So why post if this will end in about 2 and a half week time? Because I will have this post as an entry? Why now? I was away and not been on seo world for about 6 to 8 months I believe due to projects outside seo world. And just having my time now to test again what is happening around search engine.

I have seen improvements on search engines, new search engine evolve and start ups like WolframAlpha that is cool. Anyway, let have a try on this one if I still remember my brain dead seo knowledge base. Wake up brain cells lets do the work for oes tsetnoc.

If on few more days say 7 days before the end of the contest, and we don’t see improvement and google visibility, same old scenario pass the juice to all my friends entry.

This entry must be valid with this organizer site located here Webmaster Forum.

Few good things for this contest:

1. Have your content relevant to the phrase you are optimizing with. In addition, your content must be related to the site you are linking too.

2. Quality of content and its length(???). Having one or two liner entry is a big NO to win in the contest. Unless you have lots of high authority links pointing to your entry (needs to prove otherwise, two line sentence post + lots of high authority links).

3. Links. This is the basically the hardest part of SEO process. Getting links on blogs, news sites, social bookmarking, directories and other link opportunities, is by far eats the time of the process. One thing for sure, break some newsworthy post and the rest will come in handy plus a big traffic bonus.

4. Have a cup of coffee, stare at your PC and rest.

Well goodluck to all entries, hold on guys, and watch those datacenter dance, in this way, you can also check if your entry to this eriuqs spires healthy recreation thing still have a chance to propagate on the official contest DC. If you check different DC, you will probably see a new top entries and don’t be surprised for it.

We don’t want to look tidy when we go out from our home or office because of those days jobs nor we do focus on our computer screen 24/7. That is unhealthy! Recreational activities like biking, Skiing, golf, cross-country skiing, fly fishing, mountain biking and hiking are just one of those we can do to at least unwind and free up our mind on those stressful work.

We know as a busy person, every minute of it is a fortune, but a relax mind and a healthy body creates more fortune than a tired one. Now going back to this seo thing, blog is one of the main point of entry. That is easy to be promoted using those rss, fresh content indexing on different search engine and can easily be updated in case we have something to say about the contest.

Oh, by the way, I have also joined this to test the waters out though this will end on May 29, that is, 11 days from now. And this post is my entry but still no word if this qualifies.

One more thing to show after Google drop our ranking, another search engine, Yahoo pushed my entry to its search at the top place. Yahoo seems to love our entry much than Google. It seems Google choked on our entry after it found out that the post have just been posted 1 week back compared to the earlier entries who are building links on a lightning speed.

As said before, I am not expecting to win this, (oh, to correct, I am not used to win anything due to laziness) because there are lots of Filipino SEO that is way better than me, just like ranking it on 1 to 10, they are 10 and I am 1/10.

And for the winning entries, congratulations! Did you learn how google treat your ranking? Or maybe have you observe new Google algo?

You can search google for search engine optimization or search engine optimization blog and it will show you results on this niche. One more thing to consider is your site design or blog design, have a look at Claremont Design  and LA Toy Store , you can take that as a sample and build a site or blog like that.

Now on the step by step guide to get you started if you don’t have money to buy a domain and a host. You can sign-up to blogger and have your own blogspot blog with the niche you want to blog. Next step is to search on search engine like google on some free theme to suit your blog design taste or create your own. Now its time to promote your new blogspot blog. Submit your blog to different rss directory, have an article submitted to article directories with link on the resource page pointing to your new blog.

Those are some of the basics but you will learn something new in the process. You just need to be patient and have yourself open for new knowledge. This tnomeralc web design toys post is just a random not research post, lol. just getting fun out of this blog.

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Enjoy submitting and don’t forget to bookmark this post.

With this you can basically learn new things. One is to know where those guys are getting their backlinks. Second is how they optimize their pages not just for links. Third, the dirty tricks they are employing to their competitors.

It is normal in the contest, let your competitor be down while having your site up to grab their position. Blackhat!

Back to Busby SEO Test with one month more remaining and promotional items corporate gifts srednarb with two weeks more.

Other than that if you are interested on Busby SEO Test, you can also join the fun of testing your skills of optimizing a web page be it static or dynamic pages. Well you do have to sacrifice effort and time to build links to your site.

You can learn,

1. Optimizing a page

2. Search engine tactics

3. building links

Goodluck.

I have tried it myself and it was on the second page.

This warning is powered by SearchScan by McAfee. Truly Google is dangerous, lol!

On Yahoo News.

Microsoft Corp. withdrew its $42.3 billion bid to buy Yahoo Inc. on Saturday, scrapping an attempt to snap up the tarnished Internet icon in hopes of toppling online search and advertising leader Google Inc.
ADVERTISEMENT

The decision to walk away from the deal came after last-ditch efforts to negotiate a mutually acceptable sale price proved unsuccessful.But Yahoo’s board demanded at least $53 billion, or $37 per share, according to Ballmer. That would have been nearly double Yahoo’s stock price of $19.18 at the time Microsoft first made its bid a little over three months ago

What do you think? I know someone who is happy with this turnaround! You know who? Google!!!!

If you are using wordpress 2.3 or 2.5, you don’t need to have an .htaccess code to redirect your non-www site to www to avoid duplicate urls. the latest version of wordpress is already doing this and already incorporated on the code of WP. This is far that I have seen when i have implemented it on my of my blog.

What are the consequences of this if you again redirect the latest wordpress that is already redirecting the site to www version? Remember DMOZ? when their main page was out of the google index. They are redirecting permanently the www version to their own www version of the site, 301 redirect. That means if bot is going into the site www version it is again being redirected to its www version leaving bot to give up on an infinite loop of redirection.

This scenario happened to me and only then I have noticed when I checked and removed the www but still redirecting it to www version.

Resolution: Removed the line on .htaccess permanent redirect (301) to www and let the  alone the hardcode piece on Wordpress. The site now back to index.

Another area to focus is the roadmap posted on the wordpress roadmap or planned version release of the blog platform.

Version                  Target Release Date
Wordpress 2.5     March 10, 2008
Wordpress 2.6    July 7, 2008
Wordpress 2.7    November 10, 2008

With the upcoming releases and open tickets in this area, I don’t think I will upgrade just yet. Will have to wait till the release becomes stable but the problem is a new version might pop up again. Is it wise to upgrade to it?

With GrandCentral, a free service from Google, you can receive phone calls and post voicemails right on your blog. Though GrandCentral is currently in a private beta test, bloggers can skip the wait and get a free account immediately. Sign up now

WebCall Button
When you add GrandCentral’s WebCall button to your blog, your readers can easily call your phone or leave voicemails without ever seeing your telephone number.

You can use Webcall according to Grandcentral to:

Use a WebCall Button to:

* Provide a way for potential customers to contact your business
* Control who calls you and block annoying people
* Meet new people without giving out your number
* Forward calls to your WebCall Button on eBay to a voicemail message about how great the listed item is
* Have fun: Use the WebCall button for constant updates on what you are doing. Here’s how – Set phone forwarding on your WebCall button to go to voicemail (so your phone isn’t always ringing) and then update your WebCall voicemail greeting as frequently as you like. Callers will hear the latest message you have when they call and can even leave messages for you.
* Have fun: Play music RingShares when people call from your MySpace page and a fun voicemail greeting for meeting new people

Currently it is offered only on US but you can sign-up and receive update if they will be available internationally. This is a great addition and of course free and connecting and possible clients calling you for business. For seo company that is offering search engine optimization it is good to have feature!

But searching it on MSN shows no results but just backlinks to the site. A further verification shows me this data.

