The debate on whether to use white hat (persuade) vs. black hat (manipulate) SEO tactics has been going on for years. Peter Meyers goes a step further to analyze the broader issues of marketing ethics. He lays out five scenarios and analyzes intent, wrapping it up with suggestions on why it may matter.

Nasim Jafarzadeh serves up some quick tips on optimizing sites for local search. Looking at local SEO from a different perspective, Jafarzadeh provides tricks and tips to help optimize content on Web sites, making it more SEO-friendly when searchers search for information on local businesses. The insight could help content gain higher organic rankings.

Bill Slawski tells us there's no denying that Google has publishers running scared about quality scores. While he gives us a list of attributes Google considers in rankings, he looks at other possibilities that could contribute to quality scores. Slawski points to a Google patent application published last year. Analyzing the details, he provides insight into how this different approach might work.

Selecting keywords, tracking keyword ranking trends, optimizing pages, and syndicating through social channels are several of the eight steps Erez Barak explains in a long detailed post that shows us how to optimize blog posts. Barak reminds us that SEO is a gradual process that requires time and patience.

Bill Slawski wonders if Google plans to pursue Chillaxn's social application patent. The Mountain View, Calif. tech company does not own Chillaxn, although it has an indirect tie to the company through acquisitions and inventors. Slawski tells us the Chillaxn patent presents a way to track information about first-level contacts in social networks, or friends, and second- and higher-level contacts, or friends of friends, and how they use the Web.

What ranks highest isn't always best, reviews and customer feedback are becoming more popular, and having a good online reputation can help indirectly to accrue more links. Julie Joyce provides insight on getting listed in a variety of sites such as Google Places, Bing Local, and LinkedIn. She also tells us about alert tools that can help keep track of mentions online.

Blekko will power Flipboard's application search, the two companies announced Tuesday. Jennifer Van Grove explains the deal, the reasons and benefits, and brings us up to date on the number of queries it powers, as well as traffic to the Web site.

Those searching for nutritional information on the Internet can find it on Foodily, but Tim Carman asks how good it is. Carman tells us about a search function that calculates the nutritional values for every recipe it fetches from the Web. Foodily engineers built in a feed from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's national nutrient database, so each recipe features calculations on total calories, calories per gram, saturated fat, unsaturated fat, carbohydrates, sugar, protein, cholesterol, sodium and fiber.

For the geeks out there, Klint Finley tells us about the semantic Web company Sindice. This week the company released SIREn, a new semantic search plugin for Apache Lucene built on top of Apache Solr. He points to Sindice's announcement to explain the benefits and principles found in the Web search engine.

Holding on to the slightest change search engines make, Giles Turnbull tells us about Bing's addition of new Facebook features to "bring the Friend Effect to search." The plug-in lets friends see what other friends "like." It also ties in geographic data about where Facebook friends live.