Yesterday, Goldstein Media creative director Seth Goldstein was fortunate enough to speak on a panel about SEO and Paid Search at the SCORE eBusinessNow conference. Along with moderator Neal Wiser, of Neal Wiser Consulting, Glenn Gabe, of G Squared Interactive, and Lance Bachman of 1SEO, the discussion focused on how small businesses can get the most of optimizing their content for the search engines.

The eBusinessNow conference is put on by the SCORE Association, which is an organization that helps counsel America’s small business owners on how to get the most out of their business. It was a free  event and more than 300 small business owners were in attendance.

To learn more about the eBusinessNow conference and when it will be coming to your town check out their Website.

This is the Link Report for September 18th through September 19th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• Social media on marketers’ menu for 2010 – Trends & Ideas – BizReport – While email remained the most popular media among marketers for use next year (56.8% "realistically" plan to use it), social media isn't far behind. Over half (56.3%) "realistically" plan to include it in future marketing plans, found the Center for Media Research.
• Business Implications of Facebook Lite: Advice for Social Media Marketers and Businesses on Facebook | Suite101.com – Facebook Lite is a stripped-down version of the Facebook social media application that went live in September of 2009. Facebook has stated their intention to be the service of those users who do not have high-speed internet connections or bandwidth to support the main site.
• Local companies embrace social media to bond with customers | Minnesota Public Radio NewsQ – We've heard a lot lately about the power of social media services like Facebook and Twitter to connect people, spread news and even influence world events. Tens of millions of people are signed up for one or more of these services that connect folks with shared interests or concerns.
• The New AIM: Less Clunky and Annoying, More Social – PC World – I use AOL’s instant-messaging network all day long, but I’m not sure when I last used the AIM software itself (with the exception of the iPhone version). I’ve associated it with feature bloat, annoying ads, and a sort of old-timy, Web 1.0 feel. So I long ago switched to other clients that support the AIM network (Apple’s iChat when I’m on a Mac, GAIM when I’m on Windows, and the Web-based Meebo anywhere and everywhere).
• Blueprint: A CSS Framework | Spend your time innovating, not replicating – Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your development time. It gives you a solid foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, useful plugins, and even a stylesheet for printing.
• Ultimate Cheat Sheet Colllection – Hungred.com – Cheat Sheets are handle for web development. Usually, these sheets are either printed out and pasted on the wall of your working area or they are placed on your computer as wallpaper. Referencing in this way makes working faster and more effective. Here are a complete list usually used by most designers and developers during web development. Enjoy!
• Tutorial: How to change plugin table structure in WordPress – Hungred.com – Some of us will have problem updating or changing your table structure in your WordPress plugin after it has been released to the public. Many people will come up with different ideas to change their existing plugin structure to a new one. Idea such as checking for that particular column existence either through pure SQL or mixture of SQL and PHP. However, the approach here may be a bit overkill. There is a much simpler way.
• RedBeacon Wins The Top Prize At TechCrunch50 2009 – RedBeacon is a new service that made its public debut at TechCrunch50 that further streamlines this process by bringing the OpenTable model of online transactions to much broader spectrum of services.
• Google Launches New Ad Marketplace; Display Ads Will Never Be the Same – You’re probably familiar with Google AdSense and AdWords, Google’s (Google) flagship advertising products. It’s how Google makes its billion of dollars. Highly targeted text ads appear on Google search and third party websites that are part of the AdSense program. Advertisers buy ads based on keywords, with more popular keywords costing more per click than less popular terms.
• MediaPost Publications Study: Half Of Ad Impressions, 95 Percent Of Clicks Fraudulent 09/18/2009 – Click fraud continues to plague online advertising, but many just want to sweep it under the rug. Radar Research managing partner Marissa Gluck calls it "the dirty little secret of the online ad industry that no one wants to talk about."

This is the Link Report for September 8th through September 9th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• WordPress Acquires Grammer Gramer Grammar Checking Software – Automattic has announced the acquisition of After the Deadline, a service that provides spell checking, style checking, and grammar checking. Huzzah!
• 7 PPC Tools that Can Help Your SEO Efforts | The Adventures of SEO Boy –
• Don’t Lose Yahoo Traffic By Not Optimizing for Bing | WebProNews – Don't forget that Bing and Yahoo are still part of the mix. People still use these search engines and therefore you should optimize for them (Well at least Bing)
• Have a Facebook Page? Post on Tuesdays – As it turns out the best time to post to your Facebook is on Tuesday. Find out why.
• Protect Your Company’s Collaborative Spaces – You need to be prepared to lock out former workers from your online network once they leave. Good article from the people at GIGAOM
• United Way hopes to net new donors via social media – When one of United Way’s 500 cause members on Facebook asked her friends to donate money to the charitable organization in lieu of buying her birthday gifts, officials at the Greater Dayton agency were not only pleasantly surprised but excited about the possibilities for future fundraising.
• Should you ‘friend’ your doctor on Facebook? – CNN.com – Staying connected with your doctor takes on a whole new meaning. Good? Bad?
• Obama’s Facebook advice: Making a prez: The Swamp – "Let me give you some very practical tips,'' the president told the high schooler. "First of all, I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook.
• The Internet Marketing Driver: SEO, Forms, and Hidden Content – The Danger of Coding Yourself Into Search Obscurity – Too much coding with forms and hidden content Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) shows you how to fix this and do well in SEO
• AIM Now Goes Both Ways (With Twitter And Facebook) – Remember AIM? Yea that thing called Instant Messaging. Wow that's dated. Well now AIM can be used as a Facebook/Twitter app

This is the Link Report for August 30th through August 31st:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• Be Careful When Evaluating Paid Search Tests – Interpreting test results for paid search campaigns can be surprisingly difficult. One reason for this is order latency. The fact today’s clicks don’t all generate orders today, but instead sales trickle in over time means that analyzing new launches and tests can be tricky. Two ways to address this complication are described below.