MSN is indexing google translate – translated pages.  Going to the url that is indexed yields to the translated pages on the language that I don’t undestand that I believe a Russian translated pages.

I have emailed MSN about this issue if it is an issue (for me it is) and will just wait for them to reply to my feedback.

According to their site blog. Here the improvements they are now implementing

*HTTP Compression: HTTP compression allows faster transmission time by compressing static files and application responses, reducing network load between your servers and our crawler. We support the most common compression methods: gzip and deflate as defined by RFC 2616 (see sections 14.11 and 14.39). Compression is currently supported by all major browsers and search engines. Use this online tool to check your server for HTTP compression support.

The following links provide configuration information for IIS, and Apache.
o Configure Compression in IIS
o Configure Apache using GZIP or using deflate

*Conditional Get: We support conditional get as defined by RFC 2616 (Section 14.25), generally we will not download the page unless it has changed since the last time we crawled it. As per the standard, our crawler will include the “If-Modified-Since” header & time of last download in the GET request and when available, our crawler will include the “If-None-Match” header and the ETag value in the GET request. If the content hasn’t changed the web server will respond with a 304 HTTP response.

To check if your site already supports the “If-Modified-Since” HTTP header, you can use this online tool to check your server for HTTP Conditional Get support. Alternatively, you can check using Fiddler for Internet Explorer, or Live Headers for Firefox. Each of these tools allows you to create a custom GET request and send it to your server. You’ll want to make sure that your request includes the “If-Modified-Since” header like the following simplified sample:

GET /sa/3_12_0_163076/webmaster/webmaster_layout.css HTTP/1.1
Host: webmaster.live.com
If-Modified-Since: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 01:28:49 GMT

You should receive a server response similar to the following simplified sample:

HTTP/1.x 304 Not Modified

Some old days when MSNBot gone like crazy on my sites eating bandwidth. With this improvements we could expect some difference on Live Search indexing and hopefully on ranking.

In a bid to remain independent, Yahoo plans to reject Microsoft Corp.’s unsolicited takeover offer.Quoting sources familiar with the situation, the Journal reports that Yahoo’s board feels the offer of $31 per share “massively undervalues” the company. A letter spelling out the position is expected to be sent Monday. Yahoo also expressed concern that Microsoft’s offer does not account for risks to Yahoo should the deal be overturned by regulators.

The Journal source said the company would be unwilling to consider an offer below $40 per share, which would represent a $12 billion increase over Microsoft’s original $44.6 billion bid. It is unclear if Microsoft would be willing to increase its bid by such a significant amount.

If Microsoft is eager to buy Yahoo then a bid to up to $50 billion can make again Yahoo into hot seat to re-consider the offer. The possibility stands as we analyze how Microsoft willing to take over the next search engine giant.

Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Chris Liddell said the software company may issue some debt to finance the cash portion of its 50-50 stock and cash offer for Yahoo, instead of drawing down its entire $21 billion cash pile.

“It’s likely we’re actually going to borrow for the first time,” said Liddell in an annual strategy meeting with analysts before Yahoo’s apparent decision. “It’s going to be a mixture of the cash we have on hand plus debt.”

With this plan decision of Yahoo executive, I wonder how will price of shares go in the market. Google can rejoice now of this threat against their search engine.

They are about to migrate all google accounts to use the same account on all services powered by Google according to their blog to clarify some issues during log-in.

We’ve heard that there’s been confusion among publishers about this login error message — especially if you’re absolutely positive that you’ve used the correct email address when logging in. (And 99.9% of the time, this is the case.).If you’re seeing this error message, this means your AdSense account shares the same login and password as a Google Account, but the two accounts are not linked.We’re working on migrating all AdSense accounts over to Google Accounts,

My take,

1. On adwords and adsense issue, this might be not a good option, we know very well how a certain email account can be compromised. I have experienced this a year ago thus not actually having the same log-in password over the net.

2. Advantage to those who easily forgot different password on sites.

3. Will google not accept anymore other email address like the one on Yahoo (Microsoft-Yahoo possible deal)?

What is your opinion about this?

The offer might increase up to $50 billion in common stock that is much higher than the previous offer as far as I can observe if Yahoo refuses to accept the offer of about $31 per share after yahoo shares increased on yesterdays stock market.

If the deal will go through competition on the search engines will be tough combining the resources of Yahoo and Microsoft versus Google. Hmmn, Google may Ask!? AOL?

Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) today announced that it has made a proposal to the Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO) Board of Directors to acquire all the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 representing a total equity value of approximately $44.6 billion. Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock. The offer represents a 62 percent premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock on Jan. 31, 2008

This is interesting, we if the deal closed we can have a real competition on the search market and advertising (hopefully!).

With this letter from Microsoft to Yahoo dated January 31, 2008.

January 31, 2008

Board of Directors
Yahoo! Inc.
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Attention: Roy Bostock, Chairman
Attention: Jerry Yang, Chief Executive Officer

Dear Members of the Board:

I am writing on behalf of the Board of Directors of Microsoft to make a proposal for a business combination of Microsoft and Yahoo!. Under our proposal, Microsoft would acquire all of the outstanding shares of Yahoo! common stock for per share consideration of $31 based on Microsoft’s closing share price on January 31, 2008, payable in the form of $31 in cash or 0.9509 of a share of Microsoft common stock. Microsoft would provide each Yahoo! shareholder with the ability to choose whether to receive the consideration in cash or Microsoft common stock, subject to pro-ration so that in the aggregate one-half of the Yahoo! common shares will be exchanged for shares of Microsoft common stock and one-half of the Yahoo! common shares will be converted into the right to receive cash. Our proposal is not subject to any financing condition.

Our proposal represents a 62% premium above the closing price of Yahoo! common stock of $19.18 on January 31, 2008. The implied premium for the operating assets of the company clearly is considerably greater when adjusted for the minority, non-controlled assets and cash. By whatever financial measure you use – EBITDA, free cash flow, operating cash flow, net income, or analyst target prices – this proposal represents a compelling value realization event for your shareholders.

We believe that Microsoft common stock represents a very attractive investment opportunity for Yahoo!’s shareholders. Microsoft has generated revenue growth of 15%, earnings growth of 26%, and a return on equity of 35% on average for the last three years. Microsoft’s share price has generated shareholder returns of 8% during the last one year period and 28% during the last three year period, significantly outperforming the S&P 500. It is our view that Microsoft has significant potential upside given the continued solid growth in our core businesses, the recent launch of Windows Vista, and other strategic initiatives.

Microsoft’s consistent belief has been that the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! clearly represents the best way to deliver maximum value to our respective shareholders, as well as create a more efficient and competitive company that would provide greater value and service to our customers. In late 2006 and early 2007, we jointly explored a broad range of ways in which our two companies might work together. These discussions were based on a vision that the online businesses of Microsoft and Yahoo! should be aligned in some way to create a more effective competitor in the online marketplace. We discussed a number of alternatives ranging from commercial partnerships to a merger proposal, which you rejected. While a commercial partnership may have made sense at one time, Microsoft believes that the only alternative now is the combination of Microsoft and Yahoo! that we are proposing.

In February 2007, I received a letter from your Chairman indicating the view of the Yahoo! Board that “now is not the right time from the perspective of our shareholders to enter into discussions regarding an acquisition transaction.” According to that letter, the principal reason for this view was the Yahoo! Board’s confidence in the “potential upside” if management successfully executed on a reformulated strategy based on certain operational initiatives, such as Project Panama, and a significant organizational realignment. A year has gone by, and the competitive situation has not improved.

