Following on Heather’s post, I wanted to share some UK data on the proposed Yahoo! and Microsoft deal. First up: webmail services, and as the chart below illustrates, Microsoft has a dominant market share with its Hotmail service. While Gmail (GoogleMail in the UK) has gained some traction, its market share has been flat for the last few months. Last week the combined market share of the Microsoft and Yahoo! services was 13 times that of Google.

For years now, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for websites has been honed into a fine art with entire companies devoting considerable effort to defining best practices and touting the value of SEO for raising a site's performance on organic search listings.  While I believe in the power of SEO, there is a new offering we have started providing to clients which we call Social Media Optimization (SMO).  The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.  Here are 5 rules we use to help guide our thinking with conducting an SMO for a client's website: