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Google Activity May Affect Rankings

2010-08-24T10:13:00.000-07:00

There are currently some interesting happenings with Google search that webmasters may want to pay attention to. The company, which is always busy, has been making moves, which may greatly affect its flagship product - search. This is all in addition to everything the company is doing in social media, mobile, gaming, advertising and everything else (which all may have their own separate impacts on search).

Algorithm Change

Google makes changes to its algorithm all the time, but when a change comes with an announcement, you know people are going to talk. On Friday, Google announced a tweak designed to surface multiple pages from a single site for relevant queries.

"For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain, like [exhibitions at amnh], we'll now show more results from the relevant site," says Google software engineer Samarth Keshava. "Prior to today's change, only two results from www.amnh.org would have appeared for this query. Now, we determine that the user is likely interested in the Museum of Natural History's website, so seven results from the amnh.org domain appear. Since the user is looking for exhibitions at the museum, it's far more likely that they’ll find what they’re looking for, faster. The last few results for this query are from other sites, preserving some diversity in the results."

Not all webmasters have been thrilled with this. "Brace yourselves! Another Mayday disaster coming," one person commented on our story about it.

Experimenting

Just as the company frequently changes its algorithm, it also frequently experiments with different features, showing them to small sets of users before either turning them into full-fledged features or throwing them away. The jury's still out on this one, but a new experiment has been spotted, which alters search results as you type your query.

Think of this like autosuggest taking over the entire SERP. The video demonstrates:

Again, this is only an experiment at this stage, and it may never make its way to the mainstream Google experience, but people are already expressing a great deal of concern about it (particularly with regards to queries that begin with words that could yield undesired NSFW results).

My guess is that Google would have ways around that issue, but it remains to be seen if users/webmaters will have to deal with it. If the feature does come to fruition, this is something SEOs are going to have to consider, as it could have a big impact on the habits of searchers. You may, for example, want to optimize more for the earlier words in a longer key phrase, in addition to the key phrase itself. But, we'll see.

Google Crawling Sites From Numerous IPs

Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to some discussion from SEOs in Webmasterworld, who have found for the first time that Googlebot is now crawling from several different IP addresses at the same time. One webmaster said, ". their fast activity notified me so I took a peek to see who was scraping the site... I've never seen Google spider so fast and from so many IP addresses, they were all valid Google ip's but there was like 10-20 of them running at once."

Acquisition

The other day, it was officially announced that Like.com has been acquired by Google. Like.com is a shopping search company offering visual search technology and an automated cross-matching system for clothing and other merchandise.

At this point, it's unclear what Google has planned for this technology, but it could very well affect search results for shopping queries, which means it could affect small business visibility for better or for worse. Shopping search is going to be an area of Google to keep an eye on.

Source : webpronews.com

Google Now Lets One Domain Dominate Search Results

2010-08-22T04:53:00.000-07:00

Google would only show up to two results from the same domain on a single search result page. Now, Google has confirmed what many are seeing, where a single brand dominates a single page of Google’s search results.

This is not a bug, this is not an anomaly, it is an intentional change to Google’s ranking algorithm. Google said:

Today we’ve launched a change to our ranking algorithm that will make it much easier for users to find a large number of results from a single site. For queries that indicate a strong user interest in a particular domain.

What I find interesting is the last statement by Google:

We expect today’s improvement will help users find deeper results from a single site, while still providing diversity on the results page.

Remember, Google’s Peter Norvig who said, “for the second one [search result], you don’t want something that’s almost the same as the first. You prefer some diversity, so there’s where minority views start coming in.” You prefer diversity. Google is clearly saying that a result from the same site can still be diverse and different enough, even if there are ten results, all from the same site.

On the reputation management front, this is a clear winner for those with reputation management issues.

Source : searchengineland.com

Monitoring Backlinks

2010-08-20T10:08:00.000-07:00

When you set up a web presence, one of the things you want to do is start getting backlinks. They help your search engine ranking, and the more places that link to you, the more people can find you. However, not all backlinks are good ones. There are plenty of places where people can trade backlinks or buy backlinks, and a lot of those places just offer spam. Link farms are examples of places you don’t want to find your site listed.

Link farms, and similar sites don’t really provide backlinks that are valuable, but inexperienced website owners may think that just having a lot of backlinks will be enough. When they dodo not start seeing a lot of improvements on their site stats and traffic, they get upset – but they don’t understand that they’re hurting themselves by creating a lot of backlinks that aren’t beneficial to their websites or targeted to their niches. That’s why the ability to monitor your backlinks is so very important.

Anyone who decides to monitor backlinks should know that there are plenty of options for doing that. Some of them are free, and some of them cost money. Yahoo Site Explorer is free and it works as well as or better than others I have seen This tool allows you to see how many sites are linking to you, who is linking to you and what they are linking to. One thing that Yahoo Site Explorer does not do is take data points and track the link velocity. Remember that everything is relative as the Search Engines are comparing and ranking for relevance on a keyword-for-keyword basis. Generally speaking the higher the quantity of naturally occurring targeted backlinks you have along with the higher the quality of your backlinks, the higher you will rank for targeted terms. We suggest Yahoo Site Explorer because it seems to count many links that Google either doesn’t wish to count or divulge. We also recommend Link Velocity Tool as you can track competitors and take data points. This allows you to go back and see what your backlink count was at a specific point and time in the past.

Monitoring your backlinks is important. If you don’t monitor them, how will you know who’s linking to you and what content they like on your site? When you monitor backlinks, you don’t do it just because it’s the thing to do or you’ve been told by other people that you should. You do it because you want to use that information to make yourself more successful. There are plenty of ways to gain success on the Internet, but ignoring backlinks because you don’t see their value isn’t one of them. It’s much better to learn all you can and get all the data you can get about your website, so you can make good choices for its future.

It’s also important to understand the quality and quantity of your backlinks are a deciding factor when search engines determine where to place your page in search results. If many people who have ‘web cred’ are linking to you, it tells search engines that your site is valuable, and it will be ranked higher.

Not everyone monitors their backlinks with the competitors in mind, but you can certainly do that if you want to. Try our Link Velocity Tool. You can monitor the relative speed of backlink growth between you and those competitive websites that you are interested in. It’s a way of monitoring all of your important players while keeping a close eye on your long term online objectives.

Source : website-marketing-pros.com

Raise Of Social Media In B2B Internet Marketing

2010-08-18T10:46:00.000-07:00

The term social media marketing generally implies the use of online communities, blogs and social networks and other online media for the purpose of sales, marketing, customer service and public relations. The word social media itself implies those web properties where the content is mainly published by the users themselves and not through those who are the direct and actual employees of that web property. The varied twitter uses and benefits often help in this very purpose.

When it comes to marketing through a social media, the first and foremost thing required is the creation of buzz. This means that some newsworthy event or blog entry or even a tweet has to be made. This is the first step in creation of buzz and dispenses with the requirement of any press releases. The news which is put up does not necessarily need to be in relation to the product or service which the company seeks to promote. An amusing or even a compelling message on twitter, which carries the logo of the company, has been successfully used to create a viral campaign. Many times, the inclusion of an incidental tagline is employed for this purpose. This is a part of twitter uses and benefits, which allow the company to instantly reach hundreds of users instantly and simultaneously.

Others like facebook and myspace are also employed by companies to help in promotion of their services and products. One of the facebook uses and benefits is that corporate public pages can be maintained where anyone may become the company’s fan. Apart from this there can be groups where particular products may be discussed. Fans of the company may help in the promotion of any service through social media venues, or the corporation may promote online conversations regarding its services. Then there is myspace. It makes use of a combination of photos, weblogs, emails, user profiles and forums. Corporations can derive methods of increasing online presence from myspace uses and benefits. The creation of a company profile is helpful in having better media coverage.

Social media marketing is becoming a certain and fixed tool for marketing and promotion of the products and services of the various corporations. The ability of the corporation to reach millions of users around the globe is the most attractive aspect of social media marketing. It is much more effective than the traditional methods of promotion which are usually employed.

Source : website-marketing-pros.com

Caffeine Update : New Web Indexing Method

2010-06-08T22:09:00.000-07:00

Google announced completion of Caffeine Update - The New Web Indexing System. Google claims that with the help of this update it will now provide 50% fresher results for web searches than the previous index and is the largest collection of web content.

whatever is published on WEB whether it might be the Video, Story, News Story, Blog, Forum Post and such others will soon be found that are relevant to the user query soon after its published as said by one of the Google's Engineer Carrie Grimes.

"Content on the web is blossoming. It's growing not just in size and numbers but with the advent of video, images, news and real-time updates, the average webpage is richer and more complex. In addition, people's expectations for search are higher than they used to be," adds Grimes. "Searchers want to find the latest relevant content and publishers expect to be found the instant they publish."

With Caffeine the web is analyzed in small portions and updates its search index on a continuous basis (all around the world). New pages and updates to existing pages are added straight to the index, meaning freshness will be increased.

Caffeine takes upto 100 million GB of storage in a single database, and adds even more and more GB of information every day.

Three Search Types For SEO

2010-06-06T06:57:00.000-07:00

Common wisdom, supported by various research projects, has identified three primary types of searches: navigational, informational, and transactional. All of the major web search engines try to detect which type of search a user is performing by analyzing the query and attempting to determine intent, to better accommodate common searcher behaviors in their search results pages.

For example, in Google, if keyword data indicates that a specific keyword phrase is a navigational query, search engines will put a link to an official company website home page in the first position, often with supplemental Sitelinks.

A navigational query is a keyword search in which the searcher wishes to go to a specific website, or a web page on a specific site. In other words, with a navigational query, searchers are using a web search engine to navigate (go to) a website. Navigational queries are far more common than previously reported. In fact, at the 2009 Stockholm Search Marketing Expo, Peter Maxmin, Director for Online and Bing Search EMEA, reported that approximately 33% of Bing queries are navigational. And some of my sources at Yahoo told me recently that over 30% of Yahoo queries are navigational as well.

What does that mean to us, as search engine optimization (SEO) professionals? Is it enough for us to accommodate navigational, informational, and transactional queries? During my ongoing research on searcher behaviors, I discovered more types of searches that, I believe, we SEOs should know. Here are some of them.

Ad hoc search

An ad hoc search is one that SEOs are probably the most familiar with, even though we might not know the label for it. With an ad hoc search, the searcher’s goal is to find as many relevant documents as possible about a topic, as the need arises. An ad hoc search is informational in nature, since searcher is on a “fishing expedition” for information about a subject. The searcher might or might not have previous knowledge about the topic but wants to read or learn more about it.

For example, suppose a searcher wishes to purchase a new digital camera but does not know what brand or type to purchase. The searcher might want to read reviews about different digital cameras before making a purchase. Some keyword phrases he/she might type into the search box can include:

    * digital cameras
    * types of digital cameras
    * digital camera reviews
    * best digital cameras

The searcher probably does not want to go to a specific website at this time. The searcher is relying on the search engine to deliver many relevant documents (with corresponding links/URLs), and he will browse those documents to learn more about this topic.

Known-item search

A known-item search is similar to an ad hoc search but the target of the search is a particular document, or a small set of documents, that the searcher knows to exist and wants to find again (definition from Ellen M. Voorhees, National Institute of Standards and Technology, available in the paper Overview of TREC 2003). In other words, with a known-item search, the searcher knows a particular web page exists but does not always know or remember where it is.

Or, interestingly enough, the searcher might know where the web page is but finds it easier to type all or part of the URL into the search box rather than the address bar. Why? Because many people find it is easier to type in all or part of a URL into Google (for example) rather than the full URL. In fact, in 2006, 17% of Google mobile queries were URLs, indicating that searchers knew which websites they wished to visit (see A Large Scale Study of Wireless Search Behavior: Google Mobile Search for more info).

Here are some keyword phrases that indicate that a person is exhibiting site finding behavior:

    * google adwords login
    * Beyonce website home page
    * official Star Trek site

In other words, labeling a home page (in the title tag, heading and even the meta-tag description) is very important for site finding queries.

Named page search

With a named page search, the web searcher wishes to go to a specific page within a website, a page that the searcher recalls seeing or visiting at a previous time. As an SEO professional, I often test the effectiveness of site optimization by doing named page searches.

For example, many SEOs use Google AdWords’ keyword research tool, but they don’t always bookmark it or remember it when using a different person’s computer. So they might type the following keyword phrase into the search box:

    google adwords keyword research tool

Clearly, this searcher wants to go directly to specific web page on Google’s website. But I also like to do some advanced queries to see how well or poorly clients and competitors are optimizing their own sites. The queries I type use the following formats:

    * [keyword phrase] [company/organization name or abbreviation]
    * [keyword phrase] [part of URL with and without the .com or TLD]
    * [keyword phrase] site:www.example.com

So if I am looking to see how well the National Cancer Institute has optimized its site, using the above example, I might try the following queries:

    * breast cancer treatments nci
    * breast cancer tests cancer.gov
    * “breast cancer screening” site:www.cancer.gov (with and without the quotes)

If inappropriate pages appear in search results, then I know that pages need to be optimized more effectively.

As I continue to research, label, test and verify web searcher behaviors, I continually encounter these types of searches. As you can see, some of these searcher behaviors have overlapping definitions, which can be confusing. Nevertheless, I maintain a list of different types of searcher goals so I can accommodate them in all of my client websites. Which searcher behaviors do you commonly encounter, and how well does your site accommodate those behaviors?

Source

Google Going To Lists Top 1,000 Sites & Lets You To Advertise On Them

2010-05-27T19:13:00.000-07:00

The Google AdWords blog announced new features for Google Ad Planner and AdWords content network today.

The big news is that Google publicly released a list of the top 1,000 sites by unique users as measured by Ad Planner. The list ranks sites based on category, unique visitors, reach and page views. Not only has Google come out with this list, but they are also allowing advertisers to specify that they only want their content ads to show on these top 1,000 sites.

To activate this filter in AdWords, go to your AdWords account and select “non Ad Planner 1000″ within the “category filters” section.

The top list lists facebook.com as the number one ranking site globally with 570,000,000,000 page views and 540,000,000 unique visitors. The list will be updated monthly and does not include adult sites, ad networks, domains that don’t have publicly visible content or don’t load properly, and certain Google sites. Yes, Google removes some of their own sites.

Where does this data come from? Google explains it comes from “aggregated Google Toolbar data from users who have opted in to enhanced features, publisher opt-in anonymous Google Analytics data, opt-in external consumer panel data, and other third-party market research. The data is aggregated over millions of users and powered by computer algorithms.”

The other Ad Planner features released today include a way to export your Google Content Network Placements from Ad Planner to AdWords and you can now create lists within Ad Planner.

For more details, see the Google AdWords Blog.

Google Advertising Professionals Program Is Going To Be Replaced By Google AdWords Certification

2010-04-27T18:46:00.000-07:00

Google’s longstanding Google Advertising Professionals program is going away, to be replaced with a new Google Adwords Certification program, Google has announced. The change means those certified through GAP will have six months to recertify under the new program. The change may also allow more companies to gain certification, as the overall required spend level has been lowered. More below.

Google Advertising Professionals launched in 2004 and is being phased out in place of the Google AdWords Certification program. Part of this change is to offer more training materials, more challenging certification exams, offer more advanced exams to test search, display, reporting and analysis and a shiny redesigned Certified Partner badge.

This change means that those who want to be individually certified now need to pass two exams. Companies wanting to be certified need to have one individually certified employee and have a spend of $10,000 per quarter.

Google is also relaunching the AdWords Professionals Search, which quietly went live in December 2009. The new name for the search is the Google Partner Search.

Google has also changed the pricing of their AdWords API usage structure. There is now a new preferred pricing section that takes you through to see if you qualify. This means some developers will get free API units based on managed client spend. You are eligible to apply for preferred pricing if your company is a Google AdWords Certified Partner and AdWords API-based tools remain in compliance with the AdWords API terms and conditions, including the required minimum functionality. More details on this at the AdWords API Blog and AdAge has some other details on this as well.

Postscript: I asked Google what happens to those GAP certified advertisers, do they lose their certification? Google sent me the following reply:

Yup, they’re still certified. That said, partners who are GAP certified will have to meet the new criteria, along with new terms and conditions, within a six-month period.
To be certified, each company must have one employee who has passed the Google Advertising Fundamentals exam, along with one Advanced exam (there are now four exams which cover a range of topics — Google Advertising Fundamentals, Advanced Search Advertising, Advanced Display Advertising, and Advanced Reporting and Analysis — instead of one broad exam). Additionally, the company must reach a 90-day minimum spend criteria of $10,000 USD or currency equivalent — which was previously $100k — and agree to new terms and conditions.

The GAP exam always had to be renewed every two years. The broad AdWords Certification exam (Google Advertising Fundamentals) is still valid for two years. However, the the advanced exams (Advanced Search Advertising, Advanced Display Advertising, Advanced Reporting and Analysis) that must be renewed annually, so it won’t be constant re-certification.

Google sent over more details about the terms for individual certification:

The spend requirement has been removed (formerly $1,000 USD over 90 days).
Individuals must achieve a passing score on two exams — Google Advertising Fundamentals, along with one advanced-level exam — as opposed to one exam.
Formerly, these people were designated as a Google Qualified Individual. Now, they are Individually Qualified in Google AdWords.
Individual badges will be phased out and replaced with certificates and an individual profile page hosted by Google – see example

Source : Search Engine Land

Web Analytics Wednesday Ahmedabad

2010-03-30T02:35:00.000-07:00

Finally Team of Internet Marketing Journal brings Web Analytics Wednesday Day to Ahmedabad. Internet Marketing Journal (IMJ) was founded by Jaydip Parikh, Kaushal Shah and Dipali Thakkar. They really work hard and now we are going to enjoy Web Analytics Wednesday to our own Ahmedabad.

