Dear Friends,

I was at Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in San Jose on August 8-9, 2006. I went with my "small business eyes" on to see what might be of interest to my small- and medum-size business readers. Here's what I was able to glean for you.

Small Business Ideas from the Exhibition Hall

I spent Tuesday and Wednesday, August 8-9, 2006 poking around the Exhibition Hall at Search Engine Strategies Conference in San Jose looking for Internet marketing services that might be of special interest to small to medium businesses. As I look back, nothing I saw really blew me away, except perhaps Trellian Competitive Intelligence. But I did see a number of ideas that were new or new to me. One of these might be just what you need. Read the Article.

Linking Strategy Ideas

I was fascinated by the Linking Strategies Session at Search Engine Strategies, San Jose, on Wednesday morning, August 9, 2006. The panelists -- Eric Ward, Greg Boser, Debra Mastaler, and Mike Grehan -- substantially increased my understanding of live approaches to obtain links -- mainly non-reciprocal -- from a number of sources. Some of the topics discussed included link reclamation, holistic link building, blogs, RSS feeds, social networking sites, etc. The goal, of course, is to get high quality links that will ad value -- and PageRank -- to your website. Read the Article.

New Examples of Viral Marketing

The Link Baiting and Viral Marketing session at Search Engine Strategies (SES) Conference in San Jose, August 9, 2006, featured Chris Boggs, Rand Fishkin, Jennifer Laycock, and Cameron Olthuis. They discussed various ways to get a large number of incoming links to a website using viral marketing techniques. Jennifer Laycock and Chris Boggs came up with 30 examples between them that marketers can study and learn from. Here's a chance to see a relatively new and comprehensive list of viral marketing examples. Read the Article.