While online advertising growth continues, there are significant benefits of scale in advertising platform economics, in capital costs for search index build-out, and in research and development, making this a time of industry consolidation and convergence. Today, the market is increasingly dominated by one player who is consolidating its dominance through acquisition. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a credible alternative for consumers, advertisers, and publishers. Synergies of this combination fall into four areas:

Scale economics: This combination enables synergies related to scale economics of the advertising platform where today there is only one competitor at scale. This includes synergies across both search and non-search related advertising that will strengthen the value proposition to both advertisers and publishers. Additionally, the combination allows us to consolidate capital spending.

Expanded R&D capacity: The combined talent of our engineering resources can be focused on R&D priorities such as a single search index and single advertising platform. Together we can unleash new levels of innovation, delivering enhanced user experiences, breakthroughs in search, and new advertising platform capabilities. Many of these breakthroughs are a function of an engineering scale that today neither of our companies has on its own.

Operational efficiencies: Eliminating redundant infrastructure and duplicative operating costs will improve the financial performance of the combined entity.

Emerging user experiences: Our combined ability to focus engineering resources that drive innovation in emerging scenarios such as video, mobile services, online commerce, social media, and social platforms is greatly enhanced.

We would value the opportunity to further discuss with you how to optimize the integration of our respective businesses to create a leading global technology company with exceptional display and search advertising capabilities. You should also be aware that we intend to offer significant retention packages to your engineers, key leaders and employees across all disciplines.

We have dedicated considerable time and resources to an analysis of a potential transaction and are confident that the combination will receive all necessary regulatory approvals. We look forward to discussing this with you, and both our internal legal team and outside counsel are available to meet with your counsel at their earliest convenience.

Our proposal is subject to the negotiation of a definitive merger agreement and our having the opportunity to conduct certain limited and confirmatory due diligence. In addition, because a portion of the aggregate merger consideration would consist of Microsoft common stock, we would provide Yahoo! the opportunity to conduct appropriate limited due diligence with respect to Microsoft. We are prepared to deliver a draft merger agreement to you and begin discussions immediately.

In light of the significance of this proposal to your shareholders and ours, as well as the potential for selective disclosures, our intention is to publicly release the text of this letter tomorrow morning.

Due to the importance of these discussions and the value represented by our proposal, we expect the Yahoo! Board to engage in a full review of our proposal. My leadership team and I would be happy to make ourselves available to meet with you and your Board at your earliest convenience. Depending on the nature of your response, Microsoft reserves the right to pursue all necessary steps to ensure that Yahoo!’s shareholders are provided with the opportunity to realize the value inherent in our proposal.

We believe this proposal represents a unique opportunity to create significant value for Yahoo!’s shareholders and employees, and the combined company will be better positioned to provide an enhanced value proposition to users and advertisers. We hope that you and your Board share our enthusiasm, and we look forward to a prompt and favorable reply.

Sincerely yours,

/s/ Steven A. Ballmer

Steven A. Ballmer

Chief Executive Officer

Microsoft Corporation

NetAudioAds will begin pushing live ads out to their audio ad distribution network.Audio ads will NOT begin playing everywhere at the same time. This will be a slow, methodical ramp up until NaetAudioAds is playing ads to the complete network.Do not panic if you are not hearing audio ads right away. We are on course for what NetAudioAds is calling a soft launch. As the days progress after launch tomorrow, more and more ads will begin playing covering a wider and wider percentage of the distribution network.

So it will not instantly play if you have registered to be a publisher. There are estimating it to be of full launch about 30-60 days after this soft start.

They have also added a new function on their system.

Competing Ads…

NetAudioAds is adding a function where you can opt out from running certain kinds of audio ads on your website such as competitor ads. You will be able to do this by specifying the name or keyword of competitors (or ads) that you DO NOT want running on individual pages of your website.

You can also include keywords of ads that you DO want running on your site. This is all very preliminary and will develop over time.

I wonder how will the blogosphere or site owners go into this launch and the success of their network and including the visitors or readers of the sites if they hear some audio ads on their favorite sites.

I have also signed up to their program but not yet implementing their code. Would you think I can add those in this blog?

It’s been almost 2 years since this blog was born to participate in an seo contest previously with the keyword not even close to mention in the domain name. But still managed to be on top of the search that including, Yahoo and MSN and is still now when you search for the contest phrase.

You have something to learn when you join. You will know how competition is doing or how your competitor do the trick of blackhat to get your site down or out of the search.

So if you are participating in this kind of contest, play it fair. Goodluck!

Free Way

One of the free way creating a buzz to the blogosphere that might work is challenging an established blog or power blogger in the industry. Making fun out of it but be sure to take the consequence. Other bloggers will notice that you are challenging a guy or blog they trusted thus linking your site to them(hopefully), creating a free link juice. White lies article can work but prepare for critics. Interaction between visitors and blog owners giving visitors reasons to visit your blog regularly. You can also give your regular visitor a link love as a sign of appreciation of being a loyal visitor.

Creating an informative article on the niche you are targeting. Content matters most. SEO is nothing if no article or post on your blog. This generates visitors trust thus linking to your site.

Photoshop edited check with hundreds of thousand dollars in it “telling the world” I earn this much will definitely burn some bloggers to blog about your site. This is link-baiting.

Money Matters

Money has wings, it can fly all over the world. If you speak out money on your blog, world listens. Hard to admit but fact. Creating a contest in different ways creates visitors and readers. Contests like “Readers or Email Subscription”, again challenging another blogger by offering prizes in return for support, blog about this contest thing and other contest that is feasible.

Well, I just hope that its true. What another feedburner glitch. Got confused and run over feedburner stats and see my actual subscriber count and it doesn’t even reach to a hundred.

Good Content

Good advice, quality content delivers primarily not just for search engine but for real visitors. Conversion is predominantly high than those scrap contents. We talk not just for articles but also product.

Quality Backlinks

Agreed, BUT I wonder thus Live Search just believe on hearsays? Take a look at the paragraph below

The process of building up these high quality links can take time, and we hear from many webmasters who have tried to speed things up by purchasing links, or participating in linking schemes. We recommend webmaster be very careful with these, as they can often end up hurting your ranking in the long run by providing you with only low quality links that are often associated with spammy sites. If a link isn’t adding significant value to a website’s user, than it is most likely a low quality link.

Thus this mean that if they hear a webmaster buying links like google will get them outranked or be out on their search? It seems they are the shadow of google’s link buying algo.

Advanced Website???

Then develop an advance robots to crawl this pages and be the pioneer in the industry.We are Waiting……..

Starting Feb. 1, San Diego-based V2P Communications is offering five-to-eight-second audio ads, called NetAudioAds, that will automatically play when a visitor lands on a blog or Web site. Publishers sign up for the free service and V2P then lines up advertisers, who bid on rates they will pay to have their ads played on a given blog. Bids generally start around $14 per 1,000 plays. Blog publishers get a 25% cut of the ad revenue.

This basically an additional income generating system to your site. The question is how far, they can survive in this fast emerging advertising industry that as far most dominated by Google? That I am sure will also be implemented by Google and other advertising Media at a later time.

My thoughts would be the number of advertisers that will be using their site versus the number of publishers they are at now. On focus point about audio or sound device has been turned off on visitors machine, visitors don’t have to click to hear the audio (good for publishers, but not enough for advertisers).

You can check the test code below. You will hear an audio, not an actual ads yet. Sorry for my visitors if you will hear a sound not pleasing with your ear.

Previously adsense announced its referral change on adsense removing them to most of the countries.

- If you’re outside of North America, Latin America, and Japan, AdSense referrals will be retired.

For publishers not located in any of the three regions detailed above, we’ll soon be retiring referrals promoting AdSense. We’ve found that this referral product has not performed as well as we had hoped in these regions.