Lead Speaker

Ravi Pathak,
Founder & Business Head, Tatvic (Bangalore)
Tatvic is official Google Analytics Authorized Consultant in India and having clients like Make My Trip, Cardekho and other leading portal and some prestigious International clients too.

Venue – Date & Time

14th. April, 2010, 7.00 PM Onwards
Gloria Banquet Hall
1st. Floor, Regency Tower,
Nr. Rahul Tower,
Anand Nagar – Prahlad Nagar 100 ft. Road,
Satellite, Ahmadabad.

Sponsors for this Event

Lead Sponsor :

YASH Infotech (Business Partner TATA Communications Ltd.)

Diamond Partners :

InvestPlus : InvestPlus is Personal Finance Software specially Design for Individuals needs.
Datatech Media : Web Development, Design & Internet Marketing Solutions Provider
Byte Technosys Pvt. Ltd. : RIMS, On Site Support, Microsoft Solutions, Web Solutions Provider

Merchandiser Partner :

Infibeam.com : Infibeam.com is a premier online shopping portal of India portal carrying 50 Lac products including Books, DVDs, Cars, Bikes, Mobiles, Cameras, Gifts and many more

Global Supporter : Eric Peterson Founder of webanalyticsdemystified.com

Source

Ranking In Google News Can Boost SEO Efforts

2010-03-20T02:41:00.000-07:00

Placing content on Google News is an effective strategy for search engine optimization (SEO) campaigns. However, this approach has its own set of challenges.

“Google News reaches more people than any other individual news source in the world,” explained the SEO Consult blog. “The fact that articles are selected by an algorithm makes the site even more attractive, as you don’t have to spend time courting stressed-out journalists and editors.

This algorithm also makes things more difficult, which is why SEO experts have spent considerable time figuring out how to optimize for Google News.”

Ranking in Google News is a big challenge for any online content source, because it constantly updates rankings. Plus, Google limits the top rankings to authoritative sources only.

This means that most of the top search results come from professional journalists.

Currently, very few online news sites can match the primacy of Google News in the online news realm.

Source : lastclicknews.com

WAW - Web Analytics Wednesday Ahmedabad

2010-03-17T00:02:00.000-07:00

Hello Friends,

As you all know, I am here to share with you all my research and new facts that I come across related to SEO, Web Analytics, SEO Tips And Techniques, Internet Marketing Industry Updates and such others. So, in this post I would like to draw your attention towards a Grand Event that is going to be organized especially for Web Analytics Lovers. Many of you might be knowing that, there is an International Event called WAW (Web Analytics Wednesday) which has been started by a very well known Web Analytcis Practitioner “Eric T. Peterson”. Normally, these kind of events used to be held at US, UK & Canada, but since last 2 years, We were fortunate enough to get this Event at India. Last year, the same kind of events were organized at Banglore, Chennai & Hyderabad.

And, NOW, With Lot Of Cheers, I am happy to announce that, We got got an opportunity to get this event to our own “Ahmedabad”. This event is hosted and managed by IMJ-Internet Marketing Journal which is usually maintained and handled by the combined efforts of industry experts. Credit goes to my industry friends (Dipali, Kaushal & Jaydip). It will be for the first time in North-West India where such kind of events are going to be held. The agenda of this event is to share and discussion about the Role of Web Analytics Insights in the Business.

Yup, WAW- Ahmedabad sounds so good isn't it...

I would like to invite all of you people to attend this event. We will have a great presentations during this event (Might be few speakers who have presented their knowledge in Google India seminars last year will going to speak in this event)

Please visit the below URL to send your RSVP

http://www.webanalyticsdemystified.com/wednesday/list.asp?event_city=Ahmedabad

Event : Web Analytics Wednesday – Ahmedabad

Date : 14th April, 2010

Time : 7.00 pm onwards

Venue : Gloria Restaurant, Anand Nagar Cross Road, Satellite, Ahmedabad Gujarat

Agenda : To share and discuss about the role of web analytics & data based decision driven process.

If you have any queries Or concerns, Plz feel free to ask.

Feel free to get updates of WAW-Ahmedabad event on LinkedIn & Facebook.

Hoping to meet you all at WAW – Ahmedabad

Avoid Over Optimizing Your Site

2010-03-09T22:53:00.000-08:00

A little SEO knowledge can be dangerous. In fact, it can be disastrous for publishers who learn their first few tidbits of information, and then begin to apply it to their sites. The problem it can lead to is known as "over optimization."

Search engines look at a variety of signals for ranking purposes, as well as spam detection purposes. This includes a site review to determine if it's over optimized, and can result in the rankings for a site being dropped to a lower position than they may otherwise occupy.

Unnatural behavior of any kind can lead to a site being flagged for over optimization. Here are some examples:

1. Pages that have identical page titles and H1 headings. This is more likely to be viewed as over optimization if subheadings on the page also repeat the key phrase, or if all the internal links to the page use anchor text that exactly matches the page title.

This bears a strong resemblance to the keyword stuffing practices from the early days of optimization, though at a lesser scale. In general, people don't write that way naturally, and it looks bad to a user, a human reviewer at a search engine, and to the search engine's algorithms.

2. Too many non-contextual internal links on your site. For example, many publishers know the value of linking to their most important pages from other pages on their site. Certainly, you can take your 10 most important pages and link to them from nearly every page of your site. But when the list of cross links grows too large (even 25 is getting there), you're beginning to push your luck).

3. Having pages with great visual experiences above the fold, and not finding text until well below the fold. Publishers who first learn about the value of keywords, and also about the long tail, are prone to doing this. They generate large blocks of text which users likely won't even see, and if they do, they will quickly ignore.

This text, because it isn't intended for users, is often poorly written and crammed with keywords and internal links with rich anchor text. Sometimes it appears as if publishers go out of their way to make the text user unfriendly. For example, a huge block of 25 lines of text in one paragraph isn't intended for users!

Summary

Take care when you optimize a page. There's little reward, and possibly even a negative penalty, for doing too much to try and support ranking for a particular key phrase, or set of phrases. Let the content from those pages be a bit more focused on the user and optimizing conversion. You might just find that this is the best SEO tactic.

Also, be careful when providing SEO training to your writers. Many writers with good intentions have turned in articles to me that were crammed with keywords (and those writers were promptly instructed to re-write the articles).

The problem is that the result didn't look right to the average reader. Let your writers write good stuff, without burdening them with lots of SEO instructions. You just don't know where they'll go with it.

Give them the desired title of the article, tell them the topics and sub-topics you would like covered, and let them write. You'll be better off for it.

Source : Avoid Over Optimizing Your Site

12 Quick SEO Tips For Blog

2010-03-02T02:25:00.000-08:00

Here are some helpful seo tips for your blog. These tips definately useful for your blog and your blog will get more traffic for the search engines if your follow the following tips :

If you have a domain and want to install wordpress blog, don't put your blog at the root of your domain. Rename the directory with "blog" instead of "wordpress".
Always use dashes or hyphens in the url. These are best. You can also use underscore in the url. Spaces and no spaces are useless.
Put target keyword in the title tag and the heading of blog post.
Include the main keyword in the first paragraph in every post.
Use alt tags on images. Its good seo strategy.
Install title and meta description plugins. And make all the titles unique with the help of title plugin. These worpdress plugins are available free.
Always ping your blog in google and other autoping resources when updated.
When changing your host, use a permanent redirect (301).
Check your blog in all the popular web browers and cell phone.
Verify your blog using google webmaster tool and submit xml sitemap in all the three major search engines like google, yahoo and msn.
Don't mix non-www with www.
If you are earning from google adsense, use section targeting. Google will display relevant ads on your blog.

Source : tipsofseo.blogspot.com/

Suggested Users List for Twitter That You Can Actually Use

2009-11-09T23:25:00.000-08:00

Twellow has launched a new "Suggested Users" feature aimed at connecting Twitterers with similar interests. It should be much more useful to the common Twitter user than Twitter's own suggested list, which is one static list for everybody, and includes mostly celebrities and other well-known people. In fact, Twitter may be getting rid of that list soon anyway.

Twellow's feature is tailored to the interests of the specific user, so your list will be completely different than the next person's.

Twellow is a WebPronews service, which provides Twitter users with a directory of people to follow by category or location.

"Being able to find people that really share common interests is what Twellow is all about," says Twellow's lead developer, Matthew Daines. "This new feature should really add value to our Twellow toolset in helping people meet this goal."

suggested_users_tab

"While Twitter has offered a suggested users list for some time, it really hasn't been very useful for the average Twitter user," he says. "Our large database of categorized users really has allowed us to provide a much better matching system for suggesting users to follow. These are relevant people who actually share your personal interests."

Twellow's Suggested Users feature can:

    - Display up to 500 profiles.

    - Let you follow users right from the list.

    - Let your ignore and hide profiles you don’t think are good matches.

    - Let you click the More Info buttons on each profile to show the categories for that profile. Your matches are marked with a green star.

    - Let you adjust your profile categories if suggestions are not accurate, then return and view the new results.

Check out the Suggested Users feature on Twellow, and let us know what you think about it. Our team is always open to feedback.

Do you think such a feature would make Twitter more useful? Share Your Comments Here!!!!

Source
Suggested Users List for Twitter That You Can Actually Use

Google To Acquire GrandCentral

2009-10-13T02:38:00.000-07:00

Google is in acquisition discussions with telephone management startup GrandCentral, we’ve learned, and we have a high degree of confidence that the deal has actually been closed. We are trying to nail down the acquisition price. Just last week I flagged this company as the most exciting startup we’re currently tracking.

The basic idea around GrandCentral is “one phone number for all your phones, for life.” As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone numbers is a real cost. If you use GrandCentral you can give out a single phone number. What happens when that person calls that number depends on his/her relationship to you, and what you are doing at the time.

The company, which has raised less than $6 million in capital from Minor Ventures (the exact amount has never been disclosed), beta launched just last September. Earlier this year mainstream press and blogger attention heated up.

The company may have received too much press attention before the product was ready, and we reported on some backlash from beta users abandoning the service in March. Still, the company pushed ahead, launching a mobile product and other features.

GrandCentral was recently pitching a second round of financing to Silicon Valley venture capitalists, but broke off discussions abruptly as the Google talks heated up.

I’m speculating on where Google will use GrandCentral, but the synergies with Gmail and GTalk are fairly obvious and could be the next step in Google’s competition with Skype and other instant messaging platforms.

This is, in my opinion, a great move by Google. Grand Central is an awesome productivity and simplifies the lives of users with multiple phones by giving them a single phone number and letting them handle calls via rules. It’s a natural fit with GTalk and Gmail.

Google won’t comment on this story. I have an email in to GrandCentral to see if they’ll confirm.

Source

Google To Acquire GrandCentral

Sync Google Search History With Your Mobile

2009-10-01T05:21:00.000-07:00

Perhaps Google has taken cue from the very active Bing team, because they’ve rolled several search-related improvements in the matter of hours, and all that in the midst of the official launch of Google Wave.

This latest improvement is a small one, but it might come in handy. Google’s Personalized Suggest – the feature that remembers your past searches and offers them in a drop down box as you start typing – now syncs with Google Search on Android (Android), iPhone, and Palm Pre.

Anything you’ve searched for on your desktop will now show up on your mobile search and vice versa; if you often repeat searches, you’ll be grateful when you fire up search on your mobile and get exactly what you needed without having to type it all.

For this feature to work, you need to be signed into the same Google Account on your computer and on your phone when conducting the search. Furthermore, you can switch this option on and off by selecting “Save searches” or “Do not save searches” under Settings on google.com.

Original Post At

Sync Google Search History With Your Mobile

Google's Bid Simulator Tool Helpful For Adwords Keyword Bidding !!!!!!

2009-09-22T23:51:00.000-07:00

PPC (pay-per-click) search advertisers often speculate about what would happen when they increase their CPC (cost per click) bids. How many more impressions, clicks and sales or leads would they get when they increase the keyword bid price? With the new Google Bid Simulator feature, advertisers will now be able to get a prediction of the number of times an ad would appear in the search results, the position the ad would have been shown in for a particular bid price and the number of clicks the ad would have received at that position.

Bid Simulator Benefits

The Google Bid Simulator tool is aimed to show "missed opportunity", adds a level of transparency to the Google Adwords auction-based PPC system, provides advertisers with a better picture of the trade-off between cost and click-through volume, simplifies the bidding process by eliminated trail and error and gives advertisers insight so that they can make more informed bidding decisions.

How Bid Simulator Works

When Google Adwords advertisers access their Adwords account, they'll see a blue Bid Simulator icon next to keywords' Maximum CPC Bids label. Clicking on that icon will bring up the bid simulations for that particular keyword. The Bid Simulator uses data from the previous 7 days from a particular keyword and based on that information, it will show up a couple of different "simulations" for that keyword. For keywords that receive a low number of impressions the Bid Simulator shows an approximate number of impressions, estimates the number of clicks, the click cost and the average position for a bid that keyword may have generated based on a higher or lower maximum CPC (cost-per-click) bid. If a keyword receives a minimum number of impressions below a certain threshold the Bid Simulator icon may not appear.

Within the Bid Simulator advertisers can select any of the bid prices that are presented and change the bid within the tool. While this may be increasing the transparency of a "black box" auction-based bidding system, this is hardly going back to the days of knowing what you had to bid to get a certain position. Google stresses though that this is just a projection; and that advertisers won't necessarily get exactly those results. The Google Adwords blog cautions that "past performance does not guarantee future results." There are so many factors that go into keyword bidding that there's no way to predict future campaign performance.

While the Bid Simulator isn't an exact blueprint for a bidding strategy, but what it can do is make projections so that advertisers don't not have to. Advertisers could look back at their past results and use them to predict what effect bid changes will have on the keywords in their campaigns. However, for the keywords that get sufficient traffic, Google is doing that already with the Bid Simulator. And, because Google has access to information about the campaign quality score advertisers can be sure that their projections are going to be a lot more accurate than any they could have come up with on their own. Advertisers can use this information to their advantage when plotting out future budgets for their campaigns.

However, for the keywords that get sufficient traffic, Google is doing that for them with the Bid Simulator. Since Google has access to quality score information of all advertising accounts advertisers can be sure that their projections are going to be a lot more accurate than any they could come up with on their own. Advertisers can use this information to their advantage when plotting out budgets for their future advertising campaigns.

It's interesting to note that Yahoo has a similar tool, which has been active ever since they launched the new Panama system three years ago. Yahoo refers to it as "bid forecasting" and it's available by clicking on any keyword in a Yahoo Sponsored Search campaign. Once again, the projections are based on previous data, so the more traffic a keyword gets, the more information the program can use for the forecast. Yahoo offers up a few more metrics in their projections (average position, CTR) but the projections are thought to be less accurate. Again, the best way to use this tool is to make future projections, not necessarily take it at face value as a keyword bid recommendation.

The Bid Simulator is being touted as a great addition to the tools Google Adwords already has at its disposal. Once again they are overshadowing Yahoo, despite the fact that Yahoo already has it's own version of the tool. The Bid Simulator tool is coming across as making the auction in Google Adwords more transparent, but advertisers should be cautious. Remember that there are other factors like ROI that dictate how advertisers should direct their bidding strategy. When used as a projection tool and as a measurement of missed opportunities, the Google Adwords Bid Simulator can be a powerful tool in the hand of a skilled Google Adwords advertiser.

Original Source At

Google's Bid Simulator Tool Adds More Transparency to Adwords Keyword Bidding

Google Might Be On Home Page Of Yahoo

2009-09-18T05:53:00.000-07:00

Senior director's comments elicit big "huh?"

The Yahoo search experience might at some point change in a very surprising way. That Bing may take over, we've come to accept. But at least one high-ranking Yahoo employee thinks Google could get a shot, too.

Let's talk about said employee for a moment. Burke Culligan is the senior director of product planning and strategy over Yahoo's front page and My Yahoo, so he's in a good position to discuss significant adjustments. Also, Culligan's worked for Yahoo since October of 2005, so it's not like he's some newbie who doesn't know the score.

Judge the next bit for yourself, then.

Joseph Tartakoff reported, "During an update on the status of the home page, Yahoo senior director Burke Culligan told analysts that the company was not opposed to letting users replace Yahoo search with Microsoft's Bing or even Google."

Culligan apparently explained, "Right now, we're not doing that but long-term that may not be out of the question. We want to provide the best experience for the user and, in some way, if that was the best experience for the user we might be open to that."

This led Kit Eaton to speculate that the proposed Microsoft-Yahoo deal is falling apart. Or perhaps Culligan was talking about what will happen after it expires in ten years. Regardless, his comments were rather striking, and we'll keep an ear out for any denials or clarifications that follow.

Google Might Be On Home Page Of Yahoo

Yahoo Exchanges Alibaba.com Stake For $150M

2009-09-15T03:11:00.000-07:00

Yahoo should soon have about $150 million more to its name. By selling 57.48 million shares, the Sunnyvale-based company is liquidating its stake in Chinese business-to-business site Alibaba.com and collecting a tidy profit.

Yahoo acquired its 1.14 percent stake in Alibaba.com during the company's initial public offering in 2007. Now, Reuters reports that Yahoo will sell the stake at a 4.0-6.4 percent discount on Alibaba's most recent closing price.

