The following are my internet picks for this season:

Cool site for publishing your own books:
With (myebook.com), we’ve made it possible for anyone to upload, or create from scratch; beautifully simple or adventurously complex page designs and covers online, in no time. What’s more, you can publish your book with a single button and release it to the world before the (virtual) ink’s dry! You can create as many publications as you want. And it’s all free.

A cool local business search engine:
(http://www.thinklocal.com/) is a search engine for local businesses. With over 17 million U.S. business listings we’re committed to connecting our users with the businesses they are seeking in their town.

A cool professional networking site:
(http://www.mysolutionspot.com/) MySolutionSpot™ is a free professional networking Web site and online resource for proactive small businesses. MySolutionSpot features a wide selection of industry-specific articles and forums, covering the topics that matter the most to you. Sign up now to gain access to a variety of complimentary business tools and learn about effective strategies for improving your bottom line.

A cool tool to research people:
(http://www.pipl.com/) There are various reasons why you might need to search for people, you may need to find a lost relative, an old flame, a classmate or a business contact – but if you are using a search engine such as Google or Yahoo to search for people, you have probably realized by now that it might work in some cases but in most cases it won’t. Pipl’s query-engine helps you find deep web pages that cannot be found on regular search engines.

Add your business to Google Maps:
(www.Google.com/LocalBusinessCenter) Local Business Center Listing with stats.

A cool royalty free music site:
(http://musicbakery.com/) A great site to purchase royalty free music to use on your site.

Great news for e-commerce sites:
Google adds “Parameter Handling”
(http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=147959) to reduce duplicate content in Google’s index and make a site more crawlable by search engines. Read the page to understand the new feature in Google’s WebMaster Tools.

A cool tool for collaborating with others on tasks:
(http://workspace.office.live.com/) – a free service to share individual files up to 25 megabytes with 5 gigabytes of personal space to store files. It can also be used for collaboration projects with Microsoft applications.

A cool tool for sharing files with others:
(https://www.mesh.com/) – a free service that allows one to create a mesh (Live Desktop) which includes any devices you add and the folders you choose to sync and share. It comes with 5 gigabytes space to access and share across multiple platforms and computers.

Social Bookmarking is an implementation of the latest method of saving bookmarks to public websites. Backlinks can be loaded with specific keywords within the actual bookmark. Also, this is a great way to get visits to your web site from your target audience. Just search Google for the term “social bookmark sites list” for more bookmark sites to submit your site to.

Add ogdenian.com to your online bookmark site:

Social Bookmarking Drives targeted traffic to your site and helps create oneway links and popularity.

Example: I signed up at stumbleupon.com. I created bookmarks to key pages of my site and add appropriate keywords. I then made my bookmarks public. When anyone searches for my keyterms on stumbleupon.com, I come up in the results, they visit my page hence making my site more popular and driving targeted traffic to my site at the same time. I get hits every week from stumbleupon.

And there are many, many bookmarks sites that people use.

The Ogdenian Newsletter is here to help anyone with an online presence better their internet rankings and to extend the functionality and usability of their websites.

Get a Free Yellow Book Directory listing:
I called 1-800-929-3556 and my business was given a free white section listing and also listed under three business section headings. The Yellow Book is a phonebook that is delivered in over 1000 cities nationwide in the US. Also ,they automatically put me in the online version at www.yellowbook.com 

Free Business Directories:
http://www.hotfrog.com/
http://judysbook.com/post/0
http://advertising.superpages.com/spportal/index.jsp

Great plugins for wordpress blogs:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/eshop/ - a robust paypal shopping cart solution.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-auctions/ - a great paypal auction solution.

Security for wordpress blog platforms:
I saw this and remembered when the Brazilian Spy Kids hacked my blog a few years back.
The new WordPress “Firewall Plugin” blocks suspicious-looking requests to WordPress. You may download it here: http://www.seoegghead.com/software/wordpress-firewall.seo

Send a large file to anyone, anywhere, up to 300MB for free!: www.sendspace.com

HTML coding:
There is a new tag that stops search engine duplicate content penalties within the same site and allows one to set a preferred version of a site page. Just add something like <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://www.original.com/original-content.html”>
in the section of the page with duplicate content.

The Ogdenian.com website may provide links to third-party websites for your convenience and information. If you access those links, you will leave the Ogdenian.com website. Ogdenian.com does not control those sites or their privacy practices, which may differ from Ogdenian.com’s. We do not endorse or make any representations about third-party websites. We encourage you to review all third-party companies before using their services.

 I was asked tonight:
“Do you know of any good seo seminars/workshops??”

My answer:  “Not really…”

I learned search engine optimization through trial and error and now most of the information is in my blog or search engine optimization page anyway.

