If you spend a significant amount of time on Digg, or any site for that matter, then most likely you've come across little things that you wish you could change or tweak. If that's the case then the Greasemonkey extension for Firefox may just be the perfect solution for your problems. Greasemonkey allows you to install little bits of javascript that can be used to customize your experience of any site that you visit.

Below we've compiled some of the many scripts written for Digg. To make use of these scripts you will of course need to download both Firefox and Greasemonkey, if you don't already have them installed.

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It seems that businesses on the net are reflecting more and more of what is going on in the regular world of brick and mortar stores. In the 'Offline' world we are seeing big box stores like Walmart, Costco and The Home Depot making it difficult for 'Mom and Pop' stores to survive. In the 'Online' world we are seeing something similar where big companies like Amazon and EBay have seemingly unlimited budgets and are targeting an endless number of keywords.

So will there still be room to compete with these giants? With a little bit of love and attention, smaller sites can stay in the race. While these big companies are off bidding on millions of keywords through various advertising platforms they may not have the time or product knowledge to target their ads properly towards individual keywords. As the owner of a smaller site you have the advantage of dealing with less keywords which can give you the time to accurately target your terms with specific ad copy and landing pages. Dealing with less keywords then the big companies also gives you the advantage of being able to test your ads more thoroughly so you are able to find the ones that covert the best.

Big brands are also going to make it more difficult for the little guy in organic search. Google seems to love large powerful websites so we will probably see these sites encompassing more of the market in the future. Just as in Pay Per Click, the advantage that a smaller website has is that it can be much more specific about how it targets keywords. To keep up, small sites won't be able to sit stagnant; they will have to be high quality and consist of great content. As a small website you will want to show value in the industry to gain natural quality links. Big companies will almost always get the quantity of links but as a small site you can target the quality.

Big companies are only going to become more prominent as time goes on, but that doesn't mean there isn't room for the little guy.

A couple weeks ago Todd Malicoat a.k.a. Stuntdubl was kind enough to spend some time with me answering questions on the topic of linkbait. It turned into a pretty long interview so go grab a cup of your favorite beverage, then kick back and relax as Todd drops some serious knowledge bombs.

Listen to the interview

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are financial and non-financial metrics used to help an organization define and measure progress toward organizational goals. The problem is that too many SEO clients and SEO consultants are focused on the wrong ones.

• Specific rankings and ranking reports like web position gold - a bad KPI

Ranking reports like the ones from WPG are not only against Google's terms and conditions but because of the introduction of Universal search (now experiencing its first birth day) they don't return the value they once did. Google is focused on personalization, and localization. This means what you see in SF isn't what I might see, and it certainly isn't what a searcher is seeing in Miami. IE that ranking your are so focused on, might only be there because you love your own site so much, or your query is deemed to be relevant to your location.

• Toolbar page rank - another bad KPI

This one drives a lot of clients crazy. Why did my PR drop, what have I done wrong. Or on the flip side, look how great I am, my site is a PR 7. Well here it is, toolbar page rank doesn't matter at all anymore. It's a gimmick and has very little value. You could argue that it is an indicator of quality but that's it.

What KPI's should you use?

For SEO light weights

• Total organic traffic - not the best KPI in the world because there are so many factors that can influence this, but if your just starting out in search it is an easy KPI to understand. If organic (non paid) traffic is going up and to the right - good work.
• Total number of pages indexed in Google. Google will report this in your Google webmaster tools or you can do a simple query at Google site:www.yourdomain.com. If Google keeps adding more of your pages to their index - good work. This is an even better KPI if you measure it as a percentage of your total pages. If the percentage keeps improving, your going in the right direction.

For SEO middle weights

• Number of visitors per keyword phrase - take your most valuable keywords or keyword phrases, if the the ratio of visitors to keyword phrases is improving, then so is your SEO.
• Brand search terms vs non branded search terms - break out your branded traffic from your non branded traffic. If the percentage of branded traffic to non branded traffic is high, then you have more work to do. You should expect to get a lot of traffic from your brand, but good SEO is about bringing in new traffic that may not have heard of you before. Caution, this indicator doesn't work for everybody and only has value if your site has an established presence.

For SEO heavy weights

• Yielding pages - percent of pages driving traffic vs total pages. As more of your pages get top rankings, then the percent of pages driving traffic vs total pages on your site will get bigger.
• SEO reach - look at the total number of possible queries for a search term. What percent are you getting, is that percent improving?

The focus of this post was to open your eyes to what matters and doesn't matter. My list will always be incomplete, but I encourage you to send me your SEO KPI so I can add it.

So much is happening on the Internet these days that it's just hard for an old soul like me to keep up.  Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo,  just as billionaire Bill seemed set for the pearly gates.  The price of Google's shares have plummeted and it seems no great surprise because why would anyone invest in a company with a name like "Google," "Froogle" or Boogle Boogle. It seems like the inaudible utterances of a Kalahari bushman in an old cartoon. I'm just saying!  So, what do music, American pop-culture and the Internet have in common?  

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"With broad match, the Google AdWords system automatically runs your ads on relevant variations of your keywords, even if these terms aren't in your keyword lists. Keyword variations can include synonyms, singular/plural forms, relevant variants of your keywords, and phrases containing your keywords."

