Congratulations to Bonnie Harris on winning the free pass to IMS MSP! Tomorrow the Integrated Marketing Summit in Minneapolis kicks off with a mix of educational sessions and learning opportunities that run the gamut of online marketing topics. The event includes a keynote from Chad Mitchell of Forrester Research as well as sessions on multi-channel marketing, social media, social CRM, Search Marketing and mobile. I will be moderating a Search Marketing Best Practices panel at 2:45pm with Bill Leake of Apogee Results, Alex Bennert of The Wall Street Journal and Brian Kleisner from FindLaw.

Congratulations to Bonnie Harris on winning the free pass to IMS MSP! Tomorrow the Integrated Marketing Summit in Minneapolis kicks off with a mix of educational sessions and learning opportunities that run the gamut of online marketing topics.

It’s time for a new update to the BIGLIST review of  SEO blogs . I started with a list of 15 new blogs in a queue for this update and four made the cut

It’s time for a new update to the BIGLIST review of  SEO blogs .

I’m incredibly happy that Google has added the option to search over SSL by going to https://www.google.com/ — note the “s” in “https.” I’m writing this blog post in a hotel right now because I’m in Europe for a week doing a series of tech talks, but I could just as easily be working down at local Dublin cafe with an open WiFi hotspot. In both cases, I might want to do a private search that the hotel or local cafe can’t see. A Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) connection provides an encrypted tunnel between my browser and Google, so other people can’t sniff what I’m searching for.

I’m incredibly happy that Google has added the option to search over SSL by going to https://www.google.com/ — note the “s” in “https.” I’m writing this blog post in a hotel right now because I’m in Europe for a week doing a series of tech talks, but I could just as easily be working down at local Dublin cafe with an open WiFi hotspot.

When it comes to marketing in the current economy, small businesses need all the help they can get.

When it comes to marketing in the current economy, small businesses need all the help they can get. They don’t have the ad budgets, the personnel or the time that the bigger competition has. But none of those factors really matter to search engines, and SEO is a great way to both level the playing field and steal marketshare

Okay, today I’m going to try something different again. I’m going to try live-buzzing the keynote of Day 2 of Google I/O

There are currently 29.6 million small businesses in the U.S. ( SCORE ). 63% of consumers and small business owners use the Internet to find information about local companies and 82% use search engines ( Webvisible & Nielsen ).