New York SBDC Research Network

You’re running a small business. You’d dearly love to have high visibility on Google for organic search engine traffic and leads—but you’re being overwhelmed by big competitors with deep pockets and an army of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) specialists at their disposal. Cheer up! You can still win at SEO, but you have to be smart—very smart—about how you deploy your resources. The important thing to remember is: What most small businesses do with SEO is exactly what they shouldn’t do. Read more at Bplans

From SmallBusinessNewz : Okay, maybe spy is a little strong but experience tells me that most small business don’t know much at all about what their greatest competitors are up to when it comes to marketing. I know you don’t really have any competition because you provide such a superior product and experience, but setting up a competitor specific listening station can uncover some useful insights.

From World Economic Forum : The Global Competitiveness Report 2011-2012 assesses the competitiveness landscape of 144 economies, providing insight into the drivers of their productivity and prosperity. The Report series remains the most comprehensive assessment of national competitiveness worldwide.

When the press release is right, it's right: The Web offers investors a rich trove of information. But it has little value in today's fast-paced business environment if you can't quickly find the nuggets you need. That's why BusinessWeek is launching the Company Insight Center on BusinessWeek.com. The CIC, or Companies Channel, combines our resources with those of Standard & Poor's (MHP) Capital IQ division (like BusinessWeek, a unit of The McGraw-Hill Companies (MHP)) to pull together up to 33 pages of data, charts, profiles, and news stories on each of 42,000 public companies in the U.S. and abroad. The result: an unparalleled array of corporate data. CIC offers easy navigation to get you from, say, stock price charts that you can customize; to earnings reports and estimates; to profiles of chief executives and board members; to a history of their stock trades. Also available are reports on some 320,000 private companies, though since they're private, the

It’s Warren Buffett’s birthday today, so I thought I would look at advice he has offered. Warren Buffet Wikipedia Buffett has amassed an enormous fortune from astute investments managed through the holding company Berkshire Hathaway, of which he is the largest shareholder and CEO. With an estimated current net worth of around US$52 billion,[2] he was ranked by Forbes as the third-richest person in the world as of April 2007, behind Bill Gates and Mexican businessman Carlos Slim Helú.[4] Profile of Warren Buffet the free dictionary Investors Should Heed Warrens Buffett’s Free Advice SmartMoney By James B. Stewart July 10, 2007 In any event, Buffett has given away more free advice than just about any billionaire I can think of. He reports his stock holdings and discusses their merits and the reasons for his choices in his popular annual letter to shareholders. More fundamentally, he has laid out his investment philosophy repeatedly for all to see. Anyone can piggy-back his actual stoc