After a week in Vegas for PubCon, Susan Esparza and Scott Polk recall the highlights and takeaways of the conference. A number of sessions were liveblogged on a variety of industry blogs and Susan shared her post-show analysis in the SEO Newsletter.

Then Virginia talks to Sage Lewis, Web marketing blogger and founder of Internet marketing company SageRock.com. Sage will be speaking at the upcoming SES Chicago as a panelist in the session Maps: They’re Not Just For Driving Anymore. Virginia and Sage talk about maps, social media and the fate of Yahoo.

Wrapping up the show, Scott, Susan and Virginia explain best practices for getting a maps local listing. The major engines (Google, Yahoo, Live Search) all have local listings centers that provide a useful starting point. Including a physical address on your site is a good indicator to local search engines. You should also manually submit your business’s information to the local listings centers.

Hosts Bruce, Robert and Susan discuss a number of recent search headlines, with Google taking a starring role. Some of the topics covered include Google’s ability to crawl and index text in Flash files, the newly launched Google Affiliate Network, and Matt Cutts’s announcement about how the search engine uses the data it collects to fight spam.

Then Matt McGee, creator and author of Small Business Search Marketing, talks to Virginia about how his blog has helped him gain feedback and insight into a new book he wrote about the rock band U2. Through a survey on his U2 blog, Matt also found that Twitter has not yet gained mainstream adoption, so social media efforts should focus on Facebook and MySpace. Matt recently accepted the position of Director of Strategic Search at the SEM company KeyRelevance.

Following up on Matt’s suggestions for small business search marketing, Susan and Virginia offer some things to keep in mind when optimizing for local search. From the local results of the major engines and local-only search engines to Internet yellow pages and local review sites, local search is a fragmented space. Providing accurate business data through a number of avenues and going after long-tail queries should be a focus of any local campaign.