It will still be displayed on most of my sites after such time that I find one that will have a much higher conversion. There are actually lots around the net offering similar service but will try it out on some sites before totally moving into it. Comparison still plays a big role on changing rather getting out of the blue and ended up nothing.

Hoping Yahoo Publisher system will go international so we can try their system out. They are currently only available to US publishers or if your site has 90% of US traffic.

We are also waiting for MSN adcenter to roll out its publishers system out of Beta stage to offer on international webmasters to try out their most awaited ad serving system for publishers.

Okay, so back to the topic of marketing. What kind of marketing do you think will be hot in 2008? What plans do you have in mind for marketing your product or sites? Marketing plan basically will be your guide and the line towards the correct path and achievement. The risk of losing the highlights and being distracted(though will not be completely eliminated) will be reduced placing a handy marketing plan and objective.Here are some guides you can check for your plans. Wait, we take a look first what happened on 2007.

Lots of events happened way back 2007 in terms of search engines. We have watch how social bookmarking ran into the market, will it work again this year? Will digg still bring be your source of traffic? Or maybe a wrong question, this might suit ” What article or news or tips should I write to reach digg front page?”. Pay-per-Click sites or sites for publishers grown and competition arises like widgetbucks, shopzilla and other sites.

So here are some guides you can take for your marketing plan.

Objective

This just traveling without a destination. So, have your objective in place. What you really need to achieve? What are you trying to convey? Objective, gives you a head start and your vision towards your business.

Audience

Know your target audience, customers or clients. Who will buy your product? Who will read your site content? Thus it target organizations? Company? or individuals? Audience or visitors are the one that will place your business into the portal.

Content

Content doesn’t only focus on the article or post (concerns on content based site), you must think that your visitors or audience can comprehend on what you are trying to convey. Or your product must list the needed details for your target audience. Posting a product without any further details will just ruin your business. For product, concise and precise description or specification will definitely be a plus.

Strategy

Now focus on the strategy. What ways will you promote your site or business? Social Bookmarking? PPC? Email Marketing? Thus your product or content or post will grab the attention of your visitors? Will you copy your competitors strategy?

Analyze

Look how your competitor made it first? Think how can you supersede that place. What method and forms your competitor have been over their campaign or marketing period? How huge was the response and conversion?

Budget

Budget is always been a factor on how your marketing will go. How much are you willing to spend. Normally, today it is not on how much you are willing to spend but on how will you spend it. Free marketing can even work big time at the right place and at the right time.

How Long?

How long your marketing campaign will last? When do you think the effect of the marketing campaign will be? How long the response to the campaign? Basically a duration we should know that is directly proportional on how we launch or how we created a buzz in the market. That in turn can also be a direct proportional to the budget.

Implement

Having that good strategy and plan already in place, it is time to implement the marketing campaign. Taking into account the system and planning have been set accordingly.

Track

Tracking or monitoring how effective your campaign is a must. This will lead you for future campaign that will be implemented. It will show you what have been missed, what should have not done, what should be done, what are lacking and why the campaign is a failure.

So much said, hoping this simple article can guide you for your marketing campaign. And make this 2008 round full of sales and revenues!

I know there are already lots of individuals, companies and freelancers doing seo but 100$ for an SEO will just kill the business or ruined it before you notice.

Here are some advice, SEO deals with a long term base with the aim of getting rank to search engine to getting organic traffic to converting into sales. Run and go will just destroy your site and be warned that might even get your site banned.

Content

Make sure content listing is highly relevant to the search and holidays or occasions. Products listing is organized according to their respective categories. Visitors will just leave your site on an unattended and annoying site with uncategorized products. Place a descriptive description of the product or an specification of it with accompanying pictures for better conversion. A keyword rich description and some context or summary of the product listing would be good.

Product List URL

For search engine visibility, better do the url of the product listing on category that can easily be indexed by search engine, a short url is better. Remove those session id’s in the url in the product listing. Best suggestion would be domain.com/category/sub-category/product.html rather than script generated url with domain.com/catlisting=&list?phpsessionid=&listingnumbers. Though search engine still finds and indexed that session id’s url, but it is much preferred without those session id. Good inner pages interlinking should be done also accordingly. Observe good navigation for visitors convenience.

Keywords or Key Phrase

Vary keywords or key phrase accordingly. Each product listing should have a different title, description and keyword associated with. Don’t rely on single keyword list, better do a varying keyword that will include the main page key phrase.

Linking

On promotion, and keyword backlinks, as suggested above, a keyword rich backlinks with varying term associated with the product is recommended. Example, if you want to rank for “iphone”, you can have “iphone resources” “iphone store” or maybe “cheap and best iphone store”. Be sure to check also the quality of back links or you might just end up on a link farm sites that could just harm your holiday site. Remember also the links pointing to your sites should be related to it.

It basically shows  if you have a missing title tags on any of you site pages, descriptions (long and short) or non-informative title tags???

If you are just starting to build a site better to have it analyzed by these search engine tools like google webmaster tool, yahoo site explorer or Live webmaster central so you can know how’s your site doing on search engine and monitor its progress.

One of the biggest challenges with relevancy is how to distinguish legitimate information from various forms of search spam. This is one area that we’ve made especially good progress in over the last 8 months through a suite of tools that helps us detect, evaluate and manage spam. One of these tools is an extension to MSNBot, giving us an additional way to detect cloaking. (It should be noted that not all cloaking is spam related and we do our best to take this into account, however, we still don’t recommend cloaking in any situation).

There are also issues that was addressed

1.AdSense/Overture reporting – Initially there was a bug in our crawler that caused it to download all content on your page, including ad blocks.
2.Distort site statistics with unfilterable bot traffic
3. Pollute HTTP logs with inappropriate terms
4. Microsoft isn’t responding to questions

They are indeed improving their search that are being manipulated in means like cloaking where previously not being given an improtance on ranking and search.

Duplicate content should also be addressed and if some proxy sites hijacking where creating an the same content on search with proxy index page.

If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines. Such links can hurt relevance by causing:

- Inaccuracies: False popularity and links that are not fundamentally based on merit, relevance, or authority
- Inequities: Unfair advantage in our organic search results to websites with the biggest pocketbooks

These is basically their statement on why they condone such massive link buying and selling that pass pagerank. If this is there stand, then why they still have their pagerank system included in the search ranking err, I mean will this also a stand that Pagerank has a great impact on search ranking result?

High Pagerank backlink = High search ranking?

Anyway, here are recommendation to get rid of that penalty.

In order to stay within Google’s quality guidelines, paid links should be disclosed through a “rel=nofollow” or other techniques such as doing a redirect through a page which is robot.txt’ed out.

But we back to the idea of going into the battle without any defense nor ammunition to kill the enemies. What if bullets hit you hard? Or what if spam hit you hard enough, can you still stand? If you are running on a free blog hosted site, yes or maybe.

You can do this if you can have that luxury of time to delete all those spams. If you are a full time blogger (not me, I have a day job). Make your choice, how long/fast can you delete spam comments (might be worth to be a record in guiness), or maybe can your mouse and keyboard survive on click delete (irony on the block).

Maybe I will try it on new year’s eve and hope spammer’s will hold a no spam day also on that day. lol

So which is better? Most of the webmasters are craving for Pagerank for business purposes. Pagerank made its recognition much all over the internet world. WebRank was born way back 2004 I believe to compete but have not been into the half in terms of Google’s Pagerank popularity.

Now we have DomainRank from MSN or Live, as you know you can check it if you have a webmaster account on live where you can have your site evaluated and check the statistics similar to google webmaster tools. Competition is really going into search engine.

