Will Yahoo! Be Around in 2012? That is the question in 2011

Yahoo’s recent layoff of more than 4% of its workforce leads one to ask what everybody’s been thinking for a while:

Is this it? Will 2011 be the last year for Yahoo?

Like any good company in trouble, the Yahoo PR department has been trying to put the best light possible on the layoffs (roughly 560 people worldwide):

“Today’s personnel changes are part of our ongoing strategy to best position Yahoo! for revenue growth and margin expansion and to support our strategy to deliver differentiated products to the marketplace. We’ll continue to hire on a global basis to support our key priorities.

Yahoo! is grateful for the important contributions made by the employees affected by this reduction. We are offering severance packages and outplacement services to these employees.”

One has to ask why these layoffs are happening at all. Search has proven to basically be recession-proof. If Yahoo isn’t cutting the mustard, then the problem must lie within. Unfortunately, with Google, it lies at the top.

The appointment of Carol Bartz to the head position at Yahoo! appears now to have been a mistake that looked good on paper. She’s a no-nonsense money-saver. That’s good. However, innovation and creativity is not her forte. Consequently, the company seems to change its mind almost daily about what it’s trying to be. Apparently, not even Bartz could explain what Yahoo was as a company until very recently.

By turning over its search engine capabilities to Bing in 2010, the assumption was that it would free up the time for many Yahoo! employees to work on new, exciting projects. Apparently, that’s not the case at all. More and more, this appears to be an attempt by Bartz to save some money while keeping Yahoo’s relevance as a search engine alive.

Disgruntled employees are not known for their ability to keep quiet, and Yahoo is no exception.

Tweets and emails to industry bloggers report an atmosphere of a company in “shambles,” and digging a hole from which it may not be able to escape.

Here’s hoping that Yahoo! is able to get its act together in 2011, before it becomes the latest name at the top of a list that includes such past also-rans as Alta Vista, Infoseek, Cuil, etc.

Because quite frankly, if that happens, a lot of us are really going to miss it.

Content Marketing Institute Presents Three Ways to Keep Bloggers from Getting Bored and Tired

When it comes to blogging, the biggest challenge any company faces is ultimately keeping up the momentum. Writing is, after all, hard work. You can’t be brilliant all the time, but you don’t want to lose any power on your blog just because your contributors have a dose of writers block. So what do you do?

Heidi Cohen at Content Marketing Institute (CMI) has three suggestions on how you can keep your blogging team on track:

1. Set goals and related metrics for your blog. Give the blog goals that must be set to be of worth to your organization. Make sure your bloggers understand blog analytics so they can see how popular their posts are. As a result, bloggers will feel more compelled to write more exciting copy, since they know they are competing with other bloggers for rank. The elements to track include the amount of content provided, content effectiveness, page views, Social media shares, Email shares, Comments and Business-related actions to the post.

2. Incorporate blog responsibilities. Create corporate guidelines for your bloggers to follow. Involve senior management; get them to put their feedback on blog posts. A little encouragement from the guys upstairs does a lot to boost a blogger’s ego. And while this sounds odd, if you hire a blogger, make sure human relations requires blog participation in his or her job description.

3. Celebrate Your Bloggers. Everybody likes recognition. Cohen provides a variety of ways to show your bloggers that you appreciate what they do, including:

Create “About the Author” blurbs with pictures that appear at the bottom of each post.

Credit bloggers in company tweets. Let everybody know when a blog post is worth reading, and who wrote it.

Mention posts with the author’s by-line in marketing emailings.

Reward your bloggers. Gift certificates, recommendations, cash bonuses; all go towards creating a happy blogger.

In short, Cohen says if you keep your bloggers in the spotlight, they’ll write highlight copy almost every time out of the gate.

Blogger Tim Peter Contemplates Business in a World Without Google

Imagine doing business without Google. For some companies, it would be like the sun going out. They wouldn’t exist. Yet, says Tim Peter on Moran’s Biznology Blog, marketing online without Google is a very real prospect that every business faces. It can happen every time Google makes a change to their algorithm. Those changes can suddenly turn you from a page-one contender to a bottom of the list has-been.

Peter asks: “If (Google’s) next algorithm update—or a future regulatory-mandated change—knocked you out of their index, would your business survive?” He then offers seven tips to help keep yourself in the game should the worst ever happen to you:

1. Go where the customers are. Sure, Peter says. Everyone uses search. But everyone also uses email, social media and mobile phones. B2B companies also have the advantage of LinkedIn. Facebook could be a great way to contact your customers, but don’t forget to look at marketing channels that play to your target audience.

2. Set your objectives. Once you’ve located your customers, determine what you expect out of each of these sources. Leave yourself plenty of options for rethinking your marketing channels as things change.

3. Improve your web presence. That includes everything about you that your customers react with online. This is more than your website Peter is discussing here – it’s Facebook pages, Twitter, Yelp, LinkedIn, etc.

4. Continue to grow your opt-in contact list. Find out how your customers wish to be contacted. Then use those tools to communicate. Eliminate the methods that your customers ignore.

5. Blog. If you can do it well, Peter advises blogging. Allow for plenty of keyword-rich content that flows and provides valuable information for your customers.

6. Explore additional media. There’s still life in display advertising ; simply remarket your online message. Email and affiliate marketing can also work for you.

7. Investigate other additional media models. There are CPM and CPC, but Peter advises looking into Cost per acquisition as well.

In conclusion, Peter says that even with Google, you should be doing these things. But if you ever find yourself trying to battle your way back to the top, these tips will help keep you in the game.

Companies Griping About Google Local Search Have Nothing To Complain About

Even when Google tries to better itself, it can’t catch a break in the press. An article by Clint Boulton at eWeek.com covers Google’s reaction to a story published on December 12 that many startup companies are accusing Google of favoring iGoogle Places, Places Search and Place Pages over those of businesses that rely on Google results to generate business and provide decent search rankings.

Representatives from TripAdvisor.com, WebMD.com, Yelp.com and Citysearch.com complained that Google tends to promote links to its own services that are similar to the services they provide.

They point to Google boosting the profile of its Google Places local search directory. The lettered “pins” on any local search are typically sites listed with Google Places, and found within its Place Search Service.

If your company is on the map, and you’re one of the lettered locations on the map, you will rank higher than other businesses in your area that don’t. By favoring their own sites, companies say Google is makes it harder for people to find results from the startups, pushing them lower on the page.

One business, TripAdvisor.com, even reported a 10% drop in visits via Google-based searches.

