This is a quick 3 minute look at the new Google experimental view options, and how the searchers behavior and intent will change the serps at the click of the mouse. This is just a glimpse of what’s coming, and I sort of like it.

I have personally suffered from many of these afflictions below, and as a result, I’ve had a loss of productivity, loss of time, and most likely a loss of income.

This started out to be a quick list of things that I could do to improve in 2008, and it wasn’t going to be an actual list of New Year’s resolutions.

Am I the only person that didn’t know this? I just “accidentally” discovered that an entire website wasn’t ranked for ANYTHING in MSN. They had #1 ranking for the primary phrase in Google and Yahoo, yet could not be found anywhere in the top 200 results on MSN. After scrolling through 5 pages of SERPS, I guessed that it just wasn’t in the index, but I was wrong…

There’s an online community of search engine marketers called Gooruze that’s picking up steam, and I’ve been lurking there quietly for the past month or so.  The information available there is phenomenal, and I strongly recommend a visit, and signing up for this free community.

I’m pulling the trigger on something I haven’t had the guts to do before, but it’s long overdue. After nearly 3 years, I’m changing the permalink structure on my blog, although it’s not for the reasons you might think.

Besides search engine visibility, the more realistic answer is simple “user-friendliness”. People really aren’t that much different than search engine spiders when it comes to determining the relevancy of a link.

People engaged in serious online marketing have long been taking advantage of Wordpress as a nearly perfect website platform to build and maintain websites for some time now.  Combined with cutting edge SEO plugins, it’s unstoppable, in my opinion.

Meanwhile, others engaged in serious PPC  testing have been taking advantage of Google’s Website Optimizer too.  Accessible right from your Adwords console, you can use it to split test your headlines, text and images for your landing pages.

At the upcoming SEMpdx sixpack event*, I was supposed to give a 15 minute talk about Blogs and RSS in a generic sort of way that might appeal to the broadest variety of users… Pardon me while I yawn for a minute.

I’m not sure when they added this but I just happened to notice there are new columns inside Google’s Webmaster tools.

If you go to statistics - top search queries, you’ll see that you can now see an overall percentage number for what percentage of your search terms that your site appears for,

The entire search engine marketing industry is quaking in fear and speculation as you read this, and the organic ranking of many sites is now subject to penalty at Google’s whim.

The debate over paid links seems to be coming to a frenzied head this summer, especially since the SES San Jose paid links session called “Are Paid Links Evil?” in August.

A reader sent in this question:

Everyone knows that inbound links to your website are a good thing. Everyone also knows that some are better for you than others. But how do you tell exactly how much more valuable one link is over another?

Knowing exactly which link partners you should pursue first, and which ones ones are not worth your time can save you an incredible amount of effort.

One of the sessions at Danny Sullivan’s Advanced SMX show involved a panel of experts all sharing one “secret tactic” or other helpful search tip that they might use, and would recommend.

The cool thing about it was that Danny put a moratorium on all blog posts about the session for 30 days, and all but threatened bodily harm to any blogger that broke the silence.