Social Bookmarking sites aren't a huge mystery.  If you think there's some "special formula" to the Digg and Reddit algorithms, for the most part: you'd be wrong.  Sure, there's an algorithm at work there, but before you make that attempt at the front page, you need to work on the 2 major pieces necessary for success: great content, and a network of users to help promote it. The need for great content is self explanatory, and if you still need help with yours,

Keyword Research is an obvious first step in researching a niche for yourself or for a client. Keywords, and their results, make up the terrain of search marketing - and knowing the terrain (and who else is playing in it) helps us navigate up the mountain (and determine when the mountain is maybe too crowded to climb). Google's AdWords Keywords tool isn't a bad place to start,

Landing page optimization (#lpo) can be a powerful way to increase conversion rates and to get more people to complete online forms. What you do after the form-fill can be even more important. If your next step is to follow up over the phone, you are probably pissing away money and costing your company a fortune - unless you dial the phone within five minutes.

Germany's justice minister is less than happy about the direction Google's headed. Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger thinks the search giant may become a monopoly, and she's not of a mind to sit by while that happens behind closed doors. Germany has often posed something of a problem for Google. It never won the right to the name " Gmail " in the country, faced criticism over Chrome , and was forced to change its Street View data deletion practices .

Before 2009 came to a close, Google provided a look (as always) at the most searched for terms of the year. It showed the top ten fastest rising and fastest falling terms on both a global scale, and in the U.S. Globally, "Michael Jackson" was the fastest rising, while "Beijing 2008" was the fastest falling. In the U.S., "Twitter" was the fastest rising (just above "Michael Jackson", and "John McCain" was the fastest falling (just over the Olympics).

This is another addition to our ongoing series of tutorials and case studies on landing pages that work. Robert Regehr wants to save homeowners big bucks on mortgage refinancing. He and his videos are leading the charge. He's consistently getting about a 3% conversion rate (those prospects that move from reading to registering) based on about 400 unique visitors a day. Robert, to quote Oliver Twist, " . . . would like some more, please.

If you are like me, you have all your major working materials stored online: I organize useful links with Google bookmarks and Delicious, store email and IM conversation with Gmail, have most of my important (collaboration) docs at Google Docs, have multiple resource collections on Wordpress and Blogger, etc. Backing up this massive amount if highly important information is actually a smart idea because the services are not owned by me,

by Mike Moran Image by Getty Images via Daylife People who know how to do offline marketing are often mystified by how to get started with search marketing. They know how to think about their market segments in terms of demographics, so they know which magazines to buy ads in and which industry trade shows to attend. But search seems somehow different, because there are no demographics to latch on to. When I talk to them,

Crafting unmissable headlines which resonate with social web users is something which appears deceptively simple. Yet it's an art form requiring writers, bloggers and marketers to craft thousands of headlines to perfect. As someone who has been successful with creating content that goes hot across social channels I've come to appreciate the art and challenge of crafting sticky headlines. In fact,

When you first start your search engine optimization campaign for your business website or if you are just in the process of learning, your head will most likely start to spin a little from all the information available online. It will be important for you to realize there are some efforts that are industry standards and some that are very much frowned up by all including the search engines.