Here are a few recent examples of what happens when you hire an SEO firm to “improve” your search engine rankings:

New York Times Exposes J.C. Penney Link Scheme That Causes Plummeting Rankings in Google

and this one:

Forbes Accused Of Link Spam

Both of these highlight the dangers of paying for “inbound” links to your site.  In SEO, external links to your site are one of the big ways to quickly improve your search rankings.  But the search engines are increasingly getting better at “sniffing out” these links, and penalizing sites for them.  When you hire a company to do SEO for you, check into the methods they will use, and be careful.   Keep to the slow and steady, white hat methods to build traffic.  Otherwise, you may find your site blacklisted, and all your efforts (and money) lost.

Facebook gives you a way to track “likes” and “Shares” from content on your site.  It’s called “Insights”.  To use it, just go to:

www.facebook.com/insights

The first think you have to do is “claim” your domain, which means to tie your domain to your facebook account.  Facebook gives you a meta tag to add to your home page.

If you have problems claiming your domain try “DeLinting” your site by going here:

http://developers.facebook.com/tools/lint/

Note you must be logged into facebook to do this.  Type in your domain name, and click the “Lint” button.  That may help you get going.

These days, many businesses are taking payments online.  Retailers are selling online, using a shopping cart type application.  But other businesses, such as consultants, are also finding that having an online payment option is a bonus for their clients.  I do this, using a simple payment form.  I also created a simple form, you can see here.  This is a simple overview for getting started taking payments online:

Turnkey released a new patch here:

http://forum.turnkeywebtools.com/showthread.php?10710-IMPORTANT-Security-Patch-for-SunShop-4.-Please-Read!

This is something to be applied immediately, to all shops.  I’ve done it several times and it’s pretty easy, with no side effects.  Also, it’s a good time to add a .htaccess file to your /admin area for add security.