Reasonably informed web-users, even newbies, no longer need to pay someone to build a website or to spend hours and days learning to do it themselves. With five free blogging platforms, all of them accessible to even the most inexperienced users, it’s never been easier for a hobbyist, power blogger or web entrepreneur to set up shop. They all offer basic features such as RSS buttons, an easy way to post images and more.

Blogger

Blogger is Google’s answer to a people’s blog platform. Popular among users who want a no-fuss, no-muss platform, it advertises that you can set up a blog with just three clicks. And it really is that easy. You can also add video and images with little trouble, and Blogger offers design options that allow you to customize the look. However, with Blogger, you cannot use your own domain name. All Blogger sites are part of one big continuum, so your domain name will look like this: MyBlog.blogspot.com., and at the top of every blog, there’s a button that allows readers to click off to the next blog on the continuum. Think of Blogger as a starter platform. It’s fun; it’s easy, and you can get your feet wet in an environment that’s about as unintimidating as it gets.

Posterous

Posterous makes life easy, indeed. The big thing with Posterous is time-saving—it does a lot of the work of blogging for you. When you send images, it does the resizing and embedding for you. It also embeds videos and documents. The site advertises, “Send us anything. We’ll make it look great.” Posterous offers dozens of themes, but they are all customizable, and you can also use a custom domain. Plus, it offers privacy options. Let friends make posts, or not. You can also control who reads your blog. When you make a new post, with its auto post feature, Posterous lets you cross-post to Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Linkedin and more than 20 other social media sites, making it perfect for networking.

Tumblr

Pithy is addictive. If what you want to do is post news updates, spiffy images, witty comments, audio or sage quotes from Ben Franklin, Tumblr is where it’s at. Four years old in 2011 and with more than 20 million blogs, Tumblr is beloved as a microbloggers’ platform.

Among Tumblr’s many features, its “People You Know” tool let’s you look up friends, much the way you would on Facebook. You can also use a custom domain and an original theme or choose from among hundreds of ready-made themes. Want tp set up a blog just for friends, family or coworkers? Tumblr let’s you do it. You can also use the privacy feature to make an occasional private post on an otherwise public blog. Plus, it has a feature that enables you to selectively let friends make entire posts, make comments or ask questions.

Tumblr’s iPhone app lets you publish from your phone, and for those who rely on the spoken word, forget podcasting. With Tumblr, you can call a dedicated phone number that allows you to make audio posts.

WordPress

WordPress.org has been around a long time and has a lively, helpful community. If you run into a glitch or wonder how to do some task, the community will answer questions. Often you don’t even have to ask the question, just search for it. Chances are someone already asked it and the answer is waiting for you. Aside from people who strictly blog, many users of WordPress.org blogs adapt it as a traditional-looking website, complete with shopping carts. You can choose from among hundreds of good-looking free themes or purchase custom themes. All of them are adaptable. Many themes look like traditional blogs, but others have a newspaper layout.

While WordPress.org is free, you will have to pay for hosting. WordPress.org does not host blogs or websites; it offers only the platform.

The newer WordPress.com is also free, but has more limited design options than WordPress.org, and you cannot place your own ads on it, which means you can’t make money from them. Also, like Blogger, you cannot use a dedicated domain name.

Moveable Type

If you want is a commercial-looking site that no one would guess is free, or if you plan to start small and grow, or if you’re already a big gun, power blogger, Moveable Type will suit your growing needs – and with little effort. It’s more than a blogging platform. Moveable type is website friendly, as well. Plus it’s easy to let your blog or website evolve as your traffic and needs change. It works well as a content management system, and it offers a social networking platform.

Moveable Type calls itself “a single, unified solution for websites and blogs.” With one download, set up multiple blogs and websites and manage all of them from one efficient dashboard. For example, if you have multiple blogs, you can change or update just one blog or website or all of them at the same time with only one click. Moveable Type also has a track changes feature, as well, and as a content management system, you can view data from the dashboard.

Everyone wants a highly visible website. Otherwise, what’s the purpose of even having one? You’re in business to be seen, and you didn’t get where you are today by not placing yourself directly in the path of people you thought would find the goods you sell or the services you offer to be worthwhile. Why stop short of doing the same for your website?

Aha, the million dollar question. Or maybe it’s just the quarter million dollar question at this point (all things considered, including our collective economic woes and a presently limping economy). Either way, I’ll take the quarter million and so should you. The answer to that question – why would anyone stop short of ensuring peak visibility for their website, in case my digression threw you – is simple: people aren’t quite sure how to accomplish that. Enter the experts. But short of paying a third party company to optimize your website for prime visibility, which actually isn’t a bad idea, there is something you can do on your own.

If it seems like a bit too much information to make heads or tails out of, you’re not alone.

But you’re going to have to do an audit of your website. Are you still with me? If that sentence didn’t chase you away screaming, you may just have what it takes to pull it off on your own. At very least, you’ve got moxie, which means you should be able to pull it off. Here are some of the most important things to look for in your review of your website, which can directly impact is visibility.

• Select the search engine of your choice. Then make sure it’s Google. Simply put, Google is leading the way in search engine dynamics and everyone’s following in suit. So even if you prefer Bing as a search engine, you really should be using Google for all of your search engine duties with respect to site audit.

