It's been 6 months since you began your search engine marketing campaign, and you've seen great success. The keyword rankings for your website have improved, your traffic has increased, but what's next? Conversion Optimization.

Let me just say, it was a thrill to attend Blog World Expo 2010. With an endless amount of sessions and networking, it was great to be surrounded by such brilliant people. With an all-star cast of bloggers and marketers, I was looking forward to the monetization super panel for quite some time. I was not let down. I've listed an overview of my notes taken when attending the monetizing your blog session with speakers: Jeremy Schoemaker, Anita Campbell, Darren Rowse, John Chow.

Today marks the start of Blog World Expo 2010 in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’m very excited that I will be attending this year. I’ll get a chance to learn about new trends and strategies in the online marketing industry, and meet bloggers that I follow regularly: Jonathan Volk, Jeremy Schomaker, John Chow, and many, many more.

As you may know, Google Caffeine was released a week ago, spurring up new conversations in the SEO world. With Google Caffeine, Google now has the ability to index websites at a much faster rate, providing, “50 percent fresher results for web searches than [their] last index.”

Social media has been buzzing along for several years now, and with Facebook at 400 million registered users, and Twitter at 105 million registered users , it's ridiculous to ignore the two. Both services are free, and great tools to directly interact with your customers. I've outlined how to optimize your site, e-mail, and print campaigns for Facebook and Twitter.

Nielsen has just released the latest search market statistics that clearly indicate Google dominating the search market in December 2009. Google received 67% of the 9.9 bill searches conducted in December.

This week I've put together an info graphic featuring the Google/Yahoo! rivalry (which is now over 10 years old) in terms of most expensive acquisitions.  

Yahoo! Inc. was incorporated in 1994 and like Google, it started as an internet search engine but soon grew into a multi-faceted Web portal. It began acquiring other companies in 1999 in order to expand the range of its services.

At the Web 2.0 Summit, Bing announced its newly acquired search deal with Twitter and Facebook to provide real-time social results through its search engine.  Google immediately fired back by carrying out its own deal with Twitter, and launching the new Social Search feature. 

We’ve all heard the phrase “content is king,” and yes, this is true.  Content is essential if you’re trying to build an authoritative domain and strong following for your niche. Providing value to your readers, receiving feedback, and getting involved with your customers is key in any online business model.  When writing your first blog post there are several elements to consider including: title, description, and URL optimization, article structure and clarity.