Well at least we see how our site is being measured on the search and we are learning on how we can please and make that rank (whatever it is) better.

This is not also based on speculation or theory with the word “it might” or “it can” drop your site to a ranking. So what I do in the experiment is to have one of my site with PR4 to have an incoming links to my other website in one day all having a PR range from 0-5. All have been added manually sitewide without a script.

My site experiment formerly ranking at the top 10 on a certain keyword and after 3 days of triggering search engine to check if penalty is true, I have just said “Hey search engine ban me”!

It happened in just 3 days, my site is out of ranking in the top 10 for my targeted key phrase and it is way below 100 rank results in google and other search engine. I know this is so lousy to think but I don’t need that PR4 site, I will set it to expire the early of 2008 due to bad domain name, just registered way back this early 2007 but gained a PR4 with only few links and social bookmarks.

Yay, don’t feed crawlers too much links in a day, at least add it one site wide per week if the domain you are having a sitewide link have thousands of index pages in search engines.

Don’t try it at your own site, try it on your competitor site(just kidding)!

We want the center and the blog to be a place for two way communication between Live Search and the webmaster community because we understand that SEO’s and webmasters need this kind of information and the tools we are building to keep their sites performing well.

If you want to know what is happening at their end you can also check the blog dedicated for this service. I have just added a site to this system and let us see how it performs and what needs to be done and included on their tool. It needs you to add a file similar to other webmaster tools with an authentication tag.

I have just submitted this blog and see that the top performing inlink to my site is coming from an edu site? But then I don’t get traffic from that site, thus this mean live search is favoring a .edu?

So what you do is optimize your site not just for your visitors but also for the spiders to crawl you site.

Navigation

Navigation makes it easy for both visitors and bots to run down on your site contents. What it has to offer and how I can find pages on your site from your home page.  I don’t think one will put navigation button link at the footer of the page where visitors needs to scroll way down just to go to a certain page.

Deeplink

How deep your site link is? The best approach is to have just one (1) to two (2) clicks away from your home page but can still go up to 3 to 4 deep from your main page. Spiders can easily index pages those pages that is few pages relative to homepage. Example, domain.com/page1.html can be index and crawled than that of domain.com/directory/page/content/page1.html. Though search engine can still indexed it and find it, but the priority would be that of near to the main page.

Sitemap

Sitemap plays a big role on site navigation, searches, spider and its importance to your niche. How each page points to your site main content.

 Emphasize Content

Emphasize content rather than  targeting other factors like monetization and neon color designs, etc.

Clean content and url’s 

Clean content without those keyword stuff, cloak or other factors and clean url’s by removing those session id making it hard for your spiders and visitors to remember those pages they have visited.

Getting into the topic, on this blog, I still have those links as follow and never responded to that google pagerank decreasing update. As long as I get those traffic and visitors, why should I give them a no follow attribute? They are the ones giving life to this blog by giving the support to renew this domain and hosting.

Traffic is important because that is the target why we do search engine optimization or seo for our site. Though some clients look at the pagerank of the site you are managing, it doesn’t matter to me, because bringing traffic to clients site is the objective and products being sold. But if clients wants to do page rank boost, then that is another side of the story.  Or maybe just redirect that to a high PR site (just kidding).

1. Feed scraper individual keeps on posting or copying the blog content via feeds.

2. The snippet of those scraper site have no-follow on them.

3. Feed scraper is publishing all content and removing the source of the post.

What is the consequences of this?

1. Getting duplicate content from search engine especially google if the other site is publishing it also in full without a link back.

2. The possibility of outranking your site by this feed scraper on search engines.

3. Your effort of writing the content has been degraded.

I have emailed the sites publishing my content without even giving me credits and let me see how they react. Any further suggestions you can give?

Email marketing of course or any other types of marketing be it either online of offline marketing has it own good and bad side but we will focus more on email marketing bringing in an old issue towards effective email marketing.

A good effect on email marketing yields to a better conversion of your campaign. Means the percentage of profit is more than any other marketing campaign. Taking into account that for every email marketing you sent through 1K person 100 of them will look at your product and probably only 10 will  buy the product in comparison to 10K impression on PPC with on one will buy. So conversion is one good factor. Next in reference to conversion is the amount of money spent over other marketing like PPC. But dont jump into the conclusion that “hey this is good, i must send to other emails too, like hundreds thousands or even more emails to have that conversion rate”. I tell don’t do that.

Have you heard of some news by just searching on major search engine about being jailed because of spamming. And this is the downside of email marketing. Spamming! And sending emails to person trying to gamble that the person might click and buy the product. Emailing to a wrong person just creates annoyances on your site and emails and blocking every possible existence of your email and site.

I am trying to point it out, why, because I receive those  kind of mails everyday, different business and product marketing campaign. You see I talk some SEO or search engine optimization on this blog, though I know that I am just a newbie to it, still I receive those proposal and business letter, “Hey, I can rank your site high on search engine” ” We are a search engine firm in business for 5 years and can help your site in search engine”. Yeah, I know, is that what you have learned in 5 years one marketing and seo? Emailing a  related theme  help in ranking?

The lesson is better learn how this email marketing is being used before jumping in. Try to research further than speculation.

We’ve built Live Search 411 to go beyond just finding business information. Because our goal is to help you complete your task, we’ve included features like:

* Connect to any business listing you find-for free
* Receive SMS links to maps, driving directions and traffic conditions (just say “text me the info”)
* Get movie showtimes and even buy tickets over the phone (via our partnership with Fandango)
* Share text messages of business details with friends so they can easily meet you there
* Hear the current weather conditions and the forecast
* Quickly access travel resources like airlines, hotels, and rental cars
* Remember your personalized locations for movie theaters, weather and traffic, and your preferences for receiving text messages.Live Search 411 enables you to do this for free, from any phone in the US. Just call 1-800-CALL-411 (1-800-225-5411) and say where you are and what you’re looking for.

Now on Mobile search technology they also enable voice search on mobile that includes

* Voice input and gas prices in Live Search for Windows Mobile,
* A new beta for BlackBerry devices, and
* Improved mapping and directions in browser-based search for any mobile phone

Details of this voice input

You can now speak your query instead of typing it! Just press the lower left soft-key and say what you want, for example, “Anthony’s Pizza” or “Hardware Stores”. We use advanced voice recognition technology to understand what you’re asking for and give you results.

So far we’ve found it to be a really fast way to get answers for most searches. This feature is currently in beta so let us know how well it works for you! If it doesn’t recognize something you say, of course you can still type it in like you used to.

I have never tried it cause I am not from there and also not sure about yahoo and google features in terms of mobile voice search input.

It dropped to almost 50% of the traffic coming from google compared to the last weeks traffic that this site is getting in the engines. MSN or now Live has also decreased by only around 5% of traffic from the previous weeks traffic.

Thus google says ” hey don’t go to that page because the webmaster is out, come back later, check other sites!” Lesson? Don’t put on your blog that you will be out for some time! Just kidding! I am back again blogging.

Now Microsoft just launch a beta stage with the similar in platform they called adExcellence. It is basically an accreditation program also for those advertisers using their adCenter service for website marketing and advertising. Currently it is available only on US for Pilot testing and will be rolled over to other countries like UK in next coming months.

Competition is now going on in terms of advertising services. By the way, if you are US advertiser or using their adCenter service for at least 30 days, you can sign-up on their Pilot run here .

Or if you are an SEO looking into more options, you can try their service also.

