I recently worked with the fine folks at Wordtracker to create an ebook titled 50 Kick-Ass Keyword Strategies . Coming up with 50 unique and creative keyword research ideas was a bit more work than I thought it would be, but it was great fun to work with the Wordtracker crew - the feedback they gave to improve the content and the formatting they did were phenomenal.

Hope to see you there! Details here .

Recently a SEO working for a lead generation network sent me a letter in the mail alerting me that I could improve my website by linking to their site. They mention some of the large brands they send leads to and state that the link to their site from my site would improve my site's credibility, user experience, and offer our site visitors security since their lead generation form was secure.

Google announced that they are going to implement their Google Suggest search suggestion feature on Google.com. This change will help searchers find popular keywords that other searchers recently searched for. Short Term Search Influence on Search When this search suggest change is coupled with the recent launch of automatic matching and the new quality score update it may consolidate PPC competition against a smaller set of core industry keywords. Some outlier keywords,

A lot of wealth consultants and self help snake oil hucksters, the type who publish books and movies like Rhonda Byrne's The Secret, would like you to believe that if you believe something it will come true. This Amazon.com review sums up The Secret book/DVD nicely: Byrne's book is problematic on many levels. On it's face, it's a manipulative marketing tool meant to flatter, confuse and deceive. It's also pseudoscience at its best,

Google has been changing the code used to display their search results a number of times over the past couple days. We recently updated SEO for Firefox and Rank Checker . Both should work as of now, and if any more SERP changes happen we will try to update the extensions as soon as possible. If you need to update these tools you can do so within the Firefox browser by clicking on Tools in the top Firefox menu, then from the Tools menu click on Add-ons .

I love writing, especially when compared to speaking. If I make a spelling error or need to pause and think...no problem, but with video I notice my awkward pauses and voice inflections and cringe, and then I worry about sounding like the Fox weatherman with turrets I recently came across Chris Martenson's Crash Course and appreciated the clarity of the message and presentation, which got me to thinking I should try to get better with video stuff.

Most the attempts at political SEO I have seen this year have been grassroots GoogleBombing or half-thought out campaigns asking fans to comment online )and the occasional robotic sounding request for viral content creation (. Obama was estimated to have spent over $2 million on Google ads , and Google political ad man Peter Greenberger claims that limited and inconsistent search ad spend hurt Hillary Clinton ,

Seth Godin recently published a post about the dead zone between being real and being polished : "It's the banal stuff in the middle that people don't read. And yet, 95% of what I see is precisely in the dead spot of the middle zone. " I firmly try to stay in the "real" category )largely because I can't tolerate the polished up fake stuff(, though someone sent me an anonymous email today telling me I need to polish it up You know a lot,

I got mentioned in the media 3 or 4 times last week and just finished my last interview )at least for a while(. It is hard when you get used to doing interviews with friends or talking to the media because it is easy to be unprepared for the other. With reporters you have to be guarded because they often aim for a misquote because that sounds more interesting, whereas you can be really open with friends.

I just got done talking with a pretty sharp reporter about some SEO stuff. He had done far more research than most reporters I talk to, but still had one big misconception about the field of SEO...thinking it was largely about mechanical processes, hidden text, and other such tricks. Market research, site structure, and on page optimization are important. Doing them well can double or triple the earnings of a site,

On Sitepoint Clinton Lee wrote a 6 page high quality web site valuation guide . The New York Times recently published a great article about flipping websites , quoting my buddy Peter Davis . Shane Pike recently blogged about selling one of his sites to Internet Brands . The site he sold was the one that let him quit his job. I gave him some tips on how to build traffic and increase monetization during a 15 minute chat at Elite Retreat in December of 2006.

Because of the low cost of online distribution a company can quickly grow from being one of your affiliates, to one of your leading sales channels, to being the leading competitor. And once they grow into a destination you can't just cut them off without hurting your customers or your brand, as Ryanair will soon find out .

It is fun to watch Tamar Weinberg and John Andrews write about social media. Largely because they are both firm in their beliefs, and they believe polar opposites. Tamar's piece covering the definition of social media marketers is uplifting and paints social media as friendships to be won rather than games to be played and people to be fooled. But bots and ad networks are amoral, and they control the production of much of the free content.

When the .ME landrush began I thought it would be possible to get a couple fun names like SEO.ME and QUIZ.ME for about $200 each. Boy was I wrong! Look at these .ME domain auction prices ... I have seen far better .info )and sometimes .net and .org( names with far more resonance go for prices far below these prices. Many international CCTLD names are dirt cheap. It is hard to find an online market more saturated than the search engine optimization field, and yet SEO.CO.

I was just fixing up our Robots.txt tutorial today, and figured that I should blog this as well. From Eric Enge's interview of Matt Cutts I created the following chart. Please note that Matt did not say they are more likely to ban you for using rel=nofollow,

I recently saw Ed Dale and his cronies teaching thousands of Internet marketing newbies how to use Market Samurai, a paid tool promoted through their free course. As their B case video )showing the free alternative that justifies the monthlong sales pitch for various products pitched as free help ( they used a poorly configured version of SEO for Firefox to make the tool look worse than what they were trying to sell,

Google recently added search volume estimates to their keyword tool . They also recently launched Google Trends , Google Hot Trends , Google Trends for Websites , and the Google Ad Planner .

Yesterday I finished a monologue by Manuel F. Ayau titled Not a Zero-Sum Game in which he explains the basis of economics with common sense passages like: Understanding that in a market economy a person can only get rich by enriching others torpedoes claims to the moral high ground of those who propose that government redistribution of wealth is a means to alleviate poverty. and [In a market economy], one cannot "make a fortune" at the expense of others,

I recently had an email chat with Alden DoRosario from Chitika about the recent rapid growth of their ad network. They have been aggressively signing up bloggers and other independent publishers, and are now getting over 2 billion monthly impressions, with their behaviorally targeted Premium ads getting hundreds of millions of monthly search driven impressions, putting their search distribution network on par with Ask.com.