In its defense, Googlesays this is not an attempt to take money from its advertisers, but rather to simply get information to people as quickly as possible.

For once, Google may have a point. By improving its product and trying to use new technologies to expand its brand, Google is doing what any business would do.

Plus, Google says Pages and Places get a lot of the information that they use from the websites that are complaining. Google’s only goal appears to be to get the information required to the person who wants it.

Seven Blog Housekeeping Tips You Learned from Your Mom

If you blog regularly, you know how hard it is to keep up a steady stream of ideas over time. However, there are some basic things you can do to help maintain your blog that you’ve known ever since you were a little kid. That’s because, believe it or not, they were taught to you by your mom.

That’s the message behind a recent article at DailySEOTip.com, “7 of Your Mother’s Housekeeping Principles to Apply to Your Blog.” It’s true – several simple rules your mom once told you about keeping your home clean can also be sued to keeping a clean, presentable blog. Here are a few:

1. Keep ahead of tasks. Out with the old blogs, full of irrelevance; in with the new blogs for fresh, interesting content. That helps keep your ratings up. .
2. Keep your software up to date. Updates are your friends. If you have worries about viruses, etc., make sure you have a good virus protection software and do your homework to make sure the update you’re about to apply is legitimate.
3. Take out the trash. Get rid of garbage from your computer, such as plug-ins or default templates. Anything you don’t need, toss.
4. Tidy up. Occasionally clean your blog database. It’s getting easier for most software to do so. Updating Wordpress, for example, is an extremely easy, one-click process.
5. Clean up your messes. Have people been putting spam links on your blog messages? Get rid of them! Check all comments and backtracks to make sure they’re not spam
6. Lighten the load on your site with smaller-sized attachments and photos.
7. Adopt new technologies. For example, slow sites can often by remedied by changing hosts or getting more memory from your current host.

Hey, Bloggers: Now When You Break a Story, Google Could Credit You For It

If you’ve been wondering whether you blogging and online reporting ever gets noticed, Google is coming to the rescue. Recently, it announced a new meta tag for journalists and bloggers, which credits the publisher who first breaks a story on the Internet.

Sounds good in theory, but in the article “The New Google Journalism Tag Could Work in Reverse,” at the blog SEO and Tech Daily, Charlie Anzman says there are still problems.

First of all the meta tag is actually tags – one for the first person to have the story attributed to them, and one for the first person to syndicate the story online.

The problem with this, Anzman says, is twofold:
1. Most current reputable blog and news organizations credit their source with a link. Now, they could decide to quit doing that and then just use the tag, which isn’t visible to the reader. So the author of the story gets no visibility for his/her work.

2. Anzman says the current trend to switch to popular blogging software means that a plug-in for that software needs to be created to accommodate the meta tag. That means a re-writing of code, so any major adaptation of this meta tag is not in the near future.

Anzman says this doesn’t really solve the problem of “story stealing,” a problem so prevalent that Reuters now prohibits its reporters from breaking stories on Twitter. Other writers pick up the scoops and claim them as their own.

In short, Anzman feels that for Google, it’s back to the drawing board.

2011 Could be the Year of the Search Engine, if 2010 is Any Indication

As we pull up on the end of 2010, it’s kind of hard to tag this year to one monumental moment in SEO. This is simply because so many things occurred.The ongoing Google/Facebook spat saw both sides releasing updates and improvements and redesigns, etc. throughout the latter half of the year. Is Google Instant Previews really more important than Facebook Places? Only time will tell.

But one area of SEO that was very busy – and really didn’t get that much press – was in the development of new search engines. Here's a review of the four new contenders who head into 2011 hoping to grab at least a piece of the action.

Quora: Billed in the press as a type of search engine, Quora calls itself as an online knowledge market. It doesn’t so much help you find information as much as it lets you ask questions, which other Quora users can answer or not. It's up to you to check on their authority.

Advantages: If someone has answered a question in the ballpark of the answer you chose, you might find the information you need.

Disadvantages: While probably millions of questions have been posed, very few answers seem to exist so far on Quora. It does not appear to be catching on.

Swingly: You could call Swingly a spiffed-up version of Ask.com. But you'd be selling it short. Its developers have gathered together more than 100 billion question and answer pairs of information. All of the info provided in a Swingly question is accessed from other web sources, like a traditional search engine.

Advantages: Swingly can offer answers to virtually any fact-based question in a flash. By paring down the search parameters, the answers provided can be extremely succinct.

Disadvantages: Swingly is NOT very good at all with speculative or opinion-based questions. Questions starting with the word “Did” or "Will" can cause confusion. Also, it's a bit confusing to figure where to click to go to your chosen result site.



Blekko: Blekko invites the user to “slash” search, literally, by breaking down search queries using a slashtag. For example, if you want to look at political websites that appeal mostly to conservatives, for example, you can enter “political/conservative” and the first results to come up are for Fox News. Type “political/liberal” on the other hand, and results for more liberal sites appear (Washington Monthly, Huffington Post, etc.).

Advantages: Blekko is capable of searching by categorical breakdown, as opposed to simply raw terms that have a page in common. This is why you can pull up conservative or liberal pages, for example, as opposed to just pages with those words on them.

Disadvantages: It's “geeky.” "Normal" people don’t want to have to add an action (separate terms by anything other than a comma) in order to get results. They want answers now. By adding a task before getting a result, Blekko leaves impatient searchers behind.

Qwiki: The latest addition to the search engine field, Qwiki is currently in Alpha testing (go to Qwiki.com to get on their troubleshooter list). You're in for a surprise. Enter a term into the search window (Qwiki says there are 2,000 entries at the moment, but experimenting with it implies if it’s in Wikipedia, you’ll get results), and you’re treated to a 30-second, audio visual summary of your product.

Advantages: It sure is fun! Qwiki should prove to be very popular in schools.

Disadvantages: What’s the point? That’s what most people will ask about various aspects of Qwiki. You get the idea that Qwiki was developed in the hopes that one of the big guys – Google or Bing, for example -- will buy it and incorporate it into their search engines.

HubSpot Answers Six of the Most Common Social Media Marketing Questions

Having a social media presence for your company is a given. However, once you establish that presence, getting people to notice it is an entirely different matter. That’s why Magdalena Georgieva, writing for hubspot.com, recently discussed Dan Zarella’s excellent presentation, “The Science of Social Media.” In her article “Answered: 6 Frequent Questions about Social Media Marketing,” she says that a recent appearance by Zarella inspired some very thought provoking questions:

1. When you put up a company Facebook page, how do you get somebody to “like” you? You can accomplish this by creating some form of positive interaction. One good example is creating a new tab on your Facebook page that offers something free and compelling to anyone who “likes” you. Contests for people who “like” you work well , too.

