So on Halloween, I dropped by my bank to deposit a check. Only my bank wasn't my bank any more. It was in costume. The red, white and blue Commerce Bank logo was replaced by something green and utterly unfamiliar: signage for something called the TD Bank. I kept walking, aggravated that I'd have to make a detour to anyother branch. Then, something strange caught my eye: the bank's interior was identical to the way it looked last time I was there.

There have been a lot of posts and twitter announcements by people checking out the WordPress 2.7 Beta since it was announced yesterday. What’s your favorite thing about 2.7 so far? Or if you haven’t made the leap yet, to which feature are you most looking forward? Tell us in the poll below.

What is your favorite feature in WordPress 2.7?
( polls)

If you have a extra minute or two, we’ve also put together a survey that lists all the new features and allows you to rate them, as well as give additional feedback if you’re so inclined. If you want to participate, take the 2.7 Beta Favorite Features survey.

Small businesses trying to gain an advantage with local SEO should think about their efforts in more than simple terms related to keyword usage. Keywords are important, yes, they aren't the only things that are important. There are essentially aspects of each web page that you need to consider to improve your local SEO efforts. On-page content Meta tags Internal link structure In addition, off-page link building should be a serious consideration.

by Vera H-C Chan Virginia holds a lucky 13 electoral votes and North Carolina 15. In the past seven days, the two have thrown everything plus the kitchen sink at Yahoo! Search to dig into details about presidential hopefuls John McCain (R) and Barack Obama (D). In both states, one out of 10 queries checks out McCain, while Obama holds 86% of searches (the remaining 4% focuses on the campaign wives). Below details what Virginians and North Carolinians have been tracking.

Is there something happening where you live that you think the world should know about? An important story you want to share that others around the world might relate to? Now is your chance to tell that story for the chance to win technology prizes from Sony & Intel . In Round 2 of Project: Report , the journalism contest YouTube is holding in partnership with the Pulitzer Center ,

Here are some interesting search engine related articles from the recent week: Accoona re-emerges?

A couple of days ago there was announcement on Search Engine Optimization Journal that Google can now crawl and index scanned documents . But can you drive traffic to those pages with PPC and expect your quality score to register the same as it will an html page? That's a good question. It consists of two parts. The answer to the first part is "Yes, you can use PPC to drive traffic to scanned documents".

If you are moving your website for any reason - changing hosts, seeking branding benefits, to make your URL more memorable, or _ (fill in the blank) - then there are some things that you should definitely do to make your change go more smoothly for yourself and for your loyal readers.

I just noticed when checking my Gmail late Saturday/early Sunday that Google did not move the clock back in New York when it turned 2 am. My computer clock moved, my cable clock changed, but I guess Google works from Mountainview time, not GMT. Surprising, but hey we know the center of the universe is based at Google HQ - the rest of the world just needs to change I guess.

Another Google Glitch I nuked a recent post about sites potentially getting filtered because it become somewhat irrelevant and speculative considering Matt Cutts stated the following in a Webmaster World thread today : I don't consider those rankings indicative of anything coming in the future. Some data went into the index without all of our quality signals incorporated, and it should be mostly back to normal and continuing to get back to normal over the course of the day.