TweetMeme is huge, and bloggers know it. It is a wildly popular way to help people share the brilliant content that you have worked so hard to produce. You will find the TweetMeme button on any popular blogs. Another thing you will often see on blogs is a row of Sociable links. In case you are not familiar, Sociable is a WordPress plugin that makes it really easy to add social sharing links to a blog. I use both of these, and I like them. Kudos to Joost de Valk for creating Sociable and fav.or.it for creating TweetMeme.

Sociable is really cool, but the “Tweet This” button really left me with a need for more. By default, it did not shorten the URL, add a title, or include the “RT @murnahan” that I wanted. So, I thought it would be cool to add a TweetMeme button within my Sociable links rather than to have the extra bulk of both of them at the end of each of my articles. Including TweetMeme and Sociable together just made it look a bit nicer and it keeps all of those sharing links right there together in one place.

I am such a fan of this product that I want to tell you this right upfront: I have not been hired by Wibiya to market for them, and I do not have anything at stake here. My reason for blogging my review of Wibiya is nothing of the sort. It is just so cool that I was compelled to give my testimonial. Now, shouldn’t we all be so fortunate to have fans who feel like that?

Wibiya is kind of a funny name, and it may not just roll off the tongue the way Twitter, Facebook, or Squidoo does. All the same, I think this is a social media service you will see in use a lot more in the future.

Website Toolbars Are Not Created Equal

I have used toolbars on various websites before, and some were pretty cool. I have even scripted my own website toolbars from scratch and made them work really nicely with social sharing links, custom URL shortener, and all of the neat stuff you can pack into the little 50-80 pixel space you would expect from a toolbar. I am kind of geeky like that. I very often choose the hard way of programming, by doing it all myself from beginning to end. That way I get the exact result I am looking for, and not include all of the extra junk that most off-the-shelf programming code will include for meeting every possible scenario on every possible type of website. As you can see at the bottom of each page on my blog, I have chosen Wibiya on this website, and for some good reasons.

I often have a need for a character count script to tell me how many characters something contains. I also often find a need for a word count script. Since I never seem to find such a dual-purpose script handy for calculating characters and words all at once, my quickest response is often to open up my Microsoft Word. I wait for the cumbersome software to load, then copy and paste it and wait for Word to think for a while. It stinks, and I finally got really tired of it. There is no need to hog system resources and more screen space by opening Word or a similar software. I nearly always already have a browser window open, so it would be a lot easier to just open a new tab and then copy and paste the content into a quick and easy javascript character counter and word counter.

I have been a web guy for a very long time. I have often found that when I need a script or an application, it is best to just sit down and create it myself. Over the years, I have written a squillion web applications of all kinds. Strangely enough, I often find that the simplest tools to create are also the ones I have a hard time finding the moment to just do it. Once I get around to it, I have often found that there were a lot of others who felt the same way. For example, there are thousands of people every month who use my very basic and aged screen resolution test. I wrote it because at the time I saw a need for it in my daily routine. The same thing happened here.

Are you in need of a real bargain for your next website? I have a great deal for you today, and it starts at just $175,000 and $25,000 per month maintenance cost. But wait! There’s more!

It sounds like a great bargain, right? Well, maybe and maybe not.

I wish I had recorded the conversation I had with a woman desperately in need of an answer about website pricing. She just wanted to hear the answer that agreed with her. She did not have any desire at all to hear the right answer. I do have the urgent voicemail message she left for me, and I will include it in the podcast.

After hearing the voicemail message, I promptly returned her call and she was even more frazzled in real-time. The purpose for her call was that she was frantically seeking some way to sway her business partners from an offer made by a website development company for what she believed was astronomically high. The part she could not answer was why it was too high, or how much too high it was. All she knew was that it was too high, and she wanted ammunition to fire back at the developer and her business partners.

SEO: It is the art and science of getting your website listed in search engine results for more search terms and listed higher than all the others. This is a pretty important factor to website success … and business success. So, it would seem tragic if you had done almost all the right things, but then you just forgot some of the basics.

