Search-engine optimization has been all the rage ever since there were search engines – Google especially seems to be the most successful at spawning whole cottage industries around optimization (and with good reason – it’s far and away the most popular). As several have pointed out, making some simple changes to your pages, and getting into good habits, can have dramatic effects on the number of visitors to your site.

An article, 3 Ways to Immediately Increase Search Engine Traffic, over at Performancing.com, takes a look at three aspects of your site and strategies to take to increase search-engine traffic: better copy, lots of links, and networking (the social kind). Some very good suggestions.

A Beginner’s Guide to SEO is available at SEOmoz.org. This very complete article gives a great list of items you should be aware of to best optimize your site (everything from avoiding broken links and minimized downtime, to meta tags and document organization). Another great link to check out from SEOMoz is the Page Strength tool.

As you become more serious about your search engine optimization (and as your web site grows), there’s going to come a time when you need better control over just what content is being indexed by web crawlers. Matt Cutts has an article, Bot Obedience: Herding Googlebot, on building a robots.txt file and other strategies for holding googlebot’s hand over at his blog (which has plenty of other great tips for SEO).

If you’re running a blog (and who isn’t these days?), then you’re going to want to check out this 5-part post called Getting Ranked (with tips on how your page URLs should be formatted, how to improve accessibility, etc). One blogger, Paul Stamatiou, followed these tips and found a marked increased in his web traffic.

Hopefully you found these articles useful. There’s a ton of other great stuff out there, so consider this a starting point. Getting better traffic from search engines isn’t complicated, but it does require a bit of work and plenty of common sense. Good luck!

YouOS is a startup with a really neat idea – creating an entire operating system through the web browser. It sounds like a crazy idea, but with recent developments in AJAX and server-side technology, the web browser is being used for a lot more than just the web. Applications like IM clients and word processors, that were once thought of solely as desktop applications, now have fully functional web verions.

YouOS isn’t an operating system in the strict sense of the word (you can’t boot off of it), but it does have a number of features that you would expect from an OS, like a shell, a browser, and a file explorer. There’s a recent blog post on their site that gives a good intro to the project. Also be sure to check out their live demo.

I think we’ll continue to see more and applications that exist only on the web. The real boon for web apps isn’t so much the ability to run everything through one program (although that’s nice) as it is being able to work from any computer that has a browser. With YouOS, that means potentially from any Internet cafe or public library you could access every file or application that would normally exist just on one computer.

If you haven’t come across it yet, check out Squidoo. It’s a new, very Web 2.0, site that allows users to create their own “lens” on a subject of their choice. A lens can be anything you like and is intended to be a guide to other users (for instance, I created one called My Top 5 Business Books). Creating a lens is very easy, and there’s already a strong community building of “lensmasters”.

There’s a hook though: what sets Squidoo apart from other community-created sites (like Wikipedia or MySpace) is the ability to generate affiliate sales. Squidoo is aimed at creating income: either for the lensmaster or a charity (and always for Squidoo). A lensmaster adds links to purchase products (such as books, as I did, from Amazon) and upon referring a customer who makes a purchase, the online merchant has agreed to pay an affiliate fee to Squidoo. Upon receipt, Squidoo then allocates a part of that fee to the lensmaster to do with as s/he wants (for instance, claim it for themselves or donate it to charity).

I love Squidoo for two reasons: it embraces the read/write web using slick Web 2.0 visual technologies, and has a workable business model. In fact, following the cash flow through Squidoo is simple: viewers can turn to customers when visiting a lens, and sales are sent back to Squidoo and its lensmasters. The company wins because it inherently creates a community that wants to drive as much traffic to Squidoo as possible (thus further growing its community – and making critical mass relatively easy to achieve).

As a final note, I’d like to point out the uncluttered interface of Squidoo. There are targeted text ads on the pages, but nothing that distracts the eye from the content. And lensmasters are the ones with control over the content section of the pages – no annoying “inline” ads that many media organizations love to place in the middle of an article.

So, if you haven’t seen Squidoo yet, check it out. And create a lens for yourself – it’s surprisingly addictive.