Gary Hayes over at Personalize Media has created a very interesting little Flash app that shows how quickly certain areas of social media are growing. It's common knowledge that social media is growing at a rapid pace, but Gary has put together a visual depiction of this fact. For those who are using social media for more effective marketing, this puts some things in perspective.

Those who haven't been spending a lot of energy on social media should take a look at the app below. If it's not working at the moment, you can view the app here.

You can also see how important mobile media is getting. Mobile media is obviously something people need to start spending more energy on. With the phones getting smarter, the marketers who advertise on them need to catch up.

Most people are familiar with these statistics on some sense, but it's different when they are put on display like this. This app shows just how important it is to take advantage of new media in any way you can. There's just too much activity going on to ignore it.

We've been publishing some great articles over at the main USASEOPros company blog. If you haven't taken a look yet, now would be a good time to check it out.

We wrote a great post about how to find an affordable SEO firm in today's stretched out Internet marketing industry. Some SEO firms are way to expensive and others are suspiciously cheap. Te trick is to find one that can do everything you want them to for a price that is fair. A lot of SEOs charge more than they're worth, because their egos outweigh their talent and knowledge. Others charge too litte, because they don't truly understand SEO and how to improve Web sites.

We also recently released an interesting post on how you can mesh social media, SEO and SEM into a single strategy. A lot of marketers seem to think that having a social media account and trying to get followers and friends is good enough to increase your ROI, but there is a lot more to it than that. If you aren't engaging or interact with potential clients, you aren't really doing any good. Time is a valuable thing, and it's important to learn how to use your time effectively.

If you like the posts at the company blog, make sure to subscribe. It can be a great resource when you want to stay on top of online amrketing and crave a steady flow of fresh and unique information.

It's been a few days since Google has announced their new algorithm structural search engine change called Caffeine. The company has been sort of secretive with what this change does exactly, but according to Matt Cutts, it's more about restructuring Google's engine rather than updating the SERPs.

When we looked into Caffeine, it is noticeably faster than the old search engine, but there are also obvious changes to the rankings when compared to what they used to be. Google is currently accepting feedback for Caffeine, so now would be a good time to try it out and complain if you don't like what Caffeine gives you when you search the terms you look for all the time.

Google assures us that this has nothing to do with certain other search engines making changes and partnerships, but it could still heat things up a bit more, since Google hasn't really been fighting back against Yahoo and Bing until this point (they haven't really had a reason to). Releasing some improved stuff on their engine couldn't hurt things now that they have a more viable competitor.

Caffeine isn't technically released yet, so we could see more changes to it before it actually comes out, but don't expect any ground-breaking user interface changes, this change is all on the back end.

It's tough to develop any concrete opinions about Caffeine, since it's still subject to change, but from what we see so far, it should be okay. It's nothing huge, but that's what Wave is for.

By now, a lot of people are aware of the impact social media can have. USA SEO Pros utilizes many of the social media sites to successfully communicate with current and potential customers. While sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are obvious sites to look into in order to promote your business, there are other out there that are less well-known.

Several of these second-tier social media sites can be useful to get more exposure online and to introduce yourself to new audiences. Of course, USA SEO Pros has a Facebook account, but we also use some of these second-tier social sites. We don't mean second-tier in a negative way; we just mean that these sites aren't as popular as the ones top. They could eventually get there but right now they have a way to go.

Our USA SEO Pros Ideni.ca account is pretty interesting. It's a lot like Twitter, but has a very different kind of user base. Identi.ca does get as much of the celebrity/pop users, and it gets more of the programming, web-savvy user. Whatever you do on Identi.ca, don't talk bad about Linux, the community there is hardcore about it, and most of the popular topics surround open-source and Linux in some way.

Another interesting social site is Mahalo. Our USA SEO Pros Mahalo page allows us to create a SERP on the Mahalo search engine that automatically fills up with information about our company. While a lot of the content on the page is automated, it also gives users the ability to switch around and add more content to the page. There are also sections for text, so you can explain exactly what the page you created is about. It's a pretty clever set-up, and can be a cool tool for companies, just make sure you aren’t too biased when you make your page.

There are a lot of second-tier sites that don't quite make the main stream cut. A lot of these sites have something slightly different to offer when compared to the top of the crop. It might be a good idea to go check out some of the less well known social sites when you begin your social media campaign, you might be presently surprised by what you end up with.

Ever Friday SEOmoz puts together a great video to help people get better at online marketing in some way. I often find that these videos are a great jumping off point to dive deeper into specific areas of the SEO and SEM industry. This week's video had to do with structuring and optimizing your site for the things you're trying to sell.

There are some great points in the video about to focus on certain area of your site in order to bring in and sell the things that you believe will be the most successful. If you have a site that sells thousands of products, it isn't a good idea to try to promote each of those products equally, it would spread yourself too thin. Instead, pick the products that you want to feature and focus on those.

By optimizing for specific products, you're able to get stronger rankings for those and drive more business to your site. It's better to have a few #1 rankings for your products than have all of your products deep down in Google where no one ever looks. If you want to promote specific product pages, you'd go about it in the same way you would promote any other page on your Web site. Make sure to get some good links, good content, and a reason for people to pay attention to the page.

