Boo! Did I scare you? I didn’t think so, but today is Halloween so why not dedicate a month’s worth of links to the eve of all hallows. Nothing below should scare you. You may agree with what’s on the other side of the links or you may disagree, but there’s no reason to fear clicking any of them.

Plenty to get to and more at my Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn profiles.

Now on with the show and if you’re in the U.S. remember to vote on Tuesday.

Social Media

The election here in the U.S. is changing social media. More and more political conversations can be found and more and more mainstream media types are paying attention. Great for us, but that doesn’t help the sites become profitable. Enter Google with open social and some new patents to potentially mine social profiles for better ad targeting. People are paying attention and the money may be coming, but don’t overlook the Achilles heel of different types of social sites.

• How The US Election Is Changing Social Media, Online Rep Management & The World
• Social networks are Open for profiling
• The Achilles Heels of the Social Web

Micro blogging is still all about Twitter even as sites like Plurk attempt to take the mantle. Twitter is going mainstream and you need to take a look at it. Why? Maybe four months of thoughts from someone who used to think Twitter stupid will convince you.

What? You’re already using Twitter. How about some tools then to make the service more useful. Ok, you’re convinced and have enough tools. So are you conversing or broadcasting? Or are you so advanced in your Twitter skills that you practice mind control?

• Twitter - Shoemoney’s Thoughts After 4 Months Of Use
• Why You Need To Be Looking At Twitter
• 25+ Incredibly Useful Twitter Tools and Firefox Plugins
• Twitter- To Converse or to Broadcast-THAT is the Question
• 3 Forbidden Twitter Mind Control Tricks to Explode Your Marketing

Digg banned your profile, you say. What kind of karma is that? Are you sure you didn’t do something to deserve it? Maybe you were pushing your commercial site a little too hard. Sorry about the ban, but at least the rest of us can learn something from your troubles. Maybe some who haven’t been banned are feeling a little naughty and looking to boost their profile into that space you just vacated.

• Were the Digg bans a dose of karma?
• Have a Commercial Website? Then Digg Won’t Like You
• What the Numerous Digg Bans Can Teach Us about Social Media (Companies)
• 5 Naughty Tips To Boost Your Digg Profile - Part I

Don’t worry about that Digg ban. There’s still StumbleUpon and it’s not too late to learn the most important things to do if you want to have success there. Are three things too much? Then just skip to the most important thing. Self submission isn’t limited to StumbleUpon, but should you do it? It may hurt you if you do. Then again is self submitting really all that bad?

• StumbleUpon : 3 Most Important Things To Keep In Mind
• The Most Important Thing on StumbleUpon: Do Not Pose as, Be a Legit User
• 7 Ways Self Submission Hurts Yourself on Social Media
• Is Self Submission Really that Bad?

Blogging

If you were starting over as a blogger with a beginner’s mind what advice would you offer your beginning self? Would you offer tips for starting out part time? Would you teach yourself to write better headlines? Could you and your beginner self occupy the same space-time without tearing apart the fabric of the universe?

• What Suggestions Would You Offer a Beginning Blogger?
• 16 Critical Tips for Building a Blog Part-Time
• How To: Write an Internet-Ready News Headline

Do you view your readers as a market or as a community? Think relationships before sales and think community before market. Then look for ways to build your community. It takes a community to build a blog or raise a child or something like that.

• Blogging: Markets vs Communities
• 25 Ways to Build Your Community

Before you begin marketing think strategy. There’s a lot of competition out there and you need to have a plan. With strategy in place you can look to get featured in mass media or drive easy traffic to your blog. Other bloggers will be important to connect with, especially if Microsoft has its way and gives links from blogs a boost.

• Why Bloggers Need To Think About Marketing Strategy
• How to Get Featured on the New York Times, CNN, CNET and Newsweek
• 7 Easy Ways to Drive Traffic to a Blog
• Do Search Engines Love Blogs? Microsoft Explores an Algorithm to Increase PageRank for Pages Linked to by Blogs

With strategy and community in place and the New York Times and the blogosphere linking to you, it’s time to make some money advertising. Which ad server will you use? And now that the money is flowing in you can afford a better server. Do you know how to move your blog to its new host?

• Ad Marketplaces and Ad Servers for Bloggers
• How to transfer a blog from host to host

WordPress

Are you geared up for WordPress 2.7 yet? New look, new features. There’s a lot to like. Even if you’re not geared up for yet another upgrade it’s still a good idea. One reason WP gets a new version is to close holes that have been discovered and to make it more secure. No matter what version you use or will use you’ll probably want to optimize WordPress as best you can.