Nobody is perfect. We all forget things. I want to give you a reminder of something that I frequently find overlooked by WordPress blog owners when they set up a new blog, and as the blog grows. The basic principle can apply to any website, really. The little things really do add up, and this is a quick SEO tip that you can use to improve your SEO so fast that you may wonder why you ever neglected it.

When I think of all the things I do to improve client’s search engine ranking, it is enough to make a non-SEO and non-geek’s head spin. It all gets so complicated and geeky that there should be no wonder why many SEO will not shake your hand unless there is money in it.

Today I want to offer you a fast, free, and easy to understand list of actions you can take right now to improve your search engine ranking in under one hour. I don’t mean an hour per day, an hour per week, or an hour per month … one hour, and that’s it. Then you can go back to doing things you enjoy. I even broke these steps down for you in maximum increments of ten to twenty minutes, but none of them should take you that long to complete. That is, unless you don’t want to take my word for it and you need to do a whole bunch of extra research to see if I just made this all up to trick you.

When the world spoke to you and said “You should have a blog”, you listened. Well, at least hundreds of millions did. Others may take a while to catch on and understand the many good reasons to blog. Overall, blogging has caught on extremely well in the past few years. Companies understand that a good blog with things people want provides a means to reach more potential customers than any other method. It can create a lot of additional sales. In fact, it can create a lot more sales than any sales representative you’ve got … even the very best of them. It can also make closing the sale a lot easier for the whole company, and greatly reduce marketing overhead. The potential customer has already done the research about what you offer, and if they contact you, they are already mostly sold.

This all begs the question of how your blog will come across to those potential customers. If you look at your blog like it is a sales representative, would it be the sleazy representative you hired and later regret the decision; the representative who makes people’s eyelids heavy and need a nap; or the sharp and clever representative who makes up your top percentile of volume producers?

I was on the phone with a new prospective client just yesterday and he brought up the use of meta tags. I immediately felt like a time machine had just sucked me back to the 1990s when search engines gave attention to the meta keywords tag. The topic of the meta keywords tag comes up once in a while, and each time I think to myself “somebody really suckered you bigtime, buddy.” I find it really hard to comprehend how some people imagine that something simple like meta tags will make a real difference in their website ranking in search engines. It is as if they think they have really out-smarted all the technicians over at Google, Yahoo, Bing, and etcetera, with this cool trick called a meta keyword.

Why can’t the meta keywords myth just die? I mean, there was a day when a good SEO could outsmart a search engine with tricky little tactics like this, but how can somebody in 2010 really think that there is such a simple way to outrank billions of other pages vying for search engine rankings? Do these people really think they were the first on the scene and they have uncovered the golden key to the Internet? Come on … anybody smart enough to tie their shoe should be able to reason this out with just one little “duh, I guess this kind of makes sense” moment of reality-checking.

I guess it should not shock me to see the many Facebook profiles with a company logo or even a company name instead of a person. It seems that a lot of people simply do not realize the difference between a Facebook Profile and a Facebook Page. I will break this down really simple for anybody who is confused.

• Facebook profiles are for people, and not businesses. Facebook will delete your account for using a profile for a business. They may not catch each one, but I have seen it happen, and there are a lot of people out there who will report businesses using Facebook Profiles for business. It is written clearly in the Facebook rules as follows: “You will not use your personal profile for your own commercial gain”.
• Facebook Pages are for business, and include features that are better suited for a company seeking to do business on Facebook. They are easy to create, and may save you from a deleted account. Go and check it out for yourself. Here is the link to create a Facebook Page.

Blogging and SEO (being found in search engines) go hand in hand. If you have read more than a couple of my articles, you know that I am a strong proponent of blogging. Blogging is a huge asset to anybody wanting to be more visible to the public, and so it should not be taken lightly. If you do not have a blog, be sure to read “10 Really Good Reasons to Blog”.

Blogging comes with a lot of choices, and those choices include whether to truncate your blog posts and show excerpts on the home page, or to include full articles. Let us consider these options.