That might indicate that Yahoo's in a bit of a hurry; there's a definite concern, at least, about how both Yahoo and Alibaba.com shareholders will interpret its move. (A relevant note: Yahoo's stock is already down 1.22 percent this morning). But even after the discount, Yahoo should realize a profit of 47 percent or more, which makes its investment look like a good one.

Here's another important detail: Yahoo is holding onto its 40 percent stake in Alibaba.com's parent company, Alibaba Group, so it's not getting out of China or anything of the sort.

John Spelich, a vice president at Alibaba Group, also stated, "We are pleased to learn of the Yahoo! decision because having broader ownership of Alibaba.com with increased liquidity and support among institutional investors is what Alibaba.com hoped to achieve when it released the cornerstone investors."

Original Post At

Yahoo Exchanges Alibaba.com Stake For $150M

Google Launches “Google Internet Stats”

2009-09-11T23:26:00.000-07:00

It appears Google has pulled together a bunch of statistics throughout the web and created a small landing page named Google Internet Stats on the Google UK front. The page explains that this service “brings together the latest industry facts and insights together in one place.” Google collected this data from many third party vendors, on a wide range of topics. In fact, you can submit your data using this form.

Here is a picture of the mobile technology internet stats from this tool:

The categories of statistics include: -

Consumer Trends – Community – Entertainment – Information – eCommerce - Macro Economic Trends – Rest of the World – UK - Media Consumption – Changes in Media Usage – Demographic Usage – Media Consumption Stats – Media Multi-tasking – Personalised Media Experiences - Media Landscape – All Media – Online - Technology – Broadband – Devices – Mobile – Speed

The current data providers include B2Bonline.com, BARB, BusinessWeek, Coke, Commission of the European Communities, Comscore, Core Metrics, Datamonitor, Deloitte, The Economist, eMarketer, Enders Analysis, Eurostat, Film Distributors Association, Financial Times, Forrester, GFK, Google Insights for Search, Greenbee.com, Guardian, HarvardBusiness.org, Hitwise, IAB, IFPI, IMF, Internet Retailing, Internetworldstats.com, JP Morgan, KMPG, Media & Marketing, Mediascope Europe, Mindshare, Motorola, Net Imperative, New York Magazine, Nielsen, NMA, Ofcom, Opsos MediaCT, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, QuickPlay Media Inc., Retail Week, Reuters, TGI Net, Times Online, TNS, Verdict Research, Wall Street Journal, WARC, YouTube, ZenithOptimedia, and GM.

Postscript: A Google UK representative answered some of my questions, clarifying the following:

There are no plans to launch this tool elsewhere at the moment. This is a UK-only initiative.
Any stats submitted by users will be verified by Google’s market research teams
Google license data from a number of sources, as well as bring together publicly reported facts and stats from the web (sources shown on the site)

Google has an official blog post on this new initiative at their Google Barometer blog.

Original Post At

Google Launches “Google Internet Stats”

10 Firefox Add-Ons To Make Your Gmail Experience Better

2009-09-11T06:36:00.000-07:00

Gmail is a solid product from Google for emailing and Firefox add-ons make it more useful, so if you are running Firefox then you are lucky one to use Gmail features in a new way for better experience. Many new features you would be looking in Gmail to have, so now install these Firefox add-ons and find how many new features you got.

These add-ons are selected for Firefox 3.5, so if you do not have installed this version of Firefox it is better to install it to enjoy these add-ons.

1) Xoopit for Gmail

Xoopit is very recommended add-on for Gmail, if you use Gmail many times or for every time when you send emails. Recently Yahoo has acquired Xoopit.

Features:

use Google search while composing email.
Get information about people in conversation
Include Facebook status.

2) Gmail Notifier

If you always check your emails after one minute then this add-ons is for you. You would be thinking Gtalk also inform use by this way but Gtalk supports only one account at a time and this add-ons support multiple accounts.

3) Better Gmail

Better Gmail makes your Gmail experience better and adds some useful extra features like hierarchical labels, unread message icon on your browser tab and many new features. It uses Greasemonkey scripts.

4) Gmail S/MIME

This add-on enables you to send and receive signed and encrypted message in Gmail.

5) Integrated Gmail

This add-on enables you to integrate other Google’s services.

Features:

Unread count in titles.
Drag and drop control elements in sidebar
Collapsible header in sidebar for Gmail and Google calender.
Support for silting multiple inboxes .
Https support for Google selected Google sites

6) Gmail Manager

Gmail manager is another good add-on for manging Gmail to get better experience.

Features:

Notifier for multiple accounts
You can get new email notifications while viewing account details.

7) Blank Canvas Gmail Signatures

This add-ons automatically inserts HTML signatures in your message based on your selected email address. It is depend upon you which email address you have chosen to compose email, as you know this an add-on based on browser so you can set different email signatures for different emails address.

8) GTDInbox

As creators of this add-on claim ” It transforms Gmail into a powerhouse of productivity.” It gives you a faster, better and task oriented inbox.

9) Gmail Notes

It is an experimental add-on, experimental add-ons are one with testing purpose so you have try them on your own risqué. So if you are a risqué takes you may try it, as its name suggests after installing this add-on a small menu will be created in your gmail page, which allows you to attach a private note in your conversation.

10) Mailto

This add-on is also a experimental add-on.
You may check this add-on by yourself.

Source : techshali.com

Spam, Spam, Spam, Spam - Never Seen Before!

2009-09-09T05:57:00.000-07:00

Well the situation has officially spiraled out of control. There isn’t a filter anywhere that can ensure that I receive the messages I want, and not the garbage I get.

Maybe it’s the holiday season, but we now receive over 400 spam emails a day among to our info, sales and support email addresses. Personally, I receive about 300 to mine.

There really is only one solution that works, and that is the one that requires the sender to verify they are a real person the first time they email.

So as of this morning, we have installed Spam Arrest on my personal email, as well as the general company email addressess. We pre-loaded a whitelist of customers and contacts, but that’s only a start.

Let me publicly apologize to anyone who has not received a response from me, or from one of our general email addresses. I have missed too many emails lately because of this, and it ends here….

And to those of you that get annoyed when you have to type in those funny numbers the first time you email someone, understand that it’s the only way to ensure that every email from that point on will get read and responded to.

Whoever comes up with a 100% accurate, automated way to rid the world of spam should have their face carved in a mountain…..

(no I’m not kidding….)

Source : http://www.mobilewebanalytics.net/

CUIL SEO Optimization, CUIL Ranking Formula, CUIL Ranking Tips

2009-09-08T06:31:00.000-07:00

Get top ranking in CUIL with fresh content and well optimization

As per information on other blogs, sites and forums, I came to know amazing tips about ranking formula and tips for CUIL. CUIL newly launched search engine has very difficult and newly ranking method with column system. We can see ranking is divided in 2 column and 3 columns. I was searching for tips to get top ranking in CUIL and I found tips for CUIL optimization to come in top ranking order in Cuil.

CUIL gives first priority for ranking to fresh content and well optimization. That’s good news for optimizers; they can get top ranking in Cuil ranking page. They need to be careful during optimization site for Cuil coz Cuil is very alert and its optimization is very sensitive (means, we need to be careful for all points of optimization (0% stuffing for Cuil)).

Well this is information as per discussion during top seo optimizers from all over the worlds in one of the famous seo forum. Now Cuil ranking depends on our optimization. We don’t need to improve more link backs and other off page activities like SEM, SMO etc to get top rank in Cuil.

Source : sandeepdharak.blogspot.com

How To Update Sitemap Automatically to Google, Yahoo, Bing

2009-09-07T05:58:00.000-07:00

I hope you all are using sitemap.xml for your blog / site if you are not you must start using it because It’s a way that you can point your content to Different Search Engines. Search Engine can sniff your site content via you sitemap (Not all the time.) If you are not having sitemap.xml for your site the you probably get code from Google Code Sitemap Generator.

No we are assuming you are having your own sitemap.xml and you want to update instantly to all major Search Engine on a single click or complete atomized then what will you do ? Just follow the bellow mention steps. Here I am assuming that you have basic knowledge of Programming, Server Handling, FTP etc. I will advice you not to execute / edit wrong file if you are not having proper knowledge of Code or Server Admin. You just do it manually copy the bellow mention code (scripts) edit WWW.YOUR-SITE.COM/SITEMAP.XML to your sitemap URL then paste in browser and hit Enter Key.

http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/ping?sitemap=WWW.YOUR-SITE.COM/SITEMAP.XML

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=WWW.YOUR-SITE.COM/SITEMAP.XML

http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=WWW.YOUR-SITE.COM/SITEMAP.XML

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=WWW.YOUR-SITE.COM/SITEMAP.XML

http://api.moreover.com/ping?sitemap=WWW.YOUR-SITE.COM/SITEMAP.XML

This will be manual thing but if you want to make and forgot it thing then what to do? Very Simple You have to follow following steps. (Make sure you have knowledge of Server Admin)
If you are Using Linux Server

Download ping.php file from bellow mention link
Edit the file with your sitemap URL.
Upload that file in your sites root folder.
Now log on to your Control Panel.
Find an Option for Create Cron Job
Define Cron Job as per your site requirement, Daily, Weekly, Every 1 Hour etc.
Select ping.php as schedule file.

If you are using Windows Server then check this:

You can do this in task scheduler of windows server. Task can be created manually in the task scheduler or with @ commands and can be designated to run under a user account with privileges. There is also a software (free) called nnCron which uses the same kind of syntax that of Linux on Windows.
This is shared by Vishal Vasu, a Windows Server Management Expert. Thx Vishal.

Congratulations !!!!! Now you are done with auto execution of your Sitemap file.......

Source : www.jaydip.info

Mobile, Video Analytics Slowly Evolving

2009-09-04T05:00:00.000-07:00

The latest report to come from analyst firm CMS Watch (news, site) is one that will grab the attention of those who want to understand who is visiting their site and what they are doing while they are there. We suppose that includes just about everyone then. Or at least it should.

The CMS Watch Web Analytics Report 2009, is an analysis of 20 web analytics firms against twelve potential use cases. What they found was that mobile and video analytics vendors are offering a variety of solutions to track the usage of video and mobile more closely, but there's still work to be done.

Video Analytics: No Picnic

Traditional analytics vendors can only track if a video has been started, not much else. Tells you something, but you want to know more. You want to know if the entire video was watched, if it was paused, rewound or how long it was viewed.

With some invasive coding in the video, this could probably be done by traditional vendors, but there is another answer. There are new niche vendors for video analytics coming out such as Visible Measures and GlanceGuide who can track this type of activity.

Of course, these new vendors have different approaches to measuring video says CMS Watch contributing analyst Phil Kemelor and some are more complex than others.
Mobile Analytics: Still Pie in the Sky

Another critical market is the mobile user. This user base is becoming much bigger with the release of all the cool new phones and devices and the increasingly mobile workforce. We told you to pay more attention to your mobile content strategy didn't we?

To help you measure mobile usage on your website, new vendors such as AdMob, Amethon, Bango and Mobilytics. Of course the big players have also come to the table with their own mobile analytics solutions this past year — Omniture, Coremetrics and WebTrends.

What kind of information can you get from these vendors? Reports such as percentage of mobile visitors by screen size, handset manufacturer and browser. Even the mobile device header can give you some useful information. Unfortunately, header info varies by device and personal settings among other things.

As you likely know, the biggest issue with tracking mobile usage today is that not all devices accept cookies and JavaScript (both used to measure traffic) or have them enabled.
Still Inexact Science, But Evolving

CMS Watch says that both video and mobile metrics are very young and inexact practices. Which means, the metrics are here, but take them with a grain of salt because there are still some technical issues to resolve.

“If mobile or video is very important to you today, you may need to use both a niche player and a traditional analytics vendor,” concludes CMS Watch founder Tony Byrne. However, he adds, “In the longer run, it’s hard to know how successfully the niche vendors will fare, as the major analytics players catch up, and new phones come on the market that support JavaScript and cookies.”

Pick up your copy (or a free sample) of the CMS Watch Web Analytics Report 2009, available today and watch CMS Watch closely for a new four-hour online certificate course in Web Analytics Technology which will include mobile and video tracking.

Article Source : Mobile, Video Analytics Slowly Evolving

Get Listed In Real-Time Searches

2009-09-03T06:31:00.000-07:00

Real-time search is still an emerging concept. At this point, using a real-time search engine will bring you results by time/date. This doesn't always cater to relevancy, which is why there is still a lot of work to be done in this field.

Do you see traffic coming from real-time searches? Comment here.

So, if real-time results are based upon time/date, and the user's query, it stands to reason that time and those queries are the most important components in getting your content found in these types of searches.

1. Use Keywords

This seems obvious, but use keywords in not only your content, but in your titles, and your updates. If you're writing an article, you have to consider what people are going to include in their updates if they share it on a social network, whether this be Facebook, Twitter, or anything else.

More often than not, they are going to include the title. If the right keywords are in the title, then those keywords are also more likely to appear in any ensuing tweets, Facebook updates, etc. If someone searches for those keywords, they will be more likely to find your content in a real-time search.

The same goes for your own Tweets/status updates. Even if you are not sharing an article, if you want your update to be found, use relevant keywords. Again, obvious, but true.

2. Talk About Timely Events

Simply mentioning events that are current will put you directly into the results for any searches having to do with that topic, provided the right keywords are in play. This is a method that could and (surely is) being exploited by spammers, but that doesn't mean you can't provide legitimate conversation and simply put yourself on more people's radars, without throwing links at them every time.

3. Have a Lot of Followers

If you have a lot of followers or friends on social networks, or even just readers of your blog, you are going to get more people sharing your content. The more people sharing your content, the more impressions of your content will be making their way into real time searches.

There is no easy way to instantly get a bunch of legitimate readers/followers. It will take some promotion. Provide useful content that people will link to and it will spread virally. Provide clear ways for them to follow you (like links to Facebook pages and Twitter accounts on your blog).

4. Promote Conversation

Whether on your blog or on a social network, spark conversations. Talk about topics that people are interested in. This is tied to number 2. The more conversations you are involved with, the more retweets (and equivalents on other networks) you are likely to get. And again, this means more impressions in real times searches.

5. Include Calls to Engagement

Retweet button from Tweetmeme I recently talked about why there is more to retweeting than meets the eye for businesses. I mentioned the use of buttons like Tweetmeme's and Digg's. These are buttons you can put on articles that show the amount of retweets/diggs that article has. They kind of act as a meter for engagement.

These buttons are certainly not all-encompassing. They only represent the conversation on 2 channels, and not the web in general. I'm sure there are other buttons that can be used in addition.

More importantly though, they provide a "call to action" to share the content. People can digg or retweet a story with a simple click, and you're one step closer to being found in somebody's real-time search.

Wrapping Up

Real-time search is much more basic (at least so far) than say, Google Search. You're not ranking for relevancy. Really, you could hardly call it ranking it all. It's about visibility. That means, you have to get people talking about your content/updates.

Social media by nature is viral. Real-time search is nothing more than putting things in chronological order. You have to keep people talking to stay relevant to "right now."

Source : webpronews.com

Google Wave + Twitter = Twave

2009-09-02T06:02:00.000-07:00

Google Wave, released earlier today, is already generating a lot of buzz, and for good reason: it’s a potential game changer in the realm of of email, IM, and project management. But there a few key features that really speak to Google Wave’s potential. Specifically, the fact that it is open-source and can be fitted with extensions and applications.

Today, the Google team showed off a few extensions for their new communication platform. One of the most interesting ones, though, was Twave, a Twitter extension for Google Wave. The integration makes sense: Google Wave and Twitter are both forms of real-time communication, so why not bring them together? The result, though, speaks to the potential applications of Google’s newest product.

Twave is an extension based on a Google Wave robot, which is an automated participant in a conversation. It is basically how an extension can perform tasks within Google Wave – in this instance, a Google robot, named “Tweety.” The result is a full stream of your Twitter feed within Google Wave. Not only can you see tweets, but it looks like you can manage them like you would email, with replies, archiving, and even Google Wave’s awesome playback feature.

There were several other great extensions and robots that were demonstrated today. Here’s just a few of the coolest ones:

- Debuggy: A robot that responds with debugging information about each event on a wave

- Stocky: Automatically detects stock quotes and provides real-time stock information

- Bloggy: Pushes wave content to a blog

- Maps: Allows for collaboration on a Google map to plan events

- Bidder: You can turn a Wave into your own eBay

- Ratings: All Wave participants can rate and review items – then it will show you a tally of the results.

These innovations are only the beginning of the many additions that developers will build for Google Wave. The web is truly transforming into a real-time engine, and Google Wave + Twitter is only the beginning. Not only can we expect a slew of great Twitter applications within Google Wave, but some really innovative use of Google’s new real-time conversation platform.

Update: We’ve included another screenshot, this one showing a little more of what the Twave and Google Wave robots can do in general.

Source : mashable.com

Submitting Your Website to Search Engines

2009-08-28T23:58:00.000-07:00

If you have a web-based company or if a considerable part of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.

Be careful of companies that assure automatic compliance of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but only fake promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and addition is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content. Don’t submit websites that are incomplete. When you submit site or blog to search engine, be careful for details for your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

Mere submission to search engine companies does not assurance that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. As there are thousands of fresh websites upcoming up all day and it might get quite a little bit before they take up your site for review by human editors. One significant issue to keep in mind even as submitting site is to take in a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like ‘http://www.google.com’ hardly considers submissions without sitemaps.

