Apple’s iPhone apps are wildly popular and frankly, addictive. There really is an app for anything you can think of. There are quite a few developers making money off of these apps. You can check out the counter, that as of this writing, is about to hit 1 Billion iPhone app downloads at: http://www.apple.com/itunes/billion-app-countdown/ 

Black hat SEO practitioners have been dominating the top search engine positions by gaming Google’s algorithm.  The main goal of the algorithm is to keep search engine results as pure, neutral and relevant as possible. It’s upon this system that the Google empire is based. If organic search engine results are prone to manipulation, it downgrades the public’s trust in the fairness of the system.

So far, Google has been successful at thwarting black hatters that use spamming and other techniques to achieve fabricated rankings. What is seen as a new challenge is the emergence of real time blogging content such as Twitter. By in large, Twitter has not been exploited fully by black hatters, yet. This creates a new challenge for search engines like Google beacause it must find a way to integrate this real time content into their search engine results pages along with established, older content. Black hatters are taking advantage of this and overloading social media sites’ comment and discussion areas with a huge amount of link spam. Thus creating an instant buzz and getting their keywords ranked quickly in the search engine results pages.

All of the above factors have contributed to Google’s need to revamp their algorithm. As always, SEOs, both white and black hatters will have to try to figure out how the algorithm will affect their webpages and what they can do to try to get a leg up on the system. Here we go again!

These are great for syndicating your web videos, getting high rankings with very little competition and generating good traffic. The problem is that it takes forever to upload your video to every single site. That’s where Traffic Geyser comes in. Traffic Geyser allows you to upload your video only once and then they upload it to all of the major video share sites. Saving you hours and hours and getting you real results.

Top 20

Don’t forget to check out Traffic Geyser to get the most out of this list!

Ford will be releasing an in-dash fully functional computer in March. It will allow people to access the web, work on documents and is geared towards on-site contractors.

Many new vehicles have mp3 players and navigational systems. The next logical step is to have fully functional personal computers running applications on your dashboard.

I just drove my niece’s BMW 750i up to Atlanta and was impressed by the on board computer system. It offered navigation, music and climate controls all by using a single dial/button conveniently located next to your right hand.

What this marvelous driving machine didn’t have was a way for you to search and surf the web. There are some serious safety concerns such as being distracted by using the internet while you are driving. Perhaps it would be safer to install on board PCs that only function when the vehicle is in Park.

Seems that Paid search is bucking the recessionary blues by actually increasing 12% from Q4 results in 2007.

2009 will see more retailers turning to paid search to drive sales, but as the report highlights, changing consumer habits based on the economic climate will force them to work harder and smarter to maintain revenue levels.

The growth trend was consistent among all 3 major search engines. Let’s see how 2009 fares.

A new service by Meeting Wave allows employers to conduct candidate searches, evaluations and interviews.

Adam Ostrow from Mashable! writes:

As opposed to organizing group events, the idea is to specify who you’d like to meet, post an invite, and accept or reject requests to attend. For example, let’s say you’ve got an idea for a Web application and want to meet someone that can develop it. You can post an invite for coffee to MeetingWave, and then developers can take you up on the offer by indicating they wish to attend.

As a meeting organizer, you approve the people who indicate they want to attend your meeting, giving you control over who shows up, and eliminating the awkwardness and waste of time that could ensue with public meet ups. Poking around the site, most of the listings so far seem to focus on business networking of some sort, ranging from simple meetups of people with similar interests to professionals looking for jobs hoping to lure recruiters.

Great article by Nate Elliott of the Forrester Blog of how video can help to dramatically improve your Google rankings.

He says that most people (less than 20% actually) don’t optimize their videos for keywords. The key is to make use of Google’s blended results pages, which blend text results with found video results. They tested 40 of the most searched phrase and found that more than 50% of the results pages showed video listings.

Bottomline of the results is that you have 50 times better chance getting a page 1 result for a phrase when you have a video optimized for that keyword.

So how can you optimize your online videos? The agencies and search engines I’ve talked to offer a number of different tips:

• -Insert keywords into your video filenames.
• - Host your videos on YouTube, and embed those YouTube videos into your own site. Google says its algorithms consider how many times a video is viewed, and any views embedded videos receive on your own site get added to the ‘views’ tally on YouTube. (And yes, nearly every video we saw Google blend into its results came from YouTube.)
• - Optimize your YouTube videos by writing keywords into your videos’ titles, descriptions, and tags.
• - Embed videos into relevant text pages on your site. The context provided by the text on those pages (which is hopefully already optimized for search as well) will help the search engines figure out what your videos are about.
• - Also create a video library on your site, so Google knows where to find your video content. (Google Video Sitemaps can help with this too.) Write keyword-rich annotations for each video in the library.

