Launch a new site with SEO in mind:

1. Choose a relevant domain name - I am not saying "keyword based" domain as that's getting more and more difficult, but "relevant" domain that will:

help your readers/customers associate your site with your niche;

ensure relevant backlink anchor text (people tend refer to a site using its domain name).

In this post Daniel Scocco answers to another question on the Problogger Question Box (and a question that I get asked a lot). Brian Auer asks:

What about [direct advertising] pricing? Are there any good ballpark price structures? What do we base rates on?

As soon as a blogger decides to play with direct advertising, the question of "how much to charge" emerges. If you charge too much, you might end up with no advertisers at all. If you charge too little, on the other hand, you will be leaving money on the table.

by Stoney deGeyter



Trust is a key usability issue when it comes to running a successful online business. Most people automatically view web businesses with a bias against them compared to their brick and mortar counterparts. Your ability to convince your visitors that yours is a trustworthy business is one of the key components to getting visitors to convert into customers.

There is a cloud over many of the world economies caused by the financial woes in the USA. When the American banks sneeze the rest of us catch a cold. This is causing a lot of people to worry about their jobs and mortgages, so of course there will be many who look at blogs for a quick buck.

I'm not a "make money online" blogger, I don't really do the monetization posts like Darren or John Chow, but I do believe blogs are an excellent way to make some money, even if it is just a supplemental side income.

If you're doing SEO on a site with thousands or tens-of-thousands of pages, it's likely you're working with some sort of content management system (CMS). However, CMS systems frequently cause problems with search engines. The great majority of the time these problems arise through ignorance on part of the CMS software developers. Basically, if the developers are not familiar with how search engines work, they may use coding practices that are not intended to be deceptive, but could be perceived that way by a search engine.

One way of attracting visitors to your website is to create content or webpages that are entertaining or filled with valuable information. If you own a blog and have been publishing for some time, you'll have more than enough material to use as traffic or link magnets.

You might not even need to develop new content. You could simply collect articles or media you've produced and situate them in a frame which appeals to a specific audience profile.

Filed under: Utilities, Web services, web 2.0

There are plenty of comparison tools for site traffic. Given a few minutes, we're willing to bet our readers could create a graph of a site's popularity over time. But what about graphing an artist's plays on MySpace or YouTube, how often people write blog posts about each presidential candidate, or how many people are seeding a file on BitTorrent? Trendrr lets you graph, compare, and mash up this kind of data with ease.

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Shareware

Looking for a free application that will automatically save backups of your important documents which you can retrieve if something goes horribly wrong with your term paper, business report, or terribly important letter to your friend in Nigeria who has a proposition for you? DocShield will scan a folder for changed files at regular intervals and save copies to an archive. If you want to restore a previous version, just right click on the file in the DocShield interface and select View to get a list of earlier versions. You can open old copies of your document or save them as new files.

Mixx, a Digg-like site that ranks news stories based on reader voting, will launch a new "breaking news" feature later today that should get real news onto the home page very, very fast. More on that below.

Since launching just last September, Mixx has been on a tear to release new products. Groups came in December, followed by private mail in Februrary. Also in February they released a clustering feature that I think would fix a big problem at Digg - duplicate stories describing the same event. With the new feature, other users could add different but related stories to the main news item. This removes the need for Duelling stories and it gives the reader more content on the stuff they just clicked on.

When I ask a company how they monitor their reputation online the most frequent answer I hear is that we use Google Alerts. Google Alerts are ok, but they don't give the complete picture about what people are saying about you or your company, and because they are email based, the information is difficult for multiple users within a department or company to use simultaneously.