MSNBC Interactive News LLC said it acquired Newsvine Inc., a small Seattle startup that lets visitors read and comment on news stories from mainstream media outlets.Newsvine launched in 2006 and employs six people. Mike Davidson, its co-founder and chief executive officer, said about a million people come to the site each month to read articles and submit their own articles and commentary

If you will notice, newsvine lets you submit article and also getting paid at the same getting a link to your site(no-follow but helps on marketing) and still getting paid.

An small start up and an excellent young site

Newsvine launched in 2006 and employs six people. Mike Davidson, its co-founder and chief executive officer, said about a million people come to the site each month to read articles and submit their own articles and commentary.

Why I was surprised and amazed? Do you know Mike Davidson’s Blog? Maybe you can read his blog post link above so you can understand.

I recently found myself in the position of wanting to register a domain which was owned by someone else. The domain was set to expire in a week, and I figured there was a decent chance that the person who owned it wouldn’t be renewing it. Upon consulting the WhoIs registry on the current owner, I discovered the guy was a bit of a domain shark and didn’t seem to be around anymore.

So I placed a backorder through GoDaddy for $18.95 thinking that was all I needed to do. During the week that followed, I learned a lot about the domain expiration process. Two and a half months and $369 later, I am the proud owner of a shiny new domain. A really really good one.

Inspiring was it? Official announcement form David’s Blog.

Okay, back to the topic, why I have mentioned the directories? Because after falling out the possible directory business, some thinks a new way to have a new income generating scheme that can be used to gain without thinking relative to a long term basis. Does here comes blogging post network.

We all know blogs is a search engine friendly platform. Some people makes a sum of income out of blogging but with hard work or effort they have put up in making this blog qualitative.  Blog post sale comes, several networks are offering service to pay one blogger to put an article on their blog. Though, I am not against it, I am only concern on those blog network posting in bunch with the same article posted on different blogs or domain. Like selling blog post on 100 blogs on 10 different C-Class IP’s with different PR? Hope you are clever enough to know what I am saying. Wait, I also purchased one of those to test something out.

Now let us check the effect of network blog post at once.

1. Same blog post article can lead to a duplicate content being cut by google.

2. Instant back links in an hour or so. Triggering some signal like “hey I have got several links in just an hour! BAN me!”

3. Yes, this will increase your technorati for a short time and not for long term. Believe me, because I have experience it.

4.  Waste of money if those blog network posting don’t have an actual visitors coming in to that particular blog. We need visitors right?

5.  Most of those listed domain they say that have PR are coming from a drop domain they have purchased. Surely it will loose it, since most of the time inbound links will be gone in the wind.

6. Most of those blogs are not being promoted. So expect a dead blog.

7. Might affect as well blogs as in case on those directories being penalized. (ops, very weak statement, no proof)

8. The blog can end up on a link farm. And search engine might just harvest your site and pull out your site.

There are other reasons but it is up to you to use common sense if you are planning to purchase one.

In order to provide the highest level of service to our Beta Partners, we have started
off the beta program with our first group of participants. As the program is rolled out
in phases, we will incrementally increase the number of participants until all applicants
have been accepted by late November. The information you provided us thru the
registration survey will help us determine when the right timeframe is to bring you into
the beta program and ensure that our participants represent the widest range of
industries and company sizes.

So it seems you need to have a hundred of sites being managed to get in early and taste their webmaster portal. But if you will notice, they expect to have it on November even for those who have a low or minimum sites being managed. Well, November is just a month off.

Well, I can wait, but comparison on the early stage is important, why? Improvement is a must.

Jellyfish is the ONLY shopping engine to directly share $ with you. As a Jellyfish member, you’ll receive automatic savings on everything you buy. Think of us as a search engine for shopping, except we share at least half of every $1 we earn when you shop.

MSN Search Blog also announced this on their own blog

We want to welcome some new folks to the Live Search family – we recently purchased a company called Jellyfish.com, based in Madison, Wisconsin. Jellyfish has done some really innovative work in comparative shopping engines. We think the technology has some interesting potential applications as we continue to invest heavily in shopping and commerce as a key component of Live Search.

I wonder how it will help the Microsoft search engine on this new acquisition, are they building a shopping site empire?

You can even use this to access different microsoft services such as spaces and others Microsoft has to offer.

Or maybe you want a different one? Give your feedback to them and maybe just maybe, they will hear you.

# elevance, relevance, relevance. We’ve quadrupled the size of our index, which means we can return the right results for your searches. Improvements like enhanced ranking algorithms, auto-spell correction and better stop word handling help us return the best results.
# Speed. Pages load much faster than before.
# Streamlined look and feel. We focused on the end-to-end experience from the homepage throughout the site. For example, search results are now easier to read thanks to work on typography, contrast, colors and spacing.
# More high-interest content. You asked us for more in Entertainment, Shopping, Health, Local and Video search and we’re happy to deliver it.

Live search team claimed that this is the biggest update they had after their launch date. Well let’s us check if this can drive traffic or additional traffic to my sites.

And still waiting for that webmaster beta tool. I have signed up but not yet saw what it is actually inside it. And when will that webmaster link operator be in place again.

Google was my primary source of traffic form different terms within the past few months but this week MSN broke the record of google for delivering free traffic to my blog. Breakdown for the past month would be 60% on google, 20% MSN, 20% Yahoo. But this week comes into the play by MSN getting 50% while google only delivers me 40% and Yahoo at 10%.

It is not that high in terms on traffic differences, but at least MSN is delivering and performing what it should be as a search engine. Thanks MSN, but still dont forget the other search engine.

Top of the line web hosting companies sell their services for a higher price than cheaper ones but you get what you paid for. Midphase owns anhosting that offers packages that are not the most expensive and offer reliability of Midphase. Another promising web host is bluehost. You also get free advertising credits of Yahoo, MSN, and Google that cheaper hosting companies don’t offer. Reading some webhosting reviews won’t give you the neutral idea because most review sites are run by web hosting companies. For best image hosting providers you don’t have to worry much as most of them are free like Flicker.

Since I moderate the comments before it will show, I think it can increase a bit the user or visitors interaction in this blog. But still need your input on whether I need to plugged it in or not. And what plug-in is it.

It seems installing this plug-in is a decision of having to choose between traffic and link strength as powered by google. On seo point of view, link love will be less. But what’s the heck, traffic is all we want was it?

What I like about translation service of live search it their addition of some language that google translate don’t have on their service.  Though I am not setting aside the other translation, because all of them help on translating something I don’t even know. One has the advantage of the other.

But with the addition of Live Translate locate here  http://translator.live.com/Default.aspx, I have an another addition to my roll of web translation.

I guess I need to receive another email that their portal is ready for testing.  Based on comments on the live search they got the same upon sign-up. Maybe guys at live search are pulling in registration on per batch basis.

If you are a webmaster or an seo  you can also try to sign-up on their beta stag, so at first hand you can experience what msn search or live search can offer to your site and how it can improve your site rankings on MSN or Live search.

1. Make sure your site is already indexed in search engine.

2. Search engines are indexing your fresh content. Don’t worry about this much, not much needed as long as your site is indexed on search engines.

3. The juicy side. Look for keyword or keyphrase with no result on search engine and put a the keyword or keyphrase in your content or title. Like this “seohackranking algorithm” or seohackranking algorithm this dont have result in google. We will just wait for few days and we will have result of that term. With this blog post in the top spot.

Easy? Yes! Just spicing up some post on my blog. It is just an experiment on how fast search engine will get it. So we need to wait and check the search engine about the keyphrase I have indicated above and check on how many days it will be on the search results.

