The Internet revolution is responsible for two of dumbest names in business. The first is "Web." Try telling your grandmother what you do for a living with that name. The next is "blog." Most people have heard about blogs (short for Web logs). There are millions of them - most with little commercial value, but many with significant social, political or cultural merit.

However, that is changing. The business community is beginning to embrace blogs for their marketing and commercial potential. Business blogs that are well-written, focused on topics relevant to customers, employees, and interest groups are becoming new company "voice."

Blogs offer a new way to communicate with clients, potential clients, and any interested parties. Popular forms of business communication include press releases, newsletters and e-newsletters, Web sites and mailings. But these are all one-way communications. Blogs offer opportunity to interact and create a dialogue about a product or service.

Recently, e-mail newsletters helped "push" a business message to an "opt-in" audience. But spam filters, which battle increased junk e-mailings, may prevent a message from reaching its intended target. Today, people come directly to blogs for information. There is a twist. They subscribe to RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feeds, which notify a subscriber's news aggregator (like Bloglines) that blog has new posts.

Business blogs can be simple, light-hearted stories, straightforward informational articles or brief commentaries about news and issues. Each opens an opportunity for discussion about your product or service.

Wordtracker: The first and most important step in any search engine positioning campaign is identifying keywords for which you should optimize your site. WordTracker's keyword research service is only one on Internet that will provide a comprehensive and powerful database of most popular keywords in your industry. It has features that all other keyword research tools lack - for instance, it will help you identify related keywords that you would otherwise never have thought of, it differentiates between singular and plural keywords and tells you which version is more popular, it helps you identify popular mis-spelled keywords (which generally have very little competition) in your industry etc. It has a free trial version which will help you identify a few keywords. However, we recommend that you subscribe to its paid service as otherwise, you will not be able to discover quite a few keywords that can turn out to be extremely valuable to you. You can find more information on WordTracker at http://www.1stSearchRanking.com/t.cgi?5043&wordtracker/

Optilink: Link popularity has quickly become one of most important factors that influence your rankings in search engines. What is important is not only number of sites linking to you, but quality and relevancy of sites that are linking to you. If you are trying to improve link popularity of your site, until now, there has been no easy way of checking quality and relevancy of sites that are linking to you or quality and relevancy of sites that you are thinking of asking for links from. You could have done it manually, but it would take a tremendous amount of time. However, a new software product called Optilink automates this process to a large extent. In addition to doing an excellent job in helping you determine quality of sites that already link to you or might link to you, it also does following:

i) analyzes link structures of your top ranking competitors and tells you why they rank well, so that you can emulate same tactics that your top ranking competitors are using.

ii) allows you to do "what if" analysis - it tells you what sort of rankings you can expect if you adopt a particular linking strategy.

iii) monitor sites that you have exchanged links with to ensure that they are still linking to you and are linking to you way you want them to.