Owners of local small businesses now use the Internet more than any other source to find other businesses.  Yet only 44% of these owners actually have a website.  This gap is one of the main findings of new research from Webvisible and Nielsen , and reported as the ‘great divide‘ in the Marketing Vox post.

The research confirms that the Internet is increasingly the way people find local information.  82% of respondents in this study use search engines for local info compared with 57% who use Yellow Pages directories.  50% actually use the search engines first, compared with only 24% who turn to the YPs first.  A large majority of the searchers were satisfied with the online search experience even though they often had difficulty finding a specific business they were looking for.

Reading between the lines, this suggests that they found at least a similar business online, and perhaps used that instead of the one they were looking for in the first place.  As the Internet replaces other sources of local information, it will be ever more important for local businesses to have websites and to promote them.  That’s where their competition is.

The holiday season was a disaster for lots of retailers, but the glimmer of good news is that online retail held up quite well:  it is a low cost platform!  Take a look at this post from SEOBook for more on this.

Hitwise reports that online retail sales declined for the 8th week in a row.  Bright spots remain: house and garden, grocery and alcohol.  But if you are selling computers or music online, time to look even harder for good marketing outlets as well as cost savings.  This is not happening in a vacuum.  A NYTimes article reports a 0.3% decline overall in consumer spending, which is exceedingly rare. Reality bites–get serious about your marketing!

For businesses doing ecommerce in a retail environment (especially B to C), changing product continuously creates a problem for search engines and for the business website’s users. If the site was successful in ranking for a detailed product (classic long tail phrases), those results will continue to draw traffic even after the product is withdrawn.  Result:  404 errors.

Solution A:  301 permanent redirects.  This post in Get Elastic blog takes on the issue of “leaking” link juice due to expired pages. A good solution is to redirect those expired links to  a live page that closely matches the intent or content of the old one.

Solution B:  Where 301′s are not possible (why?) or you’ve missed a page, your 404 page needs to be helpful to the visitor.  I’ve written about Get Elastic’s take on 404 errors elsewhere, but here what you want is a page that helps the visitor find what they were looking for as closely as possible

Microsoft reaches into its deep pockets to offer cash back on its comparison shopping site. A challenge to Google?

Steve Baldwin has a nice post about it over at Mediapost, with some thoughts about whether or not it moves us closer to the CPA (cost per action) holy grail.  I wanted to check this out for myself, even willing to sign up for the service by giving the Empire my name, but when I went to search.live.com and tried to click on the Cash Back image link, I got an error message.  On the actual Microsoft site.  Isn’t that perfect?