2. Can social media be anti-social? Non-social? Too social? You can certainly be anti-social by appearing rude or obnoxious, as well as non-social by not developing long-term relationships . Too social? As long as what you’re doing doesn’t overhype itself and come off as spam, it’s not easy to be too social in social media.

3. What tools should be used to track specific social media metrics? Zarella recommends the paid tools Trendrr and Radian6. Georgieva recommends Hubspot’s own social media monitoring platform and marketing automation software. She also mentions Twitter Grader as a quick, free way to evaluate your current social media influence.

4. Should the company have a landing page tab on Facebook? Most certainly. It’s a perfect way to use a call to action that doesn’t look overbearing.

5. What’s the best way to engage influencers? Influencers are those people and online connections most likely to get excited about your product or brand, who will then spread the word to their friends, etc.Sometimes simply paying attention to influencers is enough to get them talking. This can be done via direct contact or even mentioning them by name in a blog entry.

6. How do you stay personable on line without tweeting about yourself? Talk instead about things that interest you. Point out interesting articles and links that you can discuss online.

Search Engine Watch.com’s Duncan Parry Offers Tips on Staying Caught Up in Search News

The last few months are the best indication in a long time that the search business is constantly changing. Duncan Parry at SearchEngineWatch.com points out that today’s new employees in the business have never heard of AltaVista, Excite, Lycos and many of the other search engines that once dominated the field.

In his article “How to Keep Up to Date In Search,” Parry offers some pointers on what to take note of in this business, and what to ignore, since it will eventually change anyway.

1. Ignore noise. Parry says that with all the blogs and articles published every day, there are more “experts” entering this field by the minute. Most of it can be ignored. Everybody has an opinion, Parry says; whether those opinions mean anything depends upon whose saying them. He suggests sticking to sites that you find to be credible and correct. He also says to keep up to date on technical developments in the products you currently use or are planning to use.

2. Get an RSS Reader. All sites worth their salt have RSS feeds. Make sure you have access to a reader so you can add your favorite sites to it. This puts all relevant articles into one easy-to-find place, and allows you to add more at any time. Parry recommends Google Reader for its ease of use, and Feedly for its looks. (Feedly can be linked to Google Reader to give you the best of both worlds.

3. Watch the mainstream press. SEO sites are not usually the first place that you will find interesting news about developments in the profession. That’s given to major news sites first. Subscribe to the New York Times, USAToday, BBC News, etc.

4. Learn about digital technology in General. Along with Mashable.com, Parry provides a significant list of popular sites that you should be reading.

5. Some search sites are musts. Specifically, Parry recommends SearchEngineWatch and SearchEngineLand. They offer daily newsletters and feeds. They sum up the news you need to know and make it readable. Parry also recommends Search Engine Roundtable, as it often seems to be the first site with hot news from Google.

6. Don’t be afraid to cut. Culling from your Reader list over time is to be expected. If a site isn’t doing anything for you anymore, get rid of it.

Parry says that there’s good stuff to be found out there, but even the good stuff can get overwhelming. Determine which experts are worth your time and trust and take it from there.

What’s in a Word? Plenty – Click Through Rate on PPC Jumps when Google Changes One Little Word

About a week ago, Google made a very small change to its search results. Did you catch it?

If you don’t bother with PPC ads, you might have missed it, but the effect was phenomenal. As reported on TheSearchAgents.com by blogger Alec Green, Google changed the phrase “Sponsored Links” to “Ads.” That’s all it took to see an 11.4% jump in click throughs.

The Search Agents analysts performed a pre/post analysis of user behavior between the last week of “Sponsored Ads” and the first week of “Ads.” Their findings:

Across all AdWords campaigns examined, the average position increased 1.5%

Total impressions decreased by the same amount.

Clicks increased 9.7%.

Average cost per click dropped 2.3%.

Total cost increased more than 7%.

Clickthroughs increased 11.4%.

The double-digit increase for clickthrough came as a huge surprise to the Search Agents team.

So what caused the change? Was it pressure from the FTC to be clearer to consumers what PPC ads are? Then, in turn, did it turn out to be true that most people didn’t know what a “Sponsored Link” was?” This isn’t likely, says Green, since the “Sponsored Links” typeface is the smallest on the page, and reducing the term by 11 letters to “ads” would make it even smaller and harder to see than it already is. If the increase sustains itself over the next few weeks however, that may be exactly what’s spurring the growth.

Facebook Email Another Needed Volley in the Social Media Wars, Ruud Hein Says

Hot on the heels of Google’s announcement of Instant Previews last week, Facebook confirmed what many people had suspected for a while: Facebook email is on its way.

The service will compete directly with Google’s Gmail audience, and the upstart may just be the competition Google needs, says Ruud Hein at SearchEnginePeople.com.

Using copious illustrations, Hein presents “The Three Reasons Why Facebook Email is a Big Deal.”


1. Facebook Overtakes Everything. Hein points out that not long ago, the way people did things online was different. They got pictures from Flickr, watched videos on YouTube, IM’d on Live Messenger and made announcements on Facebook. But now, Hein says more and more people are using Facebook to do all of these things – except email.

2. Facebook’s Social Graph Gets Larger. Hein uses a social graph to show the way all social networks used to be connected (Yahoo to LinkedIn to Gmail to Facebook, etc.), and another to show how social integration will work with Facebook email . He says: “By also overtaking email and incorporating as many type of social connection streams as possible, the Facebook social graph of you -- and as a result of its whole 500 million user network -- becomes much, much more complete.”Hein’s point is that Facebook will now not only know whom you connect with on Facebook, but also whom you connect with outside of it.

3. Email is Huge. In spite of what you may have heard – that email is losing its popularity, especially among younger audiences – Hein says email is still very much alive. He points out that Email marketing is still the #1 social list-based moneymaker. So Facebook is entering the email market at the right time.

What this all means to you, Hein says, is that getting people to “like” your company will become much more important. Messages within your social sphere will be given different “weight” than those out of that sphere. What’s more, keeping your company’s emails off people’s “spam” lists will be vital. Facebook has become, Hein says, “the world’s most efficient spam filter.” Similarly, you’re going to have to target your ads even more pointedly to reach your intended audience.

Google Instant Previews: Will it Change the SEO Landscape?

