One of the most powerful ways to market your company is through search engine optimization (SEO). This refers to what happens when users enter certain queries into online search engines. The idea is to ensure that your website gets high placement in the results, ideally being on the first page of results.

So what are some strategies for effective SEO?

Well, let's use an example. Suppose you operate a retail store based in Newport Beach, California, which sells chocolate. But when you search for "chocolate" on Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), you see that major companies rank high on that word. It will probably be impossible to get any traction on such a generic term.

"When selecting your main keywords," said Don Deveau, the SEO Team Lead at Register.com, "It's usually better to start with more specific ones. You will have much less competition."

As a result, you might want to look for keywords like "handmade chocolate." Or, you might be more specific by listing your store's location ("Newport Beach chocolate").

It actually takes quite a bit of brainstorming to come up with keywords. And yes, there are some online tools to help things out, including Wordtracker, which helps identify optimal keywords.

Next, you want to place the keywords into your website content. For example, it's a good idea to have each page focus on one or two keywords. Thus, if you have a page on handmade chocolate, then you should mention this a number of times in the descriptions. This helps search engines find and rank the pages.

I'm pregnant, with my third child, and the ultrasound gods did not smile upon me. So whereas I was able to select my previous sons' names (Everett, a family name, and Truman, a presidential name that was distinguished by being both unusual and easily pronounceable) by the time I hit five months, with this baby, I'm lost in a sea of uncertainty -- and I only have a little more than two months to go. I have a girl's name, but for boys, what to do?

So, I've been Googling. A friend suggested "Miles" and "Lowell" and (when paired with my husband's name) I quickly eliminated "Miles Hanson" as far too popular, so much so that it appeared on an IRS publication. Ick. And this is the top result for "Lowell Hanson" ... hmmm. While I ultimately discarded "Lowell" for other reasons, the Google factor was definitely in there.

When other bloggers read the Wall Street Journal's report on baby name Googling, they showed a bit of skepticism; Brian White didn't really believe that brands are competing with baby names, while Marc Perton thought Googling for unique names was, most importantly, not a good SEO strategy.

Haha. When I saw the article I just Googled "Kohler Hanson." Hmm... not bad...

If you have any good ideas, by all means, send 'em my way. You might want to Google first.

Yahoo! Answers is a very cool service and very popular. It showcases how Yahoo! can provide the technology to connect consumers and producers -- in this case, the producers of answers. 

I didn't realize just how popular Yahoo! Answers was until I spotted this blog post by Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion that passed on info from SEO Watch. Apparently, Yahoo! Answers is really exploding into something big online right now. Yahoo! Answers has had some 10 million answers posted, some 4% of the entire US that is online has visited it, and it is now the third largest reference site.

That's just amazing if you think about it. Steve posts some Technorati and Google trend charts that show Yahoo! Answers is on a growth curve. As Yahoo! turns to figuring out how to monetize and utilize this traffic, Yahoo! Answers could have a big impact on Yahoo!'s bottom line.

[picture credit: ppdigital]

With new advertising systems launched by both Yahoo! and MSN, the war is afoot now. The counterattack on Google has started. It remains to be seen if these efforts -- which may be too late -- can take away some of that lucrative revenue Google enjoys and drop it into the coffers of Yahoo! and Microsoft. To put this into perspective, this article from BusinessWeek mentions a stat from eMarketer that is quite an eye-lifter about those small Google text ads that show up every time a search is performed: "These tiny text ads, usually no more than a dozen words in length, generated more than $10 billion last year and are expected to top $14 billion in 2006." Whoa. Those little text ads are worth more than many S&P 500 companies.

What can Yahoo! -- which has feverishly worked on a similar product to Google's, and was helped tremendously by the Overture acquisition a few years ago -- do to capitalize? It was there with Overture at the same time Google was using search to monetize its business model. But Google's model of bidding and relevancy won the day -- and garnered the lion's share of the market (and the money). The keyword here is relevancy -- apparently customers don't mind Google's text ads since they are so relevant to what they are seeking -- not simply another non-targeted ad that gets blown off.

Insider Blogging looks at the employees blogs of our favorite companies, exposing the last legal way to get "inside information."

Matt Cutts at Gadgets, Google and SEO talks about the difficult interaction between Google and the webmasters of companies who are assessed penalties for their non-compliant SEO behavior. But what's more interesting is this quote: "The responsibility of picking 'Don’t be evil' as an informal motto is that everybody compares Google against perfection, not to our competitors," Cutts writes. I want to laugh but I think he's right, a bit.

The Scobleizer is excited about a little company called Eye-Fi, which adds a little wifi radio transmitter to your digital camera. He's a Microsoft guy, so of course he'd use it to transmit the photos to his Xbox and play them on his plasma screen (they must pay Scoble a lot! Boy he's got some nice toys). I'd use it to send my photos to flickr. Something tells me that Microsoft doesn't win from this technology, you tell me.