If you haven’t read Get Your Blog Google-Ranked in 30 Days Or Less, Part 1, you aren’t going to want to miss it. But, here are even more useful suggestions to put your blog on steroids without any blog-roid rage. Please read on.

25. Focus on ranking for three key words or phrases to start. The keywords you select should appear in your HTML title tags and within the site’s content when appropriate. However, watch keyword density levels. Anything above 5% starts to sound like gibberish. 2% to 3% keyword density provides more creative latitude for the content developer, and still lets bots know what the site is about.

There have always been pro-union people and anti-union people, and you can usually guess who’s what depending on their individual caste. In this case, though it carries with it the same arguments, it will have to be decided first if an industry has emerged from nebulous existence and into a viable, thriving industry.

The burning question: Is there a need for a blogger’s labor union?

And your first thought, like mine, is quite likely, “huh?”

Labor unions are for steel workers and teachers, underpaid, over-skilled and overworked, who need collective bargaining power just to avoid a return to the 19th Century sweat-shop economy – that, and the ability to feed their kids.

By Linda Bustos

“Sinning” is an archery term, which literally means “to miss the mark.” If you’re blogging to establish a two-way dialogue with the world, the “mark” is the optimal reader experience. The following is a líst of ten things that can hurt your blog’s usability.

10. Sending Mixed Messages

The focus of your blog should be decided before your first post and then committed to. Random blog entries about a melee of topics might work for a personal blog read by friends and family, but is not a good approach for a serious, professional blog. The lifeblood of any blog is in its loyal subscriber base. And readers are more willing to subscribe to blogs that talk about their area of interest on a consistent basis.

There are certain guidelines that companies should bear in mind when undertaking new ventures into the blogosphere. For starters, an effective blog should be a springboard for conversation as opposed to merely an information resource.

The blogosphere has become a virtual hotbed of information dissemination in today’s digital landscape.

Danny Sullivan, Robert Scoble, Matt Cutts… the list goes on and on of industry insiders who provide a deepening glimpse into the realms of technology and search by means of their widely popular blogs.

Major names such as Google, Microsoft, and Intel have also taken up residence in their own respective corners of the Blogosphere.

Have you ever tried to read your local newspaper online? How about the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal? It just isn’t the same. Do you know why? Because articles meant for print don’t translate well to the web, and the rules that apply to writing content for the internet are different than those for print. What constitutes quality content offline does not necessarily constitute quality content online.

How the web is different:

The skeptic has always been quick to remind that popularity is not necessarily a measure of value. In a report detailing the most influential authorities on blog marketing, Onalytica, a UK-based analytics firm, illustrates that popularity is not always in line with influence, either.

In marketing, there are as many psychological factors as monetary. A car salesman knows a family’s decision maker is often not the one signing the loan papers. She (yes, she, ask any dealership) holds more sway than the celebrity endorser. While the pro football player has popularity, the wife has influence.

After her popular Zero Dollars/30 Days blogging series, looks like Jennifer Laycock is starting another really interesting run of articles. We really enjoyed the former, so we’re hoping this new blog will be just as interesting. Here’s what Robert Clough at Search Engine Guide had to say:

“Over the last couple of months I’ve been asking Jennifer what she was planning for this year that would top her “Zero Dollars, a Little Talent and 30 Days” project from last year. With the impact that article series had, it’s a tough act to follow. That’s why I wasn’t sure that she would be able to come up something that could possibly be better. Well, she has a doozy planned.

By Mark Daoust

Starting a website used to be relatively easy. Register a domain name, get a virtual hostïng account, setup a basic looking website, then choose from the literally hundreds of marketing agencies that were willing to send traffïc to your site for a relatively small price. A lot has changed since 1999 on the Internet, and maybe nothing so much as the way we market our websites.
Some may be tempted to say that marketing has become easier in today’s Internet. We know more about user’s expectations and are able to better target our ads to users who are interested in our websites. Through programs such as Google Adsense and Yahoo’s Contextual Marketing programs, we can be relatively certain that the clicks for which we pay are from people who are actually interested in our programs (of course there are issues of click fraud, but that is not the focus of this article).

Written by Mark Daoust

Consider Yahoo the first major casualty of the search engine wars. Yahoo has admitted that they cannot reasonably expect to take away any significant amount of the search market share from Google, so they have chosen to be happy as the second most visited search engine on the Internet. On the surface, this may seem strange. Why would Yahoo ever publicly announce that they are ‘throwing in the towel’ in the search engine war? That would be similar to Pepsi recommending that people drink their product only if Coca-Cola is not available. From a business standpoint, it is absolutely ridiculous and makes absolutely no sense.

Hang out with friends, listen to new music, talk about what’s important to you, share pictures from a party, MySpace has become the teen place and now has 47.3 million users.

Few things make marketing types go weaker in the knees than a place full of young adults, millions of them just waiting to see the rush of advertising that marketers want to deliver in as many ways as possible. USA Today profiled MySpace, and in its story one can’t help but see how Yahoo may be trying to catch that lightning in a bottle.