Friday’s Finds — 08/10/2007

So many factors come into play when running a blog. It’s almost a mind-numbing experience. But once you get the hang of it and find your passion, everything else becomes second nature — did I use the right keywords in my title — is my anchor text optimized — the list goes on. Here are a few posts I’ve read over the week that talk a little about each of those factors.

• While selecting the right keywords is useful for every post, Erik Karey focuses on aligning his blog, with the term Internet Entrepreneur in his post about proper keyword selection. Frankly, I’m happy to be #1 when searching for Derrich.
• The WordPress Blog provided some stats for the month of July that I found rather interesting. In July alone, 133,000 blogs were created with over 2 million posts. Geez. Check out the rest of the July wrap-up for more stats.
• For popular searches, I like to use good ol’ Google Trends. Well, that’s good for Google searches. What about results from other sources? There’s a tool at SEOmoz.org that aggregates popular searches from other sources — Technorati: Popular – Flickr Hot Tags – Del.icio.us Popular Tags – Yahoo! Buzz – Top Overall Searches – Google Hot Trends – eBay Pulse – AOL Hot Searches – Lycos Top 50 – Ask Top Searches – Amazon, Most Popular Tags – Amazon, Movers and Shakers – Amazon, Best Sellers – Amazon, New Releases — and stuffs them into one list. The cool thing is all of the popular searches for each of these sites are also listed.
• Jamie Harrop appeared as a guest blogger on Jane May’s blog, Daily Web Ideas. Jamie suggests that a blogger’s worst mistake is breaking their blogging routine. I happen to agree. When you skip a day or two…or a week in Jamie’s case…it’s tough to get back in the groove.
• Loren Baker, editor of the Search Engine Journal, did a great job of sparking up some conversation this week. He heard that Google PageRank may be removed from the Google Toolbar. Most of his readers didn’t seem to care either way. What happened to the idea that PR is king when it comes to page validity and trustworthiness? How quickly we toss these quantifications aside. First Alexa, now Google PR?

Happy Friday, everyone!

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