Google Adwords Editor is a nice software tool for small businesses that want to manage their own Google Adwords Pay-Per-Click campaigns. The software runs on PCs and MACs and allows you to manage your campaigns from your desktop. Lots of features and I personally think it is a great tool if all you need to manage is Google Adwords.

You can read more and download it here:  Google AdWords Editor 7.0.

There is an interesting review on Search Engine Land about a recent Yahoo study on consumer behavior in choosing local services and providers. The Yahoo study covered 5 vertical categories: legal, real estate, home improvement, health care and vocational education.

One of the interesteing treands that is very noticeable from this study is how important the Internet is becoming for find local businesses and services.

• Vocational Education – 67 percent of respondents used a major search engine compared to 41 percent who used local search
• Healthcare – 53 percent used insurance provider directories while 44 percent relied on a search engine
• Real Estate – 51 percent used a real estate vertical search engine versus 44 percent who used a major search engine
• Legal – 36 percent of respondents referred to a search engine while 25 percent used the internet yellow pages
• Home Contracting – 36 percent used a search engine while 26 percent used the internet yellow pages

 You can read the complete article on Search Engine Land - CLICK HERE for the complete review of the Yahoo Consumer Study.

What does this for local businesses?

The basic message for local businesses and service providers is to make sure you have a professional website and make sure that it’s properly optimized for the search engines and can be found by consumers using the search engines to find their local businesses and service providers.

On Google's Webmaster Central Blog they just posted Google's Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide (PDF file). After reviewing it, it is definitely an excellent guide for those clueless about website optimization. A lot of what they include in their guide is good, practical advice. The guide is meant for beginners and can really help separate fact from fiction when talking with others about SEO. One thing to remember is you still have to write for your audience and not just the search engines.

A snippet for Google's SEO Starter Guide description:

"Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current."

Google's SEO Starter Guide on Google Webmaster Central Blog.

I know this has nothing to do with web marketing or website design. But it may save you some coins so you can spend more on your web marketing or website!

Go to Yahoo.com and type in "gas + your zipcode" or "cheap gas + your zip code". Yahoo will show you gas stations in your area with cheap gas prices.

PS - It is unbelievable to me that about 60 days ago crude oil was at around $130/barrel and now it is in the low $80's! What a hoax!

Google has recently launched Google Audio Indexing for video. It appears they are using their new speech recognition technology to index the words spoken in YouTube's political channel videos. With this technology users can type in a search term and navigate directly to the part of videos where the term was used.

Google calls this GAudi and eventually this will probably become a powerful YouTube search technology and add a whole new dimension to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Imagine the day when users will see the YouTube videos ranked by the keywords spoken within the videos. If you haven't started creating and distributing video content you should definitely considered it for the near future.