• Get geared up for WordPress 2.7
• New Wordpress Hacking Strategy Using Cloaking to Target Google IP Addresses
• Ultimate Guide to WordPress SEO - META Descriptions

Ready to build your site completely with WordPress? It can be used as a full CMS you know. You’ll want to design and develop your own theme and consider some of the trends the popular blogs are using. Enhance your design with jQuery, tweak your navigation a bit and you’ll be all set.

• WordPress as a CMS: How To Think About Building a Website With WordPress
• Top 10 Tutorials for Developing WordPress Themes
• 5 Trends of Popular WordPress Blogs- Part1
• Enhance your Blog Design with JQuery
• 10 Ways to Improve Navigation in WordPress

Categories or tags, pages or posts. Which should you use? Whatever you decide you may want to show off how many subscribers you have. You can do it without needing FeedBurner’s help. Did you know there are many different ways to display content in WordPress? You can even change what gets displayed under different conditions using context includes. And if you prefer not to do your own coding you can create custom content types with the Flutter plugin.

• Blog Pages, Posts, Categories, and Tags… HELP!
• Categories vs Tags
• Showing off your FeedBurner subscribers
• Context Includes
• Creating Custom Content Type with Flutter Plugin

Design And Development

Dreams can come true again, When everything old is new again. Could be what explains the retro and vintage look in modern design. More likely it’s the reaction against the web 2.0 style. Colorful is still in and can be a good source of inspiration. Art is another great source of inspiration for design. Have a look at some stunning images.

• Retro and Vintage In Modern Web Design
• 25 Beautifully Colorful Websites - Part 3
• 50 Stunning Images From Flickr Under Creative Commons

Web design matters. People will start making decisions about you the moment they come in contact with your site or worse in the agonizing moments they wait for your site to load. Logos matter too. They can communicate a lot and speak for your brand. If your site isn’t cutting it or your logo is saying the wrong words it’s time to think about a redesign. Just remember to include the key elements all top sites should have.

• Why Web Design Matters
• Logo design process of Scroll magazine
• Behind the Scenes of the AssociaDirect Redesign
• 15 Key Elements All Top Web Sites Should Have

At some point your design will likely take a trip through Photoshop. Will your toolbox be ready? Does your toolbox include a color mixer for choosing a color scheme? Have you given any thought to how comments on your blog will look? Do you know how they can look? And there’s no doubt images will play some kind of role in your design. Where will you get those images from?

• Photoshop Toolbox
• 15 Useful Color Mixers For Effective Designing
• 37 Ways to Design the Comments Form
• 30 Free Stock Photo Sites: Ultimate Collection

Sooner or later your design is going to ask to be turned into an actual site. Do you really need to use CSS? Can’t you stick with that table-based layout? Sure you can, well, sort of. It’s actually still CSS. And since you’re using CSS how well do you really understand positioning. Do you know your absolutes from your relatives from your fixed? Even if you know, how well do the browsers know. Time to get out those cross browser fixes and tools for testing.

• The Return of Table-Based Layout (Well, Sort Of)
• Absolute, Relative, Fixed Positioning: How Do They Differ?
• Cross Browser CSS Fixes, Tools, and Hacks
• 10 Helpful Resources for Cross Browser Testing

You should be able to get your CSS to display cross browser, but sometimes a little JavaScript is needed to fix those browser headaches. JavaScript can do much more when folded into Ajax. You can add effects like search suggest or full featured shopping carts. And you can’t beat 20 earth-shattering tutorials from one of the best sources for tutorials. Ok, they may not litterally shatter the earth, but they are worth reading.

• Using Javascript to Fix 12 Common Browser Headaches
• 20 Excellent AJAX Effects You Should Know
• 50 Excellent AJAX Tutorials
• The Twenty Most Earth-Shattering Tutorials on NETTUTS!

Link Building

Before you can move on to advanced concepts of link building you need a firm grasp of the fundamentals. With a basic understanding in place you can then develop an overall strategy. Directories might become one tactic in your arsenal and if so you’ll want to know how to identify the good from the bad. And perhaps most importantly you want to understand how to measure the value you’re getting so you can readjust both strategy and tactics.

• SEO Link Building Fundamentals
• The 3 Strategies of Link Building - Why & How You Build Links
• Link Building 101: How to Evaluate the Power of Directories
• How to Measure the Value of a Blog Link

Follow, nofollow, dofollow, don’t follow, let’s call the whole thing off. Are there benefits to PageRank Sculpting? Is PR Sculpting worth the effort? The answer might depend on whether your site is a Ferrari or a Gremlin. Since a followed link is preferable to one that isn’t followed should you turn your blog into a dofollow blog? Will it increase the quantity of comments on your blog at the expense of quality? No matter which side you lean on the nofollow/dofollow fence, one thing is certain. Internal linking does matter.

