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As a fan and user of Apple products, I closely followed the introduction and launch of the iPhone 4 as well as all the problems that ensued. These problems, which I'll get to in a second, became a PR mess for Apple. When Apple came around to respond, they made an argument based almost exclusively on data. Their approach to responding fit well into our philosophy of a company about being data-driven in as many decisions as possible. Likewise, the opposing argument made against Apple was representative of a much different approach. One based more on emotion and sensationalism than actual fact.

I stopped to get coffee this morning on my drive into town, and watched with fascination as another customer stood and poured packet after packet of sugar into his coffee. He was grabbing two and three at a time, and by my estimate there were 30 or more packets in his medium sized cup by the time he finished several minutes later. He actually requested a spoon to mix the slurry, since the provided plastic stirrers simply bent double.

iPhone, Incredibles, Smartphones, oh my! Smartphone gadgets seem to be one of the hottest items you can buy these days. Mobile internet searchers, social networking and location based games are all part of this shift to greater mobile usage.

I was looking around for a nifty way of examining load issues on clients sites. I wanted some way of quickly pin pointing which images/files were causing the issue (or the delay was even being caused by site file sizes in the first place!). I discovered a cool little site called Pingdom that did the job. Simply enter a URL and even check the save URL box. Pingdom drills down through your file load times and display in KB each different component of the page. It also gives you an outline summary of basic info about the site, how many images, style sheets, plugin, redirects, external objects etc. Simple and neat it does what I needed! But Pingdom is more than just that, it is also an uptime and performance monitoring system. The system lets you know if you site has gone down, gives you uptime reports, response time reports and connects nicely to Twitter, SMS and Email to alert you if troubles a-brewing.

Clients ask us frequently if they should do both PPC and SEO at the same time. Our answer is always the same - "it depends". Of course it depends mostly on whether the particular client can benefit from search engine marketing. If they can, then we talk. But if we don't believe it's the best use of their marketing budget, we work with them on other marketing campaigns. If search engine marketing can benefit the client, then the question is PPC, SEO or both. Often times both can get the best results.

Here are 7 tips small business owners can consider when working on search engine optimization (seo) for their websites.

"Web analytics packages are sold as if it's an automatic coffee marker. In fact, it's more like buying a coffee plantation.

Today, Google unveiled their new real-time search feature. It's still very new, even in internet terms, but what we see in the video below as well as in our own field tests is that results populate starting from when the search results page loads (so to take advantage of the new opportunity for visibility, it's a "right place at the right time" kind of thing). Most of these results are tweets or recently crawled articles/blogs on the topic. Our tests have shown tweets to show up with about a 10-20 second delay from when they were originally published. Not bad.

We all know the beauty of internet marketing is that you can measure everything right? This is one of the reasons why the internet has become such a dominant marketing medium. And of course the opportunities to spend money doing PPC or other search marketing activities are endless. Unfortunately there are businesses out there spending their hard earned money and not getting any return from it. I ran into just one of those cases a few days ago.

As data capturing tools advance and web analysts get smarter, the depth and breadth of search engine marketing becomes more complex while the potential for reward becomes greater. Website visits have long been regarded as the primary measure of website success, popularity, and influence. Likewise in the SEO world, keyword rankings have historically been a cornerstone for measuring search marketing success. Here are six reasons I believe this should no longer the case.