I was excited to find out that Google has released Google Sites, their on-line collaboration system aimed at helping teams work together. This site is a great starting point, but has a few serious flaws that keep it from being truly useful for team collaboration. I'm going to go over my analysis after a few hours of playing with the site, and discuss my thoughts for actual day to day business use.

Today's tip covers something that I've been doing for a while, but not everyone uses. Social media sites like MySpace and Facebook can be great for getting your name out. You can offer a lot of rich content that gets people excited about your brand. There are a few things that you can do though, to drive traffic from those sites over to yours. Today we're going to focus on how to get visitors from these types of sites, and how to convert those visitors to clients.

Besides our normal client work, we've been building out our Costa Rica SEO section to include even more information. We've also organized it a bit better to make sure that the most important info doesn't get overlooked. In the next few weeks our blog posts will be slower as we expand our marketing and web design sections with more information as well. Along with these we're planning on updating our Self SEO Help section with more user requested content. So, what we would like to know is: What type of SEO advice do our readers want to see? Leave a comment here, and tell us what type of SEO questions you have. We will then take all or some of these and add them to our Self SEO Help section. Until next time, take care and Pura Vida!

Over the weekend we released a major update to the web site expanding the information greatly to better answer the questions we were getting from visitors. I’m going to take a few minutes to cover some of the things we added and make sure that no one misses our special offers for January, which include $500 odd web site design and 10% off of all services for all of 2008! Take a look at what’s new and enjoy the savings.

Jaco, Costa Rica January 7, 2008 – Costa Rica's amazing atmosphere and people grab people's business and attention world wide. Web development and SEO firms flourish in this hot technology climate.

Why are so many big technology companies, such as Intel and Hewlett Packard, moving resources to the small tropical country of Costa Rica? It could be for the amazing climate, but it is most likely due to the amazing people. Costa Rica has the highest educated and most technology inclined populace in Central America. The promise of a well educated and trained work force has brought many big name companies here and more coming every day.

Many of the requirements for writing, whether it be for people or for search engines, are the same. The technical part, as in needing strong headlines, text that is easily scannable, or the proper usage of words and grammar is the same. It's the differences between the two that are more important in many ways. Search engines can't feel what you've written or enjoy it. They can rank it and say which is better, but they fail to understand what you've written. You can write a perfectly good article that a search engine ranks highly, but not please a single reader. Today's tips are for compelling people to read more and enjoy what you've written.

Getting a popular high PageRank site in your subject area to link to you can be difficult. There are probably plenty of them out there, but why would they link to you? Today we’re going to cover a very easy yet potentially powerful way to build strong links with little work. Actually the beauty of this tip is any time you don’t have something to write about, you can use it. It is guaranteed to give you something to say with out wracking your brain. You might even get a nice strong backlink for your web site. Since backlinks are critical for people finding your site naturally as well as in search engines it’s a double win.

Things have been quiet on the blog lately. That's partly due to the fact that my wife is due to give birth any time now, and I've been spending less time writing here, and more time with her. I have been writing a good deal though. In fact I'm nearing completion of a new free SEO guide that I hope to have completed in the next few days. This guide is designed to answer many questions that web site owners have, and is packed with tips and links. The goal of the guide is to teach you how to determine the most important tasks of basic SEO. We cover using analytics to track visitors, making sure search engines can see you site, checking your search engine rankings, choosing keywords, examining your competitors, and that's only the first two chapters! In this guide I skip the fluff and go straight to the meat. The type of meat you can use to grow huge web site traffic. I'm releasing the guide to my newsletter readers first, so if you haven't yet subscribed, check out the subscribe link at the bottom of the article. For now, here is a sample from the introduction. It includes tips for people who don't already own a web site, but want to start one. Enjoy!