Dear Wrists,

Please don’t make me take you in for therapy again. I know I abused you, but promise I’ll treat you better next time. The insurance won’t pay for any more visits to that nice hand therapist that you like so much. I won’t stop liveblogging, but will share what I learned liveblogging my first conference with other liveblogging newbies.

Prepare before the conference

Laptop Batteries

A spare battery is great to have, as you won’t always have easy access to power. I lucked out, and found a second battery for $5 at a local electronics fleamarket. It doesn’t have the full capacity of a new battery, but I also didn’t spend $130.

When a blog becomes a community destination it is more than writers writing and readers commenting. Readers get to know the names and avatars of blog authors, and check to see what they are thinking and reading. Readers who have questions may feel that the blog’s collective expertise is available to them, and use it as a great place to refer others - a smart jump start for a business with aspirations of establishing authority.

Grow a team, grow a blog, grow a community? Of course it’s not that simple. These steps may help.

Warning! Reality Check in progress..you will be returned to regular programming shortly.

Ok, so you say you know what PageRank is and how it applies to search optimization, but do you really? One thing is for certain…. A great many SEO’s, site owners and webmasters don’t seem to truly grasp the concept…so lets take a look shall we?

Hi there kiddies, Dave here (aka theGypsy) as the fine folks at Search Engine People have kindly asked to pinch hit this week, hopefully I can keep you edu-tained ;0)

The search engine has become an integral part of life in the 21st century. The ability to type in a few words and then get some results that are interesting and useful for you – it’s as transforming to a culture as the introduction of the VCR, the audio CD, the personal computer, the microwave oven, and the cell phone..

Can you imagine having to remember or having a list of every website that you’d ever want to visit, especially the ones with URLs of 30 characters or more that don’t use many recognizable words? Search engines take that burden away from us.

Social networking is increasingly becoming a vital aspect of our search marketing efforts. The connections we form amongst our online social communities can provide ever-expanding avenues of awareness of our sites, brand recognition, and ultimately buzz and link-love.

Sadly, however, there is a dark side to social networking. This dark side is one that we’d rather not talk about because we are afraid we might see it within ourselves. What could possibly be so scary? I call it the swirling vortex of social networking.

While some small business owners are on board with the idea of search engine optimization many still aren’t. However, even with those who aren’t quite on board yet, there’s an increasing awareness of this thing called search marketing and small business represents a fertile market for SEOs. The difficulty is the increasing awareness still hasn’t reached the point of realistic expectations and costs for many small business owners. So how does an SEO sell services to a market who’s needs and wants are often out of alignment with realistic expectations and pricing?

In his January video marketing piece, Tom Tsinas reminded us of the importance of incorporating images, audio, and video into our content. He wrote: “As search engine marketers, we all know that content is king and that content is more than just text. Images, video and audio each represent a fantastic opportunity to drive traffic to our client’s sites.” In this post, I’d like to share two examples that demonstrate how important that statement is.