Speaking of which, I'll be primarily posting SEO and social media tips for businesses on my new James A. Martin website. For this blog, I'll be sharing news and resources related to search engine optimization and social media. 

ICANN, or the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, yesterday announced plans to allow the expansion of Top Level Domains (TLDs). 

Companies can now have brand-specific TLDs, such as .ibm if you're IBM. You can also create generic TLDs such as .sports or .seo. 

But will these new TLDs help with SEO? (And could I possibly have squeezed another acronym into that question?)

Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land says it won't. "It’ll just enrich some new TLD owners at the expense of brands who will now spend even more to fight cybersquatting," he writes. 

"Bottom line — the new names will almost certainly mean nothing special to search engines. They won’t have any super ranking powers," Danny continues. "If you managed to get .money, that doesn’t mean you’ll rank tops for money-related terms any more than people with the existing .travel domains do well for travel — because they don’t."

So if you want those domains to prevent cybersquatting or for branding purposes, by all means, go for it. Just don't expect any SEO benefits.

The following is a guest post by James Kim

Once you've got your business off the ground through the use of some business services and proper funding, you have to make sure your business can be successful moving forward. This, of course, means advertising. The upside to advertising in our modern world is that you can use social media to get cheap ads that reach tons of potential customers. Once you're past the first part of deciding which network to use, you have to figure out how to dive into your choice of platform, which leads us to our current topic: Facebook.

Facebook is the king of social media advertising because it has the most developed advertising platform among the social networks. It's still relatively new compared to other forms of Internet marketing like Google AdWords, and it's fairly cheap.

With Facebook, you can do two main types of advertising: internal and external.

External advertising is the traditional style we're all used to, with a link on Facebook leading to your website. Internal, on the other hand, will advertise a page you make for your business on Facebook and will allow people to “like” your page, building up a following.

Obviously, you have to know what your goals are when you choose between these options. Not looking to invest much time and just looking to get an ad on a big website? Choose external. Want to build up a community based around your business where you can interact with customers (a significantly more involved option, especially since you have to create and monitor a Facebook page)? Choose internal.

If you carefully cultivate your efforts, the internal option is clearly superior, but it's not for everyone, so you shouldn't feel pressured into doing it just because it's “the thing to do.” Choosing the external option is far better than choosing the internal one and losing out because you're not putting in enough time or executing it correctly.

Now to the good part: actually placing the ads. Going step-by-step, you have to design, target and price your ad. Designing the ad just consists of a giving a title, a short text snippet and an image if you want one. The end result is a small box on the side of someone's Facebook page with your title in big, blue text as a link with the picture underneath and then the text at the very bottom (which will have the “Like” button below it if you opt to go that route). 

Targeting your ad is where you see the real value in Facebook marketing, since there are a lot of targeting options to choose from. Your options are: location, age, sex, education, workplace, relationship status, relationship interests, languages and the classic keywords.

To give you a further idea of the surprising options Facebook gives you, you can even choose to specifically target people on their birthdays, an option that definitely holds appeal for some businesses. Once you've set your options, you'll be shown an estimate of how many people the ad will reach, which will allow you to tweak everything so that you can hit a sweet spot of general versus specific.

Finally, you have to set the pricing for your ad. First, familiarize yourself with the two pricing schemes that Facebook offers: CPM and CPC, which is paying for impressions and paying for clicks, respectively.

CPM stands for “cost per million,” as you pay for how many ad views there are in total (calculated in multiples of 1,000). CPC, on the other hand, stands for “cost per click,” meaning you pay for each click on your ad, regardless of how few or many there are. If you just want to promote your brand and aren't advertising for a specific, commercial reason, you should choose the CPM model. CPC is the better model if each click counts (and Facebook gives you estimates of how many you'll get per day based on your bid). Think of it as either going for quantity or quality.

