Here is a recap from e Local listing’s Stephen Espinosa DMS 09 – Direction Media Strategies session.

Fixing the taxonomy structure of a site is not enough on its own, the other content and tag structures is as important if not more important.

YellowPages has to figure out a way to deliver answers to questions asked that don’t follow a normal YP (YellowPages) structure

Engaging the community to add more content is important, user or business generated content drives SEO results

SEO needs to filter through the entire organization, from sales people up through all aspects of product

If you rely on business to create their own content you can run into big problems

Setting the right expectation is important, in the early days of SEM (Search Engine Marketing) sales people scorched the earth and burned a lot of trust.

WebVisibles’ sweet spot is 800-1200 per month and they look for one year engagements to allow for peaks and troughs in the market

IYPs (Internet Yellow Pages) aren’t doing a good job of optimizing and distributing local customer videos, the search engines want to display video to video destinations….local videos are the easiest way to get ranked on the front page of search.

SEO can be less tangible but adds enormous value, if it can also stop one of your competitors from getting to the front page.

Videos are sexy…elocal sees 3.1x improvement in performance…video ad networks don’t work as well as youtube and yahoo video

One of the strongest ways to get multiple hits is to put data on multiple domains

Freshness of content is as important as having content…don’t expect immediate results…it’s not “Set and Forget”

You have to be committed to SEO from the top…it’s not black magic it’s an important way to drive results

So there you have it! A great recap from e Local Listing‘s Stephen Espinosa’s session at Direction Media Strategies.

While on the road to the Kelsey Group Marketplaces 2009 event this week I stopped by Barnes & Noble to pick up the new book by Jeff Jarvis, What Would Google Do?  Early on in the book, Jarvis quickly states and focuses on the fact that small is the new big. Companies can start up with a couple people and not grow past 20 and still attract a large amount of customers. At Kelsey this was proven over and over again.

Small businesses will soon be overwhelmed with the amount of choices they have to market their business online through SEO, PPC, Social Media, and Mobile Marketing. A great great of this is the start-up dotMenu, which started out by simply hiring stay at home moms to go out and scan in menus from local restaurants for $2 a piece. This allowed them to keep overhead down, efficiency up, and grow within the constraints of cash flow. In 2008 dotMenu ended up taking 3,000,000 online restaurant orders.

The consistent trend of people connecting, sharing, and collaborating on the internet is only going to have a positive effect on small business marketing. When companies and individuals become more open, competition grows larger. When competition grows larger, innovation begins. Products will start to become more transparent, ROI for marketing efforts will become clearer to small business, and the businesses that provide real value will rise to the top, whether they are small or big.

Every time I attend a Kelsey Conference I am amazed at the overwhelming amount of new start ups attending the conference. But the one thing that is more overwhelming than that is the fact that all these start ups are striking partnerships with companies 1000x their size without even a blink. 2009 is going to bring an enormous amount of opportunities for small business to get online, with the big question not being ‘should we be online, but who should we be online with?’

Now that small is the new big, things are going to be a lot more clear for small business.