There are a lot of online companies that recognize search engine submission services. You can select to do it by hand with a software package and service like this one:

http://www.webposition.com/order/trial.asp?WT.mc_id=google%3A%7Bifsearch%3Asearch%7D%7Bifcontent%3Acontent%7D%3A%7Bcreative%7D%3Atrial%3A%7Bkeyword%7D&WT.srch=1

Or if you want professional help try the following sites:

http://www.addpro.com/professional_submission

http://www.submitawebsite.com/aboutus.html

Don’t use the automatic submission services.

Here is a list of the most well-liked Search Engines and directory companies:

Search Engines
Go.com/InfoSeek AltaVista
Google, HotBot
Excite/Webcrawler

Directories
AOL Search Inktomi
Lycos Open Directory
MSN, Yahoo!
LookSmart Snap

Apart from the above there are thousands of search engines and directory companies, where you can submit your website to as many companies as possible. The next links give information on extra search engines and directories:

http://websearch.about.com/library/searchengine/blsearchenginesatoz.htm

http://websearch.about.com/library/tableofcontents/blsearchenginetableofcontents.htm

Source : professionalseoindia.com

Orkut 'Promote': New Tool In Orkut.com

2009-08-25T04:50:00.000-07:00

Orkut is a popular social site in Brazil and india. 49.83% users in Brazil and 17.51% users in India are using Orkut. It's launched in Jan 22, 2004. In 2004 Orkut has more users from United States, later US users are attracted to facebook and myspace.

We all would always wish to send something to all of our friends like messages, greetings, invitations, photos, videos, information etc. To make all this possible with a single click Orkut has released new option "Promote". It's a free tool. You will find this option below the events button ( Have a look on the following image). Currently this feature not live for all users, Probably it would be live after some time.

One of the best part of this tool is tracking. You can see clearly that how many people has viewed your message, clicked it and deleted it. It's a great feature for Promotional purposes. If you want to sale something for low price, this is the best feature to offer your friends to utilize the chance.

Just have a look on the following charts to have an idea that how orkut got popular in Brazil and India which was popular earlier in United States. (source: Wikipedia)

Source : seodailyupdates.blogspot.com

Craigslist Substantially Expands its Reach

2009-08-24T05:57:00.000-07:00

Adds Services for 140 New Cities

Craigslist has reportedly expanded the number of cities it offers its service in by a whopping 25%. Brad Stone with the New York Times claims to have been alerted by a spokesperson with the company on the matter.

Apparently Craiglist has added 140 new cities, including 87 in the United States, 8 in Canada, and 45 in non-North American countries.

"Among the targeted areas in the United States are dozens of small to midsize cities like Susanville, Calif. (population 18,000), Oneonta, N.Y. (13,000), and the counties of Okaloosa and Walton, Fla. (a combined 229,000.)," says Stone. "If that expansion sounds minor, consider that Craigslist also added new sites for international cities like Lucknow, India (population 2.5 million), Shenzhen, China (14 million), and New Castle, Australia, (280,000)."

Craigslist is expected to update the company's official fact sheet to list all of the included cities by the end of the month. There is not mention of the news on the company's official blog.

Most of the new sites are English-language only. According to Craigslist, over 50 million people in the US alone use the site. The company also claims to get over 20 billion page views per month. With an added 25% of global coverage, I would imagine it will get a nice boost in that department.

Source : webpronews.com

Yahoo’s Social Plan : Twitter, Twitter & More Twitter ?

2009-08-21T04:19:00.000-07:00

Yahoo’s moves this year is like watching a kid in class fall head-over-heels for the prettiest girl in class. He scribbles her initials inside his notebook and tries to impress her at every turn. She never seems to reply, at least not when the rest of the class would see it, so he just keeps trying harder. And harder.

Here’s what I’m getting at: Yahoo has spent 2009 making a series of moves that suggests it really has a thing for Twitter. Most of these moves have been made out of the spotlight’s glare, but altogether they leave an unmistakable trail of evidence that, at minimum, Yahoo has great admiration for Twitter. And they could mean much more than that. Consider the evidence….

Yahoo Meme

Don’t know what Yahoo Meme is? Well, the closest comparison is Twitter. It’s a micro-blogging service where users post updates that can include photos and/or video. Meme supports reposting and following other users to stay abreast of their updates. Sound familiar?

Yahoo Meme launched a few months ago, but only in a Portuguese version. TechCrunch reported Wednesday that Yahoo recently launched a Spanish-language version with little fanfare.

TweetNews

In January, Yahoo programmer Vik Singh created TweetNews, a search engine that uses Twitter to re-rank Yahoo’s latest news search results.

Singh is the architect of Yahoo BOSS and was just named one of MIT’s Young Innovators Under 35. It means something when he starts messing with Twitter.

Yahoo Home Page

When Yahoo announced its new home page last month, one of the new features is a Twitter-like status update tool that lets you post short messages to your Yahoo account.

The new home page also has an “Updates” tab in the left navigation, which mimics the Twitter experience in a couple ways — showing you updates from your own “connections” (like followers on Twitter) or from all Yahoo users.

What you post as your status on the Yahoo home page will also show on your Yahoo profile, which was redesigned several months ago and now features, you guessed it, a Twitter-like invite to answer the question, “What are you doing now?”

Yahoo Mail

Yahoo Mail is the company’s most popular property, and Yahoo has been bent on making it more social this year. In June, Yahoo announced several new features with Twitter-like sharing in mind. One of those is the ability to update your status from inside Yahoo Mail.

Know Your Mojo

Just last week, Yahoo introduced a site called Know Your Mojo that purports to tell you what kind of Twitter user you are.

There’s no real purpose for Know Your Mojo to exist that I can see, other than to give Yahoo another way to show its affection for Twitter.

Important People

Just yesterday, Yahoo was spreading the word about Important People, a new tool that’s “so beta it’s not even alpha.” What is it? It’s a tool that tries to determine “the most influential people tweeting about a specific topic.”

And how did Yahoo spread the word yesterday? Via Twitter, of course.

Sideline

Important People is being considered for inclusion in Sideline, a desktop application that Yahoo developed to let Twitter users monitor hot trends and other keyword searches in the Twitter stream.

What’s It All Mean

When new CEO Carol Bartz came on board this year, she promised what I previously called a back to the future approach to Yahoo’s properties. She promised Yahoo would “create community from isolated sites.” Adding social elements to Yahoo Mail and the Yahoo home page makes sense given Yahoo’s huge user base. But, as you can see above, a lot of these new social touches aren’t just about getting social in a general sense; they’re either directly about Twitter or mimic Twitter very closely.

Is Yahoo interested in buying Twitter? (Who isn’t?) In May, Yahoo CTO Ari Balough told the Reuters Global Technology Summit that the company is looking at buying companies that will help Yahoo be a bigger player in social media. “It’s a good time to be buying now…. I can guarantee you there will be some acquisitions, and we will do some stuff in-house.”

People have been speculating about Yahoo buying Twitter for some time. Back in February, John Battelle suggested that “Yahoo might see Twitter as a way to get back to the days of Flickr.” In May, an opinion piece on CBSNews.com made the case for Yahoo to buy Twitter. But both of those, along much of the other speculation, were written before the Yahoo-Microsoft deal.

What’s been said since the deal? Not much.

In last month’s Yahoo earnings conference call, there were several mentions of Yahoo’s plans to be more social. But the word “Twitter” wasn’t mentioned once, not even in passing. If Yahoo has any designs on Twitter, it’s playing things close to the vest (as it should).

But perhaps in this case, Yahoo’s actions speak louder than its words.

Source : searchengineland.com

Social Media Profiles Screening For Candidate Recruitment

2009-08-19T23:10:00.000-07:00

We all know that employers are getting savvy to social networking sites and the information we share online. But what you may not know is that a recently conducted survey shows that nearly 1 in 2 companies are doing their online due diligence for prospective job candidates.

This according to research firm Harris Interactive, who was commissioned by CareerBuilder.com and surveyed 2,667 HR professionals, finding that 45% of them use social networking sites to research job candidates, with an additional 11% planning to implement social media screening in the very near future.

According to the study, “thirty-five percent of employers reported they have found content on social networking sites that caused them not to hire the candidate.” The big lessons you can learn are quite obvious, but bear repeating. Provocative photos and info are a bad idea (53% of employers won’t hire you), shared content with booze and drugs is also highly dangerous (44% dismissed candidates for this reason), and bad-mouthing former employers is very risky behavior (35% reported this a the main reason they didn’t hire a candidate).

We also think it interesting that emoticons, those friendly smiley faces you see everywhere, are actually big no-nos in direct communication. 14% of surveyed employers disregard candidates for that single lapse in judgment alone.

Though this may seem as a big downer for those of us who are oversharers, the reality is that there’s still opportunity to use your social presence to land that job. The survey also found that, “eighteen percent of employers reported they have found content on social networking sites that caused them to hire the candidate.”

Source : mashable.com

Tips for Turning Twitter into an Internet Marketing Tool

2009-08-18T06:15:00.000-07:00

Twitter is a social networking website that is rapidly increasing in popularity. It is a great way to stay in contact with friends and family, but it is also an amazing way to market a website, blog, product, or service. If you have one of these four, are you using Twitter to its fullest extent? If not, continue reading on for tips on how you can transform this service into an internet marketing wonder.

Get started now. The longer you wait to join Twitter, the more opportunities you miss. Whether you sell a product, a service, or make money through affiliate links, the longer you wait, the more income you lose. You are not paid for using Twitter, but you need to consider it a moneymaking opportunity, as it is.

Create separate accounts. Do you already Twitter to stay in contact with friends and family or would you like to? If so, create two separate accounts. Unless messages are set to private, all followers will receive them. If your follow list is composed of potential clients, you don’t want them reading about the family wedding you attended.

Make lots of contacts. To use Twitter as an internet marketing tool, you must have a large contact list. This list should not just contain friends and family. These individuals may already know about your website, blog, products, or services. So, develop a new list of followers. These individuals should be your targeted market.

Determine what your target market it. Determining who is your targeted market is a lot easier than it sounds. Ask yourself what products you sell and who can benefit from buying them. For example, pet owners will buy pet products, parents will buy products for children, and so forth. These are individuals you want to target on Twitter.

Find your targeted market on Twitter. An easy way to find your targeted market on Twitter is to visit Search.Twitter.com. Do you work as an internet marketer? Search for Tweets where blogging, internet traffic, or making money online is discussed. These people can use your services. Send a quick @reply explaining your job. And, become a follower. This means that you will receive updates from the user in question. Many times, they will return the favor.

Follow those who follow you. On Twitter, someone who follows your Tweets or updates is referred to as a follower. Whether you solicited followers online or gained a new reader through the grapevine, return the favor. Remember, not only can you send advisement though updates, but also through @replies. If someone sends you an update saying “Trying to list my auctions on eBay, I hope they sell,” direct them to your eBook that shares eBay tips for sellers.

Answer questions on Search.Twitter.com. As previously stated, you can use Search.Twitter.com to find your targeted market online. You can also market your product, service, blog, or website by sending @replies. If anyone asks a question that you can answer, send a reply.

Master the trade of selling without really selling. To use Twitter as an internet marketing tool, your goal is to drive traffic to a website or blog. This could result in a sale. Unfortunately, advertisements are frowned upon. No one wants to believe that they are used simply for advertising. So, cleverly market yourself. Instead of saying buy my product or service, provide a link and ask for feedback.

Source : asdiary.com

Word Press Facilitates Usage of Short URL’s

2009-08-17T05:51:00.000-07:00

If one is aware of wordpress blog, then it is really good news for them as the wordpress blog now shares a WordPress to each of your posts.

WordPress has now launched WP.me short URL’s which are designed for link building purposes to blog posts.

* This shortening of URL has various features which includes WP.me which is the only two letter domain.
* The every post on blog has now the feature of WP.me URL.
* All of this are exposed to using “rel=short link” keyword.
* This URL works only for WP.com which is hosted ones.
* The links using this URL are permanent but all of them will work as long as WordPress.com is there.
* This URL is spam free, but we are constantly monitoring spam from WP.me.

All of such things are great but micro blogging has now surpassed the personal blogging with Wordpress keeping up now.

Source : seoupdatesdaily.blogspot.com

Comparing Google With Google Caffeine

2009-08-14T02:54:00.000-07:00

Since Monday’s launch of the Google Caffeine sandbox, there have been numerous articles and posts offering ideas on what’s different between “regular Google” and the new results in Caffeine. But good luck finding any consensus at this point.

Since few seem to agree yet on what’s changing and how dramatic the changes might be, why not do your own comparisons? Though it’s only been two days since the Caffeine sandbox opened up, there are already a couple tools that make it easier to test the results yourself.

1) Facesaerch Caffeine Compare

This new tool from the makers of the facesaerch image search engine shows both “old Google” results and Caffeine results side-by-side in frames.

2.) Google Caffeine Bookmarklet

Released yesterday on The Google Tutor blog, this is a browser bookmarklet with a simple premise: After you do a search on Google.com, you click the bookmarklet and it runs the same search in the Caffeine sandbox.

If there are any other Google/Caffeine comparison tools out there already, please leave a comment below.

Postscript, late Wednesday Evening : The sandbox will be offline temporarily.

Source : searchengineland.com

Caffeine Update : Google Seeks For Feedback

2009-08-12T04:48:00.000-07:00

Google may have a huge lead over its competitors in terms of market share, but the search giant isn't resting on its laurels. A next-generation infrastructure codenamed "Caffeine" has been unveiled, and it's already available for individuals to test.

Fair warning: don't expect Caffeine to introduce natural language recognition, search results from Twitter, or anything else too fancy. Matt Cutts cautioned, "The Caffeine update isn't about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won't notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we're rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure."

Still, he continued, "[S]ome of the search results do change, so we wanted to open up a preview so that power searchers and web developers could give us feedback."

Head over to http://www2.sandbox.google.com if you intend to take Cutts and Google up on their invitation. Keep an eye on characteristics including accuracy, comprehensiveness, and - perhaps especially - indexing speed. Then, if you've got anything constructive to say, use the "Dissatisfied? Help us improve" link at the bottom of the page and include the term "Caffeine" in your response.

Initial impressions have, as you can see below, been mostly positive.

Caffeine is likely to hit the mainstream in the near future. Cutts referred to this sneak peek as "a preview of how the search results will change over the next few weeks and months."

Source : webpronews

Facebook Just Became More Important to Search

2009-08-11T06:02:00.000-07:00

Launches Real Time Search After FriendFeed Acquisition

Facebook has begun rolling out a new version of its search feature, which it began testing with a select few last month. Of course, this would be real-time search, in the company's latest effort to move into Twitter territory.

Of course the announcement of Facebook's real-time search comes hot off the heels of their big announcement about the acquisition of FriendFeed, which comes with a pretty nifty real-time search engine of its own. But that's a different story.

With regards to Facebook's own search, the company's Akhil Wable says, "You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you're a fan. If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people's profiles as well as relevant Facebook Pages, groups and applications."

Just search like normal, and then use the filters on the left side of the screen (on the results page) to adjust your results to view by people, pages, groups, apps, events, your own friends, etc.

I would speculate that at some point, this real-time search functionality would incorporate more of what FriendFeed brings to the table. Searching FriendFeed gives you access to real-time results from all kinds of social networks - whatever the service's users are sharing.

Facebook could bring masses of people into the mix on that front, and make it far more useful as an all-encompassing real time search engine. We don't know what they're going to do with that yet though. Facebook does say that FriendFeed will continue to operate independently, but it will no doubt become integrated into Facebook in some capacity.

As far as Facebook's new search feature, the company reminds users that if they don't want their stuff to show up in other people's search results, they can adjust thier privacy settings accordingly. They're still in the process of rolling the feature out, so you may not be able to use it just yet, but rest assured, it's on the way.

Source : webpronews.com

How to Counter Web Spam-Matt Cutts

2009-08-10T06:09:00.000-07:00

It is not a secret for now that spammming pollutes Web sites as well as inboxes of email users. It is a hot topic in many SEO Forums among Web site owners and webmasters and they have taken many steps and actions to combat it that sometimes work an sometimes not.

According to post at news.com you can find Google's pointers on countering Web spam from Google's Matt Cutts head of Google's Webspam team and an engineer who's been working on the problem for eight years.

During a speech at the Web 2.0 Expo Matt Cutts expalained about countering Web spam as-
"Spammers are human," Cutts said. "You have the power to raise their blood pressure. Make them spend more time and effort...If spammer gets frustrated, he's more likely to look for someone easier."
How? Forthwith, some tips for those who manage their own or others' Web sites.

• Use captcha systems to make sure real people, not bots, are commenting on your site. He uses a simple math puzzle--what's 2 + 2?--but he also likes KittenAuth, which makes people identify kitten photos.

One blogger merely requires people to type the word "orange" into a field. "The vast majority of bots will never do that," Cutts said.

• Reconfigure software settings after you've installed it. A little modification of various settings will throw bots off the scent. "If you can off the beaten path, away from default software installations, you'll save yourself a ton of grief," he said.

• Employ systems that rank people by trust and reputation. For example, eBay shows how long a person has been a member and how satisfied others are with transactions with that person.

• Don't be afraid of legitimate purveyors of search-engine optimization services. "SEO is not spam. Google does not hate SEO," Cutts said. "There are plenty of white-hat SEO (companies) who can help you out."