• PageRank Sculpting: Parsing the Value and Potential Benefits of Sculpting PR with Nofollow
• NoFollow and PageRank Sculpting is it Worth the Effort
• The self-defeating pursuit of dofollow blogs
• Developing Internal Links and Authority With SEO

Link algorithms change. Today’s best tactics may be useless tomorrow. What works today could hurt tomorrow. Will the link you turn on today return the favor? Will it still return that favor next month?

Do you ask for links in emails? Should you? Is there really anything wrong with the practice or is it simply the implementation that’s awry? When you have control over the anchor text in a link how many words and characters do you use? Might be more important to know the answer than you realize? Maybe you’re tired of all these link building specifics and prefer to let links into your site grow naturally.

• Link Algorithm Changes
• When You Turn A Link On, Does It Return The Favor?
• The Art of Pitching - What’s Wrong With Link Building Email Requests?
• Keep Anchor Text Links Under 55 Characters In Length?
• 30 Ways to Get Links Naturally & Stop Link Building

SEO

You have 5 goals when optimizing any page on your site. Do you know what they are? If you don’t you could always try a little Q&A with Google directly. Maybe it will help clear things up. Of course Google can’t be entirely up front about everything so myths will often prevail. They may not always be right, but that’s no reason not to learn from your fellow SEOs.

• The 5 Goals Of A Search Optimized Page - SEO 101
• Google Q&A from Webmaster Chat
• Myth Busting 101: Bold statements
• 6 Lessons from the Search Engineers at SMX East

You can never have too much knowledge of keywords. Most any guide that comes your way is probably worth a look, though some guides are more comprehensive than others. Keyword Discovery is not enough. You’ll still need to measure the effectiveness of your keywords and go beyond the research to apply what you’ve learned. You can leverage keywords through older posts and then start the research anew by mining the conversation on social media sites.

• Comprehensive Guide to Keyword Research, Selection & Organization, Part I
• Effective Keyword Discovery and Traffic-on-Investment
• Beyond SEO: Applications of Keyword Research
• Quick SEO Tip – Leveraging on high traffic keywords through older posts
• Buzz Pocket Mining Tutorial: An Intersection of Keyword Research & Social Media

How do you know when your SEO is done? Well it’s never done. You need to keep measuring where you are to adjust for where you want to go. You can use a checklist to make sure you’ve covered your bases, use advanced search operators to explore the current situation, and even spy a bit on your competitors without getting into trouble.

Not everyone has the same love of SEO tools of course. Fortunately the community is happy to share it’s opinion. And while tools can tell you where things are now and have been in the past, patents can give you some ideas about where things might be going.

• The Gigantic SEO Client Technical Checklist
• How To Diagnose Your Site with Google Advanced Search
• Yahoo! Site Explorer - A review of Yahoo! Site Explorer
• 14 Tools to Legally Spy On Your Competition
• What Does Sphinn Think About SEO Tools & Software?
• Google Patents

So what should you measure with all the tools you’ve collected? Is PageRank the ultimate measure of online influence or is it a horrible measure of that influence. The reality is probably somewhere in between.

• Page Rank is the Ultimate Measure of Online Influence
• Is PageRank the Ultimate Measure of Online Influence?
• Steve’s Wrong: Pagerank is a Horrible Measure of Online Influence

Business And Marketing

What’s step one in starting a business? A sound business plan, of course. It should be obvious, but sadly too many businesses neglect this necessary first step and fail. It’s not the only reason some businesses fail, though. There are at least 5 reasons your affiliate marketing business might not succeed.

Some do succeed so how about some inspirational stories about how they did. And while it may sound counter intuitive sometimes the way to end up with more is to give everything away.

• Step 1: Profit.
• Reasons You Fail at Affiliate Marketing
• 10 Inspirational “How I Did It” Stories
• How I Gave Away Everything And Ended Up With More

Hand in hand with a solid business plan is market research. Where do you go to learn more about an industry. You might stop off at the magazine stand as part of your research or you might find the top sites in the industry to learn about the market.

• How to Use Magazines as a Market Research Tool For Your Sites
• How to Find the Top Sites in a Niche

There’s a psychology to selling. People make decisions emotionally, sometimes out of a fear of losing something they have. You want to persuade people instead of forcing them to see your point of view. Make them realize the truth on their own instead of telling it to them directly. Stories can be powerful persuaders and if you do everything right you’ll be consistently driving people toward closing the sale.

