The worldwide smartphone applications market generated $2.2 billion dollars in sales revenues in the first six months of 2010, according to research2guidance.

This is considerably more than the $1.7 billion in revenues generated by the apps market in all of 2009, and puts the market on track to more than double this year.

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO) the holy grail of getting back-links to your web pages is get inbound links from the most relevant, authoritative pages on the most authoritative websites (according to the search engines)… and to get those links to include the keywords you’re targeting in the anchor text.

Or is it?

Thriller writer J.A. Konrath says the ebooks he sells on Amazon’s Kindle e-reader outsell those on the Apple iPad by 60 to 1. While Konrath sells 200 ebooks a day on the Kindle, he sells just 100 a month on the iPad.

The Next Web’s Alex Wilhelm reckons Konrath’s sales are sufficiently big to be representative of ebook sales in general. Wilhelm’s view is that, for now at least, the 60:1 ratio reflects the general ratio of Kindle ebook sales to iPad ebook sales.

New data from Ground Truth reveals that mobile dating is hot, with the number of visitors to mobile dating sites rising by 92 percent from the first week in June to the last week in July 2010.

Ground Truth, which measures mobile website usage using a patent-pending, census-based methodology called True View(TM), found that the number of visitors to mobile dating sites increased by 31 percent between the first and last week of June 2010, and by a further 46 percent between the start and end of July.

Twitter’s Promoted Tweets advertising program is showing promise with several companies saying they’ve run successful campaigns on the platform.

Since Twitter launched Promoted Tweets in April 2010, companies such as Virgin America and NBC Universal’s Bravo channel have reported success.

Last Thursday the U.S. Federal Trade Commission revealed that California based Reverb Communications had settled charges over posting fake reviews in Apple’s iTunes store.

The FTC had charged Reverb over engaging in deceptive advertising by having its employees write and post positive reviews of clients’ games in the Apple iTunes Store, without disclosing that they were being paid to do so.

Amazon’s Kindle e-reader doesn’t appear to be suffering at the hands of the iPad or any other e-reading device. Amazon received more orders for its next generation Kindle in the first four weeks following its availability than in the same period following any other Kindle release.

On top of that, in the same period, customers ordered more Kindles on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk combined than any other product.

Amazon’s sales record is consistent with its recent claim about selling three times as many Kindle books in the first half of 2010 as it did in the first half of 2009, with the Kindle continuing to be the number one product sold on Amazon.

Google has changed its search engine ranking algorithm to display more results from a given domain. Now, when you search on a given keyword or key phrase you might see several pages from the same website.

Why the change?

Data from comScore shows that Google sites had the most U.S. visitors in July 2010, followed by Yahoo! sites, Microsoft sites, Facebook.com and AOL.

Out of a total estimated U.S. Internet audience of 213 million, here are the top 50 U.S. websites in July 2010 according to comScore:

DomainerIncome.TV – an online video show about domain name investment (a.k.a. domaining) – has launched on the Internet. The first episode features an interview between Domainer Income‘s Simon Johnson and Oversee.net CEO Jeff Kupietzky.

Oversee.net is one of the leading companies in the domain name investment space. The company owns domain name parking brand, DomainSponsor, domain name registrar, Moniker, domain asset consultants, Moniker Domain Brokerage, domain auction marketplace, SnapNames, and also runs the Domainfest conferences.