Registering your Web site at Google's Webmaster Central site can help find bogus search-engine optimization tricks others may use on your site, such as keywords written in white text on white backgrounds, he added.

Source : coolslko.blogspot.com

Delicious Shows Off New Sharing Features

2009-08-08T01:33:00.000-07:00

Earlier this week, Delicious launched a new redesign of its homepage and some new search features. Yesterday they showed off the details of the search features, which included time filters, a trends graph, tag filters, enhanced results, and suggestions.

Today they are elaborating on the new sharing features. Instead of copying and pasting URLs, you can now email or tweet bookmarks directly from Delicious. To do this, just add recipients in the new Send field when you save or edit bookmarks. Then click the Send field and you'll see the Send tab with social network options.

Delicious highlights the types of recipients you can add in the send field: - Email address. Enter any valid email address. We’ve included an auto-complete feature for email addresses you’ve previously entered to make sending emails easier.

- Delicious user name Enter any valid user name. We’ve include an auto-complete feature for Delicious users in your network.

- Twitter. Type Twitter to share the bookmark on your Twitter feed. Associate a Twitter account by logging into Twitter under the Twitter panel in the Send tab.

Twitter users can associate a Twitter account and send all saved bookmarks to Twitter by selecting "Tweet all bookmarks unless private" when adding the account. Users can also attach a 116 character message with them.

Source : webpronews.com

Twitter Hacked by DoS-Denial of Service Attack

2009-08-07T05:21:00.000-07:00

According to the Associated Press, Twitter reported in its blog that the company is currently busy staving off a denial-of-service attack that was launched Thursday by an unknown group of hackers.

A denial-of-service (DoS) attack is a method where hackers commandeer computers and flood the targeted Web site with communication requests, forcing it shut down and reset. While a DoS attack is underway, the Web site either becomes unavailable to legitimate users or responds so slowly that the Web site times out and becomes unusable.

CNet reports that Twitter began suffering problems around 6 A.M PDT.

“We are determining the cause and will provide an update shortly,” the company posted at 6:43 A.M PDT on their blog.

Around 7:49 A.M, Twitter updated users on the microblog’s status, saying that they were “defending against a denial-of-service attack and will update status again shortly.”

AlertSite, a firm that monitors Web site performance, had only 40 percent availability at 8:00 A.M, but was still widely inaccessible to most users.

According to the Los Angeles Times, at 9:47 A.M PDT, Twitters updated their status with a notice that read, “As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.”

Currently, the top trending topics on Twitter include “DoS” and “Denial-of-Service”.

Twitter is a famous social networking services available on the Internet and have millions of registered users, including Hollywood celebrities, famous business mans, politicians etc.

Another popular social networking site, Facebook, was also the victim of a similar attack this morning.

Earlier this week, the popular blog network Gawker Media was targeted by a DoS attack that was able to knock it off the Internet for a brief period of time..

According to PC Pro, the motive behind the attacks on Twitter, Facebook and Gawker are unknown.

“The question on my mind is - why would someone want to attack Twitter?” asks Graham Cluley, the senior technology consultant at Sophos, a company that specializes in network security, to PC Pro.

“I can’t imagine it’s a commercial competitor of theirs, but it could be someone with a financial motivation (blackmail?) or a teenager in a back bedroom with access to an awfully large botnet.”

Source :- collegenews.com, seoportal.blogspot.com

Benefits Of Web Marketing 2.0 Compared To Advertising

2009-08-06T05:59:00.000-07:00

As the Internet has grown with its huge database of information on varied sources, more and more people are spending their time online. This phenomenon has opened a new market of Internet advertising. Of the lucrative Internet marketing pie, Web 2.0 has a very important place. Web 2.0 refers to Internet-based services belonging to the second generation and consists of wikis, folksonomies, social-networking sites, blogs, video-sharing sites and mashups.

The reach of traditional form of advertising is limited and the whole process of developing the ad-copy and marketing it using the services of a PR person takes a lot of time, money and effort. On the other hand, Web 2.0 marketing has a wide pyramid-of-influence that can be reached pretty fast and using just a fraction of the cost that would have been used by traditional marketing methods to reach the same number of people. What’s more – with Web 2.0 marketing, geographical borders vanish and you can reach a global audience to market your products and/or services. However, you would need to do your own homework and become a web 2.0 marketing expert to reap the optimum benefits of this online media.

Unlike traditional advertising channels that were highly controlled and limited by nature, Web 2.0 marketing offers a much liberal space to customers where they can freely discuss about your products and services. So, against the traditional advertising channels that could only allow one-way messages, the dynamic arena of Web 2.0 marketing offers a much bigger participation for the consumers. Moreover, as everyone can generate and shape the message on Web 2.0, you can no longer control the nature of message, unlike the standard channels of traditional advertising like radio, print, and TV. As peer-to-peer communication and “word-of-mouth” marketing is the driving force of Web 2.0 marketing, you can spread your intended message in a viral fashion by doing proper planning for it. Just imagine what a cakewalk it would be to pass on a message related to your products and services to hundreds of friends and contacts all around the world with almost no cost and within a fraction of a second!

As you can’t control the nature of message that will get circulated on Web 2.0, the next best thing that you can do is to influence it. Try to build a good brand image online by taking an active part in the conversations about your products and services. Be an active listener and try to learn what your customers’ needs are. Then, design and deliver your offerings accordingly to delight your targeted clientele. Remember – Web 2.0 marketing is a lucrative opportunity that you can use to engage your community and turn strangers into fans. These fans would act as your online salespeople who would promote your products and services. If all these steps sound like an uphill task, you may consider hiring a social media expert, who would do the job with professional precision and bring you the desired benefits.

All these explain why web marketing 2.0 can help you achieve a lot with proper planning that traditional advertising can’t even think of!

Source : shefalinagdev.com

Google Image Search Gets Some New Features

2009-08-04T02:36:00.000-07:00

Google has added up various features with options in its search engine. This feature has now been added into its Image Search property feature also. This is a very simple feature but could save on a lot of time by searching the most accurate results. This image search options makes it essential for users to combine search options to get the best search results faster with provision of introducing more new features in the future as well.

This new feature will give one the same layout as that of Google search with various options listed on left side of image search results page. These image search options would include color, size, and type.

Color option would let one specify the different colors of image which one is searching for and includes the various colors which include red, pink, green along with black and white features.

The size option which lets you specify different sizes aside from usual image sized that users are searching for.

The type option which lets one specify image types whether one wants to have clipart, photo, face or line drawing within the image search results.

Source : seoupdatesdaily.blogspot.com

Google Wants to Pay AdSense Publishers Faster

2009-08-03T06:21:00.000-07:00

Recommends Electronic Funds Transfer

Google has taken an opportunity to remind North American AdSense publishers that the fastest way to receive payments is through Electronic Funds Transfer (EFT).

"We want to get you paid by the fastest means possible," says Elizabeth Ferdon of the AdSense Payments Team.

AdSense "EFT is quick and easy to set up. When payments are issued, there's no need to wait for the delivery in the mail -- the funds appear in your bank account shortly after they're issued," she adds. "That means if we processed a payment for you this month, your earnings would be in your bank account already."

Signing up for ETF through Google is a three-step process:

1. Enter your bank account info

2. Find your test deposit

3. Enter the test deposit amount in your AdSense account.

To enter your bank account info, just go to "my account" and click the "edit link next to the "payment details" header. Then in the Electronic Funds Transfer section, select the "add new bank account" radio button, and click continue. Enter the requested info and save the changes.

Test deposits can take a few days, and on your bank statement, they will be labeled as one of the following:

- AFS RE GOOGLE
- AFS RE GOOGLE ADSENSE
- ARVATO FINANCE SERVICES LIMITED
- BFS FINANCE LTD
- CITIBANK IRELAND FINANCIAL SERVICES
- Google AdSense Payment

Once you have your test deposit amount, click the "my account" tab, and in the "payment details" section, click "verify this account." Enter the test deposit amount that you received in your bank account in the box, and click "next." Your bank account will be approved and you can select it as your default payment method.

Currently, Google offers Western Union in 23 countries and courier service in a number of others as payment options. Other regions where EFT isn't offered are reminded that Google is continuously working on expanding payment options in more places.

Google Analytics Help : Five Simple But Powerful Ways To Use

2009-07-31T05:02:00.000-07:00

First of all - what is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a free analysis tool which gives you information on where your website visitors are coming from, which pages they visit, how long they stay, and a lot more. There are plenty of paid stat counters available which present data in different ways, but Google Analytics is one of the best, and it's free.

One can over-analyze or under-analyze any website. Some people spend too much time checking stats, analyzing, and planning, and don't spend enough time writing good content and getting new readers to their blogs.

On the other side of the pendulum, you could go on week after week, blindly publishing content and flailing along with offsite promotion, without seeing what results your campaigns are getting, which type of content is the most popular for your visitors, and which traffic-generation techniques are getting the best results.

The first is like tuning your car's engine every day without ever turning on the ignition, the second is like driving in the dark.

In between, we have a happy balance.

I find that the best times to check stats are when I don't have a lot of time to do a more intense project, or when I am a bit too tired to do anything more "heavy." Sometimes just before I go to bed at night is a good time to check into what has been happening between my visitors and my websites' pages. I can browse and poke around in my Analytics account and learn quite a lot - even with minimal energy.

Here are five simple and powerful ways to use Google Analytics:

1. Find out which of your website's pages are getting the most traffic, and optimize those pages.

If you are running ads on the pages, make sure they are properly placed and updated. If you are linking to affiliate products, make sure your links are up-to-date and that you aren't missing any links, or new products which should be there. If you are using that page for some other purpose, such as to generate subscriptions or whatever the case may be, make sure that the page is laid out as well as possible. This can be helpful if you have a large website which has a long "to do" list and many things to optimize or tweak. By just starting with the most heavily-trafficked pages, you will get the maximum results from your efforts and also know where to start.

2. Find out which referrers are generating the most traffic, and continue any actions you have been taking to generate traffic from those referrers.

For example, if you see that Twitter is generating a large amount of targeted traffic, you can increase your activity on Twitter. If you see that your article submissions are getting new visitors from article directories, you can make a note not to drop those out - or possibly increase them. Conversely, if you see that you have been spending time/money on a traffic-generation method which is not getting very far, you can stop wasting your time on it (presuming you have given it time to take effect).

3. Find out which keywords you are ranking the best for, and see which ones you can "push to the top."

If you had a website on dogs, for example, and found that you were ranking at #30-#40 on Google for many keywords, but ranking #11 for, lets say, "dog chew toys," you might want to work on increasing your rankings on dog chew toys and focus more of your SEO efforts on this term (of course there are other factors you would consider as well, such as the searches and competition for this term). Climbing from position #31 to #20 will generally not get you a huge increase of traffic. But climbing from position #11 to position #3 almost certainly will. Focus first on keywords or key phrases that have the best chance of ranking high in the near future, and then move on to the others.

4. Find out which pages keep your visitors' attention for the longest.

If the average visitor on Page A stays for 5 seconds, while the average visitor to Page B stays for 150 seconds, the likelihood is that your visitors find Page B's content more interesting than Page A's.

5. Look at the graph of your bounce rate.

This tells you how many people left your site without visiting a second page. Depending on the website and the page, this may be a good or bad thing. But if you have a blog or a content site, it is usually a good sign when people stick around to view more of your posts and content before they leave. If your bounce rate increased or decreased after you made a certain change, you can opt to revert that change (if bounce rate increased) or keep it (if bounce rate decreased). For example, if I changed the theme of my Wordpress blog and then noticed a date-co-incident increase in my bounce rate, I might consider changing it back :) This statistic can be used in many ways - it will depend on the nature of your blog.

There are many, many other ways to use Google Analytics. The above are great ways to start, if you aren't familiar with or used to using this tracking system. Google Analytics can give you a far greater understanding of what's happening on your site and can guide you to continue on successful actions and drop the unsuccessful.

Source : seo-news.com

Google Wants To Save Your Life (Or Help End It)

2009-07-18T05:45:00.000-07:00

Pushes Google Health and advance directives

Health issues are highly personal. Some folks, for example, are scared of living for years on end without control of their bodies. Others are terrified that a plug will get pulled moments before they make a total recovery. And a certain search giant thinks both of these attitudes represent great reasons to start using Google Health.

A post on the Official Google Blog tells readers, "An advance directive allows you to determine your end-of-life wishes so that your family and doctor can honor them if you get sick and are unable to communicate." It has the ability to save all sorts of people all sorts of pain, and whatever your age or condition, is something you should consider completing.

Google just wants to make sure its software is part of the equation, and as it turns out, Google Health can now process scanned paper documents.

So the post continues, "Google Health is now working with a leading advance directive provider, Caring Connections, that provides a free, downloadable form customized for all 50 states. To complete your form, download it, print it out, complete it, scan it, and upload it to Google Health. Once you've uploaded the signed form, Google Health makes it easy to share it with your caregiver."

Admittedly, this seems morbid and a bit opportunistic. But the issue's an important one, and this may prove an effective tack for Google to take.

Source :webpronews.com

Bing/Google Overlap on the Decline

2009-07-12T23:26:00.000-07:00

WebProNews received some interesting data from Compete, looking at how searchers are using Bing, with regards to how this use overlaps with the use of other search engines.

We have seen that Bing's search market share has edged up a bit since its launch. We don't know if Google is sweating bullets, but they have certainly indicated that they're not ignoring it. This data is really something to pay attention to though, because I think it is an often-overlooked fact that just because somebody uses Bing (or Yahoo, or any other search engine), it does not mean that they have stopped using Google.

Some standout stats from Compete:

- 97% of the Bing.com audience overlapped with Google Search in the week prior to launch (5/24 – 5/30).
- 30% of the Bing.com audience overlapped with Yahoo! Search during Bing’s launch week (5/31 – 6/1).
- The percent of overlap between the Bing audience with AOL, Google, and Yahoo! has changed little between launch week and last week.

What's good for Bing is that overlap with Google appears to have fallen significantly (since Bing's launch week). While it hasn't fallen an incredible amount with Yahoo, and has actually grown a bit with AOL, we all know that Google is where Microsoft really wants to make a dent.

Source : webpronews.com

Google Maps Gadget Aims To Help Businesses Be Found

2009-07-09T05:52:00.000-07:00

Will provide on-site, user-specific directions

Let's be honest: someone who's incapable of copying and pasting an address into Google Maps may not be worth having as a customer. But most companies like to make things easy on people, and a new Google Maps gadget should ensure that it's easy for would-be clients to find businesses.

A post on the LatLong Blog explains, "This simple gadget allows webmasters to add customized Google Maps directions to their business locations. . . . The gadget allows you to pre-fill the 'To' field with one or multiple addresses. Customers are then able to print their directions with a single click."

This should increase the convenience factor of businesses' sites, even as it allows firms to make sure potential shoppers don't wander away. A nice touch is that companies can keep messy street addresses out of the "To" fields, as well - it's possible to use more recognizable names and aliases.

As you can see, Legoland California's already taken advantage of the Google Maps offering. More serious entities like Emeril Lagasse restaurants and Harvard have put it to use, too.

The gadget's available in 23 languages, so it's probably just a matter of time until businesses all over the world are on much better terms with Google Maps.

Source : webpronews.com

Facebook Calls Out Intel, AMD

2009-06-27T02:04:00.000-07:00

Facebook has more than 200 million active users, and as you might imagine, keeping all of their information available (never mind the stuff pertaining to less involved people) requires some serious hardware. Yet according to the company's vice president of technical operations, certain manufacturers are falling short of the mark.

Jonathan Heiliger was interviewed onstage during GigaOm's Structure 09 conference, and in response to a question about unexpected problems, said, "The biggest thing (that) surprised us is . . . less-than-anticipated performance gains from new microarchitectures -- so, new CPUs from guys like Intel and AMD. The performance gains they're touting in the press, we're not seeing in our applications."

Stephen Lawson reports that Heiliger also stated, "Google has done a great job designing and building its own servers for this kind of use."

So we seem to have Facebook either really lighting a fire under its suppliers, or perhaps leaning towards the DIY route. And of course, both alternatives could lead to improved performance for less money.

Finally, a third possibility would involve some sort of lawsuit, but it sounds like Facebook is more at a stage of identifying issues than seeking reparation.

Source : www.webpronews.com

Don’t Panic! No-Do-Follow-You Pagerank Linking Problem Solved!

2009-06-25T02:33:00.000-07:00

Is anyone else confused by the whole Google ruckus going on right now with regards to “nofollow” links?

What the dickens is going on?

Well, to prevent blog comment spam, Google implemented “nofollow” years ago as a parameter webmasters and blog owners could use in links to stop the link passing PageRank and being counted as a “vote” for the site the link pointed to. There was much rejoicing in the blogosphere as the dastardly blog comment spammers were defeated (or not).

Anyways, the dastardly SEO optimisers used “nofollow” in links to their privacy pages, legal pages and other webpages to “conserve” PageRank and send the wonderful “Google juice” to the pages they wanted to rank highest in the search engines. Google accepted this as pretty much a side effect of the introduction of “nofollow”, and all was well and jiggly with the world.

Until Matt Cutts (a Google uber-meister, engineer, or somesuch), recently said that nofollow now doesn’t work like the SEO guys thought it did. Instead of helping conserve PageRank, nofollow voids what would have been passed through the link had it not be nofollowed. Well, that threw a spanner in the works and everyone in the SEO world howled in rage! It didn’t help when Matt added that the change had already been implemented, and no-one noticed… “we figured that site owners or people running tests would notice, but they didn’t“.

