"Fifty Questions You Need Answered Before Starting Your SEO Campaign"
By Stoney deGeyter
search engine land

Dave's Comments: A great little primer for small business owners regarding how and who should be doing their Web site search engine optimizing. All fifty questions are relevant and will take less than 3 minutes to read.

"An online business owner basically has two choices when it comes to their website marketing efforts. They can outsource it or they can do it in-house. Both of these options bring a number of secondary options to choose from and its up to the business owner to do what is best for his or her situation. Here is a rundown of the possible choices:"

Read the entire article at:

Fifty Questions You Need Answered Before Starting Your SEO Campaign

Technorati Tags:Business, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Marketing

"Local Data: Not Sexy Just Critical"
By Greg Sterling
Search Engine Land

Dave's Comments: For those of you new to "Local Search", this is a great overview article to help you understand the importance of being listed in the appropriate "local search" sections of the major search engines, and why it is so difficult for these engines to have accurate, up-to-date local search listings.
You can also review Local Search on the Internet Marketing Course Web site.

"A few weeks ago Steven Aldrich, a VP of strategy for small business software (and now marketing) company Intuit, delivered a speech in which he presented an amazing statistic. According to Aldrich, roughly 6 million businesses are started annually in the U.S. but another approximately 5.6 million go under. Think about it.

From the point of view of these small businesses, there's a fundamental challenge to survive. From the point of view of search engines and directories trying to reflect and catalog their fleeting existence, there's another kind of challenge – a data challenge.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau there are 23,343,821 “firms” in this country. Of those, 5,697,759 firms have one or more employees. But almost 99% of U.S. businesses have fewer than 20 employees and most have fewer than four. These data are mirrored by similar statistics (where they exist) around the world."

Read the entire article at:

Local Data: Not Sexy Just Critical

Technorati Tags:Business, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Marketing

"Search Retargeting: It's Ready"
By Robin Neifield
Clickz Behavioral Targeting

Dave's Comments: Search Re-targeting? New term to me as well! Think you'll find the concept interesting, and the article's author, Robin Neifield, is a great resource to learn more about the overall topic of Behavioral Targeting.

"Early adoption has its advantages, but being an aggressive innovator may not be the best idea when it comes to new targeting options. Hang back just a little bit while the bugs shake out. See what's really working among the dizzying array of options for online marketers.

Finally, it's time to step into search retargeting, if you haven't already.

What exactly is search retargeting? Where is it in terms of development? Who offers the technology, and how can you use it to effectively affect the results of your clients' campaigns?"

Click on this link to read the entire article:

Search Retargeting: It's Ready

Technorati Tags:Business, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Marketing

"Keep track of your friends with The Coop"
Mike Beltzner
Mozilla Labs

Dave's Comments: Social networking ("Web 2.0") built right into the Firefox Web browser?! Stay on top of this development so you understand how your organization can take advantage of this VERY interesting new twist in Web browser technology.

"Just a few years ago, one of the most popular uses of the internet was to send jokes, cute pictures, and news stories to friends and family (social networks) via email. Fast forward to today, and you’ll find that not a lot has changed except the medium. Now one of the most common uses of instant messenger services and social networking sites is to send people links to jokes, cute pictures and interesting news stories.

This behavior isn’t at all surprising - it’s friends sharing experiences, the very backbone of social interactions and friendships. It’s also unsurprising that most “Web 2.0″ services have a feature that makes it easy for you to build a social network so that you can share things more easily, or subscribe to a friend’s activity as a way of keeping in touch.

What is surprising, however, is how little of this type of functionality has made it into today’s web browsers. The result is that when people think of tools for social interaction, email and instant messenger are at the top of their list, not web browsers.

Enter “The Coop”, a Mozilla Labs project to experiment with adding social tools to the web browser."

Read the entire Mozilla Labs post at:

Keep track of your friends with The Coop

Here's a link to The Coop's project spec:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/The_Coop

Technorati Tags:Business, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Marketing

"Keep track of your friends with The Coop"
Mike Beltzner
Mozilla Labs

Dave's Comments: Social networking ("Web 2.0") built right into the Firefox Web browser?! Stay on top of this development so you understand how your organization can take advantage of this VERY interesting new twist in Web browser technology.

"Just a few years ago, one of the most popular uses of the internet was to send jokes, cute pictures, and news stories to friends and family (social networks) via email. Fast forward to today, and you’ll find that not a lot has changed except the medium. Now one of the most common uses of instant messenger services and social networking sites is to send people links to jokes, cute pictures and interesting news stories.

This behavior isn’t at all surprising - it’s friends sharing experiences, the very backbone of social interactions and friendships. It’s also unsurprising that most “Web 2.0″ services have a feature that makes it easy for you to build a social network so that you can share things more easily, or subscribe to a friend’s activity as a way of keeping in touch.

What is surprising, however, is how little of this type of functionality has made it into today’s web browsers. The result is that when people think of tools for social interaction, email and instant messenger are at the top of their list, not web browsers.

Enter “The Coop”, a Mozilla Labs project to experiment with adding social tools to the web browser."

Read the entire Mozilla Labs post at:

Keep track of your friends with The Coop

Here's a link to The Coop's project spec:
http://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/The_Coop

Technorati Tags:Business, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Marketing

"Loyalty Program Members Shop More, Spend More, Have More: Study"
By Richard H. Levey
Direct Magazine

Dave's Comments: While Direct Magazine's summary of a just-completed Epsilon Marketing study on the positive sales impact of retail loyalty programs is not surprising, the detail in the report is very interesting AND is mentioned in this blog because the potential positive impact of loyalty programs on B2B sales ("Frequent Buyer Programs") should not be overlooked by Biotech marketers.

"Retailers sensing that members of their loyalty programs are more valuable customers now have hard facts to back up their gut instincts. According to a survey of holiday spending, participants have more to spend -- and they do spend it.

During the past holiday season, loyalty scheme enrollees spent nearly $1200, or 14% more than other consumers. That is, in part, because they have it: 24% have incomes in excess of $100,000, compared with only 5% of non-enrollees."

Read the entire story by clicking on the following link:

Loyalty Program Members Shop More, Spend More, Have More: Study

Technorati Tags:Business, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Marketing

"Digital Pharma Marketers Keep It Simple"
Lisa Phillips
Senior Analyst
eMarketer

Dave's Comments: The "digital" slice of the pharma marketing pie just keeps getting bigger each year, as this article highlights with some very interesting details about where the digital marketing dollars are being spent.

"The endless text of pharma disclaimers is at home on the Web.

Web sites are getting pharmaceutical marketers' interactive budgets this year, according to a new study by the Medical Broadcasting Company (MBC) and CBI Research.



A plurality of pharma marketers said site spending would be most likely to get their budgets this year."

Read the entire article at:

Digital Pharma Marketers Keep It Simple

Technorati Tags:Business, Marketing, Search Engine Marketing, Web Marketing