One name we haven’t seen in the Net Neutrality debate is Apple, Inc. Though Jobs & Company are cozy neutral net advocate Google, they also just launched iPhone with AT&T exclusivity. And that brings up some interesting questions, the most interesting of which: Is Is Buying An iPhone A Vote Against Net Neutrality?

It wasn’t too long ago that former AT&T chief Ed Whitacre, who has been vocal about his and his company’s opposition to Net Neutrality regulation, expressed an interest in buying Yahoo, which historically has been on the pro side of the issue. We pondered then what a buyout would mean for the Net Neutrality cause.

Although the concept of search engine optimization can be somewhat complex, there are a number of basic search engine optimization techniques you can use to improve your organic search results. Keep the following in mind when trying to achieve top rankings for your website.

1. Meta Tags.

Meta tags are simple lines of code at the top of your web page programming that tell search engines about your page. Include the title tag, keyword stag, description tag, and robots tag on each page.

2. Create and update your sitemap.

Cross-promotion is an easy, inexpensive method for generating more traffic and more revenue for your business and for the business of your promotional partners.

What could be better than a real win-win situation? With cross-promotion not only can you generate more customers and profit, usually for free, but you can help another entrepreneur do the same!

One simple example of good cross-promotion is swapping business cards with another business in your area. The idea is to find a related, yet non-competing operation, give them a stack of your cards to hand out and take a stack of their cards in exchange.

According to online statistics from eMarketer, less than 20% of internet users intentionally read content with the aid of an RSS reader.

Indeed, even frequent internet users have no idea what that little orange RSS square represents and certainly don’t realize that there is a big shift brewing in the bowels of online publishing and marketing.

But, that may change more quickly than we all used to think for 3 very potent reasons.

There are advantages to RSS that will compel most, if not all, internet users and content consumers to “learn” to use an RSS reader and start managing RSS subscriptions.

What is the deal with Meta Tags?

Search Engine Optimizers often have two different views when it comes to meta tags. One this is unanimous meta tags have definitely been devalued for use in most major search engines but you will find they are still being used as the description often times when your site is listed in the search results.

Meta tags were started back in the early 90’s when the Internet was just getting its brand new legs and they were used to help the search engines organize the growing number of web pages. This was an easy way to get your site indexed and listed high.

In this month’s Target Marketing Magazine, a TopRank authored article on how small businesses can gain a competitive marketing advantage by leveraging content promotion, blogs, social media and universal search was featured.

Recently there has been some dialog and commentary on certain SEM channels about upcoming harder economic times calling for SEO to be taken back to the basics: “Textbook SEO” as Mike Grehan would put it. I disagree with the premise that companies should stop experimenting with new tactics and stick with the fundamentals. Effective SEO in any economic environment means getting more creative, not mundane.

Are you baffled about a recent drop in your search engine rankings? Do you know where to start and get a handle on what the problem might be and how to remedy it? One option to consider is using search engine forums as a resource. They are full of questions from people who have experienced similar situations and are great resources for an answer or two. But let’s say you really want to get to the bottom of the problem and you want to do it yourself. The following are some of the beginning steps StepForth takes when evaluating dropped rankings.

Commercial webmasters have been taught that link popularity has a great influence on whether a website will rank well in the search engines. There is a lot of truth in this teaching, but I have to tell you that the way that most people practice building links is wrong and may end up hurting their website in the search results.

Carpet Bombing Is Dead

Google understands that people are always looking to manipulate Google’s search results. Every time Google makes an enhancement to their systems, someone gets clever and figures out a new way to manipulate the system, so they can sell their SEO services to desperate webmasters.

Forget the Computer Age or the Internet Age, centuries from now our current time will probably be referred to as the Google Age. This assumption is not exactly a great leap of faith; Google has quickly permeated into mainstream culture to become an underlying factor of everyday life, a tightly woven backdrop to our lives.

But never make the mistake of trying to define Google as just a search engine or you will miss the true calling of this little “Backrub”, which was the original name used by its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1996.

There’s a new kid on the online block named Knol and even this early in the development stage, some people are already predicting that it could bring about yet another significant change to the way we share information on the Internet.

Knol is a new Web service being developed by Google that is meant to serve as a virtual storehouse of knowledge on the Internet. With content being contributed by various experts on different topics, it will behave much in the same way that Wikipedia does currently. In fact many industry experts have made the suggestion that Knol is set to become a direct competitor to Wikipedia and other similar types of web sites.