year’s Lollapolooza, which is very strange since both Radiohead and NIN are known for dissing these types of events.

After months of talks, it looks like Microsoft withdrew its bid to acquire Yahoo.

Here’s Microsoft’s press release.

Reading the whole press release, and maybe it’s just me, but it looks like Steven from Microsoft is telling Jerry from Yahoo to stick it.

We regard with particular concern your apparent planning to respond to a “hostile” bid by pursuing a new arrangement that would involve or lead to the outsourcing to Google of key paid Internet search terms offered by Yahoo! today. In our view, such an arrangement with the dominant search provider would make an acquisition of Yahoo! undesirable to us for a number of reasons:

And…

This would also effectively enable Google to set the prices for key search terms on both their and your search platforms and, in the process, raise prices charged to advertisers on Yahoo. In addition to whatever resulting legal problems, this seems unwise from a business perspective unless in fact one simply wishes to use this as a vehicle to exit the paid search business in favor of Google.

I guess they don’t like Google so much. Nonetheless, no acquisition will occur soon.

Those who know Ward Tongen know that he’s a very smart, outgoing, and funny guy. I’m happy to say that I have co-won the first searchbaiting award from Wardo, searchbaiting extraordinaire.

The middle of the award looks very similar to a soccer ball, which is fitting as I have an old person huff-n-puff rec game tomorrow. From there, I’m going straight to a church confirmation open house for my cousin’s son. My apologies go out in advance to Janie and Neal for smelling like a used jersey, but I’m digressing.

How it Works
It’s a fun combination of linkbaiting and memes, and is explained very well through the link above. Ward linked to this blog and four other Minnesota search marketers with the intent of having us notice it through analytics and stats, vanity Google alerts, or word-of-mouth. The first one who comments on his blog posts wins the sweet ’soccer ball with flames’ award.

This blog is hosted by WordPress and has limited stats and analytics capabilities, but does have basic information including showing who links to this blog. When looking at stats the other day I saw Ward’s incoming link, which is basically how I found his contest.

Kudos to Ward, master searchbaiter!

Greg Sterling and a few others note of a new Interwebz spammer called biglocal.com on a Search Engine Land post.

Many have noticed local (map) results on Google when doing a local search query. If you do a common one such as “pizza in Minneapolis” you’ll see something like this.

The above results are pretty slick and very relevant, appear above the natural results, and the algorithm is separate from the natural results as well.

Now you can do a search for “internet consulting in Minneapolis” and you find a bunch of fake ones from biglocal.com.

Clever indeed, although it’s obviously search engine manipulation and will be deleted once Google finds out what’s going on. Some notes…

1) They’re not local to Minneapolis which is considered essential for Google in these results.

2) Everytime you call their number, you suddenly get a “Due to the high volume of calls, we cannot answer. Please try again later”. On a Saturday? Right. This is noted by others as well.

3) The domain is registered by proxy, which basically means you can’t find out who they are. Domains by proxy are primarily used by those who don’t want themselves to be known.

4) Their “about us” page leads you to a broken page and they don’t show a physical address on their contact page, or anywhere else on the site.

5) The listing addresses they use for themselves are fake. Not just in Minneapolis, but in Seattle, Los Angeles, and pretty much any city across the country.

Although it appears they want to be anonymous, they do have a SuperPages profile and a Yahoo Local listing complete with a five-star “review” and matching physical addresses and Salt Lake City local phone numbers.

It does seem strange that the phrase they’re targeting is “Internet consulting + YourCity”. So many more people search for terms such as “Internet marketing”, “Web marketing”, “Internet advertising”, or “search engine marketing”. The free WordTracker tool isn’t perfect, but see for yourself.

The person or people submitting their listings are pretty clever though, and apparently pretty horny as well. The first Minneapolis listing shows an address of 307 3rd St S. This is about a block from what Google considers the city center and is also arguably one of the main factors Google considers in their local (maps) algorithm.

If you do a “street view” map search, there is no such address, but 308 and 316 3rd St S. shows you none other than this.

That’s right folks. Rick’s Cabaret, a well-known gentleman’s club. Maybe this photo was taken in the morning and these two gentleman shown are waiting outside for the club to open?

In addition to Greg from Search Engine Land, others have written about this too including Mike from the Blumenthals blog, Stephen from I’mNotADoctor (I believe he was the first to find this), and Greg’s article was even Sphunn on Sphinn.

I’ve been doing more “favorite” posts lately, and there’s a reason. There are great posts out there. Let’s share them.

This time it’s a bit unique. Often, the favorites are Minnesota-based Internet marketing posts. Sometimes, they’re about local search in general. This time, it’s about Minnesota-based local search posts.

