if your blog is typical it’s nice–clean lines, easy to understand navigation, and useful content. But it doesn’t do much to distinguish itself from the millions of other blogs out there.

If you want to really stand out from the crowd, you have to get some kind of a buzz going. The ways to do this are:

• Write about something outrageous before anyone else does (like Britney shaving her head for example)
• Write something so useful that millions of people will want to bookmark it and link to it
• Offer readers something for free that will keep them coming back for more. Examples of this might be software, such as how much is your blog worth, or an offer to do something for a reader–something they’d find really useful. The sky’s the limit really–the point is you gotta offer them something they really want.

One important thing: a blog is only as important as its comments, so encourage people. Ask them to comment, and give them link love. Make sure they realize that you don’t employ no-follow. So many people are doing that these days and it doesn’t make sense when you’re trying to establish a blog. WordPress actually has a plugin called LinkLove which I employ to help in this direction.Try and get a few good incoming links. I got a good .edu link, and I’ve been trying to find the wonderful little blog post that helped me to do that. when I track it down I’ll pass it on to you.

Try and get people to favorite you on Technorati too. That can really make a difference. Make sure you include your little icons so readers can write you up to Digg, Delicous and all the others.

Perhaps more than any other industry, search engine optimization is an area that’s particularly susceptible to ‘myths’ that have grown up around basic guiding precepts even some professionals have latched on to when creating their SEO strategies.

One major reason for this is because SEO itself has undergone multiple profound transformations since it first became an entity.

Take search engines for example. As Wil Reynolds points out in this informative video, there was a time when professionals would actually create a web page for each of the different search engines. That obviously doesn’t hold true today (thank goodness).

Myth # One

The most prevalent SEO myth of all is that SEO consultants are all scammers, or use ‘Black Hat’ techniques, to use the industry term. Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority of us regard our integrity very highly, and go to an enormous amount of trouble not just to be seen to be doing the right thing, but to give an honest and valuable service with a value that often far exceeds the actual fee we charge.

Some SEO People to Trust (both for their integrity and their know-how):

Rand Fishkin

StuntDubl AKA Todd Malicoat

Sugarrae Hoffman

Graywolf AKA Michael Gray

And of course, me!:)

Myth # Two

You will hear that META tags are totally unnecessary. This is only partly true. You really need your META description tag to get noticed in a lineup of SERPS. Word it wrongly and you’ll go unnoticed. Word it skillfully and you’ll win a lot of clickthrus.

Myth # Three

Another myth that I hear quite a lot is that if you build a page around one specific keyphrase, you’ll create a winner. About the only thing you’ll be creating here is an exceedingly boring page that couldn’t possible convey useful information as web pages should. In addition, you could be seen to be spamming the engines which is a disaster.

In my experience, optimizing for three-or-so carefully-chosen phrases should do it. And here we come to choice of keywords. You simply can’t be too picky here. It’s worth going to a lot of trouble to make sure you’re targeting the right market and picking EXACTLY the right phrases. In the ballpark doesn’t do it, because you’ll be consigning yourself in with dozens of other websites, which may or may not be offering exactly what you do. If you are getting traffic that’s not exactly matched with what you sell, you’re wasting your time and you’ll suffer for it with less-than-lustrous rankings too.

There are two reasons for this.

First, as I’ve already stated, you need highly-targeted traffic so when a visitor lands on your site, he or she says ‘wow this is exactly what I was looking for.’ Second, if you haven’t done your homework and your visitors are not happy, then the search engines sure as heck won’t be happy. And if they’re not happy they’ll consign you to the bottom of a search. This concept is so central to good SEO that it can stand repeating again and again because there are obviously a lottt of people out there who just don’t ‘get it.’

Myth # Four

SEO is a ‘set it and forget it’ kind of operation. This is so not true. No matter how much work your SEO consultant does to begin with, you will need to keep an eye on things. SEO, when properly done, takes a great deal of time initially. But the rewards are great if you’re lucky enough to get someone who knows what they’re doing. It’s important to remember that the search engines are constantly moving the goal posts for us, so we have to adapt our SEO campaigns to reflect these changes. In addition, life online is and always has been fluid. What’s relevant today bears little or no resemblance to the eCommerce environment that prevailed in the 1990s.

Myth # Five

SEO is too expensive. You can look at it like that if you like. Or you can acknowledge that even the best PayPerClick campaign (which will likely cost you thousands or even tens of thousands, and is at best a temporary fix) will never match the results of organic ranking. Organic ranking will have a profound effect on your online image and effectiveness. So a professional SEO campaign will produce results that will go on and on, and to a certain extent gain their own momentum with time. It’s sort of like being a celebrity: once you’re famous everything you do is of interest. Once you have a good standing with the search engines you will continue to get traffic even if you don’t do a thing. However, to continue to be competitive, and to keep up with your increase in traffic, you need to tweak your site on a regular basis.

Some years ago I first made the switch from Internet Explorer to Firefox. My main reason at the time was increasing frustration at IE for interrupting the flow of my work: It would keep hanging and I would have to close everything down.

Over time I started to realize that my SEO colleagues or people who work in web design were far more likely to be using Firefox than people who weren’t doing something connected with ‘the business.’

So it was with great interest this morning that I read Rand Fishkin’s post over at SEOmoz.com.

“I believe Firefox’s actual market share is still well under 15%, yet it’s almost 60% here at SEOmoz. This makes the 92% of search referrals from Google (and the 15%+ of 1920 wide screen resolutions) no surprise either. We attract a very different kind of Internet crowd than most websites.”

Interesting: from this we can more-or-less conclude that somewhere near 60 percent of SEO consultants use Firefox.

Let’s take a look at some of the reasons for changing to Firefox:

• Far fewer bugs–I’m ashamed to admit this because you’re not supposed to, but I only restart my laptop about twice a week, as opposed to about 10 times a day with IE!
• Tab browsing: this is huge for me. I know that IE has the feature with Vista, but I still prefer the way that Firefox does it.
• Integrated search engine toolbars: this is also very useful for me. I have the Google toolbar for Firefox, the Yahoo toolbar for Firefox, and even the Stumble toolbar for firefox. Really makes my work a lot easier.
• Total control over popups–they’re another huge waste of time when you have work to do.
• You can import your bookmarks so no need to worry about that.
• Firefox is fully customizable so you can put your own personal stamp on your browsing experience.
• Now this is huge; most of the viruses that you can get browsing only affect IE: Firefox is simply so much safer.

There are other reasons, but these are the most important for me. I’d be interested to hear what other SEOs think about it: what are your favorite reasons for switching to Firefox?