The closing months of 2010 are proving to be busy ones for Google – and by extension, busy ones for the entire SEO industry. The recent release of Google’s Instant Previews, particularly, has sent waves of reaction through the search community.

By now you probably know that when you click the little magnifying glass next to a search result (or when you tell Google to do it automatically), a graphic representation of the page you’re considering pops up.

Some people, like Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand.com, took the Instant Preview release as more water under the bridge. In fact, Sullivan wonders what took Google so long to do this. He reminds us that Ask.com tried a similar tactic some years back that was not overly well received.

However, other critics, such as Patrick Stafford at SmartCompany.com, see a much more significant change coming to SEO as we know it. If people begin to click on a search result due to the “look” of the site, rather than the information in the descriptive copy, your position on a page may take a back seat to how attractive your page is to the eye.

Experts say that much to the dismay of webmasters, but much to the joy of page designers everywhere, how your page looks is now going to be important. Colors, the size and position of the logo, even your who site layout now needs to consider how eye-catching it is.

Knowing that, 2011 could be an interesting year for SEO indeed.

Looking for Links? Don’t forget your interlinks, says Caroline Bogart at FathomSEO.com

There’s no question that you need to have external links connecting back to your website in order to boost your rankings. But Caroline Bogart at FathomSEO.com says that there is one link source that many companies tend to overlook that can also be an effective source of “link juice”: internal links.

Internal linking, Bogart says, is a content optimization procedure that can both help your users navigate your site and pass page rank from point to point on your website.

In her article “10 Tips for Effective Interlinking,” Bogart adds that interlinking gives you some control over how ranking power flows through your site. Her ten tips include:

1. Make sure your link structure provides easy access to every internal page on your site.

2. Use the keywords for each page in the anchor text on that page.

3. Determine the best page hierarchy. This helps to manipulate your page flow.

4. Use calls to action. They can be before, inside or after your link.

5. Only link pages related by keyword.

6. Make sure every page links to at least one other page. This speeds up the srawl for search engines.

7. Don’t use Javascript or other applications that slow down search.

8. Don’t overdo it. Too many links makes a page impossible to read.

9. Don’t link to pointless pages.

10. Try to avoid nofollow links. They block spiders, which is not what you want to happen.

Danny Sullivan: Google is the “New California”

It’s official, says Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineLand.com; Google is no longer the most popular kid on the block – at least when it comes to attracting and keeping good people.

Citing the recent departure of Lars Rasmussen, the creator of the highly popular Google Maps and the not-so-popular Google Wave. Sources indicate that he’s headed to Facebook, to join Facebook COO and former Google bigwig Sheryl Sandberg.

Sullivan says that’s no big surprise. Why? Because Google is the current “California” of SEO.

Sullivan compares the Google of today to the California of the 70s and 80s. Everybody wanted to live in California back then; enough of them moved there that the state went from being a relatively problem-free paradise to an economic, bureaucratic nightmare. Still, more people want to move to California all the time. Those who get tired of the overcrowding, etc., eventually leave for more appealing scenery, until those places too become another “California.”

Sullivan says that is exactly what Google is going through right now – growing pains that any huge company eventually experiences. People who’ve worked there for a very long time are starting to get restless and are looking to move on. Still, more people want to work for Google, even though their expectations of how they will benefit are much different than those who joined before the company went public.

Sullivan points out that Yahoo was the “new California” in search before Google was, and Facebook is undoubtedly poised to take the helm at some point in the future. But his point is that these changes, while they may not be necessarily good for a company, are unavoidable as companies grow into “adults.”

The Secret to Stopping Scanners in their Tracks: Three S’s from Abigail Rossbach at Fathom SEO

The internet has turned most people into scanners. That is, they don’t have time, or want to make time, to read a lot of content on the web. They want to arrive at a site, find what they want and get on with their lives.

Which can be rather disappointing if you’re a good content writer. So what’s “The Secret behind Getting People to Actually Read What You Write?” That’s the title and subject of Abigail Rossbach’s recent article at FathomSEO.com.

Rossbach says you need to do three things before you sit down to write your next blog post, website update, etc:

Step 1: Admit it: People today scan more than they read.

Step 2: You need to quell their urge to scan.

Step3: Implement scan-busting methods that get people to stop scanning and start reading.

To do that, Rossbach says, is simple use of the “Three S’s:” Substance, Subheads and Scannability.

Substance: Your content needs to have value. People only read when they are expecting to get some benefit out of it. That benefit could be more information, a price, ingredients, materials, etc. Start by creating a headline that screams “Look at me!” Rossbach says.

Subheads: Subheads are vital on a web page. Why? They break up copy blocks. They organize what you’re talking about. And most of all they allow scanners to find what they’re looking for. Think of subheads as mini-headlines, because that’s what they are.

Scannability: Finally, Rossbach discusses the need for making your article ultimately scannable. Format your message in to manageable, meaningful sections. When the scanner finds what he wants, he’s yours. That’s why every sentence of your content should be entertaining and make a point.

Danny Sullivan on Google: Why Does Less Always Equal More?

Something at Google is bugging Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan. Namely, why is it, when you try to specialize a search – namely, eliminate potential search results by typing “-keyword”, you frequently get a much larger list instead?

To prove his point, he conducts a simple search on “cars,” and elicits over 546 million results. However, when he performed a search for “cars –used,” which one would think should eliminate any website with the word “used” in it, the number increases to over 661 million.

This, Sullivan says, is a long-standing problem; a gripe he has had with Google for years. Sullivan provides an answer of sorts from Google’s Matt Cutts, who says that search results are simply “estimates,” and not an exact count of pages that meet the parameters of the search.

In regards to why “A B –C” can return more results that A B searches, Cutts says: “The query [A B -C] causes us to go deeper through our posting lists looking for matches, which can lead to more accurate (and larger) results estimates. Other things can cause us to go deeper in finding matches, such as clicking deeper in search results.”

Using the cars example and Cutts’s explanation, Sullivan says, when you delete a term from the search task, it allows the search engines to “think” harder. Consequently, it can pull up more results.

In addition, with more and more websites coming online daily, Sullivan says it’s not as easy as it once was for Google to catalogue all of the information available on the web. This, however, doesn’t excuse Google from aggravating behavior. He suggests that maybe Google should add a disclaimer next to the results count stating that what you’re seeing is indeed an estimate.

Using Facebook for Business? Hubspot.com has 9 Tips on What Not to Do

No one is denying that Facebook has become a viable business tool. People are coming up with new marketing methods for Facebook literally every day.

