John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing launched a free eBook named LET’S TALK Social Media for Small Business.

The small ebook is produced in partnership with Microsoft Office Live Small Business and is aimed to small businesses. The book touches the following themes: What is Social Media?, Case Study: They don’t use social media in my industry, Blogging – The front door to social media, Case Study: Blogging Customer Stories, RSS , Social search, Social bookmarking, Social networks.

I will quote also the author conclusion:

As you can see, when technology is leveraged to facilitate and enhance social interaction, a
great deal of value can be created. But tread carefully. This savvy audience can be turned off if
approached in the wrong way. Use these new tools properly and they’ll prove to be invaluable
in your effort to strengthen existing customer relationships and capture the hearts and minds of
new consumers.

The ebook is free to download.

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Google has released a few days ago in an official post a 22 page PDF document outlining recommendations for web site optimization rules. The basic guide is touching a number of basic elements, such as titles, meta descriptions, no follow link attributes, hyphen etc.

You can download and read the Google SEO starte guider PDF. The document is a great proof of what all SEO-s are doing, a chance to validate the value of your techniques and it validates the SEO practice overall.

The main chapters in the starter guide are:

- Create unique, accurate page titles
- Good practices for page title tags
- Make use of the “description” meta tag
- Good practices for description meta tags
- Improve the structure of your URLs
- Good practices for URL structure
- Make your site easier to navigate
- Good practices for site navigation
- Offer quality content and services
- Good practices for content
- Write better anchor text
- Good practices for anchor text
- Use heading tags appropriately
- Good practices for heading tags
- Optimize your use of images
- Good practices for images
- Make effective use of robots.txt
- Good practices for robots.txt
- Be aware of rel=”nofollow” for links
- Promote your website in the right ways
- Good practices for promoting your website
- Make use of free webmaster tools
- Take advantage of web analytics services

Our Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics. We plan on updating the guide at regular intervals with new optimization suggestions and to keep the technical advice current.

So, the next time we get the question, “I’m new to SEO, how do I improve my site?”, we can say, “Well, here’s a list of best practices that we use inside Google that you might want to check out.”

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Firefox is for a SEO researcher not only a simple browser. It is a SEO tool which is making your optimization work easier, your browsing will be enriched with small SEO options like watching your competitors. If you want to use a desktop application to watch parameters of a website optimization you can useWebsite Popularity or you can use your Firefox browser:

Here is bellow my list of Firefox plugins which are helping me on the SEO work or on checking some parameters for a website, for bloging etc:

Firebug

Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of web development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

ScreenGrab

Screengrab! is an extension for Firefox that makes it easy to save a web-page as an image. With it, you can save anything that you can see in a browser window - from a small selection, to a complete page.

Google UnPersonalized

This plugin prevents you from seeing personalized search results, when searching from your browser’s search box. In Firefox, this plugin also adds suggest functionality.

InFormEnter

InFormEnter adds a small, clickable icon next to every input field in a web form, from where you can select the item to be inserted - no typing required. You can configure it to display your frequently used information such as name, email, address…

User Agent Switcher

Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.

Search Status

SearchStatus is a toolbar extension for Firefox hat allows you to see how any and every website in the world is performing. Designed for the highly specialised needs of search engine marketers, this toolbar provides extensive search-related information about a site, all conveniently displayed in one discreet and compact toolbar.

TwitBin

TwitBin is an extension for firefox that brings the power of twitter right in your browser.

Seo Quake

Seoquake is a powerful tool, aimed at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. Seoquake allows user to obtain and investigate many important SEO parameters of the internet project under study on the fly.

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Hard to belive, but if you are a ISV or microISV, Microsoft is offering in BizSpark (a program launched towards ISV and microISV at European Software Conference 2008). If you are a small company Microsoft will offer you the tools, database and even hosting for developing your applications for FREE. Is such an offer possible?

The conditions are simple:
- Actively engaged in development of a software-based product or service that will form a core piece of its current or intended business1
- Privately held,
- In business for less than 3 years, and
- Less than US $1 million in annual revenue.
- To be eligible to use the software for production and deployment of hosted solutions, startups must also be developing a new “software as a service” solution (on any platform) to be delivered over the Internet

What is Microsoft going to offer you:
Design, development, testing and demonstrations rights with regard to:
- All the software included in the Visual Studio Team System Team Suite (VSTS) with MSDN Premium subscription
- Expression Studio (Version 2)
- VSTS Team Foundation Server (Standard Edition)
- Production Use rights to host a “software as a service” solution (developed by the startup during their participation, on any platform) over the Internet, with regard to products including: Windows Server (all versions up to and including Enterprise); SQL Server (all versions); Office SharePoint Server; Systems Center, and BizTalk Server T
and all these for your whole development team

Above all these, the support will be free. Hard to believe such an program exists. There is catch you will ask? A 100$ program offering fee is due when the Startup exits the Program. As part of Microsoft’s commitment to Startup success, there are no initial costs for Startups to join BizSpark.

More information can be found in this pdf.

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Second year in a row I was able to participate at European Software Conference ESWC (the last year ESWC 2007 took place in Germany, in Cologne). This time the location was Berlin, Germany, exactly in the middle of the Berlin at Maritim Proarte (my mistake, I booked at Maritim Hotel(without proarte) at 5-6 km, the good thing I was not the only one doing this mistake).

The conference was a surprise for me, the quality in the presentations is increased from the last year, a lot of information available. The whole concept of the ESWC was based this time on 2 Tracks (2 presentations in the same time). Usually the ISV-s are shy guys/gals, but this time the audience really was open on questions and on debate on different topics.

I will do a pros/cons of the conference ( I do not have photos at all, but I hope the “Avangate guys” will let me use some of their photos):

Pros:
1. Is good to have a conference in Europe, and not only the SIC for USA, ISDEF for Rusia.
2. The orientation in the conference is towards ISV and microISV and should remain like this.
3. The panels are most of the time formed of entrepreneurs+isv+marketers and you have because of this the possibility to hear all the sides of the developing, support, sale process for a software product of online service/product
4. A lot of known people ASP (Mike), Tucows (Greg), Avangate (Adriana and Florin - thank you for the bear and the clever text on the t-shirt), ShareIt (Tatyana), and a lot of developers I knew from ASP (Oliver) or from the last year. A good opportunity to discuss your techniques and to compare them with the other used techniques, the ESWC is no place for self promotion but more trying to share and gather information and to do networking.

Cons:

1. If the last year there were 7 Romanian speakers now only 3 (is the recession?!)
2. Too much discussions about AdWords (that is why my jokes were around this theme)
3. Too bad I reserved in the other Maritim hotel, I had to take a taxi 3-4 times between the hotels
4. I will make a note for the next time “do not talk business on launch otherwise you will have no time for eating”
5. Next time 3 times more promotional CD-s with me
6. The wireless in the hotel was 8 euros for 60 minutes

In the seond day of the conference I took part in a panel: ISV business - how to make it effective together wit Alwin Hoogerdijk - Collectorz.com (Moderator), Tetyana Franke - sales Manager share-it! and Florin – e-commerce Consultant Avangate. An open discussion with the audience, with questions regarding bug tracking options, payment processors, support, promotion etc. The audience was interested in the subject (as far I have seen), I tried to keep a my responses in the humor/serious side, the audience was really willing to have more information from us and more willing to ask questions (comparing with the last year). Again a lot of interest in how you promote your busiones, and how you do it cheap.

I will start to present slowly some of the new things presented and the ways these can be integrated, probably I will start with the solution from deal united.

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