And there you go! You've placed an ad on Facebook! Over time, you can tweak your settings (e.g., how much you're willing to pay per click) to try to get the best return possible. It's certainly not hard to place ads on Facebook, but getting it perfect is where the effort lies. Every minute spent is worth it, though.

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James Kim is a writer for Choosewhat.com, which provides product reviews and test data for business services and products. Choosewhat.com's goal is to help small companies make informed buying decisions on business solutions that help their business.

I've been a devout Mozilla Firefox users for years--until recently. Too often, Firefox has crashed or frozen, or it's been just too slowwwww.

So I've made the switch to Google Chrome (Mac), and after some adjustment, I'm glad I did. Chrome is noticeably zippier than Firefox, and it has plenty of extensions as well. Here are some of the SEO extensions I'm using and recommend:

* One of my initial problems with Chrome is that it doesn't display web page titles. Solution: A simple Chrome extension called Show Title Tag.

* Mozbar from SEOMoz is a handy extension for search marketers, but you won't get the full benefit of the bar unless you're an SEOMoz Pro subscriber (which I am).

* Chrome SEO provides a wealth of at-a-glance information about a web page, including pages indexed, backlinks, and traffic/rank.

* If you just want a quick look at a page's PageRank and Alexa score, install PageRank.  

Are there Chrome extensions for SEO you recommend? If so, I'd love to hear about them.  

Epsilon is "the leading provider of multi-channel marketing services," as it describes itself. The company handles email services for many well-known brands, including Brookstone, Best Buy, Walgreens, TiVo, Citi and Capital One. The company sends "about 40 billion emails each year on behalf of its 2,500 clients," according to Fast Company.

Turns out Epsilon's email system recently experienced a security breach, affecting about 50 brands, or 2 percent of its clients. The hackers might be planning to use the email addresses for spam or phishing purposes. 

The Epsilon clients affected by the breach are obligated to inform their customers of the security breach, and that their email addresses might have been captured by the hackers. In the past few days, I've received such emails from Walgreens, Hilton, Best Buy, TiVo, and Brookstone. 

What's the SEO angle? If you have something worthwhile to say on the topic, blogging about the Epsilon breach right now might help your blog become more visible in search engine results right now. For instance, an ecommerce site blog might take the opportunity to explain the security measures it takes to protect its customers' data, and to warn customers that no email system is invulnerable. 

I recently published an article for Small Business Computing, Top 10 Tips to Grow Your Twitter Following. Here's a quick summary of the first three tips: 

Blog comment spam no. 1:

Responding to my Traveler 2.0 mobile computing blog post about iPhone bills: "Everyone has his own opinion to one thing. And I agree with you. You are so good at writting and I like you article punish in your blog. It is very useful for me. From your article I know we should see his advantage and also to see his disadvantage. Thank you!"

I know my blog writing isn't always pristine. But 'punish in your blog''? Reminds me of when I used to be an editor for Publish, a desktop publishing magazine. It was such a loathsome place to work we nicknamed it Punish magazine. But I digress.

Blog comment spam no. 2:

Responding to a Traveler 2.0 blog post about digital cameras: "Have you been turned down by other lenders?"

It depends on how you define 'other lenders.' If you mean family members with money, yes. If you mean banks and financial institutions, no.

And let's close with blog comment spam no. 3, which needs no further comment:

"Your blog gives people the life is beautiful! Heart as long as optimistic there will be hope!"

via www.seocopywriting.com

Heather Lloyd-Martin's SuccessWorks blog just posted a great refresher course on what is, and isn't, important for SEO copywriting success. It's a list of 25 SEO copywriting tips and ideas you'll want to keep handy.

When I come across stories like this, I copy and paste them into an e-mail to myself and put keywords in the subject heading. That way, the story becomes part of my searchable Gmail archive. Or I'll paste the article into a new Word file and add it to the SEO folder on my Mac's hard drive. Either way, the idea is to gather wisdom like this when you see it and make it easily available for reference later.