Top 10 for the Weekend

1. Why Local Businesses Can No Longer Ignore Foursquare

For some reason businesses are hesitant to jump on the social media bandwagon. It’ll never make sense to me because even if you don’t believe in its power, your customers do!  By simply adding a little prize for the mayor or a special for just checking in, you are almost guaranteed loyal repeat customers looking to catch a deal. It’s a game for these people! Make your business the board!

2. The Rise of SMB Reputation Management

With the rise of social media, small businesses are now able to get their name out there as effectively as the big chains, and for a much smaller price than they’re paying for their marketing too! Check out this blog post for a huge list of SMB reputation management services.

3. Citysearch Plans Reputation Mgt Offering

In keeping with SMB reputation management, Citysearch is now offering a fixed-fee service through CityGrid. Check out this blog post and the interview mentioned in it for more information.

4. Yellowbot Offers Reputation Tool Too

We’re just crazy about small business reputation management here at Search Influence, so here’s another post about yet another service, this time offered by YellowBot! These blog posts are a fantastic resource in helping decide which service- if not ALL of them- is right for your business.

5. Google Maps: New Guidelines for Dealing with Multiple Listings & Duplicate Listing Removal

As much as we love Google Maps here, we don’t hesitate to call attention to its faults. This post gives a few tips on how to check for – and delete – duplicate listings for your business. We had to learn the hard way about the penalties they impose for duplicate listings. Save yourself the headache and check out this blog about duplicate content and how to rectify the problem before it’s too late!

6. It’s MayDay for Yellow Pages Sites

An early-May change in Google’s algorithm affects the way massive websites are indexed. While this probably doesn’t affect your site directly, it may affect a site that you’re listed on, a site on which you may be counting for a quality link. If you have a basic listing on a large directory site, the page on which you’re listed may not be viewed as authoritative by Google. In that case, you could then speak with the advertising department of the site and look into options about getting an enhanced listing with unique, rich content that is more likely to be indexed, viewed highly by Google and give a strong link back to your site.

7. Google Algo Changes Drop ‘The Other Shoe’

This post from Greg Sterling references the same update to the Google algorithm as Andrew Shotland’s does above, but makes the point that directories with content-rich listings will prevail over directories with simple listings of phone numbers and addresses.

8. Effective Online Marketing Messages: How to Pace Yourself

This one comes straight from Search Influence’s own Nick Fidanza. A few weeks ago he wrote a comical blog post about when online marketing messages are ineffective, with the promise of a follow up on how to avoid the outcomes mentioned in the first post. While we could go on for days about how to properly send out online marketing messages, we decided to keep it simple this time. Check out these 4 guidelines to plan out and pace your messages.

9. Google Lists Top 1,000 Sites On The Web & Then Lets You Advertise On Them

This Search Engine Land post mentions brand-new-yesterday features available to online advertisers in Google Adwords. These features are thanks to advertisers and users like you who have allowed Google to be privy your site’s analytics data and/or your personal searching and website viewing activity.

10. Evil Conversion: When Optimization Goes too Far

That’s right, we agree – there is such thing as too much optimization. Sandra Niehaus provides three vivid examples of consumer purchase experiences that, through over optimization, could end up causing the customer to navigate away from the site before converting or worse, turning the customer away for good.