The full video is below, so if you haven't seen it yet, it definiely something to check out. It's tough to go wrong when you're taking advice from Rand Fishkin and company.

SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday - Architecture for Commerce with Dr. Pete from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.

If you've been living under a rock for the past 24 hours, you might not have heard about the deal that was struck between the two competitors in Google's shadow. Yahoo and Microsoft have partnered in a way that puts Bing on the backend of Yahoo's search engine. Yahoo will manage more on the ad sales side of things, and reap 88 percent of the profits from the sales. Microsoft gets Yahoo technologies and the ability to further increase the Bing brand name.

This is going to very interesting for the SEO industry. Not only will this most likely eliminate the need for Yahoo SEO, but it also makes Bing SEO much more valuable. Now that there is a larger market share going to a single Google search engine competitor, more attention needs to be paid to Bing from an SEO stand point.

The amount of people searching on Bing will more than double once they take over the search engine part of Yahoo, this makes it more than twice as desirable as it used to be for people to optimize for the search engine.

While this move still has Binghoo (YaBing if you prefer) at number two behind Google by a considerable margin, the partnership could allow them gain more ground on Google than they could have on their own. It's pretty obvious that Google needs some tough competition, and this is definitely a start.

The video below is of the Microsoft spokesperson announcing the partnership, in case you need more proof that this actually happened.

Google is beginning to spend more on lobbying in the capitol. The Internet giant has a few different topics they invest in, including intellectual property, privacy and competition surrounding online advertising, and copyright laws having to do with the Google Book Search settlement. A lot of large companies have their hand in Washington, and Google is making sure their needs are heard with close to a million dollars a quarter.

Even though Google is throwing around millions, they still aren't the biggest tech company contributor to lobbying. Microsoft, IBM, Verizon and AT&T all spent more than Google did on lobbying in the second quarter.

The reason Google is beginning to get more involved in Washington is because there are specific debates going on in congress that specifically affect the Internet users that are customers of Google. When issues like online advertising are being discussed Google has to spend more on getting their voice heard.

Speaking of Google lobbies. Check out some of the Googleplex lobbies they have in their working environment. At least they take care of their employees as well as the lobbyists in Washington.

There's a new blog post up on our main company blog that discusses new developments in the possibility of Yahoo selling their search engine to Microsoft, who is currently promoting their Bing search engine. If this happens, it will be an incredible change in the search industry that a lot of people will need to take note of. Google will then have a single major competitor that will have a better chance to try and grab more market share.

Google has a ridiculously large search market share, and if Microsoft is able to grab Yahoo, it'll be interesting to see how things in the search engine community change. Check out the main blog post: Microsoft and Yahoo Deal Closer to Reality.

A few months ago USA SEO Pros created an account on posterous, but we haven't really done anything with it. We figured now would be a good time to come back and see what this site can do. We manage several different social accounts for the company and it would be incredibly convientient if we could use a service that could post things the correct way to the different account.

We're not yet sure how good of a job Posterous will do at this, that's why we're doing this test post. We've signed up a few of the social account we have with Posterous to see how well the site does with posting everything everywhere in the right way. Twitter needs to have a different message than Xanga does, for example. If each site is dealt with in the way it should be, we at USA SEO Pros will be very impressed and will most likely keep using the site. It's a lot to ask, but it's definitely possible with how intergrated everything on the Internet is becoming.

The blogging software Posterous usues seems to be pretty standard. There could definitely be more features, but that almost always the case with free stuff. It's definitely useful enough to produce the content you would want to, and being able to post things everywhere via e-mail is pretty cool to.

There should be a YouTube video below of an interview with the founders of Posterous, we'll see if that works when we publish this. It would be nice if the site offered a post preview, but we don't see one anywhere.

USA SEO Pros has officially made over 4.3 million search engine placements on the major search engines. This has been confirmed by our IT guys and just goes to show you what hard work and a focus on customer satisfaction can do for a company. This is an amazing number of placements, and it continues to grow every day.

Many of those placements are on the first page in search results, with a good chunk being first place rankings. In addition to our incredible number of placements, we also have a couple of other exciting things going on right now.

Until May 1, 2009, people who follow us on Twitter (@realusaseopros) will receive a discount on their services. The only thing customers need to do is follow us on twitter and use the code "TWEEPS09" when purchasing services. This discount not only works with our SEO services, but our other services as well, include our new licensing program.

Our licensing program allows customers to get ranked for keywords almost immediately once they sign up for the service.Within the same day, the keywords purchased through our licensing program will show your information when searched in major search engines. We can do this, because we keywords we've built up over the years that our clients have not renewed for one reason or another.

The pages we have created the rank well for these keywords can now be changed to include your information, so you can rank right away for whatever keywords you may want. Usually, SEO takes a while as the pages with your keywords have time to grow into the search engine results. This is no longer an issue with our licensing program.

Let's get back to our amazing mark of over 4 million placements for second. To give you an idea of exactly how much four million is, watch the video below and keep in mind that however many dominoes you see in the video, we have more placements in search engine than that!