The best and easiest tool I’ve seen for getting all of this done is called Traffic Geyser. It saves me tons of time and the best of all is that it consistently allows me to dominate certain keyword phrases.

Darren Rowse has a great post on ProBlogger where he surveys readers about whether or not they use videos on their blog.

So far the majority of people say no, followed by those that provide videos that are produced by others and lastly the minority say that they make their own videos for publication on their site.

This is both an alarming and hopeful revelation. Alarming because, in this age of YouTube and webcams, everyone should have video on their blogs. Hopeful because it leaves room for those of us that produce videos to corner the market.

A useful tool for easily producing and distributing video for syndication is called Traffic Geyser. It’s helped many online marketers dominate search engine results for tons of keyword phrases.

Jason Lee Miller from WebProNews has an interesting article where he talks about a recent incident involving 3 New York City bloggers and their fight to earn their press credentials.

New York City Police Officers are responsible for issuing press credentials and were repeatedly denying press credentials to the 3 bloggers. Their reason: They were bloggers who worked for online or “non-traditional” media outlets.

The trio responded to being shutout by filing a federal lawsuit. The NYPD backed down and facilitated press passes for the trio.

As blogging and online journalists gain more mainstream recognition, these incidents of “journalistic bigotry” will probably decrease. As a prolific blogger myself, I don’t consider myself a journalist in the traditional sense of the word. But perhaps it’s time to reevaluate the definition of the word.

So to my fellow bloggers I say blog on. Try to follow the credos of basic journalism such as verifying sources and offering subjective opinions in addition to objective reporting. Maybe they’ll call it something like “blogolists”.

What’s your take? What would you call a hybrid between a blogger and a journalist. I’d love to hear your feedback.

by Darren Rowse

This question from James of My Fitness Guide hit my inbox this week:

“Hey Darren, I just thought of a blogging question so I’ve come all the way over write a list of all your blog topics first, then plan to write one of them per then try and think of a fresh new blog topic every day?”

Here’s my answer (I’d be keen to hear yours in comments).

James - I generally suggest a few things with regards to content when I’m starting a new blog.

1. 5 Posts Already Published

I like to have at least 5, preferably 8-10, articles already published on the blog - so when people come they can see you’ve written useful stuff already and don’t just see a blog with one post.

At b5media we ask our bloggers to have around 10 posts already written before we launch but I think 5 would be my minimum.

2. 5 Draft Posts

I also like to have at least 5 posts already written but held in reserve as drafts that I can post in the next few days after launch.

I find that when launching a blog you can be a bit distracted by the excitement of it all, by promoting it, by responding to comments etc - so content creation can sometimes take a bit of a back seat.

If you have 5 posts in reserve (I’d even prefer to have more than that) it means you can keep any momentum from the launch going for at least 5 days without having to write a whole lot more. In fact I usually start a blog with just 3 posts a week and gradually increase the frequency of posts over time - so 5 posts in reserve can almost last two weeks.

3. 20 Post Ideas

Lastly - I also like to have a list of possible topics to write about in future (I try for at least 20).

I actually like to write this list as part of the process of even deciding whether to choose a topic or niche because it helps me to work out whether I’ll be able to sustain writing on that topic for the long haul.

If you can’t think of 20-30 post titles/topics pretty easily before starting a blog it could be a signal that you’ve chosen the wrong topic.

Having this list at your fingertips means you’ve always got a topic to write about in the first month or so of your new blog.

And You’re Off and Running

I find that between having a few posts already up on the blog, having a few in reserve for the coming few days and then having a list of topics to write about that creating content for a new blog is not that difficult.

The numbers of posts that I’ve mentioned above will vary from person to person (and even for me I’ve not always exactly followed this formula) but I think it’s probably a pretty solid way forward.

The only thing I’ll add is that it’s really important to put your best foot forward in terms of the quality of your content in the early days of a blog.

Of course you’ll want high quality posts as every post on your blog going forward - but a few really high quality and engaging posts in the first week of your blog can really launch it and help establish some good traffic and subscriber numbers in the early days of its life.

What Do You Do When Starting a Blog?

I’m interested to hear what your experience is with creating content on a new blog? How many posts do you launch with? How do you keep the posts coming in the early day of a blog?

Article Source: ProBlogger