When it's Blog Catalog of course - or MyBlogLog for that matter. These two appear to be in a head to head race to see who can outdo each other as alternative social media sites as well. To the outsider it may appear they are competing for blog owner traffic. The reality is that most blog owners, if they are active on one, are also active on the other. The major difference is the level of activity on each of the sites.

It had to happen at some stage. Amazon has joined the social media set by acquiring Shelfari, a social network focused on books. It is a natural progression for a company the size of Amazon and I am a little surprised it has taken so long. Shelfari is a blend of social bookmarking and forum that allows users to: Build virtual bookshelves - and fill them with books Discover books to add to their bookshelves,

Grok asks , Would you pay to achieve high PPC rankings if you already rank well organically? Good question. This is something we've touched on before. It pays to hit the consumer every way you can. If you ignore PPC advertising then you'll effectively shut out 20% of the searchers who click on those ads.

One of the most important aspects to running any business, online or offline, is the reputation that business' can build. In a bricks and mortar world, your customers are the primary starting point. There are other avenues such as sponsoring local sports or charities and promoting certain angles such as being green. For an online business, there is an opportunity to develop a blog - this can be a tremendous tool to developing a business' reputation.

Twitter is trying to battle spam for several different reasons. The obvious reason of course is that no one want to receive constant streams of spam, even in sms type messages. Twitter is a little different as it hosts millions 'conversations' at once, a factor that has lead to numerous outages. Remove the spam and you may reduce activity by 10-25% - maybe more, I doubt less. Spam has been the curse of internet since mailing lists and bulletin boards.

How often do you check your blog for dead links? Doing a regular check is important as it can identify any broken or dead links within your blog, and any dead links leaving your blog. Having a link that points to a site or page that no longer exists is a waste of a link. You are should remove and dead links and either leave them out altogether, or point them to content that exists. More importantly, you need to be able to find broken or dead links within your own site.

How do you organize your keywords? Here's the word from the Yahoo! Search Marketing team . We've given this advice before, but it still stands. Whether you use Google, Yahoo!, or MSN adCenter, grouping your keywords into a tight keyword group and matching them will relevant ads is still the best way to go about PPC advertising. This is good advice for novice advertisers as well as veteran advertisers. There is no limit to the number of keywords you can have in a group.

As the internet expands and as more people turn to the internet for information, the options to find that information expands - and it's not just in the search engines. In fact, a reliance on the search engines for traffic alone is going to be a big mistake. The newest group to start taking to the e-waves are those in retirement, or semi-retirement. Where in the past the older generation were reluctant to access technology,

What is the purpose of a blog? More importantly, what is your purpose in hosting a blog? If your answer is purely SEO then I suggest you think again. Blogs can and do help with the overall search ranking of a site when optimized effectively, they are however far more powerful than simple SEO. Blogs desinged for pure SEO are often not terribly user friendly. In fact, whilst they may rate well early, overtime they will struggle to maintain high ratings.

Microsoft AdCenter has added a new keyword research tool that Microsoft executives hope will make the up-and-coming PPC advertising vehicle more competitive with Google. But don't hold your breath. Though the keyword research tool has some unique features, it is MSN, and Google still has the lion's share of the search market. One cool feature of the new keyword research tool at MSN adCenter is Audience Insights.

Viral marketing is one of the flavors of the month at SES San Jose. The subject has been covered on many blogs over the last twelve months or more with many 'how to' type posts. When it comes to viral marketing, however, it is not all rosy; there are several negatives. Viral Marketing Is Hit and Miss: You can put a lot of time an effort into planning a viral marketing campaign only to see it fail and not cause a whimper let alone a storm.

Back in May Microsoft reported on a new social bookmarking application that was going into closed beta. In early September they will open their doors to the general community to try out. John Martin on his TechNet blog reported: Microsoft is opening up the MSDN, TechNet, and Expression sites to the community, so that technical professionals can better connect with each other, share knowledge, and succeed.

Some people are quite fastidious about keywords and exactly what sort of percentages they have on their pages. Other people like to sneak keywords in wherever they can in an attempt to increase the number of keywords on a page. Keywords are important. We suggest you include a keyword in the page title and that you spread your keywords throughout your posts. This works well for most websites and blogs. You can,

I'll say it right up front: Yes. By all means, don't just settle on one PPC provider. Would you settle for just one search engine? A lot of people focus on Google, but you can build a solid business just on Yahoo! and MSN Live and never rank in Google. I'm not suggesting you should; I'm just saying you can. And you can drive great, targeted traffic to your website if you only use Google AdWords, but you're leaving out all of those people who use MSN Live or Yahoo!

As your blog gets bigger and the number of pages expand, sometimes it can be difficult for your readers to find information. We live in an instant world where people want everything at their fingertips. One of the best ways to help your readers is to have a well placed internal search option. There are other options. Your past content should not be wasted, particularly if it is good and has been well received in the past.

Google AdWords has changed its quality score again . This time they've started calculating quality score when searchers make a search query, which is fine, but they are no longer haulting keywords and telling you that those keywords are inactive for search. Nor are they telling you the minimum bid necessary to be approved. Instead, they are telling you the minimum bid to be on page 1. This obviously has to do with increasing bid prices. Google wants you to spend more money.

Facebook has been offering PPC advertising for some time now. But is it worth it? According to The Challenge Dividend , it's an utter failure. Well, I'm not going to say it is or isn't. Instead, I'm going to offer an idea what PPC advertising should do to succeed.

Social marketing seems to be the 'in' thing at present. Whether you are reading a post on SEO, marketing or 'how to increase traffic', the one common theme is going to be 'you need to engage in social marketing'. With so many different social sites around, many web owners feel totally overwhelmed by thought of participating. If you are one of them, don't worry, you're not alone. The most basic of questions is always the stumbling block: Where do I start?

There are a lot of ways to measure the progress of a blog, however standard metrics programs don't always tell the real story for a blog. Having said that, basic blog metrics information is easy to collate and can be a good indication of the success of a blog. These are probably the 8 most important blog metrics for everyday bloggers. 1:  How many posts over a given period of time. How many posts per month is a good start.

I was discussing customer relations with a few individuals recently and one comment caught my attention. Having purchased an item from a web site, they tried to engage the site owner in conversation about the product. Despite having only positive comments to make about the product, the owner really did not engage and left pretty quickly. The reason I found it interesting was, first the public nature of the conversation and the lack of engagement, the second and more important,