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Reading time: 13 – 22 minutes Table of Contents I. Introduction II. Search Engines: A Brief History III. Web 2.0: The New Internet IV. Web 2.0: The Technical Landscape V. SEO Linking Strategy in Web 2.0 VI. Social Media Optimization: A Piece of the SEO Puzzle VII. Usability vs. Searchability: The RIA Search Challenge VIII. Googles Personalized Search: The End of Traditional SEO? IX. Search Behavior R&D: Customized Engines and Long Tail Keywords X. Conclusion References I. Introduction To those of us whose passion for the growth of the World Wide Web is exceeded only by the marketing possibilities that emerge from that growth, the Internet has become a playground for the imagination. There is a large number of marketers, however, who are fascinated by the Web but approach its marketing capabilities more out of necessity than lifestyle. The Internets capacity has advanced in so many areas in the past few years that marketers playing catch-up are at a significant disadvantage. Marketing... 

Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes You hear all the time about bad SEOs. Bad SEOs are offering worthless services, failing to deliver on their internet marketing promises, polluting the search engine resultswell, a lot of bad things. But how much ever gets said about bad SEOs’ spiritual counterparts: bad SEO clients? As an SEO, I can see things from the other side of the table. You see, despite trying hard to make it clear I’m a good, ethical, results-oriented, smarter marketing, white-hat SEO, I have gotten no end of inquiries from bad prospective SEO clients. Sure, no one who gets cheated is ever entirely to blame, and some cheated businesses are entirely blameless. But the bad SEOs would have too small a market to stay in business if it weren’t for almost-as-bad clients. Shades of Bad SEO Clients First, let me make clear what I mean by bad SEOs. Bad SEOs are bad because they either do unethical things to get e-marketing results, or because they consistently fail... 

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes Before proceeding to other parts of the article, please take your time to read the following definitions: RSS: RSS, rich site summary, or really simple syndication, is an XML format for sharing contents (such as news items) among different Web sites. Feed: It is an xml file containing headlines and descriptions also called news feed, content feed, xml feed or web feed. Web Syndication: Web syndication is a form of syndication in which a section of a website is made available for other sites to use. This could be simply by licensing the content so other people can use it, but more commonly these days web syndication refers to making Web feeds available XML: Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a W3C-recommended general-purpose markup language for creating special-purpose markup languages, capable of describing many different kinds of data. Its primary purpose is to facilitate the sharing of data across different systems, particularly systems connected via... 

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes RSS – or what is now known as “Really Simple Syndication” – is a file format that is incorporated by Internet users in their websites to allow for ‘web syndication’, making their web content available in a format that can be universally understood by other people. In essence, RSS is a ‘mini database’ that contains headlines and descriptions (a summary or a line or two of the full article) of your web content, including hyperlinks that enable users to link back to the full article of their choice. RSS websites – that is, websites that contain RSS ‘feeds’ (articles or postings) – typically have colorful graphics to indicate to users that the specific web content is available through RSS feeds. These graphics are usually depicted by orange rectangles that are usually marked with ‘RSS’ or ‘XML’. With its increased popularity, RSS is now being adopted and used by... 

Reading time: 6 – 10 minutes We’ve all heard about it-it seems like all the buzz right now in the search engine marketing industry is RSS. If you’re a website owner, than there are two ways your website can benefit from using RSS on your website-you can provide an RSS feed or, for the not-so-technically-inclined folks like me, you can use an RSS feed to keep your site’s content fresh. RSS is a way to syndicate website content. According to Wikipedia, “RSS is a family of XML file formats for web syndication used by (amongst other things) news websites and weblogs…the RSS formats provide web content or summaries of web content together with links to the full versions of the content, and other meta-data.” Wikipedia goes on to say that “A program known as a feed reader or aggregator can check RSS-enabled web pages on behalf of a user and display any updated articles that it finds. It is now common to find RSS feeds on major web sites, as well...