A successful website is now a major goal for nearly every business. A well-designed, easy-to-read, popular online presence is key to establishing online branding.

One of the best ways of achieving a high-profile online presence is promotion. This is a lot easier than most people think. Having your site mentioned on one of the social bookmarking sites is mighty powerful, especially if a number of your visitors do this. Here is a list of the most popular Social Bookmarking sites

If you are finding my posts helpful, informative, or even just inspiring, please comment on them. I would really, really appreciate it if you’d also recommend any of my pages to one of the Social Bookmarking sites listed. In fact, if you do, send me the link to consultant [at] marketmou.com, and I’ll send you not one, but three valuable ebooks on starting and running an online business, with lots of essential information for getting your website noticed. Not bad for five minutes work!

At SES Jose, a few people asked for a way to authenticate Googlebot, so I talked to some folks on the crawl team and got an official way from them to verify Googlebot. Since it was official, I said “What the heck, why not throw it up on the official Google webmaster blog.

And so I did–the post is live here. Enjoy, and hope this is helpful to folks.

September-ish is Google’s birthday! Nathan Weinberg notices that the birthday cupcake only has five candles, but it’s because they are the Roman numerals VIII to mean eight.

You may be asking yourself: “Is Google’s birthday Sept. 7th or Sept. 27th?”. Check out my blog post from 2005 and you’ll see that (in my opinion) Google’s true birthday is Sept. 7th. I think one year (last year?) there was a lot of stuff going on Sept. 7th, so we didn’t get around to celebrating our birthday until Sept. 27th. So why do it on Sept. 27th again this year? Well, I know I forgot and didn’t even notice when Sept. 7th passed by. I mean, I had to keep my eye on the prize: Talk Like a Pirate Day on Sept. 19th.