No, not like that, but in the good way! :D The following is a guest post by Jim Kukral highlighting one of the most fundamental tips to succeeding online. Have you ever really taken a step back from all the technical SEO stuff and thought about why Google wins? The real reasons why they have mass-market share and why they continue to dominate? It's time you should, because once you understand how to start thinking like Google,

Yes, deliberate mistake :( It grates when people write poorly, huh. When writers write well, the words almost become invisible. The focus shifts away from technical details, and onto the message. Is there an easy way to write better blog posts? E-mails? Web copy? Let's take a look at three guidelines for web writing. 1. If You Can Say It,

Does the thought of selling fill you with dread? If you see yourself as a technologist, or marketer, then selling may not come easy to you. But we all need to sell something, even if it is just our opinion! If you're a consultant of any description, it comes with the territory. So it pays to know a few techniques. Luckily, sales isn't something you have to be born to do - it does not require supernatural charm, charisma, a hide as thick as an elephant, and a superhuman drive.

One of the best ways to track Google's strategies is through visualizing & analyzing their acquisitions. Which is what the following image helps you do.

Alexa , a free and well-known website information tool, recently released a paid service. For $199 per site Alexa will audit your site )up to 10,000 pages( and return a variety of different on-page reports relating to your SEO efforts. It has a few off-page data points but it focuses mostly on your on-page optimization. You can access Alexa's Site Audit Report here: http://www.alexa.

Do you want Google to tell you what you should be doing? Mr. Schmidt thinks so : "More and more searches are done on your behalf without you needing to type. I actually think most people don't want Google to answer their questions," he elaborates. " They want Google to tell them what they should be doing next . ... serendipity"can be calculated now. We can actually produce it electronically.

Everyday it seems like a new SEO tool or toolset is launching. I've been quite impressed with the improvements and enhancements to Raven's SEO Tools since they launched. There are so many features in Raven but I want to focus on some of the really unique ones which make Raven a must have for me. Link Research Tools Raven has 2 powerful, time-saving tools in their Link Research toolset.

Pretty exciting day in search seeing Bing results live on Yahoo! Search results. There were some questions as to what might transfer and what might stay. It seems that generally algorithmically there was roughly a 1 to 1 transfer. Yahoo! is still showing fewer characters in their page titles than Bing does. Site links )listed below some sites( may also use different anchor text. But the core results are the same.

Sigh, not this again. ;( Recently Rand highlighted his surprise at how prevalent search spam is . But the big issue with search today is not the existence of spam, but how it is dealt with. For a long period of time Google spent much of their resources fighting spam manually. That worked when spammers were sorta poor and one hit wonders fighting on the edge of the web & few people knew how search worked.

Jon Glick is one of the leading experts on search, having literally both wrote the code at leading search engines and later becoming an SEO professional. I remember speaking with him in 2004 at the Ghost Bar in Las Vegas and it was perhaps the most fascinating conversation about search I have ever been part of. I have wanted to interview him for years & just recently was able to.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics - Disreli We get presented with graphs and statistics every day. "Most SEOs think keywords in the title tag is an important ranking factor." "Spending on search to rise by $10b". Ever get that feeling that what you're being presented with sounds plausible, but the conclusion just doesn't make sense? Here are a few common ways people try to pull the wool over your eyes with statistics.

One of Wordnet's definitions for save is "someone entirely dominated by some influence or person; 'a slave to fashion'; 'a slave to cocaine'; 'his mother was his abject slave.'" Amongst that definition of the word, it is no stretch to say many Americans ) and indeed the United States ( are debt slaves. We encourage it in virtually every aspect of our lives: consumerism, taking on debt to buy a new car or house,

Marketing generally has 2 core strategies in terms of customers: finding new customers & keeping your current/old customers happy. The best businesses tend to keep the interest of their customers for months and years through consistently improving their products and services to deliver more value. Whereas the other sorts of businesses tend to be hard-close / hype driven & always promoting a new product / software / scheme. It is never a complete system being sold,

PPC Blog has another cool infographic out. This one is called The History of Search: How Finding Stuff Online Became a $20 Billion Business . Click on the below image to see the full version. And if you like it,

Rel=nofollow to the Rescue Years ago Google introduced rel=nofollow, claiming it as a cure-all for comment spam. Once in place, it was quickly promoted as a tool to use on any paid link. Google scared webmasters about selling links so much that many webmasters simply became afraid to link out to anyone for fear of falling out of favor with Google.

Perhaps part of the "interesting data" Richard Rosenblatt was talking about was link anchor text on expired domains & cybersquatting efforts that he could redirect in bulk at high earning eHow pages . Not to fear, Demand Media is a trusted Google partner, so the algorithm and engineers are prohibited to take action against the same activity which would get your website removed from the search results.

The following is a guest post by Kpaul. :( A long time ago, on an Internet far, far away )when I wrote for fun - and for free(, I did a piece called Portrait of a Blogger . The year was 2002 and blogging was just beginning to really hit the mainstream hard. If you're not familiar with the audience at Kuro5hin.org, they're a snooty version of slashdot readers if you can imagine such a thing. )Mentioning both of these websites is outing my age, I think.

Straight from the horse's mouth : We've started testing organic )also referred to as algorithmic( and paid search listings from Microsoft for up to 25 percent of Yahoo! Search traffic in the U.S. The primary change for these tests is that the listings are coming from Microsoft. However, the overall page should look the same as the Yahoo! Search you're used to â€" with rich content and unique tools and features from Yahoo!. If you happen to fall into our tests,

Both Yahoo! and Microsoft have confirmed that they will start testing the Bing algorithm live on some Yahoo! traffic this month. One of the big questions from the SEO perspective is what happens to Yahoo! Site Explorer ? If it goes away then webmasters will need to get link data from web indexes built by SEO companies, perhaps either Open Site Explorer and/or Majestic SEO . Yahoo! also offers a link: search in their BOSS program .

Open source software is awesome, and I am much richer for it existing. But the concepts that work in widely downloaded free software may not apply as well elsewhere. One of the best books on this topic is Jason Lanier's You are Not a Gadget , which in large part inspired this post. Openness is one of the most widely espoused important ideals upon which to build an online business.