Online ad network raises $100 million (AP)

AP - Internet ad network Specific Media Inc. has raised $100 million to help finance its expansion plans amid a flurry of dealmaking in the advertising industry.

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Google signs on MySpace for social network platform (Reuters)

Reuters - Web search leader Google Inc has signed on MySpace, the world's largest social network, to its platform for allowing outside developers to write programs for social Web sites.

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Registration for .Asia Web Domains Begins (PC World)

PC World - Registration for.asia top-level Internet domain names began Tuesday for companies and other legal entities, giving corporations an opportunity to secure trademarked domain names without having to contend with cybersquatters.
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Study: Google gets bulk of world search (AP)

AP - Around the world, Internet users are conducting about 1.4 million searches every minute — most of them through Google Inc., a new comScore study estimates.

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IE, Outlook, Word get critical bug fixes (InfoWorld)

InfoWorld - Microsoft has released six security updates for its products, fixing critical flaws in Word, Outlook Express, Internet Explorer (IE), and the Kodak image viewer that ships with Windows.
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BitTorrent Rolls Out New Delivery Tools (NewsFactor)

NewsFactor - BitTorrent, whose technology once was considered the very definition of peer-to-peer piracy, is moving toward legitimacy, cutting deals with Hollywood studios and licensed content distributors. On Tuesday, BitTorrent debuted its latest download tools on Brightcove, an Internet TV platform that serves up content for CBS, MTV, and the New York Times.
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10 Usability Tips for your website

If you have a website or are in the process of creating a website then it's important to look at the usability aspect of your website.

I like the use the following phrase when talking about usability of websites "What's the point of having a Ferrari, if it has no engine. Sure it looks great, but it's practically useless."

Here are some quick usability tips for your website

1. Motivate
Design your site to meet specific user needs and goals. Use motivators to draw different user "personae" into specific parts of your site.

2. User task flow
Who are your users? What are their tasks and online environment? For a site to be usable, page flow must match workflow.

3. Architecture – it's 80% of usability
Build an efficient navigational structure. Remember – if they can't find it in 3 clicks, they're gone.

4. Affordance means obvious
Make controls understandable. Avoid confusion between emblems, banners, and buttons.

5. Replicate
Why reinvent the wheel? Use ergonomically designed templates for the most common 8-12 pages.

6. Usability test along the way
Test early in design using low-fidelity prototypes. Don't wait until the end when it's too late.Know the technology limitations Identify and optimize for target browsers and user hardware. Test HTML, JavaScript, etc. for compatibility.

7. Know the technology limitations
Identify and optimize for target browsers and user hardware.Test HTML, JavaScript, etc for compatibility.

8. Know user tolerances
Users are impatient. Design for a 2-10 second maximum download. Reuse header graphics so they can load from cache. Avoid excessive scrolling.

9. Multimedia
Good animation attracts attention to specific information, then stops. Too much movement distracts, slowing reading and comprehension.

10. Use a stats package
Monitor traffic through your site. Which pages pique user interest? Which pages make users leave? Adjust your site accordingly.

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How to beat spam in 5 steps

How to beat spam in 5 stepsHow prevalent is Spam? According to Scott McAdams, OMA Public Affairs and Communications Department (www.oma.org): “Studies show unsolicited or “junk” e-mail, known as spam, accounts for roughly half of all e-mail messages received. Although once regarded as little more than a nuisance, the prevalence of spam has increased to the point where many users have begun to express a general lack of confidence in the effectiveness of e-mail transmissions.

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British ISPs Offer Free Wi-Fi (PC World)

PC World - BT Group PLC is turning to its own broadband subscribers to help crack a nut that many governments and service providers have struggled with: Widespread Wi-Fi access.

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New Microsoft Service Stores Health Records Online (PC World)

PC World - Microsoft Corp. has launched an online health-care service designed to help patients take control of their health records and monitor their medical conditions.
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Danger Lurks on Government Web Sites (PC World)

PC World - The U.S. federal government took steps earlier this week to shut down Web sites in California in order to protect the public from hacked Web sites, but new incidents show that the problem is not going away any time soon.
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VoIP Vendor Jajah Protests eBay's Ban (PC World)

PC World - Web-site buttons from Internet telephony startup Jajah Inc. that allowed eBay Inc. buyers and sellers to initiate phone calls have been banned by eBay, a move that Jajah charges is unjustified.
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FTC Cracks Down on Health Sites' Claims (PC World)

PC World - The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has filed complaints against seven online sellers of alternative hormone replacement therapy products, alleging that the Web sites made health claims for their natural progesterone creams without supporting evidence.
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Do eBay Ads Go Overboard? (PC World)

PC World - EBay Inc. has significantly boosted its advertising revenue since last year, but some sellers worry that the company's efforts in this area are driving potential buyers away from the online marketplace.