Just about everyone running a google adwords account has broad keywords inside their adgroups. This is mostly because this is the default match type. What most people don't realize is that bidding broad is like giving Google permission to waste your money on any terms its "expanded keyword matching technology" decides are "relevant". In many cases the terms can be far from relevant.

So how do we find out what we are actually bidding on?

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SEO can be a tedious and time intensive process, so anything that will make that job a bit easier is a true godsend. Luckily Firefox has a plethora of tools to do just that.

Not acquainted with Firefox yet? It's time to head over to Mozilla and download what may very well become you best online friend. It's secure, it's customizable, it's free and it will run on Windows, Linux or Mac. So you really can't go wrong.

Ok, without further ado, here is the list.

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If I had a dollar for every great quote that came from a Kevin Costner movie I would have....a dollar. When I talk about this quote for SEO purposes, I'm talking about building out the content on your website. Many site owners make the mistake of letting their website sit unchanged and collect dust while they wait for their link campaign to start driving traffic. Don't let this happen to you and start writing pages that your visitors will find useful.

By regularly adding content, you are giving your visitors a wider range of information to choose from. This can help you retain the people that do come to the site and make it less likely they will leave to find another resource on the subject. Show people that you're an authority in the area. Provide quality content to your consumers and you should see them returning more often.

Is what's good for the visitor also good for the search engines? In this case the answer is definitely yes. Google and Yahoo will eat up this new content and spit you out some long tailed results while they're at it. One of the best reasons for building out content is that you can start ranking for plenty of small keyword phrases. Use article writing as an opportunity to target smaller terms and expand the reach of your site. It is important to remember that long tail terms can represent a large portion of your traffic.

Building out articles on a monthly basis may take time but the end result will be well worth it. Great quality content will allow you to generate more traffic and keep visitors coming back for more.

It's important for businesses to start taking advantage of internet marketing and Yahoo! did a great job of stressing this at Yahoo's Search Day in Vancouver.

It was interesting to see some of the statistics at Yahoo's Search Day. Three out of four Canadians are now connected to the internet with 85 million searches happening on a daily basis. Many Canadian businesses are not tapping into this market and are missing out on producing extra revenue. Even more interesting was the statistic from Yahoo's presentation (based on research - I think they used JC Penny as one of their examples) that claimed for every $1 spent online the mortar and brick businesses saw additional $6 revenue in store, I thought this 1 to 6 ratio was very impressive and should have been an eye opener to those at the conference not yet fully implementing internet marketing into their business structure.

Bill Barnes Enquiro Search Solutions Co Founder and Executive Vice President went over some interesting material on how people click in the search results and your website. Though most of it was fairly what I expected with the top 3 results getting the most followed up by the top right result. Interestingly enough the pattern was broken (From highest to lowest) when the next most clicked spot was at the fold (The part of the search results where you need to scroll to see more). TIP -- Those using positioning preference in google adwords may want to try ranking for the spot on the fold for cheaper clicks with high CTR's.

Overall the day was a success and I got to meet and speak to some great people. All the speakers did an amazing job and kept the whole conference entertaining and engaging. During lunch I got to briefly speak to Martin Byrne Yahoo's Search Marketing Director. I asked him if Yahoo was planning to release a google adwords editor equivalent tool for Yahoo Panama (MSN just launched theirs - Alpha Stage) and though he didn't say if they were or weren't he did let me know that Yahoo Panama is going to get a brand new UI and update in about Q3 of this year.

Search engines spiders use sitemaps to find and index the content of websites. Basically, sitemap is a guide that show search engines a list of pages available for indexing. It is important to understand that a sitemap is just a guide for search engines, and not a list of commands. The sitemap XML format is supported by many search engines including Google, Yahoo, and MSN. You can find a description of the XML schema for the sitemaps protocol on sitemaps.org.

Here is an example of an XML sitemap.

You can find descriptions of XML tags on sitemaps.org.

I just want to focus on two optional tags:

changefreq - This tag tells search engines how often you usually update the page. Please note that you just provide information about update frequency. It does not mean that search engines will index the page with the same frequency.

priority - This tag shows spiders priority of the page relative to other pages on the website. Basically, you tell search engines that pages with higher priority have more important information. It helps search engines prioritize the indexing process. Giving high priority to all pages will not help because all pages will have the same priority. And you should understand that the priority tag does not affect ranking position in search engine results pages.

Steps below describe how to create and submit XML sitemap.

1. Create XML sitemap. You can use different automated tools listed on page http://code.google.com/sm_thirdparty.html.
My personal choice is free sitemap generator on auditmypc.com.
Please note that different subdomains should have their own sitemaps located in these subdomains.

2. Put new XML sitemap on your website. Usually, it is located in the root of the website like http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml.
Sitemaps for subdomains are usually located in subdomains like http://subdomain.example.com/subdomain_sitemap.xml

3. Submit XML sitemap to Google in Google Webmaster Tools - http://google.com/webmasters/tools/siteoverview.
Please note that you need a Google Account to provide this submission.

4. Submit XML sitemap to Yahoo Site Explorer - http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/.
Please note that you need a Yahoo ID to provide this submission.

5. Submit XML sitemap to MSN using http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
(please change www.example.com to your website)

6. Update (or create) robots.txt file to include reference to XML sitemap.
Basically, you have to add just one line in the robots.txt file like

XML sitemaps provides valuable information to search engine spiders and should be used for successful search engine optimization.