While UGC and Reviews can often be a mixed blessing, as long as Google continues to reward rich snippets with enhanced visual listings, it’s probably a good idea to try to make reviews part of your website strategy.For those of you who haven’t seen rich snippets and reviews in action, here’s a sample of what they currently look like

To qualify for this program you have to have reviews, format your data using microformats, and submit your website for inclusion in the rich snippet program…

About a month ago I went to a client meeting where they had a glass whiteboard in the conference room. This was the first one I had ever seen and I remarked how cool it was. The folks at Clarus GlassBoards were monitoring for keywords on twitter, and reached out to me about sending a sample for review purposes.

Glass Whiteboard from Clarus

Now if you’ve never seen a glass whiteboard it’s a pretty substantial item, a lot more sturdy and durable than your ordinary dry erase board…

As the web matures and begins to displace, replace, or work with established news, information, and entertainment sources, the advertising that pays for this content to get created is going to change as well. When you combine this with the growth of smart phones like the blackberry, android, and iphone and appliances like the ipad, advertising will soon be faced with new obstacles.… Publishers need to adapt and overcome … and they need to do it quickly if they plan to survive … The problems advertising faces are coming from multiple fronts…

One of the things I often say that most bloggers get wrong is they sacrifice keyword focus for being clever, cute, or entertaining. Yes, it is important that you make your blog posts as interesting as possible; but you should never ignore the opportunity to tie into commercial concepts. Since I often get criticized for telling you what you do wrong but not how to do it right, here are some examples about how to write interesting blog posts that are more keyword focused…

For a moment, I’d like you to think back to high school. Remember how there was always that one kid who would raise their hand and ask the question “Will that be on the test?” Now, thanks to Personalized Google News, we have the answer.

… If Google News was limiting the news sources I read I never would have seen that article or had that idea …Last week Google announced they will be bringing personalization to Google news…

Anyone over the age of 30 who spends any amount of time online has to be aware of the gradual erosion of online privacy and how we are slowly moving to a point where our online life has become opted-in by default.

… sacrifice your privacy on the altar faster than an Aztec Priest could ever rip out your still-beating heart … A disturbing trend among people in the valley and other technology centric locations is the subjugation or near-complete surrender of one’s work, one’s copyright, intellectual property, and sometimes complete self to the great computer singularity (a concept I am shamelessly stealing from Jaron Lanier)…

Last week I was having a discussion on Twitter about whether or not  some links were bought. Quite a few people were confused about how you can use link buying to your advantage when you buy links to a website you don’t own (aka a third party). I thought I’d do a little ed-ju-macating and share some tips and tricks.

First off, standard link buying disclaimer: Buying links is against Google’s guidelines…

When I got my iPad, some of the things I wanted to know were how much could I actually get done on an iPad and in what situations could it replace my laptop. Here are the programs and apps that I use to help me get things done.

Here’s a screen shot of the programs I use

Google Apps for Domains Email and Calendar
I use the built-in mail and calendar functions, but each has its own problems…

Clay Shirky has a new book out called “Cognitive Surplus” in which he examines how the internet is changing us as a society from consumers and how we are using our newly found surplus of time, energy, and brain power to create, share, and connect with each other.

… Although so much of what kids are doing online may look trivial and frivolous, what they are doing is building the capacity to connect, to communicate, and ultimately to mobilize …

Clay Shirkey

 In the spirit of full disclosure, I want to say that I was given a complimentary review copy of the book, but this in no way influenced my opinion of the book…

While a lot of the attention on AT&T and Apple in the past few weeks has been focused on the release of the iPad and new iPhone,  the elimination of unlimited data plans is an equally important development, especially for website owners and publishers.

Even though the iPhone is meant to render full web pages, research has shown that people still prefer mobile-formatted content on iPhones …In prior years, AT&T offered unlimited data for $30 a month; however, they maintained that a small percentage of users were using a disproportionate share of data…

I’ve long stated that I prefer full feeds over partial feeds. Now that I’ve spent the past few weeks using an iPad, I feel even more strongly that full feeds are the way to go and that offering partial feeds is an obstacle to getting your posts read by as many people as possible.
Two sites I read on a regular basis that offer partial feeds are Search Engine Land and Wired Magazine…

I’ve reviewed Scribe SEO and mentioned it as a tool I like to use a few times here. If you’ve been thinking of using it but where concerned about the price, theres a promotional offer ending today.If you use the code PROMO27 when you checkout you can get the $97 level for only $27, but it ends June 4th 2010. If you’re still unsure they offer a new starter plan for only $17 a month you can only put it on one website a month and run it 15 times, but it’s a great way to test it out IMHO…

In case you didn’t already know, I’m the owner of an iPad. Like a lot of other people I didn’t get it when it first was announced: like everyone else, I thought it was meant to be a laptop replacement. It’s not. While you can use the iPad to get things done, be a content producer, and a publisher (look for more details in an upcoming post), it really wasn’t meant for that (see iPad was made for everyone but us)…

In the past few weeks Facebook has been publicly criticized over privacy policies; however, when Google invades people’s privacy, the offenses don’t receive the same level of scrutiny or public outrage.

Unless you had all of your attention focused on the Lost season finale, it’s been impossible to not know about the problems Facebook has been having with privacy …

For this post I’m going to review the SEO Automatic Plugin produced by Scott Hendison. Some of you may know some of Scott’s other work from Search Commander, Inc. and the WP Core Tweaks Plugin. For this post, we’re going to be looking at his latest creation SEO Automatic for Agencies.

