The amount of SEO smarts you can pick up just by taking advantage of free tutorials and articles is astounding. Sure, going to an SEO course in San Diego when it’s winter in Minnesota is going to sound very tempting, but if you or your company are on a tight budget (and who isn’t?) it makes sense to squeeze every bit of knowledge you can about SEO from what is readily available online. Five good sites to start with are:

• http://www.metamend.com
• http://www.jigsawinc.com
• http://www.searchengineland.com
• http://www.SEOmoz.org
• http://www.SEObook.com

If you take the time to print out the materials or otherwise pore over them with attention, you’re going to come away knowing far more about SEO than you do now, and all it will cost you is your time. There is a lot to be said for SEO self-education, particularly since there is so much information available for free out there. And once you’ve read it and inwardly digested the information, if you still decide to go to that paid SEO seminar, you’re going to be able to ask some really pointed, educated questions and learn even more than if you were going into it as a novice. Don’t wait for your competitor to soak up the knowledge first: make it your goal today to learn at least three new things about SEO.

Press releases are a fact of life for every business. Learn how to write a good press release so you won’t be wasting time writing stuff that is just going to be tossed anyway. Imagine that the editor receiving your press release is harried, overworked, cynical, and probably under the influence of massive amounts of caffeine and / or nicotine. You’ve got to make your press release a powerful dart strong enough to pierce the rhinoceros hide of even the most jaded editor. Your headline and first sentence are critical, so get these just right before sending your press release to anyone.

There are several ways to make your press release stand out from the masses. First and foremost they must be editorially clean, with correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation. The writing has to be compelling also, and it should be newsworthy. Make sure that your press release passes the “So what?” test. That’s an editor’s first thought upon reading the headline of yet another press release. Make it clear why the information in your press release is newsworthy, or otherwise it will be perceived as nothing more than self-promotion.

Once you get a press release accepted at an influential publication (online or in print), consider offering the editor exclusives in the future for a better shot at getting your press releases picked up again.

If you’re thinking of hiring an SEO company and / or a PPC company check out a company’s credentials and results carefully. Unfortunately there are all too many companies who call themselves SEO or PPC experts that use deceptive practices that could easily get your site banned by the major search engines. If that’s the case, you’ll basically be starting your e-business over from scratch.

With potential SEO companies, stay away from the ones that promise you that your business will rocket to the top of the search engines effortlessly, particularly if they don’t tell you how they plan to get you there. Oh, and when they say “search engines,” make sure they’re talking about the major search engines that people actually use. Think of it this way: if an SEO site is willing to engage in shady practices to artificially boost your search engine rankings, they’ll think nothing of rerouting your domain to a scary malware site if their relationship with you goes bad.

Many of the same principles apply when you choose a PPC company. Make sure their “results” have to do with the major search engines and stay away from cloaking and other deceptive practices. It’s bad enough to throw your money away on a bad PPC consultant, but it’s worse if they do things that get your site banned by search engines.

Social media marketing platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz provide big opportunities for you and your employees to raise your company’s profile in a very positive way. This looks to be a rather long-term trend, so you might as well get in on it now. Maybe you’ll be the first in your niche!

Start by “listening” to the latest chatter about your niche or product. Use tools like Social Media Firehose to aggregate the latest and greatest about a product or niche (see screen shots for aggregating chatter about the topic “Nexus One phone.”). Once you have a sense of the general conversational climate, create accounts on social media platforms like Twitter, build up a community, and start interacting. At first, it’s a good idea to listen more than you talk. Start small, by commenting on blogs, doing the occasional re-tweet, or announcing something going on with your company, like a sale. Gradually increase your interaction until you have a real conversation with the customer community going on. It’s amazing the things you’ll learn.

Social media marketing is basically a 21st century version of word of mouth advertising that goes much faster than it does in the face-to-face community. It’s a chance to build your brand and shape your reputation for the long haul, so don’t miss out or let your competition take all the social media love that’s out there.

Maybe Google shouldn’t have blogged about its enhanced local listings a week after the debut of Buzz, because people were pretty warmed up and ready to pounce. Here’s the deal: currently, in Houston and San Jose only, local business owners can pay $25 per month to get an “enhanced” listing on Google that places a yellow flag on the listing and builds in a link that can be customized to go to the business’s website (like the example in the screen shot) or to a coupon, menu, or pictures.

Don’t let the screen shot mislead you, however, according to a New York Times article, the guy with the enhanced listing already ranked number one on local listings. The enhancements are added to your listing wherever you may rank. Which means that if you ignore local SEO and your site is located somewhere in the bowels of the listings, it’s not going to get you anything. And if the program rolls out everywhere, will everyone and their brother buy an enhanced listing? If so, the enhanced listings won’t stand out at all.

Of course, there are some people who are predicting the end of organic search listings as we know them, because selling enhanced listings could lead to things like paying for rank, or turning the new program into a competitive bidding program like AdWords. If so, let’s hope that there’ll be an alternative search engine available for those who only want real, organic search engine results.

