Some of the greatest sources of traffic for many blogs are search engines. Whether it be Yahoo! or Google, these search engines can be a great way to drive new visitors to your blog and, hopefully, they’ll stick around long enough to like what they see. For this reason, it is important to keep search engine optimization in mind when composing some of your blog posts. Don’t write for Google, but there are some basic strategies that you can employ to improve your overall search engine rankings.

The SEO Slugs WordPress plugin is one such strategy that you may consider. As you know, WordPress automatically generates the post “slug” when you compose a blog post, assuming that you have this included as part of your permalink structure.

This is a handy feature, to be sure, but it can result in some incredible long URLs for your blog posts. For example, if you have a post called “Some of the Best and Worst Holiday Gift Ideas”, you’ll end up with a post slug that reads as:

/some-of-the-best-and-worst-holiday-gift-ideas/

With SEO Slugs, the post slug is significantly shortened by removing “filler” words like “what”, “you”, and “the”. Using this plug-in with the post title above, you’d end up with a shorter and more SEO-friendly post slug:

/best-worst-holiday-gift-ideas/

You can download and find out more about SEO Slugs though the WordPress plugin directory.

Last week we asked what do you think of the new WordPress 2.7 and 85% said they love it. This weeks question is…

When an opportunity presents itself to make a lot of money, our natural inclination is to take advantage of the situation and profit as much as possible before the well dries up. This makes intuitive sense, because you want to capitalize on the high times so that you can better survive the low times. This is especially true for freelance writers and other home-based business owners where a stable income may be luxury.

Even so, it may not be in your best interest to capitalize and take advantage of every opportunity that you encounter, because this kind of philosophy could ultimately lead to your downfall. The current recession is largely due to the credit crisis where many major banks started offering subprime mortgages to people who may not have been able to afford the payments. This led to many of the financial struggles that we face now and this is why those major banks are seeking bailout money from the government.

Its name escapes me at the moment (if you know, leave a comment below), but there was at least one bank in the United States that did not take advantage of the subprime mortgage situation. While other banks were enjoying increased profits by offering subprime mortgages and partaking in other related activities, this bank held off and stuck to its traditional model of money-lending.

Borrowers had to go through an incredibly stringent approval process, so underqualified individuals could not get a loan. As a result, this bank does not need any bailout money and it is, by far, the “healthiest” bank in the United States today.

The next time you encounter a potentially lucrative business opportunity, ask yourself if this strategy is still inline with your core ethical values and whether it may lead to major headaches down the road.

Yesterday we reached a new milestone for twitter.

We now have 600 followers on twitter. All of our followers are genuine human beings with no auto followers. I am proud to know that 600 people follow our business, life, interests in our community online. 

Not sure what twitter is?

We have spent a lot of time trying to educate people on what twitter is…

• Weekend Projects: Build a Twitter Community
• Business 101: Twitter Attraction
• WordPress Wednesdays: Twitter Blog Updates?
• WordPress Wednesdays: Twitter Links
• WordPress Wednesdays: pingPressFM
• WordPress Wednesdays: wpCommentTwit
• Marketing 101: Corporate Twitter
• WordPress Wednesdays: Putting Twitter on Your Blog
• Twitter Milestone
• How to make Twitter more like FriendFeed
• WordPress Wednesdays: WordTwit and Timestamps
• Twitter Application Development – Magic 8 Ball
• YVR TweetUp
• twitter for Business
• twhirl Review

As twitter becomes more main stream I suspect we will find new ways to use it for business.

Follow me on twitter if you want to be part of our community.

When the BlackBerry Bold hit the market a while ago, it garnered all sorts of attention because it was the first GSM BlackBerry with 3G high-speed connectivity. With the pending arrival of the BlackBerry Storm, that phone is getting lots of attention because it’s the first touchscreen BlackBerry. A new BlackBerry phone that has largely flown under the radar is the BlackBerry Curve 8900, which you may have heard about as the BlackBerry Javelin.

Some people have said that the BlackBerry 8900 Curve could be described as the BlackBerry Bold Lite. On a purely aesthetic basis, the 8900 bears a striking resemblance to the more expensive Bold, except it lacks the leather back and it is a fair bit smaller. This makes it more pocket-friendly than the BlackBerry Bold.

Perhaps the biggest thing “missing” from the BlackBerry Curve 8900 is that it does not have 3G. For this reason, if you plan on doing a lot of heavy web surfing, this may not be the best option for you. With proper BlackBerry service, you will enjoy compressed data so the performance won’t be too crippling however.

Key features on the BlackBerry 8900, which is available now through Rogers Wireless in Canada, including a 480×360 resolution display, 3.2 megapixel camera, full QWERTY keyboard, and all the usual PIM applications you’d expect from a BlackBerry.

Congratulations to this weeks geek Marilyn. This weeks questions are…

1.  Name 3 types of Digital Photography capture medium?

2.  What is HDR?

3.  What meta data is stored in a photo”?

4.  What does SLR stand for?

5.  Name 3 formats that common Digital Cameras take pictures in?