However, there are also things you shouldn’t do with Twitter – which is what Diana Freedman writes about at hubspot.com: “The 9 Worst Ways to Use Facebook for Business.” They are:

1. Duplicating your Twitter Strategy on Facebook. Twitter and Facebook are two different platforms, and you need to use them differently. While it’s good to Tweet two or three times a day so that your customers (hopefully) see you, too many Facebook updates could lead to people dropping you. When you do post on Facebook, take advantage of the extended number of characters you have to get your point across.

2. Posting plain-text entries exclusively. People like variety. Post relevant videos or links to interesting articles. Involve your readers.

3. Not Allowing Fans to Share Content. If you don’t let your fans post on your wall, what’s the purpose of having a Facebook page? If you sell a product, for example, don’t you want pictures of your fans using that product to put on your wall?

4. Not Responding to Fans’ Comments. Facebook is a social medium, so be social. Respond to comments and questions. If you don’t have time, make time.

5. Ignoring Fans’ Comments and Content. Those very contributions to your site can be shared with others when they’re beneficial to promoting your product or service. They can also be great content additions when you’re short on time. So use them!

6. Not using Facebook Questions. This new Facebook service, allows anyone to ask and answer questions to and from Facebook users. It’s a great way to get customer opinion on your product ideas, service changes, etc.

7. Using a Profile Image with a poor thumbnail. When you upload your logo or brand image, Facebook cuts it down to make it fit in the little thumbnail on the profile. As a result, many logos get cut in half or rendered totally unrecognizable. Create a 200px-wide image of your logo and use it.

8. Not Linking to your Facebook Page from your Website. Stop keeping your page a secret! Put a Facebook link box on your web page and start drawing traffic to your Facebook page.

9. Putting Up a Page with No Personality. If your page is stuffy, you won’t get many fans. Facebook users want to connect with friends, not with a sales pitch. Freedman provides several examples of companies who are doing this correctly.

Google Gains on Bing-Yahoo in September, According to Experian Hitwise

Recent statistics from Experian Hitwise reports that search giant Google received nearly 75% of all searches in the U.S. in September. This is a full 1% gain from the previous month, and is remarkable in that the gain was made in the same month that Bing was hoping to cut into Google’s share by adapting its search engine to its new partner, Yahoo!

International Business Times writer Surojit Chatterjee, in his article “Google Rules Online Search Market in September,” says that Google’s gain was substantial, given that searches on Bing gained 2% when the search was conducted on Bing.com. However, Chatterjee says that Bing/Yahoo searches reported a 5% loss. That more than cancels out any gains that Bing.com may have made on searches made to its home site during September.

64 other surveyed search engines split the remaining 4% of the search pie not already taken by Google or “Bing-Hoo.” According to Chatterjee, Bing can be encouraged by the sites intellectual growth. For example, he says that in September, Bing saw its first double-digit sequential growth in the four major categories of Automotive, Health, Shopping and Travel.

Chatterjee could not say whether Google’s release of its Google Instant service helped the company’s growth in September. However, Google stock prices rose steadily throughout the month after Instant’s release.

SEOBook’s Aaron Wall: SEO (Usually) Doesn’t Create Demand – But Here’s What Does

In a recent Blog entry at SEOBook.com, Aaron Wall answered a question he was asked at a recent speech that he felt he had to think about a bit: How do you get your geo-local page to rank better when adding the location information?

Upon introspection, Wall realized the actual issue wasn’t so much ranking, but creating demand. Says Wall, “The core issue here is this: SEO fulfills, demand, but SEO doesn’t create demand.” He’s quick to add that there are exceptions to this rule, particularly when dealing with abstract products and services such as art, but these are rare.

Wall says that true demand is created by using one of three options:

Building the brand: Wall says building brand exposure is a great way to increase demand, because there are so many ways you can do it – public relations, product offerings, blog promotion, advertising, etc. Branded keywords tend to have the highest conversion rates. This means you’re likely to see a surge in both traffic to your site and sales.

Cross marketing: The “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” method works well for aggressive marketers who enjoy working with other organizations. Wall uses the example of the company that asked him the question at his talk. He recommends that they could have taken advantage of the fact that their business had a theme park across the street. They should have run “special promotions with that theme park offering discounts to frequent visitors.”

Gaining Exposure on Broader, Related Generic Keywords: Rather than trying to rank better for brand name + location, Wall says his subject company should have broadened the scope of their related query stream:

“their product category” + their location

Create a page on their product category +”near popular local attraction

Running ads that compare your product to others

Karlie Justus at SocialMediaB2b Discusses Pros and Cons of Blocking Social Media at Work

Can your employees access popular social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter? Karlie Justus, in her article “Pros and Cons of Blocking Social Media at Your B2B Company,” at SocialMediaB2B.com, cites a new report from Purdue University that says more than 80% of the businesses surveyed restrict the use of at least one social media site, while another 13% restrict all such sites.

The concern, said the survey, wasn’t so much that people were using their social media presence to socialize, but that classified information was being entered into the public record, at an average cost of $2 million per incident.

However, another report from McAfee, which also commissioned the Purdue report, says that 40% of businesses that allow their employees to use social media in the workplace have seen a measurable increase in productivity.

So what exactly are the pros and cons of blocking social media at work? Justus sheds some light on both sides.

Pros:

1. Your business needs a singular tone and voice for its perceived image. Many B2B companies use a singular image and voice to represent their businesses. In order to maintain the image and feel you want throughout your communications, you can’t have more than one or two people writing what you release to the public. Too many voices muddy the waters.

2. There may be industry specific concerns about social media. For example, if your company makes helicopters for the military, and their current project with you is top secret, you probably don’t want somebody accidentally spilling this information out on the internet. Justus says marketers in these areas should ask their customers whether social media is a part of their marketing plan before planning to use it yourself.

Cons:

1. It silences your biggest fans – your employees. Who knows your products better then the people who make them, sell them and want you to be successful, so that they can be successful too? If your employees can’t talk about your product, what better forms of free advertising do you have in mind?

2. Justus says that few companies tend to stretch the boundaries of how social sites can be used in the office beyond the marketing department. She questions why more companies don’t use Twitter, for example, to provide public relations opportunities for their sales teams. She asks why more companies don’t allow Facebook to be used by Human Resources to help fill a position. And LinkedIn is a proven source for leads. If your employees can’t access all this, however, these are all moot points.

