With search engines ranking as a top traffic driver for many blogs and content sites, optimizing a site for search engine exposure is an increasingly critical component of any online marketing effort. Search engine optimization, or "SEO," means using technical and not-so-technical techniques to make sure that people searching for topics you write about will find your site.

Deciding to become a freelance worker can be a scary proposition. Sure there is an allure to picking what projects you work on, but it can also be stressful not knowing where your next paycheck will come from. Luckily there are numerous resources out there that not only help you find more work, but also loads of tools to help you do your job more efficiently with a professional edge.

The great thing about the Firefox browser is when you have a problem, there is usually a solution in the form of an extension. As a blog writer, I’ve been using a few that smooth out the experience and get rid of a few annoyances.

Here are a few suggestions.

From Mashable: From basic to do lists to event planning, fitness, educational organizers, and more, here are 100 new applications to get you even more organized

From Lifehacker: Round up of tools and tricks that make blog posts go faster and smoother.

From Make Use Of: Here are 5 excellent tips to make browsing even smoother and faster on Firefox.

From Mashable: Nice summary of ways that the Firefox browser can help you be more productive.

From 123 Social Media: Sharing your content via social bookmarking and social sites is a critical component to driving traffic. Rather than submit to each site individually, you can submit your information across dozens of portals with ease with one of these four social bookmarking tools.

From Make Use Of: Advice on using an online stopwatch to prevent you from wasting your time when online.

Getting things done app for Mac OSX

Getting Things Done, also abbreviated as GTD, is a popular time management productivity method created by David Allen. The method is just as popular today as it was back in 2007 when we ran our GTD Ninja post featuring more than 50 apps to help you be more productive and organized. But there are a host of new applications out there to help you be even more productive this year. Below are more than 100 of them – many that can help you manage your social media efforts.

From Fast Company: Rundown of tools that help speed up and streamline blogging.

From Twitip: Reviews Ping.fm, a very helpful tool that can be used to manage Twitter and other social media accounts more effectively.

From CNET: Advice on cleaning out our social network portfolio and start using only those services that you like best in each category since spending more time on multiple services isn’t nearly as rewarding as getting more quality time with the best services

Find out which social media usernames have already been taken.

From Mashable: Here are some simple steps that you can use to smooth the form-filling process, and each subsequent time you sign up for a site, think of the following as a handy checklist that ensures you’ve got everything ready.

From Mashable: As the number of people you follow on Twitter grows, so does the volume of tweets you get in your Twitter Stream. Here’s some advice on how to manage this most productively.

From 123 Social Media: Five steps for making your social media process more efficient.

PostRank™ measures audience engagement and provides integrated tools to enable you to customize your RSS subscriptions. Save time, boost productivity, and Read What Matters.

From Chris Brogan: Chris shares his own process for managing what I suspect is a very busy email inbox.

From Mashable: Tips, tools and methods to make your productive.

From Makeuseof.com: Discussion of a set of tools that can help you be more productive by making the most of Delicious bookmarks.

MeeTimer: Curb your Procrastination. MeeTimer logs where you spend your time online, grouping it into activities, and actively discouraging time wasting.

Understand how exactly your spend your time and attention – without data entry. Great time tracking tool.

Mac OS X only: When it's time to dig deep and do some serious focusing on a task—and refrain from surfing or checking email entirely for a block of time—you want temporary internet disconnection utility Freedom.

TextExpander saves you countless keystrokes with customized abbreviations for your frequently-used text strings and images.

When opened, Quickisilver will create a catalog of applications and some frequently used folders and documents. Activate it, and you can search for and open anything in its catalog instantly. The search is adaptive, so Quicksilver will recognize which items you are searching for based on previous experience.

From Mashable: Tools that can help you make sense of the flood of information coming via your RSS feeds and help you filter out the junk.

Search has gone mobile. Smart phones with large screens, decent keyboards, and wifi connection finally makes it fun to surf the web from a hand held device. I have tested iPhone web search applications and reviewed our five favorites.

Apparently one of the best Twitter clients for the iPhone.

With Facebook officially turning five years old recently, combined with the site surging past MySpace in Monthly Unique Visitors, it seems like a good time to take a little deeper look at the social networking giants.

Your portfolio is the showcase of your work, your skills and your potential for your future employers. The more time and effort you dedicate for a usable and nice-looking design, the higher are your chances for getting better account balance in the end of the month. So how can you make sure your portfolio is better than the portfolios of your competitors?

Great post with tons of examples of beautiful portfolio sites.

List with useful shortcuts for the Safari browser.

Great list with the Top 10 plugins for the Safari browser by Mashable

Springpads are free online notebooks that help you manage your life. Use your springpad to keep track of notes, photos, maps, to-do’s, contacts, appointments & more.

I felt so fortunate to attend a special presentation the other night: William Stout, owner of the eponymous architecture and design bookstore in San Francisco, had been invited to talk about his favorite books at Linden Tree, a casual salon of sorts that aims to foster the design community in the city

The flexdisplay is in fact an e-ink device, bringing the benefits of low power-consumption and zero-power display. And, its touchscreen supports inputs by stylus pen or fingertip.

The tool is the the ultimate time saver to building powerful social media accounts.

How Brian Carter got 1000 Twitter followers in only six months.

The new rules for the new economy can be summarized as: Where ever attention flows, money will follow. Almost anything else except attention can be manufactured as a commodity. Luxury goods are only luxuries temporarily. They quickly are counterfeited and commodified. Premium brands are only premium because they garner a surplus of attention.

Aaron Wall writes: Bob Massa, one of the original SEOs, always talks about SEO from a conversion standpoint, offering quotes like "traffic without conversions is the epitome of futility. The SEO space is a bit crowded right now. So many people are fighting for attention that it seems like people are fighting without purpose. There may be more people writing SEO blogs than there are reading them. That abundance of new publishers makes it easy for established authors to build links by re-spinning old phrases with new definitions, but if those links don’t create profit what is the point?

Ann Smarty writes: Creating a network of micro-sites for the sake of link power manipulation is a controversial technique; hence it has become risky to interlink your own websites even for very “white hat” purposes (e.g. to let your readers know about your other relevant sites). Nonetheless, link building with micro-sites can be a highly effective technique if done correctly.

With the economy in limbo what should search marketer's focus on? WebProNews spoke to Milind Mody, CEO of eBrandz Inc, an SEO and SEM firm, about online marketing and advertising. He says he believes that online advertising is more recession proof than other forms of advertising and that research indicates that any decline in online advertising is because clients are slashing their overall budgets.