By Lydia Mazorol Every now and then my sales team will come to me to ask if I think a web site will make a good SEO project for us. To have a successful SEO project with a client's web site, I found that it is necessary to be able to not only assess the web site but your client as well. What I have found are 5 steps, which take about 5 minutes, which will allow a quick glance at assessing a web site, but also, from these same steps,

By Julie Gallaher Like many bloggers, I dream of a day when I can leave my 9-5 job and make a great living on the internet. My travel recommendation site, Things You Should Do , will reach the milestone of 500,000 unique visitors during the next few weeks. I've experimented with lots of different methods to grow my traffic and recently discovered Flickr as a power tool. My strategy of using Flickr groups to build community and create stickiness is paying good dividends.

You might want to go ahead and change the oil on your RSS reader. At 2pm ET today, we'll publish the first batch of entries to our 3rd Annual SEM Scholarship Contest . That means, you'll see quite a few new posts hit your RSS reader. The same will happen at 2pm ET on Thursday and Friday. I know you'll be tempted to hit "mark all as read" but don't touch that button.

Every time I speak with a journalist about the online reputation management )ORM( industry, I'm often asked "How big is the industry?" You know what, I don't know. However, when it comes to Search Engine Reputation Management )SERM(-which is a component of ORM-I have a better feel for the amount spent in the space. So, in light of the complete lack of "estimates" for the SERM space,

I see that we're now trademarking our weirdness . So here are today's Pilgrim's Picksâ„¢ Mobile web browser Skyfire thinks it can do better than the Apple iPhone version of Safari. Investors think so too; they just handed the company another $13 million . Google has announced the pricing plans for its new Google App Engine. If you live in England, you might want to interview at the London Googleplex-it was just named the best workplace in the UK .

The local search property, Citysearch.com , is coming under fire for its lack of a click fraud system. According to a lawsuit filed yesterday in Los Angeles Superior Court, Citysearch.com is defrauding its advertising customers by not only turning a blind eye to click fraud, but the lawsuit states they are actually encouraging it. "Most click fraud cases involve companies that simply turn a blind eye to it," said the victims' attorney, Brian S. Kabateck,

It's been more than a year since the Belgian newspaper industry has been the focus of any attention , so its suing Google )again( for $77 million. Specifically the Belgian copyright defense group Copiepresse is the one doing the suing, according to Reuters . The dispute is over Google's reproduction of extracts from Belgian newspapers on its search engine.

I know you're used to reading 10, 20, and 101-step articles for online reputation management, but when it comes to hotels and local businesses, just one step could save your reputation. That one step? Don't let the customer leave your premises unhappy. I know, sounds simple, doesn't it? Yet, so few companies take the time to ensure that their customers' have enjoyed a pleasant experience, service, or stay. Simply asking them if they're happy,

You know the old Linky Goodness Litmus Testis it linky? Is it good? If so, find it below! Could APIs be the wave of the futurefor newspapers? The New York Times is betting on it. The algorithmic, scalable growth of Google's index improved by human editing. Sound appealing? Site605 hopes so and they claim to be bigger than Mahalo already. And someone else made money off Facebook's platformby selling their app.

Now here's a juicy rumor: everyone's favorite social networking site might be using everyone's favorite tech buzzword as early as this week. That's right: Facebook might go "open." TechCrunch reports that Facebook plans to go open source with their developer platform: With the new announcement, social networks won't need to go through the hassle of doing a deal with Facebook.

What blogs or sites do journalists visit most often? A study from Brodeur and Marketwire sought to find the most popular and credible sites . They measured the influence of social media on these topics: politics, healthcare, lifestyle, technology, and travel. Here are some basic findings of the study: If you're a technology reporter, you're most likely to blog as part of your job description.

I'm so glad to see the Financial Times take a look at the biggest flaw with the "free" model that's embraced the web: you can't make money with it! "There is going to be a shake-out here in the next year or two" as many Web 2.0 companies disappear, said Roger Lee, a partner at Battery Ventures. Despite this,

Is it just me, or does Google's attempt to defend YouTube from Viacom's copyright allegations sound like something the NRA would say? According to Reuters ' [Google] said that by seeking to make carriers and hosting providers liable for Internet communications, Viacom "threatens the way hundreds of millions of people legitimately exchange information, news, entertainment and political and artistic expression." I'm not trivializing gun-control here,

This time last year, I posted one of my all-time favorite photos . This year, I'm once again stealing from my wife's idea , and posting another of my favorites. I was both lucky and proud )of our armed forces( to get this shot outside the USS Missouri at Pearl Harbor. A big "thank you" to all who serve )and died( protecting our country. Pilgrim's Partners: Is a blogger attacking your company without you knowing?

By Michelle Greer There is nothing more annoying than trying to browse the web on a tiny mobile phone screen. Viewing one page on the web is hard enough. Conducting searches, updating web content, or watching a YouTube clip on a run-of-the-mill cell phone is nothing more than a painful experience. It's no surprise then that social networking is not very popular on mobile phones. According to a a survey conducted by Local Mobile Search , only 6% of the 1,

There's no need to beat around the bush: what do you, as an Internet user, think about when someone mentions the word "search"? You most likely think about Google and, why not, Yahoo! may also be on your mind. Microsoft's Live Search has started out as something they considered extremely promising but, unfortunately, things didn't exactly turn out the way these folks would have liked them to. Let's face it: as far as search is concerned,

The devil is in the details and sometimes it is easy to overlook opportunity even when it is staring you right in the face. Thankfully not everyone misses the obvious opportunities to take advantage of the hard work they have already done. Andy Beard has an excellent nearly step-by-step explanation as well as links to a video, from Stomper Net made by Andy Jenkins, showing how to take an existing Google listing and work to get an indented listing to go along with it.

How much do you spend on online advertising each year? $5,000? $50,000? $500,000? Or perhaps $5 million? Let's assume you spend $50,000 per year on ALL of your online advertising. What if you could spend just 0.01% of that budget and potentially increase the visibility, clickability, and conversions of all your online ads? Enter MarketingSherpa's 2008 Online Advertising Handbook & Benchmarks .

Okay, let's face it. Your attention span hasn't improved since this morning and neither has mine. So here's the afternoon's news in bite-sized pieces so you can leave for your vacation guilt free. Good news: most people don't believe everything they read on the Internet . 48% say that a small portion or none of online info is reliable, 38% think about half is reliable, and 13% think most of it's reliable. )And yes,

I know some of you haven't quite found the time to enter our 3rd Annual SEM Scholarship Contest . Seeing as this is a holiday weekend anyway, I've decided to extend the entry deadline to Monday at 3pm ET. This should give all of you procrastinators the weekend to put together your article entry and show the world why you're the next big American SEM Idol. Good Luck!