3. A company that can’t access social media is a company that continues to live under the idea that social media is a waste of time, Justus says. If your company uses social media to attract new accounts, but you don’t let your own employees use it, how does that look to your customers?

BlueGlass.com’s Tucker Cummings Offers Four Necessities for the Modern Office “Luddite”

Are you, or is someone in your office, a Luddite at heart?
The term "Luddite" refers to anyone opposed to industrialization, automation, computerization or new technologies .
In her article “The Luddite’s Guide to Productivity: Analog Solutions for a Digital World” at BlueGlass.com, Tucker Cummings admits that sometimes, amid all the modern social advancements of email, text messages, phone calls, IMs etc., low-tech or Luddite solutions can come in handy when you’re overburdened. She put together a list of four non-computerized tips that can really boost your productivity:

Get an egg timer. This is a great way to manage how much time you spend on brainstorming and other open-ended projects. Plus, unlike a computer reminder service, the alarm doesn’t stop until you turn it off, which reminds you it’s time to do something else.

Post-It Notes. Digital reminders aren’t always a good idea, because you can’t have your cell phone or computer screen in your face at all times. However, a post-it note sticks to virtually anything. You can put it in direct view of your line of sight regardless of whether you’re in a meeting or eating lunch. Post-it notes are great for reminding you to stay on task.

Write on your hand. Yes, it’s an old grade school trick, but if you have something really important that you must accomplish, reminding yourself about it every time you look down at your hands is a good way to do it. (Cummings adds, “just make sure to wash your hands thoroughly before heading into a meeting.”)

Eat something. Low blood sugar is not your friend. If you’re feeling tired or grumpy, it’s time to grab a fruit, vegetable or some other healthy snack to get your stamina back.

SearchEngineWatch.com’s Gary-Adam Shannon: White Hat Honesty is almost Never the Best Policy

In a column that many industry insiders may find brave for someone to write, Gary-Adam Shannon has news for White Hat link builders that they probably don’t want to hear. In “White Hats: This is Why You’re Getting Beaten,” Shannon makes this statement:

“With all things being equal, budgets matching and balanced resources, there is absolutely no way limiting your strategy to white hat will ever beat a black hat strategy.”

Shannon goes on to say that combining “white hat” and “black hat” procedures in link building (or Grey Hat) is not only the way things get done these days, it’s the only way things get done. He says someone with a lot of experience in Black Hat can skillfully combine his tricks to make them look white hat.

The stories you hear about black hat link builders going bad, Shannon says, are usually stories about inexperienced beginners. Having an experienced black hat builder on your team is vital in today’s fiercely competitive market.

If the idea of black hat makes you nervous, Shannon suggests creating a new webpage; one that uses black hat techniques. Then compare its performance over your current white hat site. If for some reason, your black hat site get’s tagged and penalized, you still have the white hat side to fall back on. Shannon says your chances of even being caught using black hat techniques anymore are next to nil, due to Google and Bing trying to outdo each other.

Shannon’s main point is that it’s time for link builders to evolve. Or as he puts it, “Life isn’t fair, and neither is the search business.”

Several Articles Point Out Google Instant’s Somewhat Fickle Blacklisting System

Now that the hubbub about the SEO effects of Google Instant has quieted down to almost nothing, a sudden flurry of articles has appeared, centered around a list of blacklisted keywords published by 2600.com. The “Google Blacklist,” as they call it, is a list of several hundred terms which, when searched, will turn off the Google Instant feature for that search.

Google says this is specifically to keep porn, violence and hate speech results from appearing in front of people who aren’t specifically looking for those things. However, both Matt McGee at SearchEngineLand.com and Samuel Axon at Mashable.com see some strange anomalies in Google’s word choices.

For example, McGee says, one of the terms that Google Instant blacklists is “Pamela Anderson.” This means you can’t use Google Instant to help you search for anybody named Pamela Anderson, of which there are surely thousands.

Since all variations of the word “Porn” are blacklisted, McGee reports that you can’t use Instant Search to find specific information on the popular indie band New Pornographers. And if you’re a rap fan, simply typing the phrase “rapping women” turns Google Instant off as well.

Axon admits that while most of the blacklist consists of words that many people find offensive, there are others that simply seem out of place on the list. As an example, he points out the fact that “bisexual” and “lesbian” are on the list, while “heterosexual,” “asexual” and “homosexual” or not. He guesses that the offending words are probably the ones most likely followed in searches by the word “porn,” so Google Instant simply assumes the search outcome and shuts off. (That’s not good news for people looking for “lesbian health services” or “bisexual counseling,” for example, but there it is.)

A Google Rep told Axon that they are constantly trying to improve the system. What they mean by “improve” remains to be seen.

Avinash Kaushik Reports on the Importance of “Making Love” to Your Direct Traffic

In his “Occam’s Razor” blog, Avinash Kaushik recently posted an article with a rather provocative title: “Make Love to Your Direct Traffic.” By direct traffic, he means everyone who proactively seeks you out on your site by typing in your URL or uses a bookmark. This includes four different, measurable groups of people:

Existing customers

People familiar with your brand

Word-of-mouth traffic

People driven by offline campaigns such as TV, radio, outdoor, etc.

Direct traffic visitors, Kaushik says, “have an extra motivation connected to their visit.” They know what they’re looking for and they know you provide it.

So it would seem obvious, then, that web marketers would pay extra special attention to this already-in-the-hand market when using them to determine accurate traffic reports to their sites. But the reality, Kaushik says, is that most people don’t.

He adamantly recommends segmenting direct traffic into your data, as it will improve your KPIs considerably. It also tends to help clean up incorrectly tracked links that have no tracking parameters. Such links are automatically categorized as “direct traffic,” which is usually not the case.

Kaushik offers several ways to keep your direct traffic “clean,” and avoid polluting your direct traffic results. He also points out several “warning” signals that the direct traffic you’re receiving may not be entirely genuine, including:

Missing web analytics tags

Untagged campaigns

Improperly tagged campaign parameters

Improperly coded redirects/Vanity URLs

“Heavy” tags at the bottom of the page

Other miscellaneous, easy-to-fix problems

By eliminating these telltale “polluters” from your direct traffic list, you can compile a list of links who are truly repeat customers who know your company name and URL without having to be told.

Google’s new “Insight for Search” Tool an Easy way to Leverage more SEO Info, CanuckSEO Says

Software analyst Joyce Loews, writing on Jim Rudnick’s “Canuck SEO” blog, is very excited about Google’s recently released SEO tool, Insights for Search (IFS). In her article “Four Great Ways to Use Google’s Insights for Search Tool for Canuck SEO," Loews calls IFS the “obscure cousin” of Trends. She adds the software actually outdoes its predecessor in several important areas.