The plugin is designed for agencies and SEO firms who run a lot of site audits and are looking to save time by getting a quick assessment of a website’s technical aspects and identifying any potential problems or issues…

Anyone who deals with the public sector will have to deal with negative listings about them in the SERPs at some point. The most damaging of these is the “scam” listing. In this post I’ll discuss some tactics you can use to handle them.

In this age it’s inevitable that some will say something negative about you and you need a strategy to deal with it…I got the idea for this article when I read a post by Tim Ferris called Tim Ferris Scam – How to Deal With the Haters…

One of my constant criticisms of bloggers and the blogosphere in general is the sacrifice of keyword focus and the traffic it could bring when bloggers are more lyrical with their prose than they need to be.

In my opinion that post meets the goal of being interesting while talking about a commercial subject… Last week I was reading an article in USA today (on my iPad) and came across an article that shows you can do both…

In my most recent column on Search Engine Land I wrote about Foursquare Tools for Businesses. After writing that article, I came across a local promotion.

This promotion came from a local Italian ice shop. Now, you may not think Italian ices are a competitive business. But there are no less than three places that are about equidistant from my house. If, by checking using foursquare, I can increase my chances of getting a free ice now and again, I’d definitely use it and visit there…

A few weeks ago I received a copy of the new book ProBlogger, Secrets to Blogging Your Way to a Six Figure Income from Darren Rowse and Chris Garrett. The book is an excellent resource for anyone who wants to learn how to be a professional blogger–or how to monetize a blog they already run.

Before I go any further, in the interest of full disclosure, I will tell you that the review copy I received was provided free of charge…

I recently became the new owner of an iPad 3G and, despite my initial skepticism when the device was first announced, I actually really like it. Truth be told, I actually like it more than my Asus Netbook. That said, if it can’t help me actually get work done, then it really is a toy. So I brought it along for my recent trip to Search and Social summit in Tampa to put it to the test…

As I mentioned before, I’m a big fan of plugins. They help me manage and run WordPress more efficiently and GTD. I’ve got a list of SEO Plugins for WordPress, which is on living URL (hmm… 2008. Guess I need to update that…). Last week, I came across two new plugins that are different. I think they really help WordPress take a big step forward. One is from EzineArticles and the other is from Linkshare…

The following is a sponsored post.

For this post we’re going to be talking with Chase Granberry of AuthorityLabs.com. For my readers who don’t know you, can you tell me a little bit about yourself and some of your SEO related experience?

I’ve always been an Internet geek. I love the potential the web has to offer and really realized this potential when I was in college…

Today’s post is an answer to a question from Don:

How to best handle pagantion, use the same description meta tags? Use the same title tags just add page 2

First off, I’m going to answer this as user: avoid pagination if at all possible. Things like slide shows or lists where you show the 5, 10, 15 or even 100 items–just don’t dothem in multiple page format…

I was having a a few conversations on twitter last week. It was clear that more than one person needed a little bit more explanation about how to put some of the tips I mentioned into action, so here are 6 quick tips to help you improve your posts.

Pull Quotes

Blue Widgets solved all my problems… If you’ve read a magazine in the past 20 years, chances are good you’ve seen pull quotes in action…

Today’s post is an answer to a question I took a few weeks ago:

How to organize archives/categories on WordPress for news site/blog that publishes a lot of articles, around 30-50 daily.

your site’s link equity will determine your crawling depth and crawling frequency The first thing I want to bring up is that generally, if you’re publishing that volume of posts per day, your posts probably are date sensitive, so you don’t mind Google attaching a date to your posts…

While Facebook may be a hot marketing tool right now, there is danger in putting too much effort into making it the center of your marketing efforts.

In a recent post I spoke about publishing paths and tailoring your content and selectively publishing it to different websites. It can be dangerous, though, if you take it too far and focus only on building your content on one website (particularly one you don’t have absolute control over) because you leave yourself and your business open to whims and decisions of others…

In the past I’ve spoken about why I turned off blog comments, but it was mostly from a time/labor perspective. Now I have another reason, one that affects everyone from an SEO Perspective. In some cases. leaving comments on will negatively impact your rankings and traffic.In case you missed it, in yesterday’s post I spoke about how Google is being more aggressive in trying to figure out the proper date for a post and displaying it in the SERP’s…

In recent weeks I’ve noticed a disturbing new trend in Google SERP’s: Google has become much more aggressive at trying to reverse engineer the publication date of a post/page.First let’s be clear about what we’re discussing. In some cases, when you do a search, Google will show a date in the listing. See the example below:

Initially, Google only looked at the date that was near the H1/Title of the page and, if it found something, it used that as the date in the SERP’s…

Today’s post is answer to a question from Curedream:

Is there really any value in getting links from the Yahoo directory

I’m going to move that up a bit and tackle directories in general.  In my opinion, yes, there is value in getting your website listed in some directories–but not all. The trick is figuring out which ones matter most.

IMHO there are four directories that every website should try to be listed in: Yahoo, Business…

The following is a sponsored post.

When I announced I was doing sponsored posts/reviews again, one of the first people to contact me was Jim Boykin of  WeBuildPages. He let me know he was interested in getting a review of his link building services. To be honest, I had some concern about reviewing another SEO’s services. I told Jim that, if things didn’t work I didn’t want to give him a bad review and would just cancel the review…