I’m happy to announce that I’m running my own Meetup groups for 2012, and my first event has now been scheduled for January 19th, at the Convention Center Red Lion Inn.

Why? 

Over the past few years, I’ve spoken on more panels and given more presentations than I can count. I’ve presented to multiple private groups and businesses, as well as at various search marketing conferences. Some have been national, some local, and I’ve instructed some weekend college classes for PCC.

One of the things I like most about the WordPress SEO plugin from Yoast is that once you have the settings tweaked the way you want them, you can export, then import them elsewhere.

At Pubcon last month, I gave my presentation on exactly how I like to use that plugin,  and why I make the choices I do. As I explained, not every site is the same, and there are choices to be made.

The oldest, largest, and arguably best internet marketing conference will take place in Las Vegas on November 8th, 9th and 10th, 2011, at the Las Vegas Convention Center.

The session grid is huge, with 9 sessions running concurrently at most times, and this year I’m proud to have been selected to appear in three sessions, more than ever before.

You MUST know that Google can instantly tell whether a certain Google user who just left a review is a “real” user or not, right?

Google has access to everything a user does from their web browsing history to their Gmail habits, and they have for years. They even know where you live, so creating a completely fake / new user to leave a single review is stupid.

This post has been several years in the making, because since 2007, as fast as I’ve written things down in my notes, the WordPress plugins keep getting built.

Sometimes we build them ourselves, as was the case with my desire to have a WordPress plugin that sets everything up with one click, or in other cases someone else will build the solution.

It was an honor to be asked to speak this year at WebCam – Central Oregon’s web and creative marketing conference, coming up on September 29 and 30th.

This will be the third annual conference, and it’s gotten rave reviews for the past two years. The agenda and list of speakers is pretty impressive, not to mention the Thursday night Brew ha-ha party sounds like it’s going to be a blast too.

It looks like Google Boost has undergone a name change to AdWords Express, but it appears everything else has remained the same. (update 7/26 – Google just announced the change)

This morning while logging in to a client’s Google Places account, instead of seeing “create a Boost ad” or “See my Boost Dashboard” I’m seeing it referred to as Adwords Express.

If you look at the Wikipedia definition of a scraper website, it says

“A scraper site is a spam website that copies all of its content from other websites”.

Well Google has a new project, that in my opinion, is basically just a well done Google scraper.

With all the buzz lately about Google Plus over the past few weeks, (feel free to test my Plus button on the right) you don’t hear much anymore about Google Contacts, but it’s pretty useful, and I sure hope they don’t kill it off.

If you use WordPress to manage a website, thanks to their auto-save feature, and the fact that it stores every revision you ever make, the database can grow quite large.

In turn, I can tell you from experience, that someday, when you least expect it and can least afford it, your large database filled with old junk you don’t need will become corrupted or broken, leading to eventual backup, restore, or changing hosts, or some other problem. Trust me, it will happen.

Friendster seems to have about 57 million 404 errors, and they have completely wiped out the vast majority of their users content.

Do a site: search on Friendster.com and try to go almost anywhere -

We have a few Friendster accounts, and just this morning my friend Brad who has a pretty busy 80′s fan site told me over the phone that his Friendster account lost all the content.

This short video shows how easy our new free Add-In works to make live links in Microsoft Excel 2007 / 2010. If you have to frequently spotcheck URLs in a spread sheet, I think you’ll love how much time it can save you.