In addition to today’s Internet Marketing Monitor coverage, we felt these stories were worth pulling out of the multitude of news items for July 25, 2007:

Are You a Courageous Blogger? [Copyblogger]

I loved this post! Not only because of what it says but because of what it made me think about. The people who know me often “criticize” me for speaking my mind, sticking to my guns, and calling things like I see them. They call me rude… or blunt… or mean. But after reading this post I realized something: they always keep coming back to hear what I have to say. The same thing most certainly applies to blogging. People may not always like what you have to say. They might not agree with everything you write. But they’ll never question your convictions, your honesty, or trustworthiness if you tell it like it is from the very beginning. And always remember - while readership is a great benefit of blogging, ultimately it should be for you. If you’re not blogging for yourself you’re doing it for the wrong reason.

Microsoft Now Using Autodiscovery Sitemaps for Crawl Assistance [Search Engine Roundtable]

Well it’s about time! With Ask.com’s recent announcement that it, too, would be using autodiscovery to detect sitemaps using a robots.txt file, all four of the major search engines are now living up to their pledge made back in November 2006. Ask.com wasn’t part of that pledge but I hear they weren’t invited to join in that fun. So good on them for joining the sitemaps party anyway! Here’s what I find strange. All of the major search engines are supporting sitemaps now. Why aren’t more sites using them? Just to get a feel for what sitemap adoption was like inside the Internet marketing niche, I checked for sitemaps at the default location or referenced inside robots.txt files of all the websites I visited today. To my surprise… very very few had robots.txt files. And none had a sitemap listed. Needless to say… I’m shocked.

SEO for Alternative Media (Flash, Video, etc) [Search Engine Journal]

It’s not just your textual content that needs SEO love! Even those hard-to-reach places need some brushing, too. Wait. I’m confusing topics here. OH yes… those hard-to-optimize pieces of content need some attention as well. Search engines can’t always index your “alternative media”. But as SEJ points out, they can index alternative content and surrounding content. I especially like the suggestion about hosting videos on Google and/or YouTube for the social implications (comments, rankings, etc).

Have a great night, folks! See you tomorrow…