SEO Made Simple: Part 2 SEO is a popularity contest Remember your high school days, when all that mattered was being popular? That's what I think of when I think about SEO. Similar to high school, with SEO everyone is trying to impress the big dog on campus-in this case it's Google.  Aside from making me shutter to reminisce about high school, thinking of SEO in this way helps me simplify it and understand it more easily. Bare with me for a minute as I explain the parallel. As you know the high school version of the popularity contest went something like this...In order to become popular ...

Over the past several years, search engine optimization (SEO) has become an increasingly important part of organizations' marketing efforts.  For those of you who are new to SEO, basically it is a strategic plan to optimize various parts of your Web site to get it noticed by Google (I'll explain later why Google is the only search engine that matters) and thus appear high up in the search results. The higher your site ranks, the more people will see your site and visit it. Let's use my company for an example. If you enter website consultants into Google, Effect will come up in the top one ...

Data shows that the usage of Internet Explorer as a browser is declining at a record rate, and for good reason. IE6 is now eight years old and can be incredibly unstable. I haven't found IE7 to be much better. In addition to being unstable and having a lot of security issues, it also doesn't have a lot of the additional add-ons that Firefox or Google Chrome has. It's also incredibly slow in comparision. This chart from Net Applications gives you a visual representation of the decline of IE and the rise of Firefox, Safari (now available for PC's and Mac users), and Google Chrome. In 2008, ...

I love time saving applications and plug-ins and I've just found a way to integrate two of my favorites: Facebook and Gmail. Xoopit (pronounced Swoop-It) allows users to both see and set Facebook status messages, and view profile photos all while reading their email. There are lots of time saving possibilites with this new application but I will have to agree with my friends at ReadWriteWeb that: "The best part of this plugin is that when you email with people who are also on Facebook, those messages will now also include their Facebook profile photos and status messages.These appear in ...

Innovation is the new buzz word.  And for good reason, we need it now more than ever. It's up to you and me. We each play a critical role in how the future of our world will be shaped. We can choose to be a part of the solution, rather than the problem. Our current economic woes have put us in a unique place, where in order to survive we must think outside the box and exercise our creative muscles. [caption id="attachment_151" align="alignright" width="300" caption="Photo courtesy of http://www.sxc.hu/profile/flaivoloka"][/caption] Sometimes its easy to get caught up in the doom ...

A whopping 78.5% of U.S. Internet users watch video online in December, according to comScore. This number soared 13% up from the previous month. 14.3 billion videos were viewed, making December a record setting month. Google's video market share (think YouTube) also continues to grow. The videos on their sites currently account for 41% of all viewing. Top U.S. Online Video Properties* by Videos Viewed December 2008 Total U.S. – Home/Work/University Locations Source: comScore Video Metrix Property Videos (000) Share (%) of Videos Total ...