Hi, welcome to Sunday Morning SEO. This is a new guide about search engine optimisation, or SEO for short. If you want to improve your rankings and increase your search engine traffic, tune in on Sunday mornings. My name is Dee Barizo and I’ve had experience as a full-time search marketer. This morning we’ll look at keyword research.

Keyword research is one of the fundamental activities in SEO. Many bloggers consider this activity to be tedious, but here are two quick and easy ways to find traffic generating keywords for your posts.

To illustrate these methods, let’s pretend you’re a sports blogger. With the NBA All-Star Game coming up in one week, you plan on publishing a couple posts about it this week. You expect a lot of basketball fans to be searching Google for information about the game. Therefore, you want to figure out the keywords that they might use and insert those keywords in your content. read more

Popular design blog Swissmiss is leaving TypePad in favor of the less limited possibilites of WordPress. However, it seems Tina Roth Eisenberg is leaving TypePad a happy customer.

For almost 4 years, Typepad has been my host and blogging platform. They have been nothing but wonderful to me and I am not leaving Typepad out of being an unsatisfied customer.

The redesign launch post talks about new features, such as search functionality (!) and different ways of listing the content. Check out the new and improved Swissmiss for some design goodness.

Shiny Media is to cut back on staff, including editorial director and co-founder Katie Lee, according to an official press release initially sent to TechCrunch UK & Ireland. Chris Price remains in place as the last of the company’s founders.

The full statement, copied below, talks of the current tough financial climate and the toll it has taken on the new media company. Shiny Media has “held on as long as [it] could without restructuring the business” but that long-term stability has now forced its hand. read more

Video blogging guru Michael Pick of WordPress.tv fame was recently interviewed by our very own Franky Branckaute at BloggerTalks.

We had the opportunity to work with Michael when he produced videos for Tubetorial, and all I can say is this guy is top rate!

As for the interview, Michael shuns the blog rockstar title and discusses how the move from Tokyo to Sapporo has done much to improve productivity (more snow meant less trips to the pub). He also shares how he likes the visual medium more than writing text and how he thinks better of being a trailblazer at your own niche rather than copying ideas that have already been done before. read more

Dictionaries have to move with the times, adding new words and phrases as they become a part of common language, so it’s perhaps no surprise that the Oxford Junior Dictionary has jumped into the 21st century and included “blog” for the first time in its latest edition.

Plenty of other tech words have been added including broadband, MP3 player, voicemail, database, chatroom and cut and paste. read more

Meebo announced that they are once again offering Facebook chat within Meebo. Originally launched in December last year, Meebo was asked by Facebook to remove the service due to technical issues with the way they are connecting to Mark Zuckerberg’s social network.

With the service relaunch, Meebo now directs its users to a Facebook Connect dialog window asking for permission to chat. If you have a Meebo account, you can login with your Meebo username and add Facebook as a network account from inside Meebo.  While the look and sign-on process is different, the experience within Meebo once authenticated will remain the same.

OpenID is a great idea: One login using a trusted provider that works across the web. The problem is that it is still a clunky experience. Facebook Connect does the same thing, but ridiculously simple. That’s why we should all rejoice as the news that Facebook is joining the OpenID Foundation board hits us! Although they have yet to announce actual support for OpenID login, the knowledge they bring is important, and it is a sign of things to come. I’m pretty sure Facebook will be an OpenID provider soon enough, hopefully by making everything a lot simpler for the users. That will benefit all, not just the evil social network that can’t stop growing. If you disagree, do check out this ReadWriteWeb post.

Chances are you’ll be logging in using Facebook Connect powered by OpenID when you publish your Blog Herald praise comments in the future. Or a Google similar branded OpenID-thingy. That is a good thing, no matter what logo you slap on it. More over at Techmeme.

I am not one for doom and gloom, and in particular I think a lot of the financial skepticism is overbaked in an effort for the media to sell more newspapers and garner more viewers.

That said, I am also not naive enough to think that it is all hype, the signs are all around us that people and business are worried, struggling and looking for solutions. At first we were told that the UK was well placed to ride out the storm, now they are saying we could go the way of Iceland and even that the UK PLC could go bankrupt. I don’t think it will get to that, but better to have a Plan B, eh?

Could making an income online be a way for you to protect your family lifestyle? read more

It’s Release Week. WordPress 2.7.1 Beta 1 released for testing. WordPressMU updated. BuddyPress Beta 2 released. WP Scanner beta released. WordPress.com releases January stats. Akismet updated and improved. WordCamp.tv releases more WordCamp videos from last year. Scott Wallick releases his site and the Sandbox WordPress Theme for sale. Kym Huynh of WordCast released from hospital, and does blogging with WordPress suck?

WordPress News

WordPress 2.7.1 Beta 1 Released: The first WordPress 2.7.1 Beta has been released and is undergoing testing. It is a maintenance release with 66 tickets fixed. Expect the final release within the next week or so.

WordPressMU Update Released: WordPressMU 2.7 is now available, the multi-user version of WordPress than runs WordPress.com and other blog networks. This new version includes the latest version of WordPress and a lot of bug fixes. It also includes the exciting announcement that Viper007bond’s admin bar has been added to the core to make it even easier to use.

BuddyPress News: BuddyPress 1.0 Beta 2 has been released and all components and Themes are available for download. Hundreds of fixes have been patched and fixed since the first beta and now will synch up with WordPressMU releases for the eagerly anticipated WordPressMU social media and networking WordPress Theme and Plugins.

Akismet Reports CAPTCHAs are dead: In “Akismet: Make Commenting Easy,” Akismet reports that CAPTCHAs are now officially dead and useless, and cite a report by ZDNet that a quarter of a million CAPTCHAs are easily broken by bot and human spammers every day. Modern comment spam fighting tools, like Akismet and Defensio, do the job without interferring in the interaction between a reader and their comment. read more

Joe the Plumber is now “Just Joe” as he joins Pajamas TV (PJTV) of Pajamas Media. To kick it off, Joe Wurzelbacher is in Washington, DC to cover the proposed stimulus package. He will also be participating at the inaugural Conservatism 2.0 conference (sponsored by PJTV) and held jointly with CPAC 2009 in Washington at the end of this month.

His “Just Joe” segment at PJTV will focus on issues of the day as explored and reported by (you guessed it right) himself. Joe has surely come a long way from being a “plumber.”

Pajamas Media continues to increase its emphasis in Pajamas TV (PJTV) for center-right and conservative viewers as the company cuts back on some of its blogger network. Just recently, the company announced that it is shutting down its ad network.