You know all those blog experts who tell you that adding your blog title to the end of post titles is good SEO? Guess what? It's not.

I had been noticing for some time that my posts weren't showing up in search results very well like they once did. It seemed like traffic was slowly decreasing so I decided to do a little experiment. I surfed around the web looking at some of the top blogs in a variety of fields like technology, politics, news, business, etc. I noticed the one thing most had in common (other than great content) was their post titles.

The vast majority of them used this format…

%post_title%

Here's the format I was using…

%post_title%  |  %blog_title%

So I decided it was time for a change. I went under my All-In-One SEO settings and changed my post titles.

Its been nearly two weeks and I can tell you that my search engine traffic has more than doubled. Each post seems to get a far better search engine ranking when the post title is all by itself. I think Google in particular liked the blog titles attached a couple of years ago, but it really seems like that's no longer the case.

LifeHacker did an informal survey asking its readers to write in who their favorite hosting company is and why. Seven companies kept coming up over and over again.

Take a look:

1. DreamHost
2. Blue Host
3. NearlyFreeSpeech.Net
4. 1&1
5. GoDaddy
6. HostGator - My personal favorite
7. A Small Orange

I have tried many hosting companies over the years and I can honestly say that HostGator has been the best host I've ever dealt with. Their prices are great and their customer service is second to none. There's nothing worse than having a website emergency at 2 in the morning and be unable to reach anyone at your host or worse get outsourced to the Philippines or somewhere for tech support. Such is never the case at HostGator. I can literally get help within 5 minutes from a real life person 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

They also offer blazing fast servers and unlike most hosting companies that promise 99% uptime — they actually deliver on it. I've been with HostGator for more than a year and haven't experienced so much as a second of downtime ever. I know I sound like a damn salesman for them, but I've had some shitty experiences with hosting companies over the years so it's a really big deal to me that I've found such a great one.

If you need a hosting company then do yourself a favor and sign-up with HostGator!!

PC World has a list of the Internet's 100 oldest domains.

Here's the first 5:

1. symbolics.com: March 15, 1985

2. bbn.com: April 24, 1985

3. think.com: May 24, 1985

4. mcc.com: July 11, 1985

5. dec.com: September 30, 1985

Click here to see the rest of the list!

Andy has a great post over at Marketing Pilgrim that looks at how you can use Google SearchWiki to your advantage.

I haven't been happy with my earnings from the typical ad service companies like AdBrite recently so I decided to try out a new PPC ad service. I'm about five days in and I'm quite pleased with what I'm seeing.

The company is called NetKlix and it allows you to either buy or sell text ads. It's extremely easy to set-up and caters to both mainstream and adult websites.

Check them out and see what you think!

Google Chrome, the hot new web browser from Google has officially left its 'beta' status behind with the official release of Google Chrome 1.0. The Google boys have no doubt been putting in work to have gotten this thing out of beta so fast.

Here's what the Google Blog had to say about it:

Since we first released Google Chrome, the development team has been hard at work improving the stability and overall performance of the browser. In just 100 days, we have reached more than 10 million active users around the world (on all seven continents, no less) and released 14 updates to the product. We're excited to announce that with today's fifteenth release we are taking off the "beta" label!

Google Chrome is a better browser today thanks to the many users who sent their feedback and the many more who enabled automatic crash reports, helping us rapidly diagnose and fix issues.

As someone who used the very first beta version of Chrome, I can tell you that Chrome has definitely come a long way fast. The bugs it had initially were taken care of practically within a week of the first release.

Here's some of the improvements you'll find in Chrome 1.0:

Better stability and performance of plug-ins (particularly video). Video and audio glitches were among the most common bugs fixed during the beta period. If you had problems watching videos with Google Chrome in the past, you should be pleasantly surprised with the performance now.

Even more speed. Google Chrome starts up fast, loads pages quickly, and just keeps getting faster. Since the first beta, the V8 JavaScript engine runs 1.4 times faster on the SunSpider benchmark and 1.5 times faster on the V8 benchmark — and there is more speed to come.

Bookmark manager and privacy controls. We heard you! Better bookmark features were a top request from our users. It's now easier to switch between another browser and Google Chrome with the bookmark import and export features, and we added a new simple way to manage large numbers of bookmarks, too. We also wanted to make it even easier for you to control your browsing data, so all of the features in Google Chrome which affect user privacy are now grouped in one place with detailed explanations for each one.

Google continues to amaze with their genius and their dedication to putting out a quality product. Think about how long Microsoft has been working on Internet Explorer, and yet it remains a terrible piece of software. Google did in 100 days what Microsoft has been working on for close to a decade.

Nicely done.

Google Zeitgeist has released its lists of the most popular search terms of 2008.

Here's the fastest rising searches globally for 2008 as compared to 2007:

1. Sarah Palin
2. beijing 2008
3. facebook login
4. tuenti
5. heath ledger
6. obama
7. nasza klasa
8. wer kennt wen
9. euro 2008
10. jonas brothers

Click here to see the other Zeitgeist lists.

Google has announced their popular Google Book Search engine now includes magazine archives in full color, page-to-page, browseable format!!

Read all about it on the Google Blog.

LifeHacker is highlighting a remarkable image editing program today. It's called Phoenix and it operates entirely within your browser. Many in-browser image editing programs exist, but this one is incredibly powerful.

Take a look at this: