Monday December 29th Roundup

This is our first week with everyone back on task. Shorter round-up, again, since most of our staff has been away.

• We start this week with SearchEngineLand I’ve been saying for a while: you need social media marketing. While I think they’re wrong on a few points (I don’t buy that the era of the little guy ranking well is coming to an end), their central point is right on: SEO in its classic forms is changing, and content and engagement are finally becoming the center-point to internet marketing (as they always should have been).
• New to the round-up, PluginHQ has a simple but clever means of increasing RSS subscribers: point to your RSS button. Doing this gained him a 10% subscriber rate for the next 300 visitors. While the article is pretty low level, it is a wonderful reminder of how simply reminding your viewers that an option is there and pointing them towards it can make a huge difference, even if over all you are just reminding them of something they already know.
• The last in our SEO section for the week, SearchEngineJournal reminds us that internet readers are still lazy, and still love lists. I can attest to this, two of our best performing blog posts are lists. No wonder so many authors are misanthropes.

• NETTUTS this week has a nice article on CSS blueprints. They provide some nice guidelines to implementing CSS blueprints. Fantastic for beginners and even experienced developers who just need t osave some time.
• Another NETTUTS, this time on creating secure PHP applications. Basic stuff but good for PHP neophytes like me.

• Eric Peterson of WebAnalyticsDemystified has put up a webcast of his conference with Coremetrics. Included is some juicy data on the recession proof status of web analytics, which we have talked about with him before.
• iMarc.net has an interesting comparison of traffic numbers from server side Urchin analytics and from Google Analytics. Interestingly he sides with Google Analytics, claiming that they show ‘more important’ information.

• Wired reports that Amazon.com has had the best holiday season ever. I’m guessing that in the recession more people are trying to get better deals, and are turning to online stores for it. Apparently they had a 44% rise over 2007. My god.