The Guide closes with a number of useful links to areas of Google Webmaster Central. As a basic explanations of SEO goes, it’s a pretty cool document however, it barely scratches the surface of the skills and knowledge held by a professional search engine optimization practitioner or the firms those practitioners work for.

SEOs should use the Guide to inform and educate their clients however those clients should be told explicitly that information within the Guide is among the most basic SEO advice out there.

Google Publishes a Dated SEO Starter Guide » Search Engine Optimization Blog.

I completely agree with their approach. The Google starter guide is a great resource to help clients understand what is going on during the SEO process, but it’s not a cure all by any means.

Search Engine Optimization is a skill that is learned over time and through experience. Also, Google will never give up its secrets and for that reason alone hiring a quality SEO/Web Design firm to optimize your site is crucial to its success and rank.

Is it possible for someone to create a malicious filter without having access to your Gmail username and password? No, however, they can force you to create the filter without your knowledge.

The blogosphere is buzzing about a Gmail Security Flaw that has caused some people to lose their domain names registered through GoDaddy.

To understand how this exploit works let me first explain how I would carry it out (if I were a blackhat). Then we can move on and explain the exploit in detail. Let’s use a current example and assume that I was trying to steal MakeUseOf.com and I already knew it was registered by GoDaddy. Let’s also assume that I knew the owner’s Gmail address. I would want to create a filter like the one in the image above, where all email sent from GoDaddy Support was automatically deleted and forwarded to my email address.

Gmail Security Flaw Proof of Concept.

Now the overall consept is neat. Having some control over your search results is definitely an interesting concept, but the user isn’t effecting anything other than the results for those exact keywords in their account.

This means that though, the search wiki resembles the voting concept of Digg, users aren’t actually improving or effecting the organic results for anyone.

On its video site, youTube, Google explained what Search Wiki actually is:

To a Internet-junky and a Web designer, I’m rather disappointed with the search wiki. Yes, it’s neat, but the usefulness hasn’t quite struck me yet.

I’d love you hear your opinions. Post them below.

Business-to-business B2B blogging is be a great way to forge relationships, talk with customers and prospects, demonstrate thought leadership, and dramatically increase visibility in natural search results for targeted search terms. Done right, it ultimately drives substantial traffic when others in the media and blogosphere link to compelling or noteworthy content. Yet the Fortune 500, many of which are B2B companies, has been slow to embrace blogging.

Fortune 500 starts blogging; wiki cites progress, examples and reviews.

Many people know what a blog is. But many don’t realize what a blog can do to increase traffic and consumer confidence in their business.

Often I’ll go to meet with a potential client and I’ll mention Goldstein Media’s maintenance package. They’ll look at me with a blank stare and ask me straight out:

“What do I need a blog for?”

My response to that very question is this. A blog increases traffic to your site through directories and search engines. Directories you have to submit to, but search engines will find your blog and will come back frequently to index your new stories. If written correctly, your blog posts will show up (hopefully high) in the search engine rankings when someone searches. As more and more people come to your blog to read what you’re writing they will start developing a trust with you and if your blog is properly branded, they will start to see you as an expert in the fields you blog about.

With this said, most people do business with someone or a company that they feel that they have a connection too. By having this blog visitors are statistically more likely to do business with you because of this feeling of relation.

Now I mentioned, though in passing, the branding of your blog. Branding is two fold. Firstly, your blog should mesh into the overall look and feel of your site. The navigation should be similar if not the same and visitors/readers should be able to navigate between your main site and your blog with ease. Secondly, what you write about is very important.

Let’s say you an used car dealer. You wouldn’t want to (at least most of the time) blog about exotic birds and new gadgets on the market. These topics have nothing to do with your industry and don’t build the trust that you need (especially in the car industry) to convert visitors into customers. What you should blog about (feel free to use these ideas) are topics that involve cars. Talk about the auto industry, how to go about buying a used car, what common misconceptions people have of used car salesmen. You get my point.

The big Fortune 500 companies are seeing the power of the blogosphere, shouldn’t you look into following their lead?

See you in the blogosphere.

Looking to build a branded blog for your company? Contact us today for a free quote and tap into you inner blogger grow your business.

The saga of cheatsheets and reference sheets continues with this outline of the hot new WordPress 2.7 which will be released soon. Like WordPress 2.5, this is a radical release. Like WordPress 2.5, the bulk of the changes affect the WordPress admin. Unlike WordPress 2.5, however, this is not merely an update of the backend but a complete rebuilding.

Termed “Crazyhorse” at the beginning of the cycle, the WordPress admin is the result of complete thinking outside the box, research and user testing. The concept began as “Let’s throw everything away that we assume to be proper and correct and see what we can come up with when we have no preset conditions”.