• 12 Tips for “Psychological Selling”
• Fear of Losing: Using Competitive Instincts to Your Advantage
• Seven Ways To Be More Persuasive
• Cause People to Realize the Truth, Rather than Just Telling it to Them
• How to Write a Story That Sells
• Website Checklist: Getting To The Close

It’s getting closer to the witching hour. Day has turned to dusk and the night is beginning to fall, bringing with it ghosts and ghouls, witches and goblins. And maybe a few late night trick or treaters. Break out the big kitchen knife and carve up a pumpkin or slice into a piece of pumpkin pie.

Enjoy the weekend and happy reading.

Popularity: 36%

The following guest post was written by Jerry Low of Web Hosting Secret Revealed.

I bet you had already heard about Squidoo.

No? Well, in this case you are losing lots of good publicity opportunities for your blog, website, or business.
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Popularity: 15%

You may have noticed it’s been a little quiet around here lately. TheVanBlog has become something of ghost town (or maybe it’s a ghost blog) in recent weeks. Other things have kept me from writing, which I’ll get to momentarily, but first I’ll put the offer out for guest posts. If you’re interested in writing a post here send me an email.
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Popularity: 17%

The closest I’ve ever come to poverty was when I first moved to Colorado. I left New York with very little and arrived in a new city without a job, without a place to live, and without a friend in site.

It didn’t take too long to find all three, but still I went without more than with for close to a year. I lost more than 30 pounds during the winter because I couldn’t afford to eat as often as I should have. I picked up change off the ground one month in order to feed myself for the weekend. Some days the only reason I was able to eat at all was thanks to the charity of others.

Often I woke up not knowing where my next meal would come from and yet I have never known poverty.
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Popularity: 16%

This Month In SEO almost wasn’t as my laptop decided last week was a good time to call it a day for good. Fortunately the laptop’s hard drive didn’t agree. Should we dedicate the post to Steven Jobs and my new Macbook? Maybe fall would make for a good dedication as the season’s recently changed.

Even better would be the Fall Classic. Baseball playoffs started a few hours ago. There’s only one October and a seamhead like me has to dedicate most anything this time of year to the greatest game every invented.

You know the drill by now. Lots of links below and even more at my Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn profiles. And once more I’ll throw a little love to my new Small Business Forum. I hope you’ll join the conversation there.

Now on with the show.
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Popularity: 63%

One of the more common questions people ask about WordPress is how to highlight the current page in the main navigation. It’s a nice effect that aids usability by giving your visitors a cue as to where they are within your site. It’s also surprisingly easy to achieve.
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Popularity: 31%

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results for targeted keywords.
—Wikipedia

A few months ago Shoemoney posted to declare that SEO has no future. While the post was most likely nothing more than an attempt at linkbait, the reaction was interesting. Your view of whether Shoe’s post was right or wrong probably had a lot more to do with your definition of SEO than anything Jeremy said in the post.

The post takes a narrow view of SEO and in doing so is generally correct. The SEO Shoe is talking about is going away, but most SEOs would define what they do in much broader terms and when you consider the more liberal definition, SEO isn’t going anywhere.
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Popularity: 28%

How focused is your blog? Would a regular reader be able to reasonable guess what your next post might be about without seeing the post title? Are you giving your readers something to expect and anticipate to bring them back tomorrow and next week?
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Popularity: 30%

Summer afternoon - summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language.
—Henry James

I wonder how many 100 degree days Henry James lived through. I’ve experienced one too many the last couple of months. Still why not dedicate This Month In SEO to the end of summer. By the time we met again the leaves will be turning and fall will bring with it cooler air. A special shout out to my brother David who celebrates a birthday every August.

As always there’s much to get to and much more at my various social media profiles. Delicious, StumbleUpon, and Sphinn. And if you’re looking for a little more in depth conversation you can catch me at my new Small Business Forum.

Ok, enough about me. Enjoy the links and on with the show.
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Popularity: 63%

photo credit: Christina Snyder

How do you define SEO? If you are an SEO, where does your work begin and end? What parts of the overall business process are under your control and what parts belong to the domain of another industry?

Last week Dave wrote a post on the evolution of SEO, which aimed to clear up some myths like the SEO is dead conversation that pops up all the time. Good stuff from Dave as usual.

The post caused a little dissension at Sphinn mostly revolving around this statement.

When did conversions become the domain of the SEO puzzle? Sure, it is the end goal of the client and we obviously want to get targeted traffic, but it IS NOT the responsibility of the optimizer.

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Popularity: 32%