Two of the most common questions that people ask about online marketing is, 'should I put a blog on my site?' and 'how do I get my site indexed quickly?'. The answer, in many cases, is yes and perhaps with your blog. If you want to be indexed by Google and other engines quickly, the answer is often "get a blog". While I won't get into all of the pitfalls of having a blog, I did want to show you one small indexing benefit that is related to having a blog...

An SEO firm in Washington state has been sued over it's practices and may face thousands in penalties and fees according to Search Engine Watch. The core issue had been that their services were not clear, that they made inaccurate guarantees, and if their competitor's post is true, called this service a "scam to avoid".

Often when you sign up for an email account, blog account, or other service, a "captcha" is used to verify that you are setting up a real account. In regards to blogs, it is often a great way to avoid getting tons of automated, spammy comments that do little to add to a conversation. However captchas can often be humorous in their own way.

The other day I was thinking about registering for a free email address. Of course, all of the names that I thought to register were taken. I tried to register a new domain, all of the names that I really wanted were long gone. I went to a couple of Web 2.0 social sites and thought about names that I didn't really want but might be interested to post under... it turns out WebTrends was already taken at Twitter. Was this a real or fake account?

There are a number of disagreements in the SEO industry about what is the most important thing in regards to improving search engine rankings. Some argue that content is the most important. Some argue that it is optimization that is the most important. Some think that links are the most important. While I think that all 3 are quite important, and while there are thousands of factors to consider, lets just look at links for a moment.

Has your site recently taken a nose dive in the rankings? Do you find that your site is no where to be found even if you use your domain name as the search term? Whether you have a Google WebMaster Tools account or not, you may now find a note from the WebMaster team waiting for you, after you've created an account and verify your site.

Ranking on your company name, product name, etc. just became that much more important. Perform a search on various brand and company names like Wikipedia, Best Buy, New York Times, and others and you'll find an extra search box just below the first result. By adding keywords to this search box, it will further refine a search so that results come only from the listed site.

I was reading an associated press piece this morning and it brought up a good point about names with dashes, apostrophes, and other characters that me non-standard to many English based web sites. Most customer relationship management apps (CRM), databases for credit card applications, hotel reservations systems, and more usually require name fields that allow only for a standard first and last name. Non-standard names may cause problems or even shut down your systems.

It is pretty likely that you've heard of the term "Web 2.0". It is basically a term coined around 2005 to signify that your web site has some type of interactivity with it's visitors. If you go to sites like Slashdot, Digg, MySpace, Twitter, Craigslist, Upcoming, YouTube, etc. the majority of content on these sites, has been created by site visitors rather than the companies that manage these sites. While many will focus on the interesting technology behind these sites, i.e. logins, automated notifications, managed lists, etc. as the "magic" behind the sites, it is truly the interaction that keeps these sites popular. In this post I want to highlight a blog called Daily Monster, it is an example of a site that is interacting with site visitors with out all of the hoopla or technological widgets that are often associated with Web 2.0 style interactivity. Hopefully it will also inspire you to interact with your own site visitors.

We are often asked by WebPosition users, "how do you optimize for more than one engine?" Although you can optimize the same web page for multiple engines, some engines will have such widely differing preferences that optimizing for multiple engines can be nearly impossible. As you start creating a page that has more appeal to one engine, it may become less appealing to another. While you can perform split A/B testing in order to see what works out best between different versions of your pages, I think most people just want to put up a few pages and be done with it. If you are in this camp, it is generally recommended that you optimize separate pages for each search engine. Although I've covered this a bit in an article called Reinforcing Ideas and Improving Relevance to Gain Better Rankings, it may help to illustrate the multi optimization point in a another way. Open another browser window and point it to the e-commerce store, ThinkGeek.com and I'll show you what I mean.

A few weeks ago, I had a post talking about link exchange spam that we periodically receive. As a follow up, just a few things to note regarding advertising your SEO services online. I got an email from a "Nick Slevin" advertising that he could "help to improve my rankings". It appears that I wasn't the only one. As an online marketer, I get all sorts of questions regarding how sites should market online. Email marketing is often a touchy subject.

As an internet marketer, it is often easier to look at some one else's site and see opportunity than it is to see opportunities on your own site. In this post I want to give an example of what I would call "bootstrap" SEO. Essentially bootstrap SEO occurs when you see some one else's success, think up ideas on how they might continue to build on their success, but you may instead find a way to build this content for your own site.

The other day I was reading a post at Google Blogoscoped called "How Google Tests Results Quality" and thinking about how many people will use advertising as a crutch for sites that have low rankings. While searchers may click on advertisements and top ranked pages, that doesn't mean that they like what they see once they reach their destination. This is why some web masters become perplexed that they can have a high "hit" count and high pay per click ad spend but low conversions or sales. This often leads to sentiments like "Pay Per Click advertising is a joke" or "top rankings don't really matter".