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Small businesses will soon feel a little more love in their love-hate relationship with Yelp, the Web site whose users post reviews of restaurants, dry cleaners and other local businesses. Starting next week, Yelp will let small-business owners publicly respond to reviews. This is a big change for the site, which has until now steadfastly refus Read More

Businesses of all sorts and sizes will be able to dip into the flood of money pouring out of Washington. Here's how to improve your odds. By now we've all heard one of the newest American complaints -- all this stimulus and bailout money, but where's mine? Like many individuals, most businesses won't get much government help. But many savvy Read More

Have you heard of the conversion funnel? This is the process in which customers get to your site and go through a number of steps that ultimately lead them (hopefully) to the checkout. In a post on the Google Analytics Blog, Alden DeSoto brings up a very good point. In a brick and mortar store, a salesperson can judge in person things that mak Read More

Many small businesses may think it's wise to tie their marketing to money and value to appeal to cash-strapped consumers. But perhaps they should tie it to something else of considerable value: time. A new study by researchers at Stanford Business School, published in the Journal of Consumer Research, found that it's generally far more lucrativ Read More

Online consumers overall say they are most likely to pay attention to internet ads in the early evening and onward into the night, though specific time preferences vary by age group, according to a survey by Lightspeed Research and the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB). The research, conducted among online UK consumers, shows that while the ea Read More

Earlier this month, changes in the Google algorithm moved in favor of big business across all industries by displaying corporate websites at the top of organic results for geo-targeted, branded searches. Over 90% of regional and national brands DO NOT optimize pages for cities and states and often cede traffic to direct and indirect competitors Read More

Customer experience is more than just customer service. This is Amazon's philosophy, and you can see how successful that company is. BusinessWeek has an in depth look at Amazon's practices when it comes to dealing with customers, and small businesses looking to boost their own success should pay attention. Read More

The dust has settled a bit on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 - the official name of the recently passed $787 billion economic stimulus package. There are a number of good articles on the package and how it impacts small business: Read More

If you have several versions of the same page or many pages with the same content, tell the search engines about it with the new canonical tag! The search engines really don't like to find the same content on several web pages. The main problem is for them to determine what is the “primary” page, the most important version, the one people shoul Read More

Why do shoppers leave the checkout before making a purchase? More importantly, what can you do about it? People abandon shopping carts for many reasons. Some simply change their minds or are just “window shopping.” You don't have much control over those instances. Some, however, find the checkout process confusing or aren't sure what you're g Read More