IFS reports the popularity of any keyword or phrase searched for since 2004. What makes it unique is that you can whittle down the results to determine the most popular search terms in virtually any State or province, and in the United States you can whittle it down to major metropolitan areas.

Results can also be determined according to content or images sought.

Citing some Canadian examples, Loews says the most searched term recently in Quebec has been recipes for “croustade a pommes,” or as we know it in America, the apple crisp.

A search on “SEO” reveals that Canada’s interest in the subject has risen steadily throughout the past six years, with British Columbia sending the highest number of searches for that term.

Loews says what IFS does best is to perform comparative research into search volumes. It’s not a numbers tool, like Keywords, but rather a way to narrow searches by region, time period of the search and search type. She says it’s a vital tool for companies with a new product to sell. They can research which areas of the country are interested in the company’s keywords. This tells companies where their potential audience is.

Another feature of IFS is “Rising Searches,” a list of keywords and search terms that have steadily risen in popularity over the years.

Loews sums up by saying that the heavily graphic-laden site should help to persuade the stubborn naysayers at your office that SEO is important, since search results are spelled out so well.

Guest Blogger Kasteler emphasizes the Importance of Creating Good Social Content at SearchEngineJournal.com

“The Creation and Promotion of Social Content” could be the single most important strategy for increasing interest and traffic to your site. Moreover, it’s the name of Jordan Kasteler’s recent article at SearchEngineJournal.com.

Kasteler, CEO of BlueGlass Interactive, says the combination of social media and content is the single best way to take full advantage of the web as both a marketing and reputation tool. Using several easy-to-follow illustrations, Kasteler diagrams this new marketing strategy. He says all it takes to generate more traffic is “a little ingenuity, passion and the ability to recognize the type of content your target demographic market is out looking for.”

Kasteler adds that it’s not enough anymore to rely on target key phrases and 3% keyword saturation to make an impression – you need to focus on “building up your content repertoire.” For example, you need to generate content that has a point and holds your reader’s attention. This needs to be content that the reader will want to share with others. Kasteler say s try to make everything you write as compelling and “viral” as possible.

To that end, he says the most preferable option is to make a funny video. People like humor, and if your video is truly funny, this can prove to be a great way to increase awareness of your product or service in a very short time.

This naturally leads to Kasteler’s next point. Whether you shoot a video, create a widget put up a quiz or do something else, make sure it’s visible to the web, and shareable by all. You also want to be sure to track your content, to see which pieces are being picked up and shared.

Google’s Eric Schmidt Hints Announces Fall Debut of “Google Me” during Google Zeitgeist Conference Speech

On the heels of finding out that Facebook had finally surpassed Google in total visits in August, Google CEO Eric Schmidt bared his teeth a bit at the recent Google Zeitgeist Conference in Scottsdale. According to John Brownlee, writing for Geek.com, Schmidt confirmed what most people suspected – “Google Me,” the company’s latest attempt at taking some of the social marketing energy that Facebook has all but snapped up , will debut this fall.

However, Schmidt was equally as adamant at insisting that Google Me was not going to be a hub for social networking. Rather, he sees the service as adding social networking capabilities to existing Google services, such as YouTube (you’d be notified if a lot of your friends were watching the same video, for example).

Brownlee says the industry is taking a “wait and see” attitude to see exactly what Schmidt and Google are up to. “Let’s just hope it’s not another ‘Buzz’ fiasco,” Brownlee says, referring to Google’s ill-fated Google Buzz project, which users never really accepted.

Meanwhile, other commentators see Schmidt’s comments as being much more mercenary, using such terminology as “Facebook-scraping,” and saying that Google is willing to take as much info from Facebook by any means possible. For example, Schmidt also announced that Google had recently invested over $100 million in the Zynga Company, developers of Facebook’s popular Farmville and Mafia Wars games.

Then, says Seth Weintraub at Fortune Magazine, there’s this quote from Schmidt’s Google Zeitgeist speech:

"The best thing that would happen is for Facebook to open up its data. Failing that, there are other ways to get that information."

What are those ways, Weintraub asks? He envisions someone creating a cartoon of Schmidt saying, “We have ways of making you talk. Mwahahahahah…”

As usual, Latest Google Innovation Causes Great Commotion; Affects Almost Nothing, PCMag.com Says

Within 24 hours of Google releasing its Google Instant search capability, industry pundits, almost predictably, went into the usual “man your battle stations” mode, saying yet again that this latest change would affect the importance of SEO as we all know it.

Not so fast, says Mark Hachman at PCmag.com in his article “SEO Not Affected by Partial ‘Google Instant’ Keywords”. Not 48 hours after Google Instant hit the streets, Google put out an announcement that internet marketers shouldn’t start jumping to conclusions and change any of their SEO strategies.

The commotion, Hachman says, comes from many marketers believing that now, with Google making suggestions on partially typed searches, you need to optimize your search capabilities to rank for these partial searches. However, Alden DeSoto of the Google Analytics team says that’s not necessary, and rather silly. “This is not a productive strategy,” DeSoto explains. “”Ads are triggered based on the ‘predicted query,’ not the stem that users type in.”

As an example, DeSoto says the partial query “flow” would provide results for the predicted query “flowers.” The only way people would see an ad optimized for “flow” would be if they were specifically searching for the word “flow.”

Desoto added that Google Instant doesn’t change search rankings, either, because the predicted query still wins out over the actual query.

Google Instant: Search Results Before You’re Done Thinking About it

It’s “Google’s decision to fix what wasn’t broken.”

That’s the rather skeptical reaction of Google critic Tom Krazit at Cnet.com, over Google’s recent release of the Google Instant results capability. If you have performed a search on Google over the last few days, you’ve probably noticed that the results you’re looking for are already on the page before you stop typing. It’s what Google calls its latest attempt to provide “search before you type.”

Yvonne Bell at Search Engine Journal says it’s Google’s attempt to take the guesswork out of search and put an end to the speed argument created by other real-time services such as Twitter.

If you run a search right now, you’ll notice how results can change literally letter by letter , at a speed that Google estimated to be 480 milliseconds.

Google says the three main advantages to Google instant are:

Dynamic Results: What you see is always relevant to what you’re typing and changes word for word, if necessary.

