Katie Hellmuth's blog

So you're paying a web person to do SEO for you. Great! What are they doing? How are you checking their work? If they provided you with a report that says where they filled in keywords, that may be satisfactory to you, encouraging you to sit back and wait for Google and other search engines to start flinging traffic your way.

Bad idea. Here's why:

Alright, entrepreneurs. I'm not a financial junkie, or even very good at it. What I am around here is the Chief Nudger of Retirement Planning & Tax Preparation. This probably goes way back to my mom instilling in me not to carry a lot of debt on credit cards, and trying to establish credit history for us while in college, so that we could benefit later on (it worked).

You may have read already that the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has amended its guidelines regarding endorsements and testimonials, last changed in 1980, to require bloggers to disclose a financial relationship they have with an advertiser or agency when publishing a review about a product or service.

Well done to all of you who participated in Shine A Light from American Express in partnership with NBC Universal; because of your support, a spotlight truly did shine on so many wonderful entrepreneurs, including many of you.

We couldn't resist sharing this picture of Sabina with you, as she gets ready for a Fashion Week night out, in her rollers.  Sabina is out on the town representing Tin Shingle and our members, we truly are your ally in NYC!

Ick.

For those of you who only comment on blogs in the hopes of including a link back to your website: beware. Savvy blog owners will read your blog comment like a hawk, and read the between the lines to decide if A. you actually read the blog post and B. if you are being legitimate. If the blogger treats "dofollows" like this guy, you're out of luck. See here where Google started to implement "nofollow tactics" to prevent this sort of thing. A "nofollow" command tells search engines like Google to not follow a link, and therefore not count it in the grand link popularity count for a web page, as seen by search engines.

What would be the most blatant attempt of using a website or blog that does allow comments to count links, is to inject a rel="dofollow" command in the code of your comment. Which doesn't even do anything. It's an attempt to override a "nofollow" command set on a website. Therefore, it's just salt in the wound of your attempt to create a link to your site, and calls attention to you even more. Blogger blogs set the "nofollow" by default, and WordPress.com blogs might (see here for a WordPress.org "nofollow" setting adjustment for blogs hosted on individual hosting accounts). But what we do do is monitor every single comment that gets placed on our blog or regular articles. When we see one that is blatantly spamming or link-dropping, and ads no value to the article at hand, we delete with a swift click. But that's not all we do.

We have mollom.com reading each and every entry. Mollom is a fantastic resource for not only blocking a lot of spammy comments that never even see the light of day on a blog or website, but if one slips through, it gives the blog owner the option of reporting it to Mollom, so that they can be on the lookout for that infringer's IP address, or other super power methods Mollom has. Ok, it's not super powers, but it is data crunching.

Today's headlines like to speculate that "retail is dead", while CNBC anchors may promote a product and then tell you what website to find it on, or suggest that you buy it "the old fashioned way at their store", but this boutique junkie is here to tell you that retail is not dead, and in fact, is throwing an anchor into the online-based social networking waters.

You may have heard about the Shine A Light program from American Express in partnership with NBC Universal, where you could possibly win  a $50,000 grant and $50,000 in marketing support from American Express.