1. Always make sure the top post on your blog has unique content that is attractive to a first time visitor. Bloggers write a lot of different things, including personal rants, news, link lists and lots of content that directs visitors to other resources and sites. While this is great, it can have massive effects on new visitors who stumble onto your blog; after all, the first thing they get to look at is the top post. The main homepage of your blog will be the strongest page for rankings and branding, as well as offering the best opportunity to win new subscribers and visitors.

It appears Apple is listening to the blogosphere’s chatter that there’s really not many video podcasts that take advantage of the 720p capabilities of Apple TV. In response, Apple has emailed many video creators and suggest the following advice:

I just read a very well-written video search tips list from Steve at GoogleWatch. Some of my favorites from his list for SEO and video:

Yesterday I attended the Podcast Optimization session at SES in NY. Chris Sherman was moderating and speakers were Amanda Watlington, Daron Babin, and Rick Klau, all of which provided very engaging presentations. It was a great and informative seession, and here are some highlights from it:

Market

If you can measure it, you can improve it.  The promise of scientific advertising, marketing with measurable results, is now available to anyone.  Anyone can Increase conversion rates with the Google Website Optimizer.  Any website that has conversion as a goal will benefit tremendously by engaging in testing using this tool. 

Results from a recent iProspect study outline the specific behaviors of users visiting the most popular social networking sites. Among other items, the study finds that marketers should spend more time and resources investing in sites that operate within a relevant niche to their product than they have in the past.

This isn’t reverse engineering, says SEOMoz’s Rand Fishkin, who called a virtual quorum of the top 37 minds in the SEO business. It’s a list of 35 factors that make up, in Fishkin’s estimation, 90-95 percent of what Google’s algorithm is looking for when determining rankings.

Does the thought of writing give you a sinking feeling? Do you find yourself falling asleep at the keyboard?

What follows are ten unique tips to boost the clarity of your written words.

“Why should I care?,” you say?

Whether you believe in karma or not, making your blog a success often has a lot to do with a series of seemingly disconnected events.  Every post you make, person you contact or comment you leave adds to the sum total of your efforts in the blogosphere. 

Building relationships is important in any industry, but blog karma is the idea that what you do and how you behave will ultimately have an effect on you directly or indirectly.  Blog karma is not often written about, but very often spoken about by bloggers, especially successful ones.  So if you did believe that blog karma does exist, how should you go about increasing yours?  Here are 10 ways you can improve your blog karma:   

Two months ago, Charlene Li of Forrester produced a report on the ROI of blogging by comparing the relative spend on blogs to the spend required for focus group based research. 

Clean is better. Eye-tracking studies say so. Web copy should be bulleted, concise, easy. Photos should be informative, not decorative. White space is good. And guys like looking at George Brett’s protective cup.

You weren’t expecting that last part were you?

I wasn’t either. But this post on effective news article design proves it.

Newspapers have had trouble transitioning from print to the Web. They’re used to doing things differently.