The folks over at CNet news must have noticed that white hats and blacks hats got traded in for flashy pink and purple hats at the "Pimp My Site" clinic at last week's Search Engine Strategies conference.

CNet's Elinor Mills penned an article last week titled "Bring some 'bling' to your Web site" that featured some tips and advice on taking a small business web site and giving it an overhaul designed to help it rank better in the search engines.

The panel, which included yours truly along with Dax Herrera, Todd Friesan, Heather Lloyd-Martin and Elisabeth Osmeloski started working on two sites shortly before the conference and went over the changes that had been made and the goals for the sites moving forward. The team will continue to work on the sites over the next few months and will present a complete overview of the project at the Chicago Search Engine Strategies in December.

If you're curious to see the works in progress, or if you'd like to do a little shopping at some interesting sites, you'll want to check out Hella Good's creative bath products and the hand crafted swords from Albion Armorers.

We'll continue working on things like on-page optimization, content organization, link building and online PR between now and December. We'll also be providing the site owners with some great products courtesy of a few different firms. The great folks at Monster Commerce have been kind enough to donate a year's worth of their service so that we can set the companies up with some good e-commerce software. Patrick Gavin of Text Link Ads is providing some relevant link building services for each site, and ClickTracks will be providing their award winning web analytics software to help us track the progress.