Local SEO quickly is become an important tool for all businesses. Danny Dover explains the complex data sources and metrics required to make it work. The topics include accessibility and content, keyword research and targeting, links, and social.Dover provides a list of local directories and suggestions on additional metrics.

Frank Watson runs through what he calls the "top 10 local search insights for the moment" and gives an overview of recent actions and reactions to bring up to speed the marketing professionals who have been too busy with work or got sidetracked by outside influences. For starters, he suggests paying close attention to mobile in location-based services. And while he believes it's now time to start track everything, only use what's needed and works.

Taking a tip from Alcoholics Antonymous, Stoney deGeyter creates a slightly tongue-in-cheek 12-step program for marketers' online campaigns -- all serving to show the benefits of search engine optimization. Step 1 suggests marketers admit they are powerless without SEO and that their online marketing has become unmanageable. "Step 2: Believe that a power greater than yourself is needed to optimize your website for rankings and conversions." And so on to step 12, which says marketers should recommend SEO throughout the business community.

Sometimes optimized Web sites gain traffic, but not conversions. Cameron Chapman tells us how to achieve both, and explains how small to moderate tweaks to a Web site can produce great gains. Even simple things like changing the size, shape or color of buttons on the site can have a huge impact on the number of people who end up clicking.

As much as we may put Google designers and engineers on a pedestal for the search engine and tools they've created, no one is perfect. As Danny Dover points out, it's a grandiose idea to organize the world's information. Dover uses the five senses as a way to understand Google's limitations. For example, you use your sense of taste to give you information about the world -- like whether or not "a meal a friend made for you doesn't have an ingredient you are allergic to" -- but you can't do that on Google.

Bill Slawski wonders if SEO professionals should rely on search engine spiders to rewrite Web addresses. He ponders the question after finding patents this week granted to both Google and Yahoo that examine multiple addresses for the same Web page on a dynamic site. Google's original filing dates back to 2003, and Yahoo's in 2006. Slawski steps through the patents and tells us what they might mean for SEO professionals when optimizing sites.

With all traffic now running through adCenter for both Bing and Yahoo, Erin spends a good portion of her time in the ad platform, and is finally seeing results. She tell us about new tools--Microsoft Advertising Intelligence, and Microsoft adCenter Desktop--in adCenter that are making life in the platform a little easier.

Nathan Hangen tells us seven lessons marketers can learn from Apple's marketing strategies -- learnings that resides in the company's product, design standards and ideology. The points start with "ignore your critics" and end with "become 'the name." After all, "you don't buy MP3 players, you buy an iPod," he writes.

Site audits allow SEO professionals to benchmark a site's strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to help prioritize the work. "There's no way to approach an audit formulaically," writes Adam Audette, but he provides plenty of guidance, covering everything from the best tools to use, to consolidating and delivering reports.

Casey Ernsting believes B2B Web sites require a different set of SEO tools and strategy because search volume is typically lower and brand interaction is not the everyday concern that it is for many B2C companies. He gives us a short list to keep in mind when optimizing copy for a B2B site, and throws in a few key performance indicators to keep in mind.