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With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization SEO, which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.

You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers.  Luckily, the WordPress plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help. Here are 20 of the best SEO plugins to help you choose the right tags, tell search robots what to work on, optimize your post titles and more.

via 20 of the Best SEO Plugins for WordPress.

We’re seeing growing interest from site owners in doing A/B split testing and multivariate / multivariable testing – for landing pages, for product pages, for buying processes, for e-mails and so on.

But who are the service providers out there specialising in offering such solutions?

via Multivariate Testing and A/B Split Testing – who provides it? | Blog | Econsultancy.

Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time, according to a new Nielsen report “Global Faces and Networked Places.” If data captured from December 2007 through December 2008 is any indication, that percentage is likely to grow as time spent on social network and blogging sites is growing more than three times the rate of overall Internet growth.

“Social networking has become a fundamental part of the global online experience,” commented John Burbank, CEO of Nielsen Online. “While two-thirds of the global online population already accesses member community sites, their vigorous adoption and the migration of time show no signs of slowing.”

via Social Networking’s New Global Footprint | Nielsen Wire.

Call it viral, buzz or word-of-mouth advertising: Getting customers to spread the word about a new product through their social or professional networks is a hot strategy in the marketing world. Its proponents insist that the technique — whether online or face-to-face — is sure to boost a companys return on investment ROI.

But how can companies find the right individuals to deliver the message? Marketers may wonder if they are finding the best “seeding points” — that is, well-connected people at the hub of social networks who will latch on to a product and promote it widely among the people they know.

New research led by Wharton marketing professors Raghuram Iyengar and Christophe Van den Bulte, working with University of Southern California preventive medicine professor Thomas W. Valente, has found that traditional targets may not be as influential as previously thought. The pharmaceutical firm that sponsored the research for their recently published paper, “Opinion Leadership and Social Contagion in New Product Diffusion,” had its “a-ha” moment when they found Physician No. 184 on a map.

via The Buzz Starts Here: Finding the First Mouth for Word-of-Mouth Marketing – Knowledge@Wharton.

Kawasaki to discuss his latest book, Reality Check, and his upcoming keynote, “Twitter as a Tool for Social Media,” during free Webcast this Friday, March 6, from 1 to 2 p.m. EST

New York, NY (PRWEB) March 4, 2009 — Search Engine Strategies (SES), the leading and most established search engine marketing (SEM) and search engine optimization (SEO) conference and expo series, today announced that Guy Kawasaki and John Gerzema will give keynote speeches at SES New York (http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/newyork/), which will be held March 23-27, 2009. Leading up to the event, Kawasaki will discuss his latest book, “Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition,” and his upcoming keynote, “Twitter as a Tool for Social Media,” during a free Webcast this Friday, March 6, from 1 to 2 p.m. (EST).

Matt McGowan, Vice President and Publisher for Incisive Media’s Interactive Marketing Group, which includes Search Engine Strategies, Search Engine Watch and ClickZ, will host the SES Webcast with Kawasaki. To register for this event, go to SES Webcasts (http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/webcasts/).

McGowan said, “We’ll discuss Guy’s most recent book, Reality Check, and get his insight into why Twitter is rapidly becoming the social media tool of the 21st Century. Our exclusive 60 minute closed-circuit webcast, which takes place in advance of Guy’s keynote presentation at SES New York, is also your chance to engage Guy with specific strategic and business questions of your own.”

Kawasaki is giving the opening keynote at SES New York on Tuesday, March 24, 2009. He is a founding partner and entrepreneur-in-residence at Garage Technology Ventures, a seed and early stage venture capital fund. He is also the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics on the web — the success of which is attributed to social networking tools such as Twitter. He is considered one of the top 50 most popular bloggers worldwide, and was recently selected by Invesp.com as the #2 top marketer of 2008.

Kawasaki’s newest book, Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition (Portfolio, Penguin Group), was released on October 30, 2008. Reality Check is his all-in-one guide for starting and operating great organizations — ones that stand the test of time and ignore any passing fads in business theory. He is also the author of eight books including The Art of the Start, Rules for Revolutionaries, How to Drive Your Competition Crazy, Selling the Dream, and The Macintosh Way.

Gerzema, the Chief Insights Officer at Young & Rubicam Group, is giving the morning keynote at SES New York on Thursday, March 26, 2009. The best-selling author and pioneer of account planning in American advertising agencies has designed brand strategies for clients for almost 25 years, guiding campaigns to international strategic and creative acclaim. He previously oversaw the international network for Fallon and founded offices in Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Sao Paolo.

Gerzema’s new book, The Brand Bubble: The Looming Crisis in Brand Value and How To Avoid It, was voted #3 Best Business Book for 2008 from Amazon’s editors and “Best Advertising and Marketing Book for 2008″ from CEO Read. The book is currently on Business Week’s Best Seller List.

Those who register for SES New York (http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/newyork/registration-details.html) by Friday, March 6, 2009, will save up to $200.

About SES

Incisive Media’s Search Engine Strategies (http://www.searchenginestrategies.com/) is a leading global conference and training series focused on search engine optimization and search engine marketing. Other Incisive resources for interactive marketers include Search Engine Watch (http://searchenginewatch.com/), which provides news and information about search, analysis of the search engine industry and tools for improving search marketing effectiveness, and ClickZ (http://www.clickz.com/), which provides digital marketing news, information, commentary, advice, opinion and research.

Incisive Media (http://www.incisivemedia.com/) is a leading global provider of specialized business news and information, in print, in person and online. The company’s principal markets include financial services, legal services, commercial real estate, marketing services and risk management. Incisive Media’s market-leading brands include Accountancy Age, Computing, Investment Week, Legal Week, LegalTech, Post, Real Estate Forum, Risk, Search Engine Strategies and The American Lawyer.

The thumbprint of social media on search engine optimization is evolving. It used to be that the big rage was figuring out how to develop link bait that had a strong chance of making the front page of Digg, Reddit, or other similar social news sites. The results were good, mostly in terms of getting a volume of links to a page on your site.

This is still a great tactic, but social media can do so much more today. For example, with Twitter or Facebook it is possible to use networking and information sharing techniques to build high quality links. I have seen sites from a number of different spaces use Twitter effectively as a PR outreach mechanism.

This new type of PR has become a new technique for link building and promotion. However, fast forwarding from today, there is the widely held belief in the SEO community that social media will be a major source of ranking signals for the search engines in the future

via The Evolving State Of Social Media & SEO.

Facebook remains on the lookout for acquisitions after its failed attempt to buy microblogging site Twitter, one of the companys directors and largest investors says. “Were still focusing on growing as much as possible,” says Peter Thiel in an interview with BusinessWeek.

In Facebooks first public confirmation of the talks, Thiel said the parties disagreed over price and structure when they seriously considered a deal last fall. “It became pretty clear it wasnt going to happen,” Thiel says from the mid-Manhattan office of his hedge fund Clarium Capital. “The deal would have to be done with Facebook stock. And then you have to figure out how much the stock is worth.”

via Facebooks Thiel Explains Failed Twitter Takeover – BusinessWeek.