Update: Faster than expected, Google search engine already indexed the post within 30 minutes of posting. And that was fast, that particular phrase have now a result on google. Check and search it google search. Yahoo is yet to index and MSN search

Initially we’ll support these scenarios:

* Troubleshooting tools to ensure MSNBot is effectively crawling and indexing your site
* Sitemap creation, submission and ping tools
* Statistics about your website
* Consolidation of content submission resources
* New content and community resources

This will help webmaster a lot in terms of optimization of their own site on MSN search engine. An application to test out this tools for beta stage is required if you want to have it first hand.

Link: operator was also pointed out together with the tools from bringing it back to the system seo and webmasters analysis. On my point, this tools should had been implemented when they launch the live search but who knows they could be better than other search engines in terms of webmaster tools.

http://webmessenger.msn.com/
www.e-messenger.net/
www.meebo.com/
webmessenger.yahoo.com/
www.iloveim.com/
www.msn2go.com
www.communicationtube.net
www.ebuddy.com
www.aim.com

So you see there are other browser based messenger where you can chat or even log-in to different web based messenger on a single site like meebo. MSN has also its web based messenger. Wondering about google? hmn, maybe they will also create one, dont know just maybe.

Enjoy this list and if you know others just comment and I will add it on the list.

Anyway, just to give you a picture on the awstats or log I have on my server. There you go, I called it SEO Backfire!

Look, at the links that are pointing to my sites on red area, free-sex? scam free? what the h**l is that doing into my seo blog? Just for curiosity of course, gone through the site, but did not find my link there, lol. It can be done? Yes, of course it is, and it is happening a lot not just on my blog. How can I do that? I can’t tell you, cause you will become lazy. What can you do is protect your site against this act.

Okay, back to the topic though the situation above is one way of killing your business or site. Another one if you are displaying adsense (your income source), can be click bomb, with those trigger happy competitor. Or put your site as above that is way google hates and breaks their webmaster guidelines.

Another one, is the option on your webmaster tools, reporting links, like paid links. Possible? Yes it is, and you will not know.

The best possible solution is not to fight them back or do the same to your competitor but to protect your site against this and also to some malicious intent to your site.

We then take the example keyword above which is SEO. On the reaction of google for the term SEO.

Look what comes up on their search engine. Now we took the sample on yahoo for the term SEO.

The same result was it? Only that yahoo has so many sponsored link. Now we go to MSN for the keyword SEO.

Every search engine look the same was it? Now we go to the juicy part, let us take the keyword SEO but this time we separate or we put a space on each letter of the word so it would become S E O. Again we take a look at the search engine response. On google,

Same result? Yes indeed, google can recognize the keyword even if your search term was spaced separated. Nice algorithm isn’t it? Now we take the picture on how Yahoo respond.

Look closely how yahoo react on that keyword, he seems to list websites with all the possible combination it has with letters S E and O. It seems that yahoo cannot recognize such keyword and just displays results with S E O letters in them. Care to see MSN?

It seems MSN knows a little about the keyword so he displayed one result at the top of it related to the keyword. But look at the next result, same as yahoo? Indeed. SO based on the experiment above, definitely obvious about search algorithm they use and how each engine reacts and distinguished a keyword when accidentally if not intentionally separate each letter of the keyword the user search. Now you can apply this principle on key phrase where not only a single word is being search but a group of keywords.

“Both Microsoft and AdECN have a deep commitment to creating the technologies and platforms that enable advertisers and publishers to maximize their ROI in the digital marketplace,” said Kevin Johnson, president, Platforms and Services Division at Microsoft. “We believe the addition of AdECN to the Microsoft portfolio is a perfect fit and will create more efficiency for the industry by forming a more robust marketplace between advertisers and publishers, aggregating more supply and demand. This is good for the whole advertising industry.”

Competition keeps on improving over time with these three giants with its own respective company acquisition. We do expect great improvements on market or industry in terms of advertising and publishing. Better option for webmasters to choose the platform and company to work with in serving ads with great monetization of course.

Also Microsoft made some announcement on enhancing MSN, based on this press release. Good to know isn’t it? Maybe MSN will be in the eyes of webmasters again.

May 10, 2007 – We’re excited to update you about Microsoft’s activities since we acquired DeepMetrix.This summer you’ll be invited to try the beta of our new Web analytics service-Project Gatineau.

But then some screenshots of the said projects have an initial peak at David Naylor blog and was seconded by Ian Thomas (guy working in Microsoft’s Digital Advertising Solutions group). It was quite an idea where competition can really bring in good cause and the choice of solutions is at hand. But let me sliced some area on both blogs from David Blog

Demographic analysis including age and gender

and from Thomas Blog

Beta 1 will include the ability to segment data by both age and gender buckets, so you can get more of an idea of what kind of visitors you have. Questions are already being asked on Dave’s blog about where we get this data from; the answer is that we do get this information from users’ Live ID (formerly known as Microsoft Passport) profiles,

Interesting indeed but then based on profiles? I wonder how many have put in their information pack in on microsoft services.

Maybe some other beta testers of this project can shed some data and screenshots of the service. Or if publicly available, we can start to play it around and compare to the same services offered by other search engines.

Let’s site some examples or scenarios here on why it doesn’t always work the way you want it.

1.  You are only benefited on a short term. Why, your link is being removed on their site after doing the link exchange. After few days or weeks, your site where you are supposed to get link into was removed.

2. In relation to item number 1, your link becomes no follow after few days or weeks. Avoiding that google PR juice.

3. If it pass for few weeks or months of exchanging links, check for few more months and it will be gone.

4. The domain you just exchange expired.

5. The site your just exchanged has been suspended or similar cases like parked.

6. Sites you have exchanged with becomes a redirect. Meaning having new url that is not directly pointing to your sites either using javascript or other scripts.

7. The domain is banned from search engine.

Now with the scenario above, I just would like to give you some advice before doing link exchanges. Here are few of them.

1. Create a simple database or excel sheet where your record of link exchanges. Simple word, have a record of the exchanges. What is your site, where is your site located, what is their site, and where is it located, duration of exchange or terms of exchange, the date when the exchange happen and where it happened, like forum post etc.

2. Check whois information of the domain, indexed pages (if it is site wide), pagerank if it is part of the exchange. In this way you will know if the domain you are exchanging with is not banned by search engines or the site itself is not allowing search engine to index them.

3. In view on the above, please be clear about the exchange, are you exchanging on traffic or on pagerank? It does mean that you don’t care about the PR of the site as long as it has tons of traffic. By the way, Traffic pays better than PR (though you can react to me on this). This also mean, that if the exchange is in terms of traffic, you can ignore even if it is no-follow or redirect.

4. Check your site frequently or on schedule base on your recorded data of exchange at item 1.

5.  Check not just your site is there but also check if it turns down to no follow or redirect.

6. If you are changing your site or doing renovation, be sure to contact the person whom you exchange link with. In this case, he or she will not assume that you are a link scammer.

7. If you found your site, that is not on their site, email the person that you are about to remove also their link on their site in reference to your exchange data recorded on item 1.

These are just simple advice but in anyway can help you, your site and the person you are exchanging to have a common understanding on the exchange. Why I write this because this had happened to me when I check the links on my sites. Link exchange is a mutual process or can be beneficial if both parties are abiding the rules, was it?

Since the theme of this site is all about search engine optimization, seo tips, news and other website creation tips, but still generating traffic from search engines searches on different words or phrases. I am not complaining because that is still traffic though the term is not related to the site. The term or key phrase appeared to be just words or phrases I use in writing a blog post.