• Once you’re on Google, run a search of your company’s name and take a look at the results. The first returned search result should be your website’s home page – unless, of course, you share part of your company name with a much bigger, more wildly popular entity (for example Amazon Housecleaning Services), in which case you might also end up sharing space with Amazon.com on the search results page. If your home page isn’t showing up as the very first search result for your company, this is indication that your site’s architecture needs a bit of an overhaul and that there could be issues with your internal linking.

• Review your website’s content. You’ve probably read a lot about the importance of content, and if you’re looking to hear any different you’ve come to the wrong place. Content not only brings people coming back for more, but it also plays a big part in your Google search results ranking. Make sure that your home page has at least a paragraph of relevant content with appropriate keywords, but don’t keyword stuff. It just looks ugly. Your landing pages should also contain content, and there should always be more content on your site than advertisements. As a rule, check to make sure that the formatting of your content is uniform, easy to read, and that there’s plenty of white space. A cluttered page is hard on the eyes.

• Make sure there’s no duplicate content on your website. If you’ve written a really cool article about how to grow peppers in your garden (and if you did, you’re hopefully a horticulturist and not an online CD ordering company, otherwise you’re really going to confuse your site visitors with lack of focus) make sure it only appears once on your website. Google looks for duplicate content and can penalize your search engine ranking for it.

• Go after scrapers who lift your content and place it on other URLs to drive traffic for pay-per-click advertisements. You can do this by copying and pasting a unique sentence from each page of your website and pasting it into Google (in quotes) and searching. If you do come across content from your site that’s been scraped and is appearing elsewhere, you can sick the Google dogs on them and have it removed. It’s yours, after all, whether you wrote it yourself of paid someone to do it for you.

• Check all navigation links to make sure they work. There are few things worse than offering a link on one of your website’s pages that doesn’t work. Your viewers will hold this against you, and why shouldn’t they? Think about it. It’s like opening an empty box on your birthday. In other words, a major letdown.

• Ensure you don’t have too many links on any given page. The general rule is no more than 100 maximum, but even then if you have that many you have to ask yourself what the deal is. Links are important to search result placement, but don’t go overboard.

• Look at your meta tags. Every page of your website should have a meta tag that’s unique and different from the next, and that’s relevant to the content of that particular page.

If you’re still up to the challenge of auditing your own site, bravo. That moxie we talked about earlier? It’s there. What you’ve read above is a list of some of the high points that you should be looking at to try to drive up your website’s visibility in search engines. If it seems like a bit too much information to make heads or tails out of, you’re not alone. Neither are you out in the cold. There are a good number of third party SEO gurus out there who can do the heavy lifting for you, leaving you to get back to doing what it is that you do best. Whether that’s horticulture or CD sales makes no difference as long as you don’t mix the two. Just remember: “Focus.”

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m personally freaked out by what Google is up to these days. It would appear that in its quest to stretch the reach of its influence and dominance, Google is now working on something that could potentially revolutionize mobile social media – and not necessarily for the better. What am I talking about? I’m talking about Google Face Detection.

You’re probably wondering what I’m so worked up about. If so, you probably have the wrong idea of how the program operates. When I first heard of it, I immediately assumed it was some sort of software that would work through a webcam to positively identify you when you sit down in front of your desktop or laptop – sort of like a much less invasive retinal scan. But that’s not what Google Face Detection is at all.

What it is, in a nutshell, is a technology that may soon come your way via a mobile social media app that you can use to identify someone by simply snapping their picture. The application works by running the person’s image through facial recognition software to find out who they are. If their information is found, it’ll immediately fork over the kind of private data that some people pay a monthly fee to keep revealed. We’re not talking about Social Security Numbers or anything, but we are talking about full names, addresses, and phone numbers. So what’s the big deal? Here’s the big deal.

Google says that in order to be “found” using the app, an individual will have to jump through a few hoops to do so – but in the end, those hoops will amount to nothing more than a couple of “CYA” opt-in forms telling Google that you’re cool with everyone having access to the basics of your identity. And maybe you are, who knows? After all, not everyone in the world likes to live like they’re constantly on the run from someone or something. But I wonder how many people will feel the same after they get a midnight phone call from some stranger who saw them at a restaurant, snapped a pic, got their name and number, and decided to try forcing a friendship.

Of course, this sort of scenario is probably very unlikely. The fact is, not everyone in the world is a raving lunatic out to get you. Where I’m concerned, I feel pretty safe – I’m not exactly in danger of being singled out and stalked for my physical beauty. But I certainly wouldn’t want my own kids leaving themselves vulnerable to this type of technology. Forget issues of social media privacy for a second – we’re talking about physical safety here.

To its credit, Google is going about the whole thing extremely carefully. Which really only makes me more nervous. That, to me, indicates that someone there knows they’ve developed a technology with unforeseeable ramifications, and they’re almost afraid to implement it. Maybe I’m just being paranoid. Or maybe they’re thinking exactly what I’m thinking – like what could conceivably happen in cases of mistaken identity when the person in the crosshairs just happens to resemble someone that broke your heart 10 years ago… or someone last seen fleeing the scene of a crime. Throw in the hero factor and you’ve got a recipe for disaster where you might actually welcome the roving eye of Big Brother to keep you safe from the misplaced wrath of angry strangers. And that, my friends, is the scariest thought of all.