Search optimization isn’t an easy task and often you may feel overwhelmed by the complexities, the tags, the code, and the rankings. None of us have control of what Google and Yahoo do, and none of us get any search optimization feedback from the search engines when our efforts fail to produce the results we’d hoped for.

Heard of Bing? It’s a new search engine by Microsoft that’s been getting a ton of attention since its recent launch, likely thanks to a huge marketing budget.

When was the last time you checked your Facebook privacy settings? Do you know what your profile and activity look like to the rest of the world? Is Google indexing your personal information? Follow along as Social Media Strategist Jen Grant walks us

I don't think this is a particularly big deal, but I am fascinated by crawler behavior and the wheres and whys of crawlers not honoring sites' specific robots directives.

Invites just went out for an Android event at Google HQ, scheduled for a week from today. They don’t mention the Nexus One, but they don’t have to. The event looks like a proper announcement party, if not a full launch – demonstrations are on the itinerary, which is unsurprising given that Google has been handing out Nexus Ones left and right. ... The meat of the announcement, presumably, will be about how they’re going to sell it.

Happy New Year to all of LSG’s readers! As per my custom around the holiday season I encourage everyone with a web site to give the gift of SEO by linking to their favorite charity’s site with on-the-money anchor text. Here are some of mine:

SEO competitions are a great way to get noticed in the industry and allow you to really test your own skills and see who is best

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Every month we do a recap of the past month of Google changes based on an ongoing WebmasterWorld thread. To see last month's report, see the December 2009 Google webmaster report.

Bummer that I missed PubCon this week but I have just been traveling way too much lately. Speaking of traveling, I was in Indianapolis last week visiting the offices of Compendium Blogware. I got a demo of their hosted blog platform -- including a look under the hood -- and it's pretty slick. There were features and functionality I had never seen before in blog software. One of the key differentiators, and the reason for the company's name, is the "compending" capability that their solution does.