I was excited to find out that Google has released Google Sites, their on-line collaboration system aimed at helping teams work together. This site is a great starting point, but has a few serious flaws that keep it from being truly useful for team collaboration. I'm going to go over my analysis after a few hours of playing with the site, and discuss my thoughts for actual day to day business use.

Today's tip covers something that I've been doing for a while, but not everyone uses. Social media sites like MySpace and Facebook can be great for getting your name out. You can offer a lot of rich content that gets people excited about your brand. There are a few things that you can do though, to drive traffic from those sites over to yours. Today we're going to focus on how to get visitors from these types of sites, and how to convert those visitors to clients.

Today we're going to cover an easy self SEO tip that you can use to increase the power of pages that link to you. The first links for your web site are often the hardest to get. When a site is popular everyone wants to link to it. When you do get the first few critical links to your site, how do you make sure that they will be popular in the future? Using this tip, you can drive extra traffic to these sites and ensure better search engine power for your backlinks. You can use this on blog posts, press releases, reviews, or just about any type of web page.

Our baby Luna Theresa Dillinger Valverde was born last night at 11:30PM, weighing 6.5lbs (2950g) and 19.5" (50cm). It was a difficult birth, but my wife and I are both glad to have her home with us now. We want to thank you all for your kind thoughts and words while we were away.

I like to help people. I discovered long ago that teaching people the basics of promoting their sites saves a lot of work and headaches down the road. There are a lot of people who spend a lot of time promoting their sites the old fashioned way. Well I'm here to tell you that there are better ways to promote your site, and you've probably never heard of them. That’s why I've decided to share one of my newest backlink secrets with everyone who reads here for free.

The SEMMYS have announced their finalists in each category. You can now go to the site and read the top articles of each category. When you're done reading feel free to vote for the winner. Voting ends January 30th.

The SEMMYS are search marketing awards dedicated to highlighting the best blog posts of the year. The best part about this web site is looking through the titles alone I see many of my favorite blog posts from the year. This page is an amazing resource for any business looking to promote on the web. While I haven't finished reading all of the posts (there are well over 100), there were some favorites that I'm about to share with you.

Besides our normal client work, we've been building out our Costa Rica SEO section to include even more information. We've also organized it a bit better to make sure that the most important info doesn't get overlooked. In the next few weeks our blog posts will be slower as we expand our marketing and web design sections with more information as well. Along with these we're planning on updating our Self SEO Help section with more user requested content. So, what we would like to know is: What type of SEO advice do our readers want to see? Leave a comment here, and tell us what type of SEO questions you have. We will then take all or some of these and add them to our Self SEO Help section. Until next time, take care and Pura Vida!

Setting up a pay per click campaign the right way can save you a lot of money. I spend hours every week tweaking PPC campaigns, and when I read what James over at Apollo SEM found I was floored! They put together a write-up on how to display exact PPC keywords with Google Adwords and Analytics. This little trick only takes a few minutes to do, and can save you a ton on PPC advertising. You see with Google’s Adwords PPC and Analytics you get some nice information about the people who click ads and visit your site. Well with this you can find out the exact keywords that they use to find your site. This is helpful to eliminate search terms that might not be relative to your site, or to setup an ad variation for a specific keyword. I know that eliminating irrelevant clicks and fine tuning keywords can save my clients thousands of dollars per year. Thank you very much Apollo SEM and enjoy!