Fresh from the London Search Engine Strategies conference, our correspondent Deb Harrison provides some solid information when it comes to optimizing your blog for the search engines.First, be careful using an overabundance of blog widgets. Too many widgets can damage templates and could hurt the crawl ability of your blog – an essential element to a respectable search presence.

Deb furthers this thought by saying:
“Also too much tweaking on a blog is tempting – see if one tweak makes any impact. The advice here is to do a little at a time.”

Because of the focus shift towards social media and linkbait, it is also essential to make your blog easy for your audience to socially bookmark it. Including some of the various social bookmarklets is an effective way to facilitate this process.

Google opened its Gmail to anyone who wanted to sign up for it last week. Now they are doing something Google rarely has to do – advertise. It’s not a multi-million dollar TV and print campaign. It’s Gmail Theatre, presented on YouTube, narrated by an engineer, and conducted by a group of puppets. The video covers Gmail’s features, like spam blocking and chat. They won’t make anyone forget Kermit and Miss Piggy, but the puppets are cute.

Digg has banned a number of sites from being submitted as story sources. A number of those sites fall into the SEO category, which has created bad blood between Digg and some SEO’s. Even though Digg doesn’t say who is banned, Dave Naffziger has done some research to get an idea. He found one-hundred eighty-three sites out of Alexa’s top 10,000 and Blogshare’s top 1,000 that stop at Digg’s Great Wall. For some reason, Digg has banned a few gossip sites too.

Just like AOL’s Netscape, Yahoo, and Dell, Microsoft has fallen in love with the Digg model. In Belgium, Norway, and the Netherlands, Microsoft has MSN Reporter in beta testing, and it comes a lot closer to the Digg experience than clones at other sites. Unlike those copies, TechCrunch noted that Microsoft lets people submit stories from outside MSN. That encourages people to leave MSN to visit those sites. Microsoft not being a control freak? Must be the weather.

Web traffic toolbar Alexa, a standard analytics tool for online marketers, got a few upgrades this week. Perhaps the most useful new feature allows users to break down traffic geographically.

For example, say if you want to know where the bulk of Google-owned Orkut.com visitors come from, the new tool will show that nearly three quarters of them come from Brazil. You can also see how that particular site ranks in other countries. In India, Orkut is the second most visited site.

We don’t have mention the drawbacks of a tool like Alexa, but we will anyway just to be thorough. The data collected by the toolbar is limited to users who have installed it on their browsers. And unlike other traffic indicators which base samples on the whole, Alexa data is typically limited to search engine marketers.

This is why, perhaps, a few months ago, Matt Cutts blog was ranked higher than Ask.com. And while the Kentucky native is quite popular in the SEM community, he’s not quite THAT well-known.