IE6 still holds a 20% market share on web browser activity, but it’s likely that that number will drop in the extremely near future. A number of sites and anti-IE6 campaigns have popped up in the past year, though none have made quite the impact that Google’s recent announcement likely will.

In an announcement made yesterday, Google’s Apps team stated that they would no longer support IE6, choosing instead to phase the browser out of commission over the course of 2010.

Rajen Sheth and his Apps team didn’t offer too much of an explanation for the decision; they didn’t need to. All he provided was that there existed a new guard of browsers – “Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above” – that would much better fit your security, JavaScript processing, and HTML5 needs. He goes on:

Many other companies have already stopped supporting older browsers like Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers. We’re also going to begin phasing out our support, starting with Google Docs and Google Sites. As a result you may find that from March 1 key functionality within these products — as well as new Docs and Sites features — won’t work properly in older browsers.

So the question turns to those 20% of Internet users still using what’s just been deemed an artifact: is it time to phase out IE6? Is this decision from Google all that surprising? And something else to consider: do you think that with the advent and development of Google Chrome that we’ll see Google begin to abandon their support of more and more external browsers?

Keywords

Do some preliminary keyword research for each post, and use appropriate keywords in your meta tags on your blog post page. If readers come across your post about a recipe for sauteed asparagus with butter because they searched “health food,” they’re probably not going to stick around to read through your site or even to the end of your post. Using Key words that are related to the information that you’re writing about will help to improve reader interest and loyalty, decrease your bounce rate and increase the number of return users.

Use your keywords in your post content to enhance your post and help strengthen the relationship between your meta keywords and the content. Remember, keyword stuffing is a black hat SEO technique and can get your blog black listed. It may be in your best interest to stick to whitehat SEO for your blog.

Titles

Meta titles appear at top of the window when your blog is opened and on the tab. Just like meta keywords, it’s important that your title tags reflect the information in the blog. Titles are important for spider food, but they are also important for usability. The title will show up in the Search Engine Results Page and is often the first thing a user sees before deciding whether or not to read a post. If your titles aren’t appropriate to their search chances are that they will look right over it.  Cory Doctorow, who writes for BoingBoing offers the following: “Write headlines as though you are a wire service writer.”

Heading Tags

Using H1 tags appropriately is also very useful technique for search-ability. It’s a good idea to use your most relevant keywords in your H1 tags, but also to use them in front of content that is relevant.

Links

Remember to link a word in a sentence to something that is related to that word. Try writing the sentence and then deciding which word(s) to link. The sentence containing the link should sound natural and not feel like you’ve forced that sentence in to your content just so you can add that link. Linking the word “here” or the phrase “click here” is not useful to your user because it doesn’t give them any information about what they are about to click on and where they will end up when they do.

Use internal links as often as possible. When readers find a topic on your blog they are interested in they will want to read more, by linking to other blog posts in your blog you’re making it very easy for them to find that extra information and stay on your blog at the same time.

Make your external links open in a new tab or a new window. You want to give your reader more information and make them feel that they can trust your sources and your knowledge on the subject, but you don’t want them to navigate away from your site completely. Opening links in a new tab is usually easy to select in most WYSIWYG editors and blog software, but it’s not always the default option, so you have to remember to check every time you link something outside of your site.

Content

Like most things in your blog the content is just as important to usability as it is to SEO. You should have an appropriate amount of content and an appropriate use of keywords in your content. Remember that your some of your lead can end up on a search engine result page and goes hand in hand with your title in helping your user decide to read or to skip over. Make your lead clear, relevant to the keywords, and enticing enough to encourage a click.

The average number of words for blog posts can vary, but remember that you shouldn’t limit yourself to a certain number if it means sacrificing your message.

These techniques may seem to be common sense, but they are often over looked when writers sit down to their blogs. Remembering these simple tips can lay the ground work for a very SEO friendly blog post.

For the most part, these questions stem from a lack of clarity concerning the iPad’s flexibility as an operating device. There are a lot of people out there, myself included, who had hopes that the iPad would be the product to replace laptops to some degree. Obviously we forgot the fact that Steve Jobs is a master when it comes to product separation.

The iPad has just enough specs and features to make it valuable to those who need more than what an iPhone or iPod touch has to offer but lacks the necessary features to suffice in lieu of a laptop. Among those features:

• Flash capabilities
• A working camera, still frame or video
• Non-Internet phone functionality

That first one is the biggie. The iPad’s lack of flash capabilities may be the omission that singlehandedly restricts Apple’s new toy from rendering the laptop non-essential, but Jobs likes it that way. In restricting users from using such flash-powered sites as Hulu.com, Jobs is forcing the user’s hand and requiring that they buy movies and television shows from the iTunes store. Smart move on his part. This way he can price the Pad somewhere between an iPhone and a MacPro, picking up extra revenue through movie and TV show sales.

All this is to basically say that the preconceived notion (according to Apple) that flash slowed operations down too much to put on the iPod Touch and iPhone was straight fabrication.

There are, of course, other less-obvious features that Apple has left off the iPad that will further force users to iTunes. Though it’s available on iPhones, Apple is holding out on the iPad implementation of Microsoft Silverlight, which allows Netflix users to watch their instant movies on their devices. It’s not exactly a monopoly; just a really smart way of thinning your wallets.

Well, isn’t this just the biggest surprise in the world?

Images and details about Apple’s iPad Tablet have been leaked for weeks now, but that doesn’t mean that Steve Jobs can’t draw a packed house crowd at Apple’s Press Conference 2010. Engadget’s been there liveblogging the scene all day. Check it out.