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Major Internet hubs see lesser influence (AP)

AP - The recent rush by major Internet portals to buy advertising companies and extend their sales networks is a sign that the business of being a one-stop shop for information and entertainment isn't what it used to be.

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T-Shirt Helps Find Hotspots (PC World)

PC World - With at least one municipal Wi-Fi project being proposed or abandoned seemingly every day, and big carriers such as BT Group PLC turning to their subscribers' Wi-Fi routers to make Wi-Fi available, it's hard to know exactly where you can get online these days. But a T-shirt going on sale late this month could solve that problem for you and everyone around you.

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France Declares War on Spam (PC World)

PC World - France is hoping to shut down spammers more quickly through a system that makes it easier for users to notify ISPs (Internet service providers) when unsolicited e-mails are coming from their network.


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How to Generate Quality One Way Links

Jack had an amazing idea & started his online business with a vision of making it big someday. But few years down the line Jack is left wondering as to why his business isn’t turning up the way he expected it to!

Mark thinks that he has a better service than his competitors, but still fails to understand why their Balance Sheet figures are running into millions, while his are still in few thousands!

All these puzzling facts make one doubt himself. But my friend, the problem is not with the idea or the service! The problem lies in the promotion strategies. No matter how good an idea or a service is, it won’t be successful unless you put it to the right people in the right manner. Good Web Promotion can do wonders to an average idea; forget what it can do to a good one. Had Jack & Mark adopted the right kind of Internet Promotion strategy, they would have achieved what they wanted to.

Everyone will agree that today’s Web Promotion is dominated by Search Engines, or to be precise, Google. If your site is in the top thirty, for the right “Keyword”, you can be a winner. But how can one make it to the top & stay there for a long time? (Mind you, in this dynamic world called Internet, sticking to your position is as important as getting there!)

The best way to “optimize” your site is through a new “Organic Method of Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) that Google & other search engines just love, generating “Quality One Way Links”. One can generate quality back links by way of “Directory Submission” & “Article Submission”.

Online directories provide you with quality back links, which is precisely what you are looking for. Apart from this, you need to submit your site to the most appropriate category & with a brief description about your business. Thus, they also send targeted audience your way!

Another way of generating quality targeted audience & one way links is by writing quality articles & submitting them to Article Directories! By writing a quality article, you are not just informing your potential customers about your service, but are also sharing your knowledge with them. Again, Article Directories gives you an opportunity to inform people about yourself & also provide a link to your site. This way, people get to know about you & your site. And if your article provides a visitor what he came looking for, you have most definitely found yourself a new client!

Had Jack written an article about his idea & explained his service to his target audience and submitted his site to Hundreds of Search Engine Friendly Directories, he would have been on “Cloud 9” by now. Had Mark written an article informing his potential customers, how his service is better than his customers & also submitted his site to Online Directories, his Balance Sheet too might have run into Millions. To summarize, when you submit your article or your site to various online directories, this is what you get -

1. You generate hundreds of quality back links to your site.

2. People who search these directories may find your article or your sites description interesting & visit your site. Thus you get large targeted audience.

The end result is that your site satisfies all the criterions set by various search engines to have a favorable Rank. You thus reach high positions in search engines & stay there for a long time!

Rahul Rungta is a Professional Internet Marketer. Having done intensive research on Search Engine Optimization & Traffic Generation, he is now pioneering two new innovative tools in Internet Marketing - Article & Directory Submission. To know more about him, please visit http://www.submit2please.com

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Having your major keyword in your domain name

here has been some discussion on how having your major keyword inside your domain name can help with search rankings provided you have already optimized everything else

Do you think this is a legitimate claim or do you think it does not make a difference?

This is what Ross Dunn, CEO, StepForth Search Engine Placement Inc. had to say about this.

Ross: Yes it can help but only marginally. If your domain name includes the primary keyphrase that you want rankings for it will help boost the perceived relevance of your website. I generally consider keywords in a domain to be a 1-5% advantage in the rankings war. The simple fact is that before keyword domains really help rankings your site must be well optimized. Theoretically if you were head to head with your competitor and both sites were equal in optimization and online popularity but only site #2 had keywords in their domain they would get a better ranking.

In short, domains play a role in rankings under only the most competitive of terms where every percentage of advantage is a welcome edge.

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Seo - Do You Have Enough Search Engine Friendly Content?

A discussion of search engine friendly content and how the problem with most websites is that they don’t have enough of it on their search engine optimized pages.

Is it possible to have too much SEO on your website? The answer is no. In fact the majority of websites are sadly lacking in true search engine indexable content. This is because almost half of most web pages consist of blank space that are read by the search engine spiders as being nothing. Remember too that the problem is worsened by the fact that most search engine spiders also read flash animation (as typically found with banners and graphics) and photographs as blank space too.

