During my daily reading of Search Engine Land I was reading Google Free Fridays and Danny Sullivan mentioned his new product, Sphinn.

I took an initial look at Sphinn and all I have to say is wow, it’s great. Digg is for the techies, Reddit is for random weird stuff but Sphinn is a collection of articles from all over the place about SEO! What a great and NOVEL idea. So if you need an extra resource to get a glimpse of who’s who in SEO or just learn a little more information, this is a fantastic starting point. Kudos to you Danny and the rest of Search Engine Land. A product the web can be proud of!

Today I had a very yummy luncheon at the Four Seasons with a hospitality and tourism networking group here in Atlanta. I met some new people, stuffed my face with as much free salad and pasta as I could, then listened to a speaker from a Trade Show marketing company.

His topic? Simple, “The Basics of Successful Marketing.”

I think there are times when we try, not only in marketing but many industries, to dig almost too deep to be the best and the first. Sometimes we forget the basic ideals originally motivating us to pursue our current careers.

I love SEO because it’s such a dynamic industry, things are always changing and moving forward. But with that fast paced progress, I think it’s important to occasionally step away and go back to the basics.
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Our dependence on certain things we expect to remain static is a little scary. Just as we tend to rely on a cellphone to constantly connect us to friends, family and colleagues, we also expect the cellphone will work. And just as we create brilliant marketing campaigns to target Google traffic, Google may not always be around.
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With all the buzz about blogs, you’d think that people with really popular blogs would make tons of money. There are people in the blogosphere claiming to get $100,000 checks each month from Google for their AdWords campaigns. And maybe they do, but how many of those bloggers are out there and should we all aspire to this lofty goal?
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Having a website entitles you to no privacy, leaving every company on the Internet equally vulnerable to their enemies. Now, this sounds like a bad thing, but there is an advantage to this openness and I have already said it. EVERY company is equally open to scrutiny, meaning you have the same chance as everyone else to spy on the competition.
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Search for any term in a search engine and you will get a list of results. From that list of results you can click on any link directing you to a website.

Type a URL in the address bar and a website will pop up.

Follow a link from one site to another and land on a website.

How to get to a website is the easy part. What to do when you get there is the hard part, this is where landing pages come in handy.
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“Try a little tenderness”

These words from the great voice of Otis Redding describe perfectly what a relationship should be between a website and its owner. Websites should be coddled, loved and spoiled. Remember that websites work for you 24/7, they represent you and everything your company stands for 100% of the time, so they need to be maintained.

But without any site traffic, the love you give your site won’t be apparent to anyone but yourself. Maybe you get some traffic on occasion, but it trickles off. So what can you do to your site to keep visitors interested and give others a reason to view it as well?

Get out the fly paper because we’re going to make your site sticky.
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Abraham Lincoln once said “Give me six hours to chop down a tree, and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” In the business of online marketing, the best way to sharpen the tool is to find a better tool. As online marketers, we are always on the lookout for better tools for our clients.

Here is a list of 100 Web Applications for Small Business.

Some of our favorite tools are:

• Omniture
• Keyword Discovery
• Quickbase
• KeywordSpy

Keyword spy was brought to our attention by Rob a 262 blog reader. Thanks for the addition Rob!

If you are an e-commerce business, you need to make sure you get Internet Retailer Magazine. 

In their June 2007 issue, they just published The 2007 Top 500 Guide.  This issue provides mountains of data on what the best e-commerce websites are doing online.  It is full of great information!

Here is just a brief overview of some of the great data:

• According to a study by Shop.org and Forrester Research, online purchases in the U.S. increased by 25% last year, helped by a 61% increase in apparell sales (sparked by liberal return policies).
• The same Shop.org and Forrester Research report estimates that online retail sales, including travel, grew from $176 billion in 2005 to $220 billin in 2006.  Excluding travel, online retail sales reached $136 billion last year.
• Forester Research Cross-Channel Sales Forecast Report estimates that online research influences more than $400 billion in in-store sales, and predicts that figure will exceed $1.1 trillion by 2012.  This applies to automobiles, consumer electronics and computers.  Growth is expected for apparel, beauty products, home furnishings and appliances and jewelery. 
• According to Hitwise, search traffic accounts for 25% of Internet retail traffic (Google accounts for almost 16%).  Travel sites received 31% of their traffic from search enignes. 
• According to eMarketer, U.S. ad spending on social media will hit $900 million in 2007 (72% of which goes to MySpace and Facebook), up from $350 million last year.  By 2007, it’s expected to reach 2.7 billion.
• 30 million, or 17%, of the 176 million U.S. Internet users that accessed the Web via a PC also used a mobile device in January 2007.  Users under 35 account fo 46% of this audience.

Check out the magazine for a lot of other great information.

David Sifry is the CEO of Technorati, and he had written a great post on The State of the Blogosphere and Social Media. It provides great information on blogs and other social media trends. Great information!

Here is a quick summary:

• 70 million weblogs
• About 120,000 new weblogs each day
• 1.5 million posts per day
• Growing from 35 to 75 million blogs took 320 days
• 22 blogs among the top 100 blogs among the top 100 sources linked to in Q4 2006 – up from 12 in the prior quarter
• Japanese the #1 blogging language at 37%
• English second at 33%
• Chinese third at 8%
• Tracking 230 million posts with tags or categories
• 35% of all February 2007 posts used tags