If you own a blog, you are probably familiar with the concept of pinging. In essence, when you publish a piece of content, you want to let syndication services such as Technorati to come and pick up on your new content. This is all fine and dandy if you do it moderately (don’t do it 5 times a day and when you have no new content as you will get banned). Pinging allows you to get extra links and traffic from around the net and who hates that, right? It all looks harmless really. You publish content, you let others know about it, and you get traffic... 

I  often hear people complaining about how doing search engine optimization is like flying blind. That’s simply not true. If you know you SEO basics (keyword research, tagging, link building, and …), you are not flying blind. Sometimes SEO efforts take time to show up in your results, and often you are outdone by an even more dedicated site. All hope is not lost though. There are tools out there that can help you gain competitive edge and stay atop of your market. One underrated tool that you can use to help you figure out whether you are on... 

Uncertainty is the nature of search engine optimization. Google provides us all with a guideline on how to keep our pages optimized for its bots, but it doesn’t tell us which factor is more important, or what truly determines the ranking for a site (for a specific term). So, it’s only natural for SEOs to make up stories to make more money. One of these unfounded claims is the fact that you can hurt your rankings by putting Google Adsense on your blog or website right away. Now that can’t be further from the truth. I have done numerous experiences... 

When I posted a story about the new search engine, Cuil, a while back, I never thought that Cuil had the potential to surpass major search engines in the short run, as far as driving traffic to my site. After testing Cuil for a while now, I am personally stunned that it is driving more traffic to my site than Yahoo! (I am actually getting traffic from Yahoo! and Live). I have a very small niche site that gets about 100 visitors a day from Google, about 20 visitors from Yahoo! and about 10 visitors from MSN. I do get traffic from Twitter, which is my 2nd... 

You may have heard stories about how Digg can help you move up the search engine rankings and double or triple your SEO conversions. But is that really true? The simple answer is yes and no. Digg, Wikipedia, and all other Web 2.0 social networks have pretty much implemented the no-follow tag on their links. So you get a link but it is pretty much ignored by search engines. Does that mean that you should not go after these links? That’s not true at all. Unlike some SEOs claim, no-follow links are actually very valuable, if they are obtained from the...