According to Engadget’s Joshua Topolski, some of the iPad’s best features include a refined Maps application, the msot advanced iTunes yet, a new look to the calendar, and a touchpad keyboard that’s “a dream to type on.” More iPad specs, as told by Engadget’s Nilay Patel, include the following:

It’s a half-inch thick and weighs just 1.5 pounds, with a 9.7-inch capacitive touchscreen IPS LCD display, and it’s running a custom 1GHz Apple “A4″ chip developed by P.A. Semi, with a 10-hour battery life.. It’ll come in 16, 32, and 64GB sizes, and it’s got the expected connectivity: very little. There’s a 30-pin Dock connector, a speaker, a microphone, Bluetooth, and 802.11n WiFi. As expected, it can run iPhone apps — either pixel-for-pixel in a window, or pixel-doubled fullscreen.

And thus begins the rush to your nearest apple store. The only question that truly remains is, how much is  this bad boy gonna cost?

Obviously the list of available cities is pretty small right now (Twitter’s made Local Trending available for 13 US cities and 2 international cities, Sao Paulo and London), but it’s safe to say Local Trending will be coming live to a city near you very soon.

This should be especially interesting tonight after Obama’s State of the Union Address when you’re looking to see how different parts of the country (or world, you can access Local Trending for 7 countries including the US) are reacting to the speech.

For experts this could very well be a walk in the park, but everybody else should be able pick up a great deal of knowledge from the quiz. If that’s the case and you struggle through it, make sure to get a print out of the correct answers and use it as a guide when you go about your future endeavors.

Get smart while you can. Google plans to run the quiz until January 27.

Basically, if you have valuable information in the orange section of the graph, only half of your site’s visitors are seeing it on first glance. Another reminder that when designing your website, you want to keep the important stuff in the top left.

Using keywords and key phrases in your twitter lists can help to enhance their SEO power. Using geo-targeted keywords or phrases for your twitter lists is a excellent strategy. Check out this Google search for Austin marketing twitter; the first organic result is for a twitter list by @ElleLaMode a marketing grad out of Madison, WI.  @EllelaMode’s twitter list appeared at the top of my Google search because she geo-targeted her list name to Austin.

It’s a good idea to think of twitter lists not just as internal features of twitter, but as useful links that can enhance blogs, facebook fan pages, myspace pages, and tweets. Twitter lists linked in blogs offer the user vast amounts of extra information on whatever subject you choose to blog about. This strategy can greatly increase your blog’s user experience and, hopefully, encourage return visitors and loyal readers.

List your own twitter account on your lists of appropriate subject matter so when people follow your list they can also follow your tweets.

Remember that Twitter is a community, so be friendly with your neighbors. List people who’ve listed you and ask others if they would like to be on your list.

Twitter lists are very useful SEO tools, but they can be used to create Reputation Management Problems, so be sure to pay attention to the lists that you appear on and remember that it’s important to list people appropriately.

Recently Google announced that it would implement a ‘Click to Call’ feature onto AdWords, a development that could change the way PPC ads are viewed and treated. According to Search Engine Land, Google will place a location-specific business phone number alongside your company’s destination url on all ads appearing on high-end mobile devices. Advertisers will in turn be charged for the click to call service the same way you are in the PPC model.

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to the conversion rates of AdWords now that there’s a phone number attached to the service. The PPC game has long been one built around flooding the market, mostly because users are likely to click on a number of ads and whittle down their options based on how credible each site appears to be. Now, if users can get on the phone with a company before having the chance to go with another option, your chances of converting on your ad greatly increases. As Thenextweb.com suggests, Click to Call leads are warm leads; there’s a bit more of a foundation already established when contact is made.

If you use Facebook and have logged in sometime over the past two weeks then you’ll surely know what he’s talking about. The social networking megasite changed their region assignments a few weeks ago, and everybody who’s logged on has had to reassess their privacy settings. Here’s how Calacanis explains it:

In case you missed it, when you logged into Facebook this week you were road blocked with a popup explaining that they “we’re making some changes to give you more control.” Sounds good, and like most users looking to quickly get into a website or application, I simply clicked through the message. How important could it be?

When faced with a TOS (Terms of Service) or license the world has been trained to hit the word “agree,” and click, click, click until they get to the actual website or software they were trying to get to in the first place.

Everyone in the industry knows this, and certainly a company built off of studying social behavior like Facebook would. Since the ToS is considered a formality, it is up to technology companies –- in fact our industry –- to behave. If we don’t behave well then we are going to get regulated by clueless politicians and policy makers. That would suck for everyone.

Yes, Jason, that most definitely would suck for everyone.

So where did Facebook go wrong? It couldn’t have been ignorance, right? Facebook’s hip, young staff knows better than anyone that ToS approvals never get read. Calacanis thinks it’s greed.

The entire purpose of Facebook since inception has been to share your information with a small group of people in your private network. Everyone knows that and everyone expects that. In fact, Facebook’s success is largely based on the fact that people feel safe putting their private information on Facebook.

When you do get to the second page a series of confusing radio buttons default –- yes, defaults –- to giving everyone access to your social graph. Wow. I’ve been using the internet since before images were supported. I’ve been a member of every social network since Six Degrees and Ryze, almost a decade before Facebook became available to the public, and I was confused by their settings page. An average user, certainly, has no idea what is going on by these changes.

So why is Facebook trying to trick their users? Simple: search results. Facebook is trying to dupe hundreds of millions of users they’ve spent years attracting into exposing their data for Facebook’s personal gain: pageviews. Yes, Facebook is tricking us into exposing all our items so that those personal items get indexed in search engines–including Facebook’s–in order to drive more traffic to Facebook.

With 350 million users worldwide, you’d think that Facebook gets enough page views per day, but who knows. Zuckerberg and his Facebook crew have never done much to hide the fact that they’re out for world domination.