Leslie Rhode said, “no way dude” (ok, he actually said, “First, the entire idea is just competely silly to start with and would have noticiable and really really bad ramifications that every SEO on the planet would have already noticed.”) and various other SEO’ers put forth ideas for working with Google and their new way of working with nofollow. One analysis I particularly like is Dr Andy Williams’ explanation of the changes and their effects, here.

So, what should you do?

Relax. Link to people who provide good content, nofollow any links that may potentially link to bad content (like your user-generated links) and then create more great content yourself in the time you would’ve spent worry about “pagerank bleeds”!

Source : neilshearing.com

Google Maps : Voice Search Feature for Android Device

2009-06-24T02:39:00.000-07:00

Recently Google announced that you can search Google Maps by your voice using Android device.

These new feature includes:

1) Voice SearchingGoogle Maps Voice Feature
2) Transit and Walking Directions Talk
3) Reviews and business details
4) Updates for various Latitudes

Google fixed the latitude background location updates and that will continue to update.

But there are various things which need to kept in mind while using these facilities:

1. Google Maps Update will be useful for users with system updates for SDK 1.5+ version called as CupCake version.

2. If you experience the Installation error for Package file, then it is because your device is not on a user build identified as kila-user, opal user etc. If you have a user debug build then these update will not be installed on your system.

3. Street View was not removed but it is now available within Maps as its own mode. If these mode is available then you will have the option of seeing the imaginary view along with rest of options for that location.

Source : seoupdatesdaily.blogspot.com

New gPhone (myTouch 3G) Coming in Early August

2009-06-23T04:11:00.000-07:00

T-Mobile has announced that the successor to it's semi-popular G1, the myTouch 3G, will become available in early August.

The myTouch 3G will be extremely customizable, unlike Apple's iPhone. Users will be able to choose menus, wallpapers, icons, themes and skins. Will being customizable be enough to lure iPhone users away?

Has the myTouch 3G already lost to the iPhone, even before its release? Tell us what you think.

The phone will come in three colors: black, white and maroon ... err... sorry, I meant distinctive "Merlot". (Why is Merlot a distinctive color?)

A new exclusive app that T-Mobile is hyping is called Sherpa. Below is some detailed info...

Created by Geodelic, Sherpa features GENIE (Geodelic ENgine for Interest Evaluation), a learning engine that automatically customizes itself to the user’s preferences. Through behavior and user feedback, the application learns a person’s likes and dislikes, prioritizing recommended retailers, restaurants and attractions. Seamlessly blending behavior recognition, a recommendation engine and location relevant information, this combination of learning is exclusive to Sherpa and unlike any experience currently on the market.

Below are two lists, the specs and Google services offered on the new myTouch 3G...

* 3.2-inch HVGA touch-screen
* Virtual keyboard (portrait or landscape)
* 3.2 megapixel camera
* Music player (pre-installed 4GB microSD card)
* Enhanced video capabilities
* Google Search
* Google Maps (with Street View)
* YouTube
* Picasa
* Gmail
* Google Talk

Sure, the myTouch 3G sounds good on paper... but how, or will, it compete with the iPhone? Ali asked this question the other day, and got some pretty good feedback.

This will be the true test for T-Mobile.

If you're interested in the myTouch 3G, T-Mobile will begin taking pre-sales on July 8th. The phone itself will be released in early August.

Source : webpronews.com

Google Web Analytics How important Is It ?

2009-06-22T04:04:00.000-07:00

Web Analytics have major importance in on line business. Tracking the history of visitors and keep doing research on analytics is must and should. We can know about visitors and their views through these analytics.

Analytics usage are increasing day by day. Analytic professionals have higher demand in the market. Everyone can't become an Analytic expert. It needs great thinking, visualization and case study.

Every On line business should take care about :

Bounce rate :

Bounce rate is something which will helps you to know that how visitors are going away from your site. Higher bounce rate means visitors aren't interested on your site. Lesser means visitors are happy to stay on your site. It's always better to make bounce rate 0%, however it's not possible, so it's better to keep it less.

Visit Length :

How long visitors are staying on your site in average? If most of the visitors are staying good amount time on your site means they are reading some thing on your site which is useful for them. So visit length always matters to know the interest of viewer on your site. According to this metrics you can optimize your site.

Visit Depth :

Visit Depth means "Are the visitor is showing interest in visiting the other pages of your site too?" If a visitor visited most of the pages on your site and spent good amount of time on each page says your site awesome. visited all pages and spend less amount of time is not good. Not visited other pages is bad. So higher visit depth helps to grow your business as well as brand.

Returning Visitors :

More returning visits means you have loyal readers for your site. If a visitor come again and again to your site means he liked your site and found it useful. These kind of readers are called as loyal readers. More loyal readers you have, that much popular your site is. It's very important to have more returning visits. Always try to increase the number of normal visits as well as returning visits.

... Most of the search engines will consider all these factors, to show up your website in top search engine results for a particular keyword. So it's important to make note of all these topics and keep working and optimizing it to succeed in your business. Comment your thoughts :) ...

Source : seodailyupdates.blogspot.com

New Ways to Search on YouTube

2009-06-19T23:06:00.000-07:00

YouTube Adds Wonder Wheel and Improves Advanced Search

Youtube is supposedly the second largest search engine. It only makes sense that the video site's search capabilities should be expanded. that is just what YouTube has been working on. This week, they have added some new ways to customize your search experience, and hopefully better find the videos you are looking for.

The Wonder Wheel

You may recall that Google introduced its new search options a while back, which gives users of the search engine a lot more control over the results they see for any given search. One of the features in this release was the "wonder wheel," which is basically a visual representation of related searches that you can use to navigate through your search experience.

YouTube has now incorporated this into its results as well. When you perform a search on YouTube, you may see a link on the right side above the results that says "wonder wheel". Clicking it will bring up something that looks like this:

Wonder wheel doesn't appear to be an option for all searches. When I search for "social media" I am not presented with the option, but when I search for "Facebook" as in the above image, I am.

Improved Advanced Search

When you go to search something on YouTube, and you click the "advanced options" link, you will now be presented with more options.

"Let's say you want to narrow down your search for a video and be more precise about what you're looking for," explains the YouTube Team. "Advanced Search allows you to specify many more details than our normal search, including when a video was uploaded, the location it came from, and its length. We've reworked Advanced Search to be easier to use and to better reflect the range of content on YouTube (lots of new stuff!)."

To be honest, I'm not really sure what all features were available here in the past, but now you can find results using queries and specifying to use all words, an exact phrase, one or more words, or none of the words. You can request results based on videos, channels, playlists, shows, movies, or all. You can request results to show only HD, annotations, closed captions, or partner videos.

You can also refine your search by duration, language, upload time (general - anytime, this month, this week, or today), location, and category.

Other recent features added to YouTube include a remaining time display on the upload progress bar, the ability to download MP4 files of your own videos, and YouTube XL, which is designed to give users a more television-like experience. YouTub'e mobile app is also now available in French, UK English, Italian, Spanish, German, and Dutch.

Source : webpronews.com

Three SEO Don’ts

2009-06-08T06:23:00.000-07:00

With SEO being a buzz word of the times every body wants their website to be search engine friendly and up there in the first page rankings, but there are some errors which people are regularly making when trying to optimize their sites that are preventing them from getting the first page listings that they are striving for. The following is a list of 3 SEO don’ts when optimizing your website.

Don’t use the same page title on every page on your website. By using your different keywords in the page titles of the different pages on your site and making those pages more specific to those keywords you increase your chances of being listed on the search engines for more than one set of keywords.

Don’t forget to use your keywords within the content of the pages on your website. Be sure to use your keywords in the body text on your page but do not over use them by just sticking them in here, there and everywhere! Also, make sure that your keywords are in the ALT tags of any images that are on the page. This is another place where keywords can be used but again, be careful of the overuse of a keyword - you do not want to risk being penalised by the search engines.

Don’t make the content of your site just for the search engines. Actual human beings will be reading your pages and are ultimately who your website is for so make sure that your content is relevant, interesting and informative and include your keywords where you can but make sure they fit effortlessly into the flow of your wording.

Source : seoservicesaustralia.blog.com

Google’s Tetris Logo

2009-06-06T03:21:00.000-07:00

Google Australia, China and some other places where it’s Saturday already are displaying a special logo doodle celebrating Tetris. The alt text reads “Celebrating 25 Years of The Tetris Effect - courtesy of Tetris Holding, LLC”, and the logo is linked to a search for tetris. Wikipedia knows: “Tetris ... is a puzzle video game originally designed and programmed by Alexey Pajitnov. It was released on June 6, 1984”.

And did you know? One of the original makers of Tetris is now working at Google – Google Australia, specifically, on the Google Wave project. Sydney Morning Herald reports: “Vadim Gerasimov was just 15 when he was taken under the wing of two Russian computer engineers – Alexey Pajitnov and Dmitry Pavlovsky – at the Moscow Academy of Sciences and helped them create Tetris ... Since around 2003 Gerasimov has lived in Australia, where he worked in complex systems research with the CSIRO [Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Research Organization] before joining Google about a year and a half ago.”

[Thanks Hebbet, Tom & Tony!]

Google’s Tetris Logo by Philipp Lenssen

Source : blogoscoped.com

Manage Unfollowers with 5 Twitter Tools

2009-06-05T04:36:00.000-07:00

Tools to help you take control of your Twitter account.

Twitter has an insurmountable number of various applications from the very useful to the rather comical . It’s hard to weed through and find the true great applications/services.

To better help you in your Twittering efforts, I’ve put together a list of 5 really great tools to help you monitor your followers and unfollowers… since we all know is about that ratio. Hopefully you find the list useful. If there are some I’ve neglected to add or if you know of other ones please leave a comment with a description and a link.

Twellow, The Twitter Yellow Pages, has many features that range from extended profiles to Twellowhood (one of my personal favorite Twitter tools on the Internet).

Mixed in with the plethora of features that Twellow offers is an unsung hero which is just simply called "Followers". With this you can easily see who is reciprocally following you. But, the best part of Followers is... you can follow or unfollow directly from Twellow. No clicking to got back to Twitter, you can get the job done without leaving the page.

Qwitter is a nice little service that emails you when someone stops following you on Twitter with a message, below is an example.

That's pretty much it... no extra frills.

Friend or Follow is pretty self-explanatory, you enter in your Twitter username and it gives you three tabs of information.

Following (who your following, but not following you back), fans (who’s following you, but your not following them back) and friends (people who you follow and they follow you back.

TweetLater is an online service that has an abundance of features ranging from scheduling tweets to Ping.fm integration. They offer a free account as well as a payed professional account.

Buried deep within the features of TweetLater is the option to "Follow those who follow you" and "Unfollow those who unfollow you". This is completely automated and set by the user.

Twitterless is an online service that notifies you when any Twitterer stops following you, and gives you their username. But, they don't stop there. They take it one step further and give you a graphed out "follower history" over a period of time to help you understand where your gaining or losing followers.

They also offer follower filters that give you a more descriptive view of your followers. You can filter in real time and search using keywords to see if your followers are talking about anything that interest you.

Source : webpronews.com

Advanced SEO Tactics

2009-06-03T05:55:00.000-07:00

If you're like most online webmasters, then you have probably read one article after the other about search engine optimization. Most of them rehash the same old information and you end up wading through tons of fluff. However, this isn't one of those articles. Listed below are 7 advanced SEO tips that you won't find on every digital corner.

1. Syndicating Articles that Link to Your Sitemap

As you probably know, syndicating articles is one of the best methods for obtaining one-way backlinks. They are also valuable pieces of search engine bait because search engine crawlers are frequent visitors to many high-profile article directories. If you want to get the spiders quickly crawling your site, simply submit an informative article to a site like EzineArticles, GoArticles, or ArticleCity. However, there's another article marketing strategy that isn't mentioned much in marketing circles. This tactic can get the crawlers searching deeper into your site and indexing more of your pages. Simply link to your sitemap within the resource box. This will send the spiders straight to a content buffet where they can quickly slurp up all of your pages.

2. Translating Your Website Into Other Languages

Are you marketing in just one language? If so, you are missing out on 64.8% of your marketing potential. This is because 64.8% of the world is surfing the internet in a language other than English. By becoming a multilingual marketer, you immediately open up a stream of new markets. Google alone crawls web pages in 35 different languages. One of the best ways to attract worldwide traffíc is to translate your site and register it with both English and foreign-language search engines and directories. If you are a seasoned SEO, you'll be happy to hear that the competition in foreign search engines is much less than in those of the United States. In addition, online foreign language markets are currently growing at a much faster rate than English speaking markets. You have the opportuníty to tap into this market while it's in an exponential growth phase.

3. ROR Sitemaps

As you probably know, sitemaps are important for making sure your site can be completely spidered and indexed by the search engines. Unfortunately, many of these sitemaps are specific to one search engine or another. For this reason, there have been a number of Google and Yahoo site map generators produced in recent years. However, there is an alternative that is even more exciting. These are ROR sitemaps and they are readable by all search engines, not just by Google or Yahoo. ROR is an exciting new sitemap tool that uses XML feeds to describe your website. These sitemaps are structured feeds that enable search engines to complement text search with structured information to better interpret the meaning of your site. With a ROR sitemap, search engines can better understand your products, services, images, newsletters, articles, podcasts, and anything else that you want to describe.
For example, if you are selling products, a ROR file enables you to document your product names, descriptions, prices, images, availability, affilíate programs, and any other
relevant information. Search engine crawlers like the Googlebot have an enormous job to do. It's time we start helping them to better understand our content.

4. Keyword Phrases that Convert

Selecting the right keyword phrases is the single most important aspect of any SEO campaign. Unfortunately, many webmasters target the wrong keywords. Too many of us target very general keywords like "real estate" or "internet marketing". Although these terms get lots of visitors, it is unlikely that you will be able to rank highly for them. Then, even if you do, this type of traffíc produces very low conversion rates because it does not target prospects. You will be much more successful, if you target keyword phrases that are 3-4 words long. These terms are much less competitive and have been proven to convert much better than keywords that are 1 to 2 words long. Who do you think is more likely to buy; someone who goes to Google and searches for "ipod" or someone who searches for "4gb black ipod nano"? Obviously, the person who searches for a more specific phrase is much closer to making a buying decision.

5. GoogSpy

Would you like to get an in-depth view of how your competitors run their business? Well, you can do exactly that with an online service known as GoogSpy. GoogSpy is a free research tool that will tell you what keywords your competitors are bidding on. This tool tracks over 500,000 keywords every day from Google and then loads this goldmine of information into the GoogSpy.com database. Using this tool, you can browse by company or by search term. This tool is extremely powerful. Unfortunately, many people take it for granted. This service basically hands you a business strategy on a silver platter. Maybe we should just keep this one to ourselves and enjoy the benefits of being one step ahead of our competition.

For example, let's say you wanted to do some in-depth research on Overstock.com, one of the largest companies online. You would simply go to googspy.com and type in overstock.com. You will then be shown thousands of words that this company bids on. These keywords are proven profít generators. Research like this would normally cost thousands of dollars, but they are providing it free of charge.
If you want to find keywords with high conversion rates, simply type in words such as buy and purchase. You will be shown keyword phrases that are bid on that include the words buy or purchase. These are very lucrative keyword phrases because the person who types in "buy sony playstation 2" knows exactly what they want. They're not just looking around, they are in buying mode. These are the type of keywords you want to bid on. Using GoogSpy, you can uncover these hidden gems in seconds.
Other high-converting keyword phrases include brand names and product names. Type in the keyword "camera" and you will find thousands of different brands and product names for cameras. These keywords are some of the best keywords because of their high conversion rate.

6. Internal Links Within Content

The navigation of your site is a crucial element of your search engine optimization campaign. Each link within your navigational structure should correlate with a keyphrase that you are trying to rank for. However, you can also include internal links within your content. For example, let's say you have written an article about online marketing. Within the article are a number of keyword phrases. Some of these phrases include "link popularity" and "web site traffíc". If you have other articles within your site that pertain to these topics, then you should definitely link those keyword phrases to those articles. By doing this, you can increase the link popularity of other pages within the same site. There are very few sites that take advantage of this optimization technique. By doing this, you enable the search engines to find and index much more of your site. These internal links also contribute to a higher ranking because of the anchor text that is used. Many people only think of inbound links from outside websites when trying to raise their link popularity. However, the internal link structure is also a major ranking factor.

7. Using Your Log Files for SEO

Your server logs reveal very important information about your site. If you learn to use them properly, they can quickly help to maximize your site's traffíc and conversion rates. One of the most valuable pieces of information found in your log files are search phrases. The log files will tell you exactly which keywords people are using to find your website. Once you have optimized a page, the log files will tell you how people are finding that page and what keywords they are searching for to get there. If you find that people are using keywords that you hadn't thought of to get to a certain page, it would probably be in your best interest to further optimize that page for those keywords. You might also want to create a new page optimized for that particular term. This is especially true if a new page would enable you to serve better information on the phrase being searched for. In addition, by looking at how your site is found organically, you can determine whether the same keyword phrases belong in your paid search campaigns. Only choose the ones that are highly relevant. You will find that these keyword phrases have the best conversion rate.

Article Source : ifergan.org

Earn Money With Microsoft pubCenter Beta Program : Really Amazing...

