There are literally thousands of blog plugins available for WordPress and the temptation is often there to install one because it is 'nice'. However every blog plugin you install adds just a little more to the load time of your blog. For efficiency, you should only the plugins that you really need. That then raises the question, which blog plugins do you really need? Talk to 100 bloggers and you will get 100 different answers.

Inside AdWords announced yesterday a new development in the Google AdWords pay per click platform. You can now use keywords and placement targeting within the Content Network. There are two ways to make this work for you. You can create custom bids for your ad placements or you can choose to have your ad displayed within the content network only when the keywords and the placements match.

Social bookmarking is one of the oldest in the social media portfolio; forums and noticeboards being by far the oldest, dating back to the first social activities for networked computers. Social bookmarking can server many purposes, however the one thread I see from many people, particularly those in the blogging system, is to drive traffic to their pages.

Google recently blogged about the first anniversary of their current Google Analytics Interface. If you use Google Analytics as part of your blog metrics regime then it may be worth reading. Google Analytics is getting better, however they are still not recoding a lot of visitors so tracking and reporting is still not an exact science. The current interface is an improvement on the old one particularly the visiualizations.

Back when we were all younger and learning about things like writing papers in school, teachers always made an effort to say that you should always try to capture your thoughts in a draft and to put the pieces together, and then go back through and clean things up a bit. When it comes to press release writing, you'll find that this is a remarkably good idea. Revisions in press release writing are about a number of things.

Kevin Gold asks a great question: Is there ever a time when a paid search marketer can stop optimizing their campaigns and just sit back reaping the benefits of a previous job well done? When it comes to managing pay per click campaigns, you can't just sit and hope for the best. You can't get your ads to where you want them then sit back and kick your feet up. You have to "manage" them. That requires constant supervision. Organic search listings are always changing.

Professional social network Linkedin had announced the release of DirectAds, a new advertising service for small business looking to target their ads. The Linkedin blog reported the release a day or two ago. They claim: Like existing ads on our site today, DirectAds advertisements are intended to be non-obtrusive messages that accompany the overall experience of LinkedIn.

One of the most important things for marketing professionals and business owners who plan to use press release writing to attract media attention is actually quite simple: if you want to attract media attention, you're going to need to be sure that your press release stands out: )source( "I found that the average journalist receives 215 press releases a week â€" mostly e-mailed â€" but some receive many more.

Now that Yahoo! has its own custom search service - albeit a few days )re: years( too late - and is poised to compete with Google in that arena, will they go the next step and add search marketing adds to the results pages? We'll see. The real question is, where will be PPC go? There have been huge developments in pay per click in the last year, mostly from Google. They've add the ability for advertisers to manage print campaigns, radio campaigns, and TV campaigns. Yahoo!

WordPress 2.6 has been released almost a month ahead of schedule. The latest release is not a major overhaul and has not addressed some of the issues that many had called for following the release of version 2.5 - it does however have a few nice changes. For blogs with multiple authors, the latest release allows for the tracking of changes made to content.  Other changes include a toolbar feature that will allow you to insert content directly into a post.

Every web site wants to be number one, particularly number one in the search results pages. Unfortunately we cannot all attain those lofty heights. In fact getting to the top ten is no easy feat either. Fortunately we have social media to promote ourselves, our websites and our products or services. Where we may luck out on the search engines we may have better luck with social media marketing.

When you are writing press releases to market your business and you recognize that there are going to be circumstances in which you are writing about anticipated results, one of the things that you're going to find is that it's important to add "Safe Harbor" statements. When you make statements about what you expect will happen within your press release writing,

PPC Hero is reporting a new practice at Yahoo! that could seriously affect your PPC account there. The practice is called Ad Profiling. Evidently, what Yahoo! is doing now is taking low-performing keywords and revising the ads without account holders' permission. If this is really taking place then Yahoo! is treading into dangerous territory. I can envision a Yahoo! account representative making undisclosed changes to a user's ad that lead to higher click throughs,

Some blog owners go overboard and submit their sites to as many blog directories as possible in the shortest time possible.  Not only that, they use the same text in every submission. This result is that the main search engines look at these links coming back as unnatural and treat them accordingly. The key to successfully submitting your site to blog directories is to take it slowly and to do it smartly.

Social marketing is different to general marketing. With general marketing, you are promoting a brand, an image, a product or a company. When it comes to social marketing, you are really promoting yourself. If your not promoting yourself, you should be. Social marketing, as I have mentioned in previous articles, is about being social. Products cannot be social. Socializing is a human interaction and as such becomes a one-on-one or one-to-many event.

Sometimes one of the most difficult tasks is to generate comments on your blog. You may ask why are comments necessary? The number of comments on your blog can be indication of the quality of your blog content. Poor content and you may not receive too many comments. There is also talk in some circles that search engines will include the social popularity of content when ranking for search results.

Ask most public relations professionals and they'll tell you that press release writing just doesn't look the same as it used to. No longer exclusively about getting the word out to newspapers, magazines and TV and radio stations, these days press release writing is about something far more: attracting the attention of the social media.

Users of Google AdWords have had access to WordPress tools for some time now. Now, MSN adCenter users have access to a WordPress plugin that looks to a promising tool. The adCenter Analytics WordPress tool should allow WordPress bloggers the opportunity to track how their PPC ad campaigns are doing and to be able to track traffic to their blog. All it really does is add the adCenter Analytics code to your web pages. But do you really need it?

It seems it might be. As I start to look around the internet I see signs of social blogging, or micro blogging as it is often called, everywhere. There are a couple of quite humorous videos floating around Youtube centered on the addictive nature of sites like Twitter. Blog writers are probably the biggest users, and certainly the biggest culprits when it comes to spending at lot of time social blogging - but then blogging comes naturally to them anyway.

Blogs have become one of the major sources communication with the advent of Web 2.0. The are a few different blogging platforms around, most of which rely on PHP to control the behind the scenes action. Trouble is, PHP is quite slow and needs to be interpreted before your page can load to the screen. These blog design tips may help to speed things up just a little. Blog Design Tip 1: Convert your Header to HTML. Whenever anyone accesses your website,