by Sage Lewis Sage gives credit to Skitzzo of SEO Refugee , who writes "An Open Letter to SEO Bloggers: Back up Your Statements!" In the letter, Skitzzo expresses his frustration with SEO bloggers for stating theories and opinions as facts without any supporting evidence. Sage supports the call to legitimize SEO and create some sort of standards for the industry.

Posted by rebecca Danny Sullivan's lovely wife, Lorna Harris (who once lent me a hat and gloves when Danny took me to see Stonehenge on an especially cold, windy day), recently created Boudica , a social news site for women. The site is pretty new and is currently in Beta testing mode, but I thought I'd give an initial review of things thus far. I'll start with the following caveat: I'm not an especially girly female.

John McCain wants you to "Invest in Victory." According to information gathered by Media Trust, the McCain camp is running ads with a call-to-action reminiscent of the ones Clinton relied on during her run for the presidency. Ads spotted on sites based in swing states including New Hampshire and North Carolina, among other sites, urge supporters to "Invest in Victory, Donate $25." Display ads from Hillary Clinton's shuttered campaign were almost entirely fundraising-based,

Launching your company into the world of online marketing could be frustrating. So much information available to you and picking a starting point could get sticky. SEO moz has created a program that makes it virtually impossible to foul up your marketing plan. This extremely user friendly program was created to help user of all experience levels.

Ya-Who? Seems Microsoft has already forgotten the Sunnyvale search engine. Microsoft has agreed to buy Powerset , the semantic search engine touted as the next generation of search. Powerset is the much-hyped beta natural language search engine that the metaphor-challenged mainstream media call the Google Killer. That means you can type questions in a search box the way you normally ask them. (Think Ask Jeeves 1.

Yahoo! is back around the $20 range again today. If Microsoft could find a way to buy them they could quickly gain some search marketshare, but presuming Microsoft builds a memorable search brand they could probably catch up through other acquisitions cheaper. I think rather than buying another overpriced ad platform a cheaper way to attack Google would be to buy some of the leading editorial brands/sites that dominate Google's organic rankings.

Marketing executives working with digital media vendors might need a scorecard handy to track who owns who these days. AOL, Microsoft, and WPP each acquired five marketing, advertising, or digital media companies during the first six months of 2008, according to a report on mergers and acquisitions released today by investment bankers PetskyPrunier. According to PetskyPrunier's research,

Yeah, okay, I'm still mad at Google for adding every single person I've ever emailed to my "friends" list. But lately worse things have been happening to me over at MyBlogLog ( remember them ?). I know, I know, MBL has long since fallen out of favor with tech & SEM bloggers. I'd forgotten about them, too, other than the occasional "So and so has added you as a contact" e-mails. Until the end of May, when I got one of these e-mails that stood out.

Imagine turning a Firefox extension into the base for an ad network. Someone just did that, as Patrick Gavin recently announced that ScribeFire is launching an ad network and ad optimization service for bloggers . They are currently in limited beta testing, but if you want to sign up your blog quickly you can be one of the first to try it out by emailing them at seobook@scribefire.com . An extension to a social network usually does not create such an opportunity,

I am usually a fan of creating niche sites that are easy to link at and in profitable categories. In some cases generic sites can do well because they allow you to expand wherever the money is. Sites like NexTag can buy mortgage ads on Bankrate because they already have enough volume that it makes it easy for them to quickly build inventory whenever an arbitrage opportunity comes about.