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.

While using Opera I noticed the following Google test which places related phrases near some documents in the search results When I entered our above link building page into the Google AdWords Keyword Tool they showed mostly phrases related to the broader category of SEO and did not list the niche link related phrases, which indicates Google is still holding back quite a bit of data from advertisers that they are willing to share with searchers for free.

In the past I have mentioned that I am not a fan of doing lots of traditional SEO consulting for a number of reasons )mostly economic(, but I still work on a few large projects from time to time. One of the great parts about working with large corporate clients is when you uncover holes in their strategy, finding areas and opportunities that they can own just by deciding to. To some degree it feels like editing the search results, just like a search engineer,

I decided to pick David Lubertazzi and Elisabeth Sowerbutts as the winners for their SEO Knol improvement comments. I added a few pictures and fixed up some writing errors and incorporated a bunch of the feedback )like making the introduction better - thanks Andrew (. There are many things )like domain names, duplicate content, blogging, social media, conversion, history and background of SEO( that I could have discussed, but I was unsure of how long I should let the Knol get,

I try to teach my mom SEO stuff from time to time, and often do so through the use of analogies. Some analogies perhaps oversimplify the SEO process, but are good for helping get the basic concepts across. On Page Content fish and a fishing pole - when explaining how text heavy sites often outrank thin ecommerce sites, I like to call searchers fish and each word on the page an additional fishing pole in the water.

Knol Off to a Quick Start One day after Knol publicly launched Wil Reynolds noticed that a Knol page was already ranking . Danny Sullivan did a further test showing that 33% of his test set of Knol pages were ranking in the first page of search results. Danny was also surprised that his Knol was ranking #28 after 1 day. After citing it on his blog now that Knol page ranks #1 in Google!

cNet recently covered a new Microsoft Search research paper on BrowseRank [PDF] . The theory behind the concept of BrowseRank is that rather than using links )PageRank( as the backbone of a relevancy algorithm, you could look at actual usage data from hundreds of millions of users. Since there are more web users than webmasters BrowseRank would be a more democratic system, but many users are mislead and/or easily influenced by social media, public relations,

Like so many pursuits in life, it is easy for blogs to get stuck in an intermediate rut. I know, because I've been there. My site, Herbivoracious.com , has hit several plateaus in its first year of life. Each time the visits started to level out, I debated whether it was worth the effort to keep writing if only a few people were going to read it. Naturally I wondered what it would take to get more exposure for my site.

I gave my mom my old weight loss blog a few years back. In spite of publishing it on its own domain )smart( I was still using Blogger )dumb( when I gave it to her. It is not that Blogger is bad, but that Wordpress offers so many customization options that allow you to effectively rank for a wider array of keywords, and thus earn more per word. These are the steps I did to help move her blog over from Blogger to Wordpress.