  Problem: Successful tests can look bad initially because of order latency

• Turn Google Voice into a Growl-Friendly Windows App – Google Voice – Lifehacker – Get Google Voice as a windows popup app. Very handy!
• Adobe Buys Business Catalyst / GoodBarry – Adobe will own the American part of the Australian company. Business Catalyst / GoodBarry provides tools that help web designers set up online businesses for their clients with minimal cost and effort and no programming skills required, combining website content management, e-commerce features, e-mail marketing, business analytics and basic CRM tools into one system.
• Wikipedia Will Use Colors to Add Layers of Trust to its Articles – Wikipedia plans on signifying the level of their trustworthiness by adding layers of color. It’s easier to trust editors with a high number of entries and revisions than those who are new to the site, and now registered users will be able to easily discern between the two by looking at the color of the text’s background. This will most likely make Wikipedia more authoritative.
• AJAX Search: Is Google Sweating Bing Or Just Feeling The Need For Speed? – Is it possible that Google sees a real threat in Bing? Possibly but they've been improving their search for a long time, well before the birth of Bing.
• Google Voice Warms Up For iPhone, Cuts Off Calls After 15 Minutes – Google voice dropping calls on the iPhone after 15 odd minutes? Oops!
• Why Don’t Teens Tweet? We Asked Over 10,000 of Them. – Over the last few months everyone has weighed in on the question of “Why Don’t Teens Tweet” — except, it would appear, teens. We recently ran a survey of 10,000+ US teens aged 13 – 17 to see if we could add anything new to the question. As it turns out, the question itself is flawed.

  Great analysis on how people and teens tweet

This is the Link Report for August 13th through August 14th:

Please feel free to post your thoughts in the comment section below

To see all of our links please visit our Delicious page at Delicious.com/goldsteinmedia

• Google Rank vs Google Caffeine Rank Tool | Sembience – Test your ranking in both Google and in Caffeine
• WP.me — shorten your links « Blog « WordPress.com – The guys over at WordPress have done it again making a url shortener that is really short
• Twitter Is Revamping Retweets, Launches A Retweet API – Twitter is getting easier Retweetability.
• The Evolution of Blogging – Where is blogging heading Om Malik of GigaOm has some ideas.
• Friendfeed launches custom (and public) themes – The Next Web – Custom themes have come to FriendFeed
• Google Doodled: Hans Christian Ørsted (1777-1851) | Technology | guardian.co.uk – Thanks to Google, hundreds of millions of people are today celebrating Hans Christian Ørsted's birthday without having much of a clue who he is … so who exactly was he?
• Netscape founder seeks rematch with Microsoft in new browser war – Marc Andreessen is back. Famed Netscape browser founder who took on Microsoft in the original browser wars of the 1990s is building a new browser.
• Jolicloud, a cool new OS for your netbook – Looks really neat
• How Google’s Caffeine Will Impact PPC – ClickZ – Every once in a while Google makes a major algorithmic change to its organic results. In reality, its organic algorithm changes at least monthly, if not more frequently, but the major changes are sometimes announced. Even when they aren't, these changes are quickly named by the industry, like hurricanes named at the time they prove themselves able to do damage.
• SEOmoz | Case Study: How Much Do Rankings Matter? –

There is an internal strife within the SEO community between the Organic purists and the PPC get it done even if you have to pay for it group. Now there will always be a disagreement between those who think that paying to be at the top of Google is the best idea and those who think paying for a link is just plain silly. I fall right in the middle.

To Buy a Link or Not To By a Link

PPC has its merits. There is no other way to be at the top of Google. Usually the top two slots are for paid links. If you have the pocket book to fight for those links or if you just so happen to be in a less competitive keyword then this is for you. But PPC does involve money and in turn tha takes capital. So where does that leave the little guys. There in lies the inherent downside to PPC. If you don’t have a huge budget and you’re in a somewhat competitive keyword area you really don’t even have a chance.

To be free and pure and full of goodness

Now you might be saying that Organic SEO is the way to go if you don’t have a big budget. This is true and false. If you just so happen to know what your doing it can save a whole lot of money, but if you need to hire someone to optimize your site it can be just as expensive as PPC if not more.

But don’t dispair. Studies show that though PPC gets you where you want for a price. The organic listings hold more trust and their for in my opinion are more important.

With that last statement in mind, the real perfect recipe is a combination of both PPC and Organic. If done the right way you’ll see the results.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on which is better: PPC or Organic. Post your thoughts in the comments.