Independent.ie, which publishes more than 300 articles daily online, has embraced SEO, greater use of RSS news feeds and made an investment in semantic Web technology. "Attention to SEO in 2008 meant that Independent.ie grew traffic considerably, and is consistently ranked at the top of search engine results pages," writes John Kennedy. SEO has helped to offer readers better contextual ads and content such as news articles, blogs and videos. The online newspaper has experienced a boost from SEO because it helps to "unlock more relevant information" by returning searched content to the top of queries, rather than …

Gaining inbound links is important to ecommerce Web sites, but purchasing them can be a risky move, according to Jeff Muendel, who offers the pros and cons of a service called InLinks.com. The service matches advertisers with bloggers who get paid to have links added to their blog content. "InLinks goes out and looks for requested textual terms and phrases already existing in the content of member blog sites, and then offers to turn those terms into anchor text with an active link for a fee," he writes. After all, "links are like votes" for Web sites in …

It's never been easy SEOing video sites. Although Google and Yahoo are working with Adobe to crawl Flash content like SWF files, limitations exist for publishing Flash content on sites and how engines crawl externally loaded files in Flash movies, such as xml, txt, and other SWF files. Glenn Gabe provides pointers. He recommends using alternative html content when publishing Flash movies and covers in detail how to accomplish this using SWFObject 2.1, the latest version of the JavaScript library. This is Part I or a two-part series. You can access the other part through this post. In …

Matt Story think brands are not taking advantage of opportunities in video game advertising. He arrived at this epiphany after spending Thanksgiving Day not becoming a couch potato, but rather "a couch marketer." He spent the entire day checking out "console user interfaces, magazines, Web sites, and dynamic in-game advertising in between endless rounds of leftover green beans and mac and cheese." Story believes increased pressure on small budgets to deliver better results shouldn't stop marketers from reaching out to consumers through video game ads. He reminds us to align brands with valuable content, be careful when using …

If you are wondering why companies are investing in SEO during the worst economic downturn in years -- read Rand Fishkin's post. For starters, Fishkin believes the Web outperforms other sales, paid search drives interest in SEO, and marketing departments are in a brainstorming cycle. And, when companies check their Web analytics, "not surprisingly, search engine referrals with their exceptional targeting and intent-matching are ranking high on the list." More evidence that SEO is holding steady: Fishkin fielded seven calls from venture capital firms about investments in SEO companies they are contemplating, including wondering if SEOmoz would consider taking …

Nicholas Carlson lifts your spirits by blogging on a conversation he had with some local Web designers in a coffee shop. Fresh from a meeting with a customer, they say their business is doing OK and note that "another good business right now is search engine optimization." It's not a long post, but provides some good news for SEOers during uncertain times.

While no small business is recession-proof, SEO can provide "unparalleled" return on investment through targeted Web site tracking and analytics. Hiring an in-house SEO expert might not fit into the budget during a recession, so Mike Tekula provides book recommendations to help get you and employees up to speed. Don't make SEO an afterthought. Tekula suggests methods to choose basic keywords that reflect consumers' needs. He also admits pulling the SEO job in-house requires careful research, planning and execution, but with the right training and guidance you can manage the work.

Increase traffic to your Web site by building a Twitter landing page. You can expand on Twitter's 140-character limitation and link to your Web site, which will provide the biggest SEO benefit from doing so. Nick Stamoulis suggests optimizing the landing page by adding Twitter- and niche-related keywords, rather than just your name, to gain search traffic. Add a "Follow Me" button on the landing page to lure search traffic to your other Web sites, too. Still don't get it? In the post, Stamoulis provides an example.

According to Greg Meyers, Columbia Pictures' campaign for the movie "2012," due out next year, fails to use search correctly. While visitors who check out the film's trailer are told to "Google 2012," those who do won't find anything very specific about the movie -- "especially since there is no organic or paid listing that is part of a coordinated strategy with the movie trailer," writes Meyers. Meyers works up a sample PPC campaign for the movie -- and suggests the studio put some punch behind efforts with Web analytics and the use of long-tail keywords in the trailer.

Rae Hoffman provides a "not technical" explanation of hooks, how you make them and why you need them, compliments of Chris Pearson, the author of the Thesis Theme, a publishing and design framework for WordPress. Thesis now runs on "hooks," which Pearson describes as similar to an application program interface (API), which provides a set of basic Web commands used to add, subtract and customize functions. Hooks are various parts of your blog, while functions are the content appearing within them, according to Hoffman. Each section in the blog post has a hook. Headers are controlled by thesis_hook_header, …