SEO, SEM, Web 2.0 - Demystifying these terms is one of the first objectives I take up whenever I start talking about my job to friends or clients. There’s a lot that goes into Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing, but there certainly isn’t any Voodoo, other than hard work that creates successful websites that garner a healthy amount of traffic and high visibility through search engines.

This video by CommonCraft does a great job at explaining what Social Bookmarking is, and how it is beneficial to you as an individual, and to the greater web community at large. Enjoy!

Online Reputation Management, and the accompanying Issue Resolution Process seems to be a very hot topic of late. There is much debate about the approaches to use in varied situations. That said, I thought I’d take a stab at trying to add some clarity to the process by creating a model to guide the decision making process. As it happens, I was so impressed with SEOMoz’s How to Handle a Google Penalty flowchart, that it occurred perhaps one should also be created in this situation … voila!

When the news about Google Shared Stuff broke I of course had a look right away.

The Email/Share icon looked vaguely familiar. A couple of hours later it came to me. I had seen the icon before on a similar service called ShareThis:

This seemed weird to me and made me wonder if Google had maybe done a buyout or buy-in that I wasn’t aware of.

Wordpress 2.3 = Seo Goodness Mmmm…

1. Native tagging support - Gone are the days of using 3rd party plugins such as Ultimate Tag Warrior, Jerome’s Keywords, Simple Tags, and Bunny’s Technorati Tag plugins. Tagging is now integrated into Wordpress 2.3! If you’ve already been using a tagging plugin you can bring your data into the new system. The tagging system is also wicked-fast, so your host won’t mind

Loonie Surpasses the US Dollar

The falling US Dollar is certainly affecting more than just Americans, with its effects reaching far and wide into both the online and offline realms. With the Greenback being the most preferred currency for all transactions online, you can certainly expect changes in sales and demand in online businesses, as well as any revenue you generate online.

A Tale of Baguettes and Tears

There’s two sides of the coin to this story, and while is rather rosy, our’s is almost as bleak. While some of us are rushing off the States for a weekend shopping spree, others shall be working hard to recoup their losses in online revenue. A bit dramatic perhaps, but our Canadian exporters will surely share in lamenting this fluctuating dollar.

Delicious (they have dropped the del.icio.us) has just launched version 2.0 to a by invitation only preview group. Boasting 3 million registered users and 100+ million unique URLs bookmarked, Yahoo! owned Delicious is in for some major changes.

Founder Joshua Schachter was quoted saying that we can expect a complete code rewrite, along with a decidedly different interface, broken down into four sections; Home, Bookmarks, People and Tags.

Michael Arrington has a post with detailed screen shots of some of the new features which include:

Google’s online Powerpoint clone is live. Those who regularly receive PPT files filled with images of cute animals will be thrilled. Right…

If you decide to use Google Presentations it’s good to keep something in mind which also applies to PowerPoint:

Do not put what you say on the screen

Australian research shows that the brain is limited in what in can process how. If the exact same information comes to us in verbal and written form at the same time, our brain sort of phases out.

Here’s the question: why do you want to rank high on Google? Why isn’t your first interest Yahoo or Live Search (formerly MSN)?

It seems a strange question. With Google having grown out to become the heart of the web, the starting point for all online activity, who wouldn’t want to rank high on Google first, right?

Sure — but why? If you’re a high school teen who has just setup her first web site it might be very, very important to see a page counter click up: 1 visitor, 2 visitors, 3 visitors (hi mom!), 4….

In what to me amounts to the high impact SEO story of the year, Ammon Johns has announced that he is stepping down as an administrator and moderator of Cre8asite Forums.

Ammon Johns (1966) is a household name in the SEO community. Active in SEO and SEM since 1997, Ammon was one of the first proponents of the holistic approach which has ROI instead of “just” high rankings as its goal. Instead of sending more visitors to a site (the classic SEO model), Ammon worked to send qualified traffic where “every single one of them is a genuine, prequalified sales prospect”.

My friend Peter Papadimitriou at Globecraft sent me the following email he received from Google:

Dear Peter Papadimitriou,

We are happy to announce a new feature that will allow you to
easily reach additional qualified customers who are searching
Google from their mobile phones.

In the next few days, your search ads will be eligible to run on
Google Mobile Search pages (like they currently do on Google.com).
We are offering this feature - and any resulting clicks - for
free through November 18, so you can experiment with the rapidly
growing mobile platform while still reaching qualified customers.