Predictions: This improvement to Google’s assumptive search capability predicts the rest of your search term in light gray text. As soon as you see what you’re looking for, stop typing and click.

Scroll to search: If Google pulls up several possible predictions for your search, you can scroll through them to get to the one you want faster.

Helen Popkin at msnbc’s Technolog sees another advantage to Google Instant in the “question-asking” category. Type in a “Where is” query , for example, and the most popoular results to this query pop up before you type in a qualifying noun. She calls it “instant access into the bizarrely awesome zeitgeist experienced by Google users.”

While Popkin finds Google Instant somewhat “creepy,” she also wonders whether you really have an alternative: “What are you gonna do – use Bing?”

Make no Mistake: DailySEOTip.com Knows 5 SEO Mistakes that Happen all the Time

Everybody makes mistakes. It’s how you learn. And once you know it was a mistake, hopefully, you avoid it and never worry about it again. Scientists learned this lesson with the brontosaurus. After years of believing it was its own species, it turned out that the bronto was no different than the apatosaurus. You live, you learn.

In SEO, mistakes are also a reality, says Kev Strong, a guest columnist at DailySEOTip.com. Some mistakes are made more than others are, so Strong put together a list of “5 SEO Mistakes Anybody Can Avoid.” He says these are the five most commonly noticed mistakes that webmasters notice when asked to analyze other people’s websites:

Duplicate Titles: Every page on your websites should have a unique tag. Many times, multiple pages are found using the same tags, which just gets confusing for the search engines. Strong says to check this by either browsing your website or searching on Google for your domain. If you see duplicate titles, change them on the pages that need changing.

Duplicate content: If you’re not repurposing pages that have been moved or changed, you run the risk of having duplicate content seen on your site by the search engines. While the rel=”canonical tag can help deter problems, it’s best to just put new content on those pages or remove them completely.

Blocking your Website: One of the most common mistakes made by people who should know better is when web developers forget to turn on the “index, follow” command for new pages. Look at your source code. If you see “noindex, nofollow,” change it immediately.

Non-Crawlable Navigation: Java script menus keep search spiders from crawling your site. They can’t rank what they can’t read, so think hard before deciding to use Java.

XML Sitemaps: These help the search engines see all of the pages on your website. You can even use a sitemap uploader, such as xml-sitemaps.com, to alert all the search engines at once to the existence of your site.

Hubspot offers tips on getting leads from Whitepapers

In a guest post on Hubspot.com, Kuno Creative co-owner John McTigue recently explained “How to Write a Whitepaper that will Capture Leads.” He says it’s a challenge to simply write a good whitepaper, much less attract leads with it, but it can be done. The three areas where whitepapers differ from blogs, for example, are scope, style and intent.

The scope of a whitepaper is usually incredibly in-depth. He suggests thinking of whitepapers as web-based research papers. As a result, your whitepapers should be at least 10 pages long, profusely illustrated and researched, with plenty of information for the reader to absorb. Whitepaper readers aren’t looking for a summary; they want all the information you can give them right at hand.

The editorial style of a whitepaper is usually serious and professional. You’re talking to people who are seriously considering buying your product or service, so make sure your whitepapers are written, edited and formatted professionally. If you’re not a graphic designer, hire one to help you put the piece together. Even if you write for a living, show your document to at least two other writers to make sure you’re being clear, accurate and literate. Make sure you’re not saying anything potentially liable or false.

The intent of your whitepaper should be one thing: capture leads. This is business and you’re providing valuable information that most people would gladly pay to see. “Good information backed by well-documented research is worth its weight in gold,” McTigue says.

Five Ways to Make Your B2B Popular on Twitter from Karlie Justus at SocialMediaB2B.com

Chances are, you know that you’re supposed to be supporting your company’s B2B social media campaign with an active presence of Twitter. But what you might be thinking to yourself is, “How do we do that?” Check out this article by Karlie Justus at SocialMediaB2B.com, “5 Ways for B2B Companies to Engage on Twitter.” Justus says that building an online reputation, generating leads and company coverage through Twitter doesn’t happen overnight. You need to develop ongoing two-way communication with your followers. Her five ways to do this include:

• Original content: Create tweets to alert people of the original content that you should be adding several times a week to your company web site. Rewrite eNewsletters, news releases and updates. If you don’t have any news of note, create 140-character facts and tips that you can fall back on when you tweet.
• Retweet: Did you get some excellent information from a Tweet? Share it with your followers. It shows you care about your industry and the other players in it.
• On-the-Ground Updates: Twitter’s mobility and brevity make if perfect for up-to-the-minute updates. “From the field” tweets about events at conferences for example (“just had a great conversation with manager of Smith in Atlanta,” e.g.)shows your company is busy and on top of things.
• Determine the popular hash tags and keywords to your industry: Then use Twitter searches to find tweets with those terms. This allows you to follow users who tag their tweets.
• Tweet with Personality: Your tweets don’t all have to be about business. Justus says, “Think of Twitter as a cocktail party.” Appoint one person to handle Tweets for your company and encourage them to let their personality come through. This means occasional Tweets that step outside the business realm. It makes your company look human and easier to identify with.

StayOnSearch.com: Save time on Social Media Research with Seven Social Bookmark Tools

One of the setbacks to staying up to date with your social media campaign is that it can take up a lot of time.


Any advantage you can get toward saving you time is welcome. Which is why Mark Thompson posted “7 Social Bookmarking Tools You Should Know About.” While he admits the list is hardly conclusive, Thompson says that all of these tools have helped him to stay active on numerous communities.

Sub Digger: Thompson calls Sub Digger “a real time saver” for anyone who is very active on Digg. Browse all of the Digg submissions of your friends and colleagues with a custom submission bar.

OnlyWire: This social bookmarking syndication tool can send your post to more than 20 popular social bookmarking sites with one click. Among the sites covered are DIgg, Mixx, Reddit, Twitter, Friend Feed and more.

Social Blade: Provides front page analytics for Digg, as well as a current list of the most frequent Digg users.

Su.Pr: Pronounced “Super,” This specialized URL shortening service caters specifically to submissions on Stumbleupon.

Social Bookmarking Demon: Think advanced OnlyWire. You can submit your articles to many more sites at once. Ideal for anyone looking to generate more traffic and links, Thompson says.

Social Marker: Adds social bookmarking buttons to your website or blog, so you can access any social site with a click.

Friend Statistics: Thompson says that Friend Statistics is “one of the best tools for anyone who is addicted to Digg analyzes your Digg connections.

(Photo courtesy petittscreations.com)