Besides dropping eight figures on advertising this year Ask.com has had a little bit of a redesign. They added a wallpaper feature, one of which is polka dots. No joke.

This article just showed up on the front page of Digg. It is from the New York Times and has a rarely seen inside look at Google’s search ranking unit also known as “search quality.”

I have long abandoned reading the endless forum discussions and blogs about search engine optimization. (Besides simply not having the time, focusing on advertising and promotion has proven to be far more profitable.)

Sick of Matt Cutts? This article refers to some of the real Google puppetmasters including Amit Singhal and Udi Manber. If you want to know who they are, read the article.

“Mr. Singhal has developed a far more elaborate system for ranking pages, which involves more than 200 types of information, or what Google calls “signals.” PageRank is but one signal. Some signals are on Web pages — like words, links, images and so on. Some are drawn from the history of how pages have changed over time. Some signals are data patterns uncovered in the trillions of searches that Google has handled over the years.”

The Golden Rule/Holy Grail/Platinum Plasma Gun of marketing is one thing: Know Your Customer. If you know your customer you know what they want. When you give people what they want, success happens. Lots of people try to make this more complicated; its not.

1. What are my visitors really looking for? Read your stats. Pay close attention to the longgggg tail. Screw the overture search tool, you’ve got the best data on your servers already.

2. Who is coming to my site? Is my audience the technical elite or average single moms? If you have a forum or some other interactive area you can figure this out quickly. Here stereotypes are very useful.

3. What do I want them to do? Tie #1 and #2 together and create a path to action. Make it very easy for your visitors to bring their friends. Two sentence case study: Tagged.com is one of the fastest growing social networking site. Tagged asks new users to add their entire e-mail address book.

4. The best way to know your audience — be one of them. The difference between being and pretending is enjoyment. You can pay college kids to write thousands of articles for your site. When it comes time to make valuable contacts, or figure out the next “big” thing — your screwed.