2009-06-02T03:58:00.000-07:00

Web Site Owners: Earn Money with Microsoft Ads on Your Web Site

Turn Your Traffic into Profit

The Microsoft pubCenter^Betaoffers you the chance to include advertising from one of the leading online advertising networks on your web site. With the pubCenter^Betayou can:

Place ads on your web site—realizing revenue potential with relevant ads targeted to your audience.
Customize ads to the look and feel of your web site.
Gain access to one of the largest advertising networks, delivering high-quality ads.
Monitor performance with a variety of tracking features.

As a beta user, you'll also have the opportunity to earn money and influence the direction of this new advertising marketplace.

Start Now! It's Free!!!!

There's no sign-up cost and you can continue to use other ad networks. Here's how it works:

Complete the interest form below.
Note : This is a U.S. only program at this time. You must provide a U.S. tax ID and address. Please read the site selection criteria for more information.
Once approved for the beta program, you can begin to place ads on your site.
Earn money when your ad is clicked.

Registration Form Here.......

Bing Bing: Microsoft’s Search Engine Unexpectedly Live, But Not Live

2009-06-02T03:40:00.000-07:00

Microsoft has made its new search engine available ahead of schedule, and is redirecting searches from Live Search to the new site

If you fancied using Microsoft’s new search engine, it’s unexpectedly live at http://www.bing.com/ . (According to Microsoft, it was being opened at the SMX search marketing conference in Seattle on Wednesday.)

Or rather, Microsoft’s new “Decision Engine and consumer brand” is unexpectedly live. Microsoft says:

“Bing is specifically designed to build on the benefits of today’s search engines but begins to move beyond this experience with a new approach to user experience and intuitive tools to help customers make better decisions, focusing initially on four key vertical areas: making a purchase decision, planning a trip, researching a health condition or finding a local business.”

Bing is not Live Search, though obviously it’s based on it, and the current UK beta version still has Live’s front page layout, rather than a menu down the left hand side, which is the format for the US version. The UK also doesn’t seem to have any image hot spots, and other features. To get the “real thing,” go here.

It’s too soon to say whether Bing will attract long-term users, rather than tyre-kickers. However, the reception on Twitter has been reasonably positive.

It does seem to work much better than Google for finding real product info and reviews, where Google’s results are loaded with spam and price comparison rubbish. As @studentsoftware noted on Twitter: “Keyword stuffing that skews Google search results doesn’t quite work in bing. Bing 1 Google 0. Over to you SEO gurus…”

Some Google commands also work — for example, try ["psp go" site:guardian.co.uk] — which could ease the changeover.

The Search History feature, which keeps a list of your previous searches down the left hand side, is obvious but excellent.

But in most respects, Google still rules. The fact is that Bing is an incomplete beta, and while it’s not bad, it’s not actually a match for Google at the moment.

Microsoft knows perfectly well that it’s going to take it “years and years and years” (in Steve Ballmer’s words) to get anywhere in search, if it ever does. It knows it has to overtake Yahoo first. In that sense, comparisons with Google are misguided, though we’re all making them. In reality, Bing is competing with Yahoo and Ask to be the leading Google alternative, and that’s how its success — or failure — should be evaluated.

Acronym note: Microsoft PR reckons Bing is “the sound of found” but the common joke is that it stands recursively for Bing Is Not Google. This has prompted another acronym, Wanger, for Wolfram Alpha’s Not Google Either, Really”

Source : guardian.co.uk

Basic Steps to get RANKED for the Targetted Keywords

2009-06-01T05:06:00.000-07:00

First of all, select the right targeted keywords for your web page. Please don’t do the mistake of selecting the most popular keywords. Instead you can use Google’s Keyword Suggestion Tool to select the most appropriate variations considering both popularity as well as competition. During this process please make sure that keyword phrases should be related to your website content as without that the entire process will be of no use.

Before you start with Off-Page optimization like Building backlinks and generating traffic, you have to make sure that the keywords are placed in the right spot. No page will get ranked if you haven’t clearly indicated exactly what keyword’s the page should be ranked for.

The Basic Steps to get ranked for the Targeted Keywords are:

1) Keyword in the URL
2) Keyword in the title
3) Keyword in the only h1 tag
4) Keyword Usage in Body

1. Keyword in the URL

Just make sure that your URL is in the form www.example.com/keyword (.htm or .php or .aspx or whatever). Avoid URLs without the keyword eg www.example.com/products.htm?id=12. For the URL it is best to have only the keyword and no other junk.

2. Keyword in the title

It is also recommended to use the keyword in the page title, eg “Keyword (with some wording included) | Example.com”. Do not repeat titles on all your pages, and do not dilute keywords by using the same keyword in all your titles. Every internal page should consists a Unique page title.

3. Keyword in the only h1 tag.

When you describe your Targetted Keyword, there should be a header above your description. Just add h1 tags, eg h1Targetted Keyword/h1. The title should also have some extra wording that is different from the title wording.

4. Keyword Usage in Body

Please make sure that the content that you posted is Keyword Rich.. Because Google Algorithms are more sensitive to pages that do not contain the keyword they’re getting links for. Do not spam the keyword though! Just use it a few times, naturally. (Keyword Desnity of 2%-6%)

So stop trying to implement all the hundreds of factors that could possibly help you rank higher. Unless you are done with these basic steps do not move on.

Article Source : dailyseoupdates.com

101 Link Building Tips To Market Your Website

2008-10-13T21:48:00.000-07:00

Link Building... Time-intensive. Frustrating. Sometimes confusing. Yet Unavoidable. Because ultimately, it's still the trump card for higher rankings.

Many of us have been hoping that it would go away. In Brett Tabke's 5/18 Robots.txt entry, he echoed a sentiment that many, many webmasters hold on to as a hope:

What happens to all those Wavers that think [i]Getting Links = SEO[/i] when that majority of the Google algo is devalued in various ways? Wavers built their fortunes on "links=seo". When that goes away, the Wavers have zero to hold on to.

The pertinent questions:

Will link building still be very important for rankings in the medium term?
When will link popularity be devalued in favor of other algo elements (that are less tedious, from a webmaster's point of view)?

The answers:

Sorry, but link building is still going to be the SEO trump card for the foreseeable future.
I wouldn't hold your breath for search engine algorithms to place less importance on link popularity until the Semantic Web arrives, or maybe when HTTP gets replaced by a new protocol. Because links are still the basic connector, the basic relationship, on the Web. And for the foreseeable future they're going to be the easiest way for a computer program to judge the importance and trustworthiness of a Web page.

What will happen to the way search algorithms score links is already happening. The Google algo has become much more elegant and advanced, devaluing staggering amount of links that shouldn't count, and placing more emphasis on trusted links. And the trust and juice given by those links is then verified by elements like user data, domain age, and other relatively hard-to-spoof factors.

But please, don't fool yourself. Links that should count are still the key to rankings (in Google, at least — and MSN and Yahoo! are only a few short years behind). In that spirit, Aaron and I have created our 101 Ways to Build (and Not Build) Links in 2006. (Yeah, it just so happened that there were exactly 101!)

Oh, and mad props to our inspiration, 131 Legitimate Link Building Strategies, one of the original authority documents on link building. It was just getting a bit rusty, that's all ("Host your own Web Ring"?). Anyway, enjoy the update. It's guaranteed to be accurate until January 1, 2007. ;-)

71 Good Ways to Build Links

Love for Lists

1. Build a "101 list". These get Dugg all the time, and often become "authority documents". People can't resist linking to these (hint, hint).

2. Create 10 easy tips to help you [insert topic here] articles. Again, these are exceptionally easy to link to.

3. Create extensive resource lists for a specific topic (see Mr Ploppy for inspiration).

4. Create a list of the top 10 myths for a specific category.

5. Create a list of gurus/experts. If you impress the people listed well enough, or find a way to make your project look somewhat official, the gurus may end up linking to your site or saying thanks. (Sometimes flattery is the easiest way to strike up a good relationship with an "authority".)

Developing Authority & Being Easy to Link At

6. Make your content easy to understand so many people can understand and spread your message. (It's an accessibility thing.)

7. Put some effort in to minimize grammatical or spelling errors, especially if you need authoritative people like librarians to link to your site.

8. Have an easily accessible privacy policy and about section so your site seems more trustworthy. Including a picture of yourself may also help build your authority.

PPC as a Link Building Tool

9. Buy relevant traffic with a pay per click campaign. Relevant traffic will get your site more visitors and brand exposure. When people come to your site, regardless of the channel in which they found it, there is a possibility that they will link to you.

News & Syndication

10. Syndicate an article at EzineArticles, GoArticles, iSnare, etc. The great thing about good article sites is that their article pages actually rank highly and send highly qualified traffic.

11. Submit an article to industry news site. Have an SEO site? Write an article and submit to WebProNews. Have a site about BLANK? Submit to BLANKinformationalsite.com.

12. Syndicate a press release. Take the time to make it GOOD (compelling, newsworthy). Email it to some handpicked journalists and bloggers. Personalize the email message. For good measure, submit it to PRWeb1, PRLeap, etc.

13. Track who picks up your articles or press releases. Offer them exclusive news or content.

14. Trade articles with other webmasters.

15. Email a few friends when you have important relevant news asking them for their feedback and/or if they would mind referencing it if they find your information useful.

16. Write about, and link to, companies with "in the news" pages. They link back to stories and blog posts which cover their developments. This is obviously easiest if you have a news section or blog. Do a Google search for [your industry + "in the news"].

17. Perform surveys and studies that make people feel important. If you can make other people feel important they will help do your marketing for you for free. Salary.com did a study on how underpaid mothers were, and they got many high quality links.

Directories, Meme Trackers & Social Book Marking

18. This tip is an oldie but goodie: submit your site to DMOZ and other directories that allow free submissions.

19. Submit your site to paid directories. Another oldie. Just remember that quality matters.

20. Create your own topical directory about your field of interest. Obviously link to your own site, deeplinking to important content where possible. Of course, if you make it into a truly useful resource, it will attract links on its own.

21. Tag related sites on sites like Del.icio.us. If people find the sites you tag to be interesting, emotionally engaging, or timely they may follow the trail back to your site.

22. If you create something that is of great quality make sure you ask a few friends to tag it for you. If your site gets on the front page of Digg or on the Del.icio.us popular list, hundreds more bloggers will see your site, and potentially link to it.

23. Look at meme trackers to see what ideas are spreading. If you write about popular spreading ideas with plenty of original content (and link to some of the original resources), your site may get listed as a source on the meme tracker site.

Local & Business Links

24. Join the Better Business Bureau.

25. Get a link from your local chamber of commerce.

26. Submit your link to relevant city and state governmental resources. (Easier in some countries than in others.)

27. List your site at the local library's Web site.

28. See if your manufacturers or retailers or other business partners might be willing to link to your site.

29. Develop business relationships with non-competing businesses in the same field. Leverage these relationships online and off, by recommending each other via links and distributing each other's business cards.

30. Launch an affiliate program. Most of the links you pick up will not have SEO value, but the added exposure will almost always lead to additional "normal" links.

Easy Free Links

31. Depending on your category and offer, you will find Craigslist to be a cheap or free classified service.

32. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Yahoo! Answers and provide links to relevant resources.

33. It is pretty easy to ask or answer questions on Google Groups and provide links to relevant resources.

34. If you run a fairly reputable company, create a page about it in the Wikipedia or in topic specific wikis. If it is hard to list your site directly, try to add links to other pages that link to your site.

35. It takes about 15 minutes to set up a topical Squidoo page, which you can use to look like an industry expert. Link to expert documents and popular useful tools in your fields, and also create a link back to your site.

36. Submit a story to Digg that links to an article on your site. You can also submit other content and have some of its link authority flow back to your profile page.

37. If you publish an RSS feed and your content is useful and regularly updated, some people will syndicate your RSS content (and some of those will provide linksâ€¦ unfortunately, some will not).

38. Most forums allow members to leave signature links or personal profile links. If you make quality contributions some people will follow these links and potentially read your site, link at your site, and/or buy your products.

Have a Big Heart for Reviews

39. Most brands are not well established online, so if your site has much authority, your review related content often ranks well.

40. Review relevant products on Amazon.com. We have seen this draw in direct customer enquiries and secondary links.

41. Create product lists on Amazon.com that review top products and also mention your background (LINK!).

42. Review related sites on Alexa to draw in related traffic streams.

43. Review products and services on shopping search engines like ePinions to help build your authority.

44. If you buy a product or service you really like and are good at leaving testimonials, many of those turn into links. Two testimonial writing tips — make them believable, and be specific where possible.

Blogs & the Blogosphere

45. Start a blog. Not just for the sake of having one. Post regularly and post great content. Good execution is what gets the links.

46. Link to other blogs from your blog. Outbound links are one of the cheapest forms of marketing available. Many bloggers also track who is linking to them or where their traffic comes from, so linking to them is an easy way to get noticed by some of them.

47. Comment on other blogs. Most of these comments will not provide much direct search engine value, but if your comments are useful, insightful, and relevant they can drive direct traffic. They also help make the other bloggers become aware of you, and they may start reading your blog and/or linking to it.

48. Technorati tag pages rank well in Yahoo! and MSN, and to a lesser extent in Google. Even if your blog is fairly new you can have your posts featured on the Technorati tag pages by tagging your posts with relevant tags.

49. If you create a blog make sure you list it in a few of the best blog directories.

Design as a Linking Element

50. Web 2.0-ify your site. People love to link to anything with AJAX. Even in the narrowest of niches, there is some kind of useful functionality you can build with AJAX.

51. Validate and 508 your site. This (indirect) method makes your site more trustworthy and linkable, especially from governmental sites or design-oriented communities. There are even a few authoritative directories of standards-compliant sites.

52. Order a beautiful CSS redesign. A nice design can get links from sites like CSS Vault.

Hire Help

53. Hire a publicist. Good old fashioned 'PR' (not PageRank) can still work wonders. Andy Hagans now offers a link baiting publicity service.

54. Hire a consultant. Yes, you can outsource link building. Just make sure to go with someone good. We recommend WeBuildPages, Debra Mastaler and, ahem, Andy Hagans.

Link Trading

55. Swap some links. What?! Did we really just recommend reciprocal link building? Yes, on a small scale, and with relevant partners that will send you traffic. Stay away from the link trading hubs and networks.

56. In case you didn't get the memo — when swapping links, try to get links from within the content of relevant content pages. Do not try to get links from pages that list hundreds of off topic link partners. Only seek link exchanges that you would consider pursuing even if search engines did not exist. Instead of thinking just about your topic when exchanging links, think about demographic audience sets.

Buying Sites, Renting Links & Advertisements

57. Rent some high quality links from a broker. Text Link Ads is the most reputable firm in this niche.

58. Rent some high quality links directly from Web sites. Sometimes the most powerful rented links come direct from sites not actively renting links.

59. Become a sponsor. All sorts of charities, contests, and conferences link to their sponsors. This can be a great way to gain visibility, links, and a warm feeling in your heart.

60. Sell items on eBay and offer to donate the profits to a charity. Many charities will link both to the eBay auction and to your site.

61. Many search algorithms seem biased toward older established sites. It may be faster to buy an old site with a strong link profile, and link it to your own site, than to try to start building authority links from scratch.

Use the Courts (Proceed with Caution)

62. Sue Google.

63. Get sued by a company people hate. When Aaron was sued by Traffic Power, he got hundreds or thousands of links, including links from sites like Wired and The Wall Street Journal.

Freebies & Giveaways

64. Hold a contest. Contests make great link bait. A few-hundred-dollar prize can result in thousands of dollars worth of editorial quality links. Enough said.

65. Build a tool collection. Original and useful tools (and collections of tools) get a lot of link love. What do you think ranking for mortgage calculator is worth?

66. Create and release open source site design templates for content management systems like Wordpress. Don't forget the "Designed by example.com" bit in the footer!

67. Offer free samples in exchange for feedback.

68. Release a Firefox extension. Make sure you have a download and/or support page on your site which people can link to.

Conferences & Social Interaction

69. It is easy to take pictures of important events and tell narratives about why they are important. Pictures of (drunk?) "celebrities" in your industry make great link bait.

70. Leverage new real world relationships into linking relationships. If you go to SEO related conferences, people like Tim Mayer, Matt Cutts, and Danny Sullivan are readily accessible. Similarly, in other industries, people who would normally seem inaccessible are exceptionally accessible at trade conferences. It is much easier to seem "real" in person. Once you create social relationships in person, it is easy to extend that onto the web.

71. Engaging, useful, and interesting interviews are an easy way to create original content. And they spread like wildfire.

30 Bad Ways to Build Links

Here are a few link buiding methods that may destroy your brand or get your site banned/penalized/filtered from major search engines, or both.

Directories

72. Submit your site to 200 cheesy paid directories (averaging $15 a pop) that send zero traffic and sell offtopic run-of-site links.

Forum Spam

73. List 100 Web sites in your signature file.

74. Exclusively post only when you can add links to your sites in the post area.

75. Post nothing but "me too" posts to build your post count. Use in combination with a link-rich signature file.

76. Ask questions about who provides the best [WIDGET], where [WIDGET] is an item that you sell. From the same IP address create another forum account and answer your own question raving about how great your own site is.

77. As a new member to various forums, ask the same question at 20 different forums on the same day.

78. Post on forum threads that are years outdated exclusively to link to your semi-related website.

79. Sign up for profiles on forums you never intend on commenting on.

Blog Spam

80. Instead of signing blog comments with your real name, sign them with spammy keywords.

81. Start marketing your own site hard on your first blog comment. Add no value to the comment section. Mention nothing other than you recently posted on the same subject at _____ and everyone should read it. Carpet bomb dozens of blogs with this message.

