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.

Google has released its open-source browser, Chrome, to public beta. The quick and streamlined browser got a lot of attention and also raised concerns about privacy and search engine bias. Bruce and Susan take a look at how browsers’ default settings and history storing can impact searcher behavior and affect marketers’ SEO efforts.

Then Virginia talks to Vanessa Fox, best known for her role in developing Google Webmaster Central and expanding the Google Webmaster Guidelines. Vanessa is also author of the blog Vanessa Fox. Nude. and is part of the team behind Jane and Robot. At Jane and Robot, Vanessa writes about the intersection of Web developer issues and SEO. She talks to Virginia about what developers need to remember about Google’s new Flash crawling ability, as well as her thoughts about redirecting the black hat/white hat debate. She also explains what she’s doing to help coordinate developer sessions at SMX East.

Susan and Virginia then discuss the various search engines’ webmaster guidelines in more detail. Along with the search engines’ published guidelines, search engine official blogs, forums and conference coverage also provide excellent sources which clarify and provide further explanation of the intentions and recommendations. Another helpful resource is Feed the Bot, for its straightforward break-down of Google’s guidelines, complete with definitions and examples that shed light on any jargon.