• California legitimizes massage therapists, Georgia Board of Massage Therapy
• Relieve shoulder, arm and back pain with exercise

I am always looking for ways to diversify my skillset and experience, y’know? Should I find myself out of a job, I want to know that I have a hustle or five that can at least keep me afloat, if not make a raging fortune.

For years now, I’ve been waiting for a community-driven cooking and food website — one where users and professionals can submit recipes and share ideas. So when I found out about Chefs.com, I got excited. Could this be the site I’m looking for?

The good

Chefs.com has hundreds of recipes, most of which seem fairly easy to make. Searching is simple. And Chefs.com has the same personalization and community features — a recipe box, comments, and forums — of larger sites like Epicurious.com and FoodNetwork.com.

The awkwardly-named Kitchen Sink feature is pretty cool. Every time you click on the Kitchen Sink link, you receive a listing of 10 randomly-selected recipes to choose from. It’s cooking inspiration.

The bad

Unfortunately, the site has more wrong going for it than right. Usability issues can be found throughout the site, usually in the form of poorly named or poorly thought out sections.

For example, the ‘Explore’ section looks like a rehash of the ‘Recipes’ section, just with different dishes. Feature articles are buried within.

Submitting a recipe is not as smooth a process as it could be. First you must enter your recipe, tag it and assign categories, and mark a check box granting permission to include it in the Chefs.com recipe collection. A more streamlined process would assume that all recipes submitted are for sharing and use tags as a category system with added classification by users or Chefs.com staffers.

One other annoyance: user-submitted recipes don’t carry any credit information and submissions become Chefs.com property. Think very carefully before submitting your great-uncle Clarence’s barbecue recipe.

The conclusion

Chefs.com as a concept has the potential to become a premium food destination. But the site experience is marred by usability issues and mediocre content.

Soon (um, like tomorrow), you will start to see occasional product reviews that I have been paid to write. For each review I write (advertisers purchase a review and the blogger chooses whether or not to accept), ReviewMe gives me $50. I have two days from when I accept to write and submit a review of the product.

Okay, a little bit of ethics schmethics: ReviewMe requires disclosure, and I wouldn’t have signed up if they didn’t. All posts that I write for ReviewMe.com will be a new category — ‘Blogging for dollars.’ I will also clearly label it as a paid review in the content of the post.

Need some search engine optimization consulting? Do you want to know more about what search engines are looking for (or not) and how to market online? Check out Shimon Sandler’s SEO Consultant blog.

Sandler is a member of SEMPO, an industry organization for search engine marketing professionals. He is also a Google Adwords Qualified professional.Considering Sandler also has the #2 slot on Google for “SEO Consultant,” I’d say he’s doing something right.

Sandler’s weblog is chock-full of quality tips for promoting your web site online. He offers insight into both pay-per-click and organic search, covering a range of techniques.

Several of Sandler’s tips are technical in nature. For example, his post “Duplicate Content mistakes and solutions” advises using 301 redirects and the robots.txt file to avoid having pages get bounced for duplicate content.

Other posts are more marketing oriented, such as his recent entry on Spanish-language search engines.

Sandler’s blog also offers a few tips on optimizing Flash sites for search engines and whether to use a second domain for SEO. He even covers “Black Hat” and ethically-gray techniques — both what they are, and how they can hurt or help your site.

I do wish Sandler would write more about RSS marketing, copywriting and social networking sites. I also think he should write cover e-mail marketing more often. Overall, however, I’d say that Sandler’s blog is one to keep an eye on if you are at all concerned about online marketing.