By the way, Google just upgraded my site http://ogdenian.com to pagerank 4 on New Years Day. http://website.grader.com/ is a great service. Here is Ogdenian.com’s  score: http://website.grader.com/wsgid/2160686/

Basically, a site should have the following:

• Use clean 100% valid code
  ( like: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fogdenian.com )
• Use clean 100% valid external css to get rid of extraneous code ( like: http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/validator?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fogdenian.com )
• Crunch code to get rid of spaces before publishing a site
• Use keyword and key-phrase heavy text with some keywords bold, and at least three times or more in a natural way.
• Create and add sitemap.xml file, then  submit to MSN Live, Yahoo and Google accounts ( like: http://ogdenian.com/sitemap1.xml )
• Get listed in www.dmoz.org
• Bookmark all site pages on a lot of popular bookmark sites ( like: www.delicious.com)
• Add robots.txt file ( like: http://ogdenian.com/robots.txt )
• Add/edit .htaccess file to make only one version of the www.domian.com work,
  (with 3 w’s [better] or without) ( explained at:
  http://ogdenian.com/search_engine_optimization.html#9 )
• Submit site to all same type web directories.
• Have a blog – add articles often ( www.digg.com them)
• Go to sites like www.digg.com and www.technorati.com and add your blog feed.
• Join a couple of social media sites, www.facebook.com and www.myspace.com – participate in groups and be social
• Use no fullscreen splash, fullscreen flash intros or frames.
• Use light weight graphics
• Write article at topic sites and press release sites ( like: www.pr.com )
• Create a buzz about your product, brand or site.
• No paid links to site
• Use rel=”nofollow” on all links leaving the site…links leak pagerank.
• Never link to a site using unethical seo methods, alt tag stuffing, hidden text, meta tag stuffing, scrapping, link farms, etc….
• One-way links to your site from a similar and same or preferably higher pageranked site is the only good links. Reciprocal links are no good.
• Never use run-on keyword comma sentences ( I. E. we offer these services: keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, keyword, and keyword )
• All marketing has to be done in natural progression, meaning not overnight, hence why most SEO firms hurt a site more than helps it.
• Larger sites rank better.
• Older domain names rank better.
• No duplicate content at all ( use www.copyscape.com to test a page ) Duplicate content cancels all results of the later efforts.

It is just not one of the later items that needs to be done, it is all of them.
Once a site is done, then it needs to be checked periodically so that it stays done. The process of maintaining the site correctness, keeps the content fresh, content that never changes is concidered an archive and not worthy of a good search result (SERP.) So, adding new content or updating a site is a great idea, that is why blogs are great….they make it easy to add and update content.

Ogden Mcgahan
http://ogdenian.com

One thing that I have learned is that perseverance always wins out in regards to economic downturns such as what’s happening in the USA and elsewhere today. So, I always do everything I can to market my own business and suggest that you do too. As a rule of thumb, I never create too many links back to my site in a short period of time because the search engines like a natural link building progression. Here are my picks for marketing, site marketing analytics, online classifieds, graphic design tools, video converting tools, up-and-coming social media sites, online file transfer tools, and new search engines:

Cuil is a new search engine with over 121,617,892,992 web pages indexed so far, add your site for free: http://www.cuil.com/info/contact_us/feedback.php?to=crawl%20me

• http://www.bloglines.com
• http://www.google.com/reader/
• http://www.blogged.com/submit_your_blog.php
• http://rssmountain.com/submit_anonym.php
• http://www.feedsee.com/submit.html
• http://www.freewebs.com/blogotion/addblog.html
• http://blogit.a1weblinks.net/submit.php
• http://www.blogs.com/submit
• http://www.webloogle.com/index.php?a=join
• http://www.bloglisting.net/submit.php
• http://feedfury.com/submit
• http://www.rssmicro.com/feedsubmit.web
• http://itsmynews.com
• http://www.millionrss.com/add-my-feed.php
• http://www.rss-network.com/submitrss.php
• http://www.daytimenews.com/submit-rss-feed.aspx
• http://www.feedage.com/submit.php
• http://www.feedbase.net/Add.php
• http://www.photarium.com/add-site-standard.php

Submit your site to these free business directories:

• http://www.Brownbook.net
• http://www.ibegin.com
• http://www.directorybest.info
• http://www.bloglines.com
• http://www.vendora.com
• http://directory.webpronews.com/submit.html

The Ogdenian.com website may provide links to third-party websites for your convenience and information. If you access those links, you will leave the Ogdenian.com website. Ogdenian.com does not control those sites or their privacy practices, which may differ from Ogdenian.com’s. We do not endorse or make any representations about third-party websites. We encourage you to review all third-party companies before using their services.