The result is a semantically, aesthetically and structurally different WordPress than you’ve ever known before. This is not your grandma’s WordPress!

10 Things You Need To Know About WordPress 2.7 | Technosailor.com.

reCAPTCHA is a free CAPTCHA service that helps to digitize books.

A CAPTCHA is a program that can tell whether its user is a human or a computer. You’ve probably seen them — colorful images with distorted text at the bottom of Web registration forms. CAPTCHAs are used by many websites to prevent abuse from “bots,” or automated programs usually written to generate spam. No computer program can read distorted text as well as humans can, so bots cannot navigate sites protected by CAPTCHAs.

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that’s not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into “reading” books.

To archive human knowledge and to make information more accessible to the world, multiple projects are currently digitizing physical books that were written before the computer age. The book pages are being photographically scanned, and then transformed into text using “Optical Character Recognition” (OCR). The transformation into text is useful because scanning a book produces images, which are difficult to store on small devices, expensive to download, and cannot be searched. The problem is that OCR is not perfect.

Example of OCR errors

reCAPTCHA improves the process of digitizing books by sending words that cannot be read by computers to the Web in the form of CAPTCHAs for humans to decipher. More specifically, each word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is placed on an image and used as a CAPTCHA. This is possible because most OCR programs alert you when a word cannot be read correctly.

But if a computer can’t read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here’s how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

Currently, we are helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive and old editions of the New York Times.

How can I help?

In order to achieve our goal of digitizing books, we need your help.

If you run a website that suffers from problems with spam, you can put reCAPTCHA on your site. For some applications (such as Wordpress and Mediawiki), we have plugins that allow you to use reCAPTCHA without writing any code. We also have easy-to-use code for common web programming languages such as PHP.

If you get email spam we have a method that will help you to reduce it. Many spammers crawl the web looking for email addresses. When they see an email address on a web page, they send spam to the address. Mailhide allows you to safely post your email address on the web. Mailhide takes an address such as jsmith@example.com and turns it into jsm…@example.com. In order to reveal the address, a user must click on the “…” and solve a reCAPTCHA. If you use the Mailhide version of your email address, spammers won’t be able to find your real email address and you’ll get less spam.

What is reCAPTCHA?.

This is a great application for any Website that has a contact form. It is very effective at preventing spam and best of all it’s not too hard to read.

Many captcha spam-stopping plugins out there are extremely hard to read and unruly to install. Recaptcha is secure and safe to keep spammers out but easy enough to not scare away visitors from contacting you.

I’ve started installing reCAPTCHA on my clients sites and their spam through their forms have dropped exponentially.

Best of all it’s helping with the scanning of books. There’s nothing better than a win-win situation.

Give it a whirl and post back here to let me know what you think,

The overall concept of these SEO tools are great. The idea of streamlining some of the most tedious work involved with optimizing a site by using the “Cloud” is brilliant. But it’s only as good as the accuracy that these “Cloud” apps spit out.

I’d like to hear your thoughts on what tools, both free and paid you like. Also post your thoughts on doing SEO manually vs. using programs.

<Image credit: Smith Marketing>

Many people get up every morning and walk outside and pickup the paper. I go to my inbox and well… read my news that way. Every morning I go to my inbox and I have anywhere from 5 to 15 blogs sitting there waiting to be read. I love it, because I read some with my morning coffee, then the ones I don’t get to right away I read throughout the day.

FeedMyInbox is a brilliant program and needs the recognition that it deserves. It’s a simple app where you put the URL into a form on their site and then enter your email address. They then send you a confirmation email and once you click on the link in the email you’re set to get that blog delivered to your inbox on a daily basis (so long as there is a new post).

All I can say is that I’m addicted. I keep finding blogs that I like and subscribing through FeedMyInbox. Normally I would keep the tab open in Firefox for a few days then forget about the blog. But now I can keep up with it and not worry about having to go their site everytime to see if there is something good to read.

Thank you FeedMyInbox!

Rating: 10/10 tumbs up!

Google says it has only benefited from the economic downturn. Bargain-hunting Americans are using the search engine to scout out deals, according to chief economist Hal Varian.

“One thing that we think at Google is that when there is a recessionary environment, people are counting their pennies, are going to be researching their purchases, looking for bargains, and this potentially has something of an upside for Google, where we referred to this last time I called it the Wal-Mart effect,” said Varian, in a conference call last month.

It’s a fine argument, but it can’t hold for long — as consumer spending dries up, businesses won’t be able to justify buying ads if they don’t get a return on it. That’s bound to catch up with Google at some point.