82. Say nothing unique or relevant to the post at hand. Make them assume an automated bot hit their comments.

83. Better yet, use automated bots to hit their comments. List at least 30 links in each post. Try to see if you can hit any servers hard enough to make them crash.

84. Send pings to everyone talking about a subject. In your aggregation post, state nothing of interest. Only state that other people are talking about the topic.

85. Don't even link to any of the sites you are pinging. Send them pings from posts that do not even reference them.

Garbage Link Exchanges

86. Send out link exchange requests mentioning PageRank.

87. Send link exchange emails which look like an automated bot sent them (little or no customization, no personal names, etc.).

88. Send link exchange requests to Matt Cutts, Tim Mayer, Tim Converse, Google, and Yahoo!.

89. Get links from nearly-hidden sections of websites listing hundreds or thousands of off topic sites.

Spam People in Person

90. Go to webmaster conferences and rave about how rich you are, and how your affiliates make millions doing nothing.

91. Instead of asking people what their name is, ask what their URL is. As soon as you get their URL ask if they have linked to your site yet and if not, why not.

Be Persistant

92. Send a webmaster an alert to every post you make on your website.

93. Send a webmaster an email every single day asking for them to link to your website.

94. Send references to your site to the same webmaster from dozens of different email accounts (you sly dog).

95. If the above do not work to get you a free link, offer them $1 for their time. Increase your offer by a dollar each day until they give in.

Getting Links by Being a Jerk

96. Emulate the RIAA. When in doubt, file a lawsuit against a 12-year-old girl. (Failing that, obtain bad press by any means necessary.)

97. Steal content published by well known names. Strip out any attribution. Aggregate many popular channels and just wait for them to start talking about you.

98. Send thousands of fake referrals at every top ranking Web site, guaranteeing larger boobs, a 14-inch penis (is that length or girth?), or millions of dollars in free, unclaimed money.

99. Wear your URL on your t-shirt. Walk or drive your car while talking on a cell phone or reading a book. When you run into other people say "excuse you, jerk".

100. Spill coffee on people or find creative ways to insult people to coax them into linking at your site.

101. Sue other webmasters for deep linking to your site. Well, this is more "hilariously dumb" than it is a "bad linking practice".

Source : seobook.com

Serial Bomb Blasts in Delhi Connaught Palace

2008-09-13T06:39:00.000-07:00

On the eve of the day of Saturday when all the people were in the mood of holiday on the same time theere were two serial blasts happened in Delhi Connaught Palace where number of people were died in a single blast and very high number of people were injured.

For further stories keep checking in the blog.

Powerful Software For Webmasters

2008-09-10T18:53:00.000-07:00

One of the best webmaster tools available for free on the web is certainly provided by Google. Google provides many fantastic tools of which most webmasters are unaware. Worse still, some webmasters realize the tools exist but haven't investigated them. The ones who don't make the most of these Google webmaster tools are at a considerable disadvantage to those who do use them. The first step is to register for an account with Google. Once you've done that you need to open one of their Adwords accounts. You'll need the Adwords account in order to access the most powerful Google tools, so you should open one even if you don't foresee that you'll need to place any Adwords advertisements.

Whatever your internet business, it is critical that you understand how to do keyword research. Effective marketing requires close attention to this basic aspect of online business, but fortunately Google offers a free service to assist you. Their free keyword suggestion tool will assist your research greatly. You can locate this tool by using "Google keyword suggestion" as your search term in the Google text box, and then following the link in the first of the search results. Using this tool can reduce struggling with your business.

The next very powerful tool is their site analytics software. You need an Adwords account for this one, but it is an amazing tool that tracks visitors to your site. This tool allows you see a wealth of data about how they found you and whether they are converting to customers and/or leads on your site. Similar software costs hundreds of dollars and is not nearly as user friendly and powerful. Using this software is an absolute must for any serious webmaster.

The last software we address, but by no means the least important, is the suite of webmaster tools. These tools give you up-to-date information on any problems with your pages, the number of pages contained in your index, and a detailed compilation of every page on the internet that links to your pages. This list can help you establish why your page ranks well or poorly for search terms that you think are appropriate to your company. This fairly new addition to Google's software offerings is probably the most important software that google has ever released. It has been highly effective and I recommend it very strongly.

Source : seoseonews.com

For the Best SEO, Google Says Think Text

2008-09-10T18:46:00.000-07:00

Even though a recent Google gadget has provided us a potential glimpse at Google’s future video indexing technology, and even though both Google and Yahoo! are working with Adobe to get better at indexing the textual content within Flash movie files, for proper search optimization, thinking about your text is still king. According to Adam Lasnik, who is a Search Evangelist at Google, webmasters really need to focus on their text content to make their sites visible to Google and accessible to all users.

Beet.tv has a short video up with Lasnik, in which the Googler talks about SEO and accessibility. Lasnik spends much of the video talking about Google’s efforts working with Adobe to index Flash content, and says that even though Google is making strides in indexing rich media content like Flash, videos, and photos, webmasters need to think about text as the “primary means of communicating.”

Andy Plesser of Beet.tv says the key takeaway from what Lasnik says is that rich media publishers should always use descriptive text around their rich content.

This isn’t ground breaking stuff — anyone interested in building accessible web sites should already be concerned with making sure their text content and descriptive tags are up to snuff — but it is short and worth the watch. And if you’ll recall, last month we called the announcement that Google was working with Adobe to index Flash content a PR disaster for the company, so Lasnik’s video is perhaps a small salve on that public relations wound.

Source : seoseonews.com

The Evolution Of SEO

2008-09-10T18:40:00.000-07:00

With all of the conference events, podcasts, and social media buzz focused on SEO, it's easy to lose sight of how young a profession SEO truly is. You don't have to think back too far to remember the days of keyword stuffing, Web rings, irrelevant meta data ploys (back when Britney Spears was a keyword for every site), and old-fashioned black-text-on-a-black-background cloaking.

How far we've come.

We've seen a natural progression from back rooms to boardrooms -- from the basement to the mainstream. SEO has not simply shed its dubious roots; it has become a legitimate, reputable component of a proper client marketing mix.

It's rare to witness evolution as it happens. Let's look at what a few short years of professional SEO has given us.

Getting Thrown in the Mix

Once an afterthought to many of our clients, SEO has slowly become a big part of the overall marketing strategy. Maybe these clients have just woken up to the idea of free traffic, or maybe their marketing teams have finally become savvy about the online landscape. Either way, strategic SEM benefits the users, clients, and agencies involved.

After having to justify itself for so long, it's good to see SEO as a regular in many a client marketing mix.

Becoming On-Site Evangelists

Now that marketers understand the value that SEO can add to their bottom line, they need to navigate the nuanced waters of proper optimization. Unfortunately, they sometimes make mistakes that can land them, intentionally or not, in the realm of black hat marketing.

The role of the SEO agency has grown from just fixing a client's site to championing proper on-site optimization. We educate as we address site issues and put client Web sites back on the right track.

Even better, we're now brought into client Web projects much earlier, often before the site is even built. Being given the chance to create a search-friendly site from the ground up is a fantastic indicator of client trust and of the legitimacy of the profession.

Building Connections

As SEM matured, it headed off to high school, and we left the confines of our home pages to build links and connections with others. Link building marks a major turning point for SEO, not because it hadn't been done in the beginning, but because of the level of sophistication it has achieved.

Our desires to build link popularity and the illustrious Google PageRank have created a boom in SEO strategy, marrying SEO to public relations and sales strategy. This is when SEO truly began to permeate every facet of the Internet. Every site could be a partner; every page presented opportunity.

Link building was the step in evolution SEO needed to move from a strictly technical discipline to an accessible marketing discipline. In short, it was the element we need to make SEO understandable to the layperson (not that I don't think 301 redirects are great).

Joining the Conversation

Back to high school again, the burgeoning social media scene gave everyone a voice... and they used it to gossip. SEO became about harnessing this online water cooler to build relationships with key communicators, create buzz, gauge consumer opinion, and create new links to receptive audiences.

And content was once again king. A new breed of social media marketers emerged to generate Digg effects and build followings for clients through audience tailored articles and viral materials. Users digested content that interested them, bloggers received grist to churn out new posts, and client sites slowly slid up the SERPs.

Making It In Film

Remember when MTV first hit the airwaves to the tune of the Buggles' "Video Killed the Radio Star"? Well, now the video star uses a Webcam. The popularity of sites like YouTube, and the creation of new sites like FaceSpook (which creates a 3D movie of images you upload), means that video will continue to play a large role online.

Now that everyone's a mini-Spielberg, it's up to SEO professionals to ensure that our clients' content isn't lost in the shuffle. With this newfound responsibility comes a new set of optimization tactics focused on boosting this content's visibility in Google and all the other video engines. And we might just sneak a link in there for good measure.

Going Universal

Once long ago, there were creatures known as the Top 10 Search Results. These once-pure content pages ruled the SERPs without fear of indented listings or local search feeds. But times have changed.

The proliferation of images, video, books, and news has flipped the concept of search results "real estate" on its head. Now you'll likely be served images, video, news, or books along with the list of links for your query.

SEO must to go beyond the text-on-the-page approach and encompass all digital assets. This will continue to gain prominence and importance, making it even more important to take a holistic approach to your SEO marketing program.

Upward and Onward

This progression is so astonishing because it didn't happen over a series of decades or ever years. SEO has evolved into more than what it was 24 months ago. As Google slowly expands its ability to read Flash objects, as mobile search begins to pick up steam, as new search engines hit the ground running, SEO shows no signs of stunting its evolution.

Ensuring you get the best ROI for your marketing program means taking advantage of all the different flavors of SEO. And, like in high school, the most popular technique today may be yesterday's news in the next few months.

Source : searchenginewatch.com

15 Link Building Strategies for New Websites

2008-08-26T19:21:00.000-07:00

By following the under described tips I am sure that these tips will definitely be useful to you for keeping your site in top listings.

These tips includes free submission process which is very much helpful for growing business or newly launched web sites. Special care should be taken while preparing the anchor text and applying them in the directories or other sites.

1. Submit your site to Web Directories. This is a pretty monotonous process that can get you several hundred backlinks if you have the time. An alternative would be to hire a manual directory submitter.

2. Submit Press Releases to PR sites. A basic press release about your website’s launch can be released to several PR websites, who will distribute it to various online news outlets. A good way to get a free link.

3. Reciprocal Links with Similar Websites. Its important to pick sites that are of high relevance so you’ll not only get links but traffic. Reciprocal linking can be useful from the beginning but don’t overdo it. You can find link partners by emailing them directly or searching on internet and various other sites also.

4. Squidoo Lenses. It is fairly easy to create. It only takes around 15 minutes to set up one fully and you’ll be able to insert a bunch of anchor text links to your website along with your feed content. Hubpages is another similar site you can use.

5. Article Submissions. Create a short article on your niche topic and submit it to article directories for a backlink and some traffic. You might get more links if your article is picked up and published on other websites.

6. Social Media Profiles. There a whole bunch of social websites online which allow you to insert a link to your website on the profile page. Sign up for some of them using a username that brands your business. This might be useful when you prepare to submit your website in future.

7. Social Bookmarking. Certain social voting websites like Netscape or Digg are often crawled by search engines and their links do help to get a website indexed.

8. Forum Signatures. Sign up for some forums in your niche and start contributing to ongoing discussions. Insert a link to the homepage or some inner pages of your site.

9. Create a Tool, Theme or Widget. Dedicate a designer to prepare an add-on application or template that will be related to a specific social network, popular website or platform. Include a credit link that points back to your website.

10. Blogs on Other Blog Platforms. Use existing blogs you have on other blog networks. Or set up different versions of your blog on different blog networks like Wordpress.com, Blogger and Xanga that link to your webpages.

11. Comment on Other Blogs. Start commenting on relevant and popular sites in your niche. Don’t just spam for links but focus on building a relationship with other bloggers as well. Write a relevant comment and try to avoid using keyword names or signature links.

12. Guest posting on other blogs. Like article and press releases, this one involves having readily available content you can send out to certain blogs in your niche. This is great for getting relevant links and traffic.

13. Hold Contests. Some websites often offer contests in a bid to attract anchor text links from bloggers. Contests allow you to determine the specific anchor text but its possible that too many links using the designated keyword may harm your domain instead.

14. Collaborative Projects. You may need to develop an article specifically for a writing project, blog carnival but it will usually get you a couple of backlinks, depending on the number and generosity of the participants involved.

15. Offer your Expertise. This will apply if you have a specific skill set such as web design, copywriting, SEO, etc. Write to an established website and offer to optimize their website in return for a mention or credit link on a webpage. This offers excellent branding, particularly if your offer is picked up by a website with a decent audience.

Republished By : Vishal Shastri

Pay Per Click: 10 Steps to Success

2008-08-19T19:06:00.000-07:00

Step 1: Set Goals

Set goals for Cost Per Conversion. This should always be the primary measure of success.

* When your total cost per conversion is lower than your break even point, the campaign is profitable.
* You goal should be to have the lowest cost per conversion with the most conversions. These two sub-goals are opposed to one another because the more you pay per click, the more traffic you will be able to drive. It is important to determine the optimum compromise between low cost conversions and more traffic. But any time your cost per conversion goes above your break even point, the campaign will no longer be profitable.

Secondary goals can include:

* Traffic (total clicks). Issue: Traffic without conversion is wasted money.
* Click-through rate (CTR). Issue: Clicks without conversion is wasted money.
* Conversion rate. Issue: Good conversion may still lose money if the cost per click is too high.
* Average cost per click (CPC). Issue: Low cost per click is still not valuable if the clicks don't convert. The secondary goals represent valuable data points, but all of them can show good numbers and still be part of a failing campaign. Always use these other measures in the light of your average cost per conversion.

Step 2: Develop Initial Keyword List

Starting with what you think your prospects are searching for and using the available tools from Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing and/or others, develop an initial keyword list. The list should include every keyword you think someone interested in your products or services MIGHT type into Google, Yahoo, MSN or other search engine.

Step 3: Develop Initial Keyword Bid List

Starting with the keywords in your Initial Keyword list, determine what you believe your conversion rate will be on clicks you get from those keywords. If you have no idea, begin with your average conversion rate for your site and adjust up or down based on how targeted you believe the keyword is. This is just needs to be an educated guess at this point. Soon after you launch your campaign, you'll have real data to replace your estimates with.

Based on your cost per conversion goal, determine what the maximum amount you can afford to pay for that keyword is. Multiply your cost per conversion goal by your estimated conversion rate. The result is the maximum you can afford to pay per click. So if your cost per conversion goal is $20 and you estimate a 2% conversion rate, you can afford to bid up to $0.40 ($20 x 2%) per click.

Finally, use your PPC vendor's tools to check whether or not you can pay that amount or less per click to buy the keyword. If so, add it to your initial Keyword Bid List, and note the maximum bid amount. If not, put it on a backup list, which you may revisit in the future.

Step 4: Determine what landing pages to use for each keyword on your Initial Keyword Bid List.

The landing page for each keyword should be as relevant to the keyword or phrase as possible. DO NOT send traffic from a specific keyword to your Home Page. If you are bidding on keyword phrases that do not correspond directly to any pages on your web site, create specific landing pages that speak directly to your ad copy, and direct users from that landing page to where you want them to go.

Step 5: Write Ad Copy

Write copy for each listing. For Google, you can write several ads for each. Consider exactly what the user is looking for when they search for a specific keyword phrase, and write copy that is compelling to that mind set. Ad copy with the exact keywords in it generally produces a higher click-through rate.

Step 6: Launch Campaign and Analyze Results

Once you have your list of keywords, your maximum bids and your ads ready, launch your campaign. Initially, you should keep a very close eye on it, generating reports every day or two. Key things to look for include:

* Keywords that are getting a lot of clicks but no/low conversions.
* Keywords that are getting very high conversions.
* Keywords that are getting no clicks.
* If you are running multiple ads for some keywords, which ads are doing better?
* Are there trends in conversion rate associated with time of the day or day of the week?

Step 7: Make Adjustments

Based on your analysis, adjust you campaign. For keywords generating a lot of traffic but low or no conversions, try either changing the copy of your ads to better qualify prospects, lower your bid amount or stop bidding on the keyword.

For keywords performing better than expected, if you are not already placing #1, analyze the cost per conversion of increasing your bid to a higher placement position and compare that with the expected additional traffic from higher placement. If it will be more profitable, raise your bid. If you're not sure, test it and see.

For keywords getting impressions but few or no clicks, try different ad copy.

Step 8: Refine Your Keyword List

As you get more data, and test more bidding strategies and ad copy, you should be refining your keyword list, removing unprofitable keywords and potentially identifying new potential money makers.

Step 9: Use the Click-Through and Conversion Data to Inform Your SEO Campaign

The data gathered in a well-run SEM campaign can be invaluable to a SEO effort. Knowing exactly what keywords are actually converting into sales and driving traffic should be used by your search engine optimization team to target the appropriate keywords in their campaign.

Step 10: Continue Monitoring and Adjusting

Over time, less analysis is needed, but you must still monitor your results, look for changes and adjust accordingly. New competitors enter the market. Old ones leave. Bid prices change. Users start searching for more specific terms. Left unattended, all of these can lead to a stale campaign decreasing performance. Run at least high-level reports weekly and detailed reports monthly.

Republished By : Vishal Shastri