Google Personalized Search is Google’s way of taking into account a user’s search history to fine tune the search engine results it presents to that user. It means that for search terms that can mean different things to different people, Google will try to match up the user with the results most likely to be applicable to them, based on their past search history. This, by the way, can be disabled or erased at any time if you are uncomfortable with the idea of Google “knowing” that when you type in “apple” you mean the fruit and not the brand of computer.

Personalized search also works on a broader basis when nobody is signed in. With web search history enabled even when nobody is signed in to Google, the search engine will generate results based on 180 days worth of web history, regardless of who went where on the web. And with signed-out personalized search, the individual sites that influenced the personalization can’t be listed, so even a fairly nosy person can’t deduce much from it.

Webmasters wonder whether personalized search will doom their SEO efforts or actually help them. For those who avoid any and all deceptive practices and who concentrate not just on keywords, tags, and all the minutiae of SEO but on providing top quality content, then personalized search will only help, because it will boost a site based on people reaching it and bookmarking it (or visiting it frequently), regardless of how they found the site.

If you have a gmail account, you’ve probably already encountered Google Buzz and maybe even set it up and used it a little. Astonishingly easy to get started with, it looks like a hybrid of Facebook and Twitter, and can be integrated with Twitter, blogs set up on blogspot.com, Google Reader, Google chat status, YouTube, Picasa, and Flickr. Those that you choose to integrate into Buzz will be updated by, or can share information with Buzz.

What may end up setting Buzz apart from the others, however, is the geographical information that can be associated with Buzzes that originate from your mobile phone. If you happen to see a celebrity, say and wanted to share a picture you snapped with your Droid or iPhone, you could do it, and use Google Maps to give it a geographical tag.

It could potentially be an alibi killer as well. If you were to tell your spouse or the police you were at a certain place at a certain time, and someone had photographed you and geo tagged you at another place and another time, you could be totally busted. But with the exception of the geo tagging option, this isn’t that much more of an alibi buster than a regular camera phone with a date and time stamp.

Google has taken some flack for just how wide open the Buzz platform is, and it has already tightened some of the privacy settings. But it will take a little time to find out just how many novel uses this new platform can be put to.

Robert Burns was right when he said, “O would some power the gift to give us to see ourselves as others see us.” He probably wasn’t thinking about search engine robots when he wrote it, but it certainly applies. If you don’t know how the major search engine robots (like Googlebot) “see” your website, then you may be in the dark when you’re trying to make changes to bring up your standings in the search engine results.

Fortunately, Google Webmaster Tools has a “Fetch as Googlebot” tool. On the Webmaster Tools dashboard, click on the “+” sign by the “Labs” link in the left hand column. When you do, you’ll see an option called “Fetch as Googlebot” as you can see in the first screen shot. Click on it, and it will download your site as the Googlebot sees it. (The tool is still buggy when it comes to interpreting PDF files, however.)

The second screen shot shows just a small part of what it sees. Even if you don’t know much about html, if you read through your results you can at least see if important parts of your site are making it into Googlebot’s “view” of your site. The main problems the Googlebot has is with Flash graphics, but there are workarounds for this.

Like the rest of the web, Google’s marketing strategies and tools are constantly evolving. Does this mean the death of affiliate marketing on Google (as in the screen shot), or, as some have speculated, the death of “thin affiliates” on Google? Thin affiliates are sites that build a site or platform around affiliate programs. For example, a thin affiliate might find an affiliate program for teeth whitening kits and then build a site about cosmetic dentistry around it, hoping to drive traffic to the affiliate site in order to get commissions.

Actually, the death of thin affiliates has been declared multiple times, and perhaps there’s something to it, but like the “corpse” in Monty Python’s “Bring Out Your Dead” sketch, thin affiliates say they’re doing fine, thanks.

However, in early January 2010 Google slashed the number of advertisers in some categories by 90%, clearing the way for those who create original products and original content. And that’s what it eventually comes down to, even for thin affiliates that make quick fortunes slinging affiliate sites all over the place: if you don’t have unique content, you’ll be roadkill on the information superhighway eventually.

The way to long term marketing success with Google has always theoretically been high quality original content, it’s just that now they’re backing up their words with some slash and burn tactics that make thin affiliates a shorter term proposition for most.

Like the rest of the web, Google’s marketing strategies and tools are constantly evolving. Does this mean the death of affiliate marketing on Google (as in the screen shot), or, as some have speculated, the death of “thin affiliates” on Google? Thin affiliates are sites that build a site or platform around affiliate programs. For example, a thin affiliate might find an affiliate program for teeth whitening kits and then build a site about cosmetic dentistry around it, hoping to drive traffic to the affiliate site in order to get commissions.

Actually, the death of thin affiliates has been declared multiple times, and perhaps there’s something to it, but like the “corpse” in Monty Python’s “Bring Out Your Dead” sketch, thin affiliates say they’re doing fine, thanks.

However, in early January 2010 Google slashed the number of advertisers in some categories by 90%, clearing the way for those who create original products and original content. And that’s what it eventually comes down to, even for thin affiliates that make quick fortunes slinging affiliate sites all over the place: if you don’t have unique content, you’ll be roadkill on the information superhighway eventually.

The way to long term marketing success with Google has always theoretically been high quality original content, it’s just that now they’re backing up their words with some slash and burn tactics that make thin affiliates a shorter term proposition for most.