First, Jennifer Lind talks about the root of local search & where it could take us.

Local search… is it the new way we search or the old way? It’s both. Local search connects us to our community and to our neighbors. The old way of search is now online and it will continue to develop further than it ever could in the traditional means.

It is in fact both. Many people will use the Internet to search for products and services to go offline and physically make a purchase. Jennifer makes some great points including different online options, actually touching a product before making a purchase (this is kinda’ important), and opportunities for local customers to be involved online with businesses they purchase from.

Aaron Weiche has some cool local SEO results with his new company, Five Technology. They have five SEO initiatives so far. I really like number three, which is to create content for users first and search engines second. On a side note, see Barb Prindle. She’s is simply a fantastic writer! Five Technology is doing some very cool things so far (including video optimization) and you will see more of them in the future.

My rollerblading partner (who leaves me in the dust) Ed Kohler gives some insight on where offline shopping beats online today. It includes dealing with disappointment, negotiable pricing, proactive help, and bundling opportunities.

Ed, let’s get on the Greenway and rollerblade!

Maybe I’m the last kid on the block to see this but it strikes me as a bit strange.

I am in the naymz network I guess, but was surprised to see this. It can give the assumption that I would actually pay for a PPC ad for users to see my Naymz profile that I’ve never really done much with.

For those unfamiliar with Naymz, it’s an online reputation management and networking tool where members can say nice things about each other and get a good rep score because of it.

I don’t know if it’s clever or annoying. Any thoughts? In Naymz? Google your name and there’s a good chance they’ll have an ad in your name.

Update - Thanks for the comment Tom. That explains it. I should check out my Naymz email more often

I’ve been both fortunate and honored to be a guest writer for Search Engine Guide since late 2005 (Jennifer and Robert, I’ll write more - really!!)

Since 2005, there have been some great writers that have jumped on board. I’ve met a few of them and hope to meet more the next time I hit a search marketing conference. It seems fitting to give SEG some (well-deserved) love back and provide a Search Engine Guide favorite posts of the week.

The first is from Manoj Jasra titled common web analytics issues. Manoj makes some great points, including a paragraph about the wrong data going to the wrong people. Depending on whether your client contacts are marketing managers, CEOs, or Internet marketing departments should give you an idea of what type of data you can provide them.

Next, David Wallace writes on Matt McGee’s local search workshop presentation during the recent Small Business Unleashed conference. The post is quite lengthy, but it sounds like the presentation was too at 90 minutes! Kudos to both Matt and David. Matt talks about maps, SEO, PPC, local search engines, and even provides a relevant lists of industry sites. It’s a great post! Just read it.

Liana Evans is also at the conference blogging on Sage Lewis’ building a community workshop presentation. During the presentation Sage talks about different community channels such as YouTube, Facebook, and Digg. He begins with YouTube and how easy it is to use, and how to properly optimize and tag your videos. He goes on explaining how you can promote this with other social sites such as Facebook. Lastly, he stresses the importance on participating yourself.

Just like in many industries, you have your honest companies and shysters alike. The search engine marketing industry certainly has plenty of both. One of the latter just got a $100,000 fine for misrepresenting their clients in a number of ways.

Fellow Search Engine Guide blogger Sage Lewis has a video post that mentions the culprits, and the Washington State Attorney General office announced their petition to enforce a court order against them in November, 2007.

This post isn’t to “out” the culprits, but to hopefully give some tips to non-industry business owners and marketers who get pitched from search marketing firms.

Many (not all) will pitch “rankings” for keywords related to your business and will often offer some sort of “top 10″ guarantee. I actually don’t have a problem with this since savvy sales professionals know that’s what potential clients often want to hear. The problem is that rankings simply do not automatically equal net profits.

There’s one word that most of these search engine marketing firms tend to forget:

Marketing.

Yes, marketing.

It seems strange, but it does happen. What are the business overall goals for marketing online?

I hung out with some industry friends tonight and we had a pretty big discussion on SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats). Remember that from beginning college marketing classes? Something so simple as understanding your business SWOTs can definitely help in a search marketing campaign.

There’s another word that is sometimes forgotten in pitches.

Analytics.

This is key. There are plenty of decent analytics packages out there. There are great and worthy ones that can set a price of over 50k a year. Some analytics experts will disagree, but Google Analytics works well for many companies… and it’s free.

Analytics is crucial. It can measure how users navigate your site, how you can continually improve on not just your search marketing efforts, but your usability, design, and development. The possibilities are almost endless. This has everything to do with marketing. Not just search marketing, but marketing in general.