By: Loren Baker | Source: searchenginejournal.com

Cameron Olthuis announced this morning that ACS is launching a new personalized social media search tool, Serph, which will let users find what “other people are saying on the web right now.”

Serph, in limited beta testing, seems to be a bit different from Technorati or BlogPulse in terms of total social media coverage. If you’d like to check it out, go to the Serph.com site and apply to privately beta test Serph.

Desired Serph Features:

1. Social Media Differentiation : I can search for blog search results anywhere and a lot of the searches resulted in Sphere or Bloglines results. Ideally, I’d like to be able to search for bookmark or social news mentions only.

2. Social Media Comparison : How can I see where my social media optimization or marketing campaign is paying off? Serph should offer the service of drilling down and comparing forms of social media coverage… such as bookmarks only vs. social news only…. like del.icio.us, furl and MyWeb vs. Digg, Reddit and Newsvine.

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By: Chris Taylor | Source: selfseo.com

Some of you may have already experienced writer’s, or in this case blogger’s, block. This is when you can’t seem to start blogging anything worthwhile, sometimes not even a single word’s worth.

How could this happen when you were so good at blogging before? Why is it that you can’t get one word written? And the most frustrating thing of all: the more time you spend thinking about blogging, the less able you are to start your next project! Is there any cure? Luckily, there are a few things you can try.

Visiting other people’s blogs is a good start. Read through your favorite ones, or do a random blog search and see what gets turned up. Reading what other people have to say can spark your own creativity and send you over the hump of blogger’s block. Leave some comments to get you started; you might be able to expand on their ideas, and sometimes you can track back to your own blog. Looking at your blog inbox can help, too, as there might be a question or comment there that can get you started.

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Source: webconfs.com

If you’ve read anything about or studied Search Engine Optimization, you’ve come across the term "backlink" at least once. For those of you new to SEO, you may be wondering what a backlink is, and why they are important. Backlinks have become so important to the scope of Search Engine Optimization, that they have become some of the main building blocks to good SEO. In this article, we will explain to you what a backlink is, why they are important, and what you can do to help gain them while avoiding getting into trouble with the Search Engines.

What are "backlinks"? Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Also knows as Inbound links (IBL’s). The number of backlinks is an indication of the popularity or importance of that website. Backlinks are important for SEO because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query.

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