And now, the signs are on the wall now that the financial crisis is taking its toll. Sponsored ad sales — or Cost-per-click ads that are paid for by advertisers only when people click on them — are softening, according to Collins Stewart analyst Sandeep Aggarwal. His research suggests that CPC ad rates have held up so far because of the number of advertisers bidding on keywords and quality scores demanded a minimum bid for low-quality key words. But now, says Aggarwal, bid density, or the number of bidders on keywords, is softening and delivering smaller returns.

“Going forward, bid density will deliver 2 percent to 4 percent year-over-year lift in CPC, and quality scoring, perhaps 1 percent to 2 percent versus the average of 6 percent year-over-year for the past six quarters,” Aggarwal said in a note to investors.

The upshot: Although search ad budgets are holding up better than many other forms of advertising, Aggarwal thinks Google’s fourth-quarter revenue will come in closer to $4.26 billion, versus his previous estimate for $4.37 billion. The analyst also trimmed his adjusted earnings estimate to $2.54 billion from $2.58 billion.

Shares of Google took a hit in a pretty dismal trading session, falling more than $7 per share, or 2 percent, to $303 per share by midday.

Photo: Flickr/mark knol

Google’s Ad Biz Finally Cracks | Epicenter from Wired.com.

The economic state of the World right now is really scary. When you see the tech industry cutting back and laying off people you know its gotten bad.

I personally have used Adwords from Google to advertise Goldstein Media, and I can relate to other businesses that are cutting their cost-per-click advertising. I’ve probably spent a few hundred on it since starting with it and my ROI (return on investment) hasn’t been that good. This doesn’t mean that I’m not a big proponent of Adwords adn other CPC networks, because I am, I just feel that my industry is expected to be high in the organic listings to be trustworthy.

The question with Adwords and advertisers is when do you stop? If the ROI isn’t there, but people going to the Internet for deals is growing, then maybe holding out for another month might be worth it. I really don’t have an answer.

Hopefully with the new administration of Barack Obama this economic turmoil can be turned around. I don’t think it’ll happen overnight, but hopefully we’ll start seeing positive effects sooner rather than later.

What are your thoughts. I’d like to hear them. Post your comments below.

Digg founder Kevin Rose says this is the best time to launch a company, even if the economy is going to hell, venture capital for web startups is drying up, and consumer spending has stalled.

“I believe it’s going to be a great time to start something new,” said Rose, while speaking at the Web 2.0 Summit, in San Francisco. His argument: There is less competition and noise in the marketplace and it’s easier to get press. “Funding for consumer internet companies is going away and that means there’s going to be a lot of opporunity for everyone.”

And if you choose to take the plunge, he has a few tips, which mainly boil down to one theme: Be cheap.

“When Digg launched, I had a day job. It was something I worked on at nights and during weekends,” says Rose.

And instead of dishing out tens of thousands of dollars for a fulltime developer, Rose outsourced it to a guy through Elance, and paid one-third of what he would have spent on somebody in the U.S.

“[Outsourcing] only works up to a certain point . . . When it comes time to add multiple servers you absolutely need to have talent that’s been there before,” says Rose.

And when it comes to PR, do it yourself. Aggressively communicate, he says, and Tweet your heart out.

“I really believe that email communication is dead,” said Rose. “Twitter is more of a real-time communication.”

Kevin Rose on Surviving the Downturn: Be Cheap | Epicenter from Wired.com.

I was going through my emails this morning and reading my feeds that are sent their by a great little app called FeedMyInbox.com. I came to the feed from the Epicenter blog at Wired.com and the above post caught my eye.

Kevin Rose, the founder of Digg, and all round Web 2.0 god, says now’s a good time to startup a Web company. Though this might be true, for reasons he explains in the article, people need to be cautious when doing this, especially when the economy is in an economic downturn. The margin of error is much greater and the consequences can be much worse.

That being said, The end of the article Kevin Rose says something very interesting, something that I’ve been pondering for a while:

“I really believe that email communication is dead,” said Rose. “Twitter is more of a real-time communication.”

Twitter really is the wave of the future. I use it on a daily basis to keep up on the news, through following tweets from CNN, MSN and other reputable sources. I also keep up on what’s going on in the Technology and Web community by following people like Rose and other luminaries in the professions surrounding the industry.

The great thing about Twitter is that it doesn’t involve a lot of reading. I can get the gist of most posts in the 140 limit that twitter allows users to tweet. If there is a link, often if my interest is peaked I go to the site and read more.

What Twitter really does well is give me an avenue to keep up with people and information that otherwise would be too cumbersome and bothersome to read. It would take me a lot more time to go to each of these sites and blogs to read the posts than just getting a synopsis on Twitter.

In the above article, Rose says that PR is key to the success of your business. Twitter is a great tool for this PR. I have many tricks that I use to integrate Twitter in to my business game plan.

Please feel free to drop me an note with any question you might have. I’ll be glad to enlighten you.