What thus this scenario imply? Content is definitely bringing traffic, and the good thing is the keyword they search where my site is in the front page yields millions of search results.  Creating good content and constantly updating it and providing a quality article can yield to an extra traffic to your sites through the words or key phrase on your content. This is not new to me however, I have just put it in writings that many of you also as a webmaster is experiencing this extra traffic.

Quite relieving isn’t it? If you are selling product to your site, with this extra traffic, visitors can still purchase something isn’t it? So build contents and maintain your website.

Though Pagerank measures the popularity of the page or your site and its relevance, this should not be basis doing search engine optimization to your site. Most of the time Pagerank refers to the site popularity inbound links, its quality and quantity per se, and that clearly means you are only doing an off-page optimization. SEO is not always about off-page optimization, it also deals with on page optimization. Bringing in search engine bots and human visitors understand your site. SEO is about ranking on most search engine on its results based on the keyword or key phrase users searching into the engine.

One major proof is that even a low PR site can outranked high PR sites when you search for specific terms. Check my google sample result below. I have search for the term “used car” without quotes. 

The first site listed has a PR of 6 and the second site has a PR of 8. So it doesn’t matter how high your PR was, but it is how  content is relevant your site on the search phrase. What does this mean on SEO?

Simple, content is still the main attraction on search engine optimization, it is one element on the so called on-page optimization.

In doing SEO, think google pagerank last, it will come when you need it at the right time.

What is really happening is, if you want to search for books then you can go to a category live search http://books.live.com. In there you can search for book and in-copyright content. So that means MSN Search is improving its search engine by category and in general search of their search engine, they will just punch in when someone search on that particular key term. Please note also that this is only my observation them as far as searching on their general search is concerned about some keywords i used to search. MSN is part of search engine optimization quest, on my day to day experiment on their search.

Though other search engine like google and yahoo have this kind of system, but MSN is also going into the scenario and adapting the way how other SE’s doing on categories.

Creating popularity by means of article is a tedious way and mind shaking thing for you to think. How should an article look like? How should it be presented? Was the article eye catching? Does it relate to your site? Do you think visitors will subscribe and publish your article on their site (with of course a juicy link back)? And do you think visitor will visit your site?

These mere questions are just few, that you could think of when doing this promotional method. But I guarantee that the results will be great and of course profitable at your end. As everyone knows that traffic means money.

Article writing as a way of link building and promotion was already discussed many times on different convention about search engine and marketing. Take a look at the large companies producing products on electronics,  semiconductors, softwares and other products even services who are indulged in press releases and article writing. Most of them even have their press release and article printed on local and international papers.

I am telling you to leave the link exchanges but think of another alternative way of doing it by articles. Goodluck.

The only available product for now is the WIndows Live OneCare that offers a 1.5$ per unique download. Here is some excerpts about their network

What is the Microsoft Affiliate Network?

The Microsoft Affiliate Network encompasses all Microsoft’s premier affiliate opportunities. When you apply to the program, you will get:

* New, affiliate-exclusive commission opportunities as soon as they are available.
* Optimized marketing materials for all the offers you promote in one portal.
* Real-time traffic reporting powered by Kowabunga’s MyAP v9 affiliate tracking and management technology.
* Full Earnings reporting for all offers in an easy-to-use interface.
* All the support you need from affiliate managers dedicated to your success.

And here is the link to sign-up form http://www.microsoftaffiliates.net/signup.aspx Good luck with the new affiliate system, but wonder when will content ads be available to public? I mean for publishers.

The acquisition yields to $6 billion with around $66.50 per share. The recent deal will enhance Microsoft campaign on advertising industry that generates high possibility of advertising return on investments. Tools and services to the advertisers, agencies, and publishers.

This will bring into a higher competition between giant advertising companies that is not limited to search engine capabilities and distributions. An excerpt from Microsoft Press

The aQuantive acquisition enables Microsoft to strengthen relationships with advertisers, agencies and publishers by enhancing the Company’s world-class advertising platforms and services beyond its current capabilities to serve MSN. The acquisition also provides Microsoft increased depth in building and supporting next generation advertising solutions and environments such as cross media planning, video-on-demand and IPTV. Combining aQuantive’s technologies and services with Microsoft’s portfolio will provide value for the industry’s key constituencies as follows:
•

Advertisers and ad agencies will benefit from a world-class media planning, buying and campaign management solution to drive maximum ROI and optimize their reach to audiences across the increasingly fragmented, interactive media landscape.
•

Media owners/publishers will gain access to best-in-class inventory optimization and monetization solutions across a full suite of rich media, video and targeting capabilities.
•

The broader advertising ecosystem will benefit from the leading interactive advertising agency, Avenue A | Razorfish, continuing to serve its impressive client roster, while also embedding the voice of the marketer into Microsoft’s next generation advertising solutions and services.

Just today, when I am doing my routine to do some check on search using MSN and again using the site: operator, the search results are now showing fine on their search index. It will now show just fair enough like a thousand links of the same site. But I don’t know if the site is indeed have a thousands link index on MSN but is believable considering what I am searching is a forum where every thread is index I supposed.

Compared to previous results of billions of pages in their result for just a particular site seems to be an exaggeration. Good thing they have fixed it.

They are testing it on their own site in msn directories like health.msn.com and others and only available to US markets. There are also who signed up to test the pilot run of these content ads using a form provided by them only if you are in a US Market. I recently checked their adcenter blog on the development of their system in here http://adcenterblog.spaces.live.com and still quoting http://adcenterblog.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!85E824269AB8C30D!317.entry

we are currently rolling out our Microsoft Content Ads pilot—our contextual advertising offering in the U.S. This service allows your text ads to display next to relevant content on sites within the US Microsoft network, such as MSN’s Health & Fitness, Tech & Gadgets, Travel, and Money.

So some US publishers are actually using MSN content ads, and going into their adcenter forum I have come across this post with a form to sign-up to notify if we are eligible or we want an update to this program. The thread here http://forums.microsoft.com/AdCenter/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=1468091&SiteID=44  and of course the sign-up interest form.

So if you think you need those, try it out and let us know the result.

MSN made its announcement also via their blog together with Google.

For example, this site http://www.allseocontest.com have sitemap located at http://www.allseocontest.com/sitemap.xml. So my robots.txt should include

Sitemap:http://www.allseocontest.com/sitemap.xml

If you have another sitemap, like a directory, or subdomain, just include it on robots.txt and it should be auto discovered. Great suggestion and of course implementation by Yahoo. Hope other crawlers check this too!

Update: It seems major search engines, yahoo, ask, msn and google are supporting this auto discovery feature. Great work!

You can check the site here http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!2BBC66E99FDCDB98!8495.entry

It also have some fixes and updates of the current version release. Some excerpts on their blog.

If you’re running Firefox 1.5 or later or Windows, the VE3D control is now supported. It is a Netscape style plugin developed using NPAPI and hosts the VE3D managed control. In Live Maps, click the 3D button on the navigation dashboard to launch the setup to either install or update 3D functionality. The setup process itself has been streamlined for both IE and Firefox users – It’s a lot smarter about dependency checks and component installation. Regardless of which browser you use, you only need to run the setup once and you’ll be able to go into 3D view in either browser. Memory management and cache performance has been improved in this release of 3D, providing a better overall experience for exploration.

So get it, if you want it. http://virtualearth.spaces.live.com/blog/

The reason, it was turned OFF by MSN. One reason they emphasized is the mass automated data mining though most of the users have these features to be of great use. This is one way of checking your inlinks on MSN search.

MSN also promised to turn it back ON once they have sorted out or find a way to beat those using the functionality in  abusing way.

We are looking for this update on their blog here http://blogs.msdn.com/livesearch/ , and hope search result can improve too!