With so many websites and blogs writing on Web 2.0, it is not easy to keep track of the new projects and tendencies in this sector. I have compiled a short list (that will save you some time) of the best (in my opinion) resources to keep an eye on (if you follow Web 2.0 development in general).

The list is not exhaustive. If you think I missed some great links – let me know in your comments.

TechCrunch.com – reviews new web 2.0 products and companies. In addition to new companies, profiles existing companies.

Dion Hinchcliffe’s Web 2.0 Blog

eConsultant.com – great collection of categorized lists

Web 2.0 awards – SEOmoz company (a well known SEO specialists) special project. Great design and presentation.

Summary:
Internet business becomes more complicated. One needs some great ideas to succeed online. Web 2.0 is a trend that helps new ideas be noticed and funded. Web 2.0 is not failure proof and some projects close down, but it is sort of fresh air – attempt to bring new ideas.

[tags]web 2.0, techcrunch, seomoz, econsultant[/tags]

In this post I would like to focus on link popularity issues. No doubt, links are of great importance to site owners and SEO specialists who promote websites of their customers. It is harder and harder to rank well in the search engines with their every major update. One of the ways to change and improve the situation is to constantly work at your link popularity getting more related links of good quality that will refer to your website.

Link popularity is a measure of the quantity and quality of other web sites that link to a specific site on the World Wide Web. It is an example of the move by search engines towards off-the-page-criteria to determine quality content. In theory, off-the-page-criteria adds the aspect of impartiality to search engine rankings.

Link popularity plays an important role in the visibility of a web site among the top of the search results. Indeed, some search engines require at least one or more links coming to a web site, otherwise they will drop it from their index. [wikipedia.org]

In this post I want to list a few valuable resources that will update you on all recently available techniques to improve your link popularity. Once you are through with them will see that most information is common, but each resource will provide some unique tips that are worthless.

Link popularity guides:

Link Building Wiki
Link Building Guide

Link popularity blogs (to keep you updated):

www.jimboykin.com
www.stuntdubl.com
www.linkbuildingblog.com

Link popularity calculator (good if you buy or sell links):

Link calculator

This should do for now to help you with improving your search engine visibility and rankings.

[tags]link popularity, affiliate marketing, google, yahoo, msn, guide, how to, seo, search engine, search engine optimization[/tags]

Affiliate marketers often look for the ways to increase traffic to the website. One of the popular methods is to scan various top search phrases and optimze the websites for those popular keywords.

CIA also provides this curious data. They have published the list of 25 top website searches for the last month. The stats include only those searches that were entered directly at the website (other searches referred to by some third parties including Search Engines are not countered). I am surprised to see Soviet issue at position #1: the USSR fell apart back in 1991.

Top 5 searches:

·         soviet analysis: 1647

·         ufo: 1066

·         iran: 690

·         cuba: 652

·         south africa: 457

Complete list of 25 CIA website top searches

[tags]CIA, top searches, Soviet, search engines, Cuba, Iran, ufo[/tags]