To be truly optimized experts say that your site should contain at least 200 words of keyword dense text. That is the minimum that you need on there to attract the attention of the search engine spiders that determine what content is indexable by the amount of text used on the page.

Yet another important thing to remember is that the impact of keywords on search engine spiders is maximized if the keywords that you use in this minimum 200-word length text also match your page titles. For instance a site selling psychic advice that is owned by a company called PsychicsRUs should have both psychic advice and PsychicsRUs somewhere in the body of the text.

Just how long is a 200 words. The above three paragraphs is 203 words which gives you an idea of the minimum chunk of copy that has to be on your website for it to be considered optimized. As you can see it is not a lot of copy. There is a big debate about whether or not you can overdo SEO text on a website page. To avoid overdoing simply make sure that whatever SEO copy you are writing is friendly for both humans and bots to read and that should weed out any keywords that are serving as “overkill.”

Information from http://www.selfseo.com

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Content is KING!!!

Who on here believes that content is king for getting good rankings in all the major search engines? ME

It is suggested that the content on your web page has keywords that you think people will search on to find your business website.

If my business was about bodybuilding, then the word bodybuilding will play an important role in search rankings if it’s found inside my content area, heading tags and links on the page.

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Example

Bodybuilding

blaa blaa blaa blaa, bodybuilding. It is said that bodybuilding makes you stronger blaaa blaaa blaaa. Bodybuilding is all about bodybuilders who do bodybuilding to win bodybuilding shows and to impress other bodybuilding bodybuilders.

This would be my link —> More bodybuilding information

Bodybuilding Show

blaa blaa blaa, coming and see this great bodybuilding show with more bodybuilding bodybuilders that you can poke a protein packed stick at. blaa blaa blaa

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Cleaning Your Code and Creating Style Sheets

Not everyone out there uses Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. It’s still more popular than all the others combined, but it’s been losing market share as Macintosh users have migrated to Safari and Windows and Linux users have begun to move to browsers like Firefox and Opera. Why is this movement away from IE something to think about when it comes to optimizing your website? Because what you see when you look at your site in IE may not be what others see when they use different browsers.
Using Compliant Code

Internet Explorer, at least up to and including version 6, is not compliant with the World Wide Web Consortium’s specifications for HTML and XHTML. Because IE was the browser for a long time, web designers would use code that worked in IE, without concerning themselves with whether that code was technically correct. However, with the rise of standards-compliant browsers, code that looked fine in Internet Explorer is often found to be an utter mess. The proper way to create a web document is to use valid code and test it in a compliant browser. Once the page looks the way you want it to and is either completely valid or at least as close to valid as you can get it, it should then be tested in IE. Utilizing this method, you can feel secure that the code you’re using is not likely to break in the future.

Tables Are Not For Layout!

Most websites are designed using tables for layout. It’s convenient, because it makes it easy to see which elements go where on the page, and if you’re using a WYSIWYG (”what you see is what you get”) editor like FrontPage or Dreamweaver, it’s easy to split one cell into many or merge many cells into one. However, tables were never meant to be used for layout of pages. The table element’s real purpose, as the name indicates, is the tabular display of data. Is that a reason not to use tables for layout? That’s a matter of opinion. To some people, it doesn’t matter what an element was designed for. If it works, it works.

However, it may not work the way you expect it to. Different browsers interpret tables differently. Empty cells may not take up the amount of space you expect them to, and backgrounds may not appear the way you thought they would. Moreover, using tables to lay out your pages makes your code extremely dense, and that means that over time, it will become more and more difficult to update the page without breaking it. This problem increases dramatically if your layout requires you to nest one table or more inside another.

Another problem with the use of tables for layout is that your content is broken up by your layout. This is probably not a problem for search engine spiders, but for people who browse the internet using screen readers, it turns your page into a jumble with absolutely no logical flow.

Cascading Style Sheets

With cascading style sheets, we can reduce the amount of code on your pages while ensuring a consistent look and feel across the site. The style sheet will control formatting and positioning, and the HTML will only be used for content. Pages will load faster, they will be easy to go through with screen reader software, and they will display consistently across all modern browsers. This method also makes it significantly easier to update and expand your site, even if you don’t know HTML. You simply have to enter your content into the proper tags — headings, paragraphs, etc. Allowing me to clean up your code and create or expand your CSS means that you won’t need to use me as an overpriced webmaster in the future, and you won’t have to worry about breaking your pages whenever you need to change some of the content.
How will this improve your rankings?

It probably won’t have any effect on your site’s rankings. Search engine spiders are quite capable of ignoring the garbage on a page and finding the content, so unless your code was so bad that it was trapping spiders, or so heavy that spiders couldn’t get through it, these changes are not going to push your site up in the search engine results. However, assuming your website will not be finished when I’m finished with it (believe me, websites are never truly finished) making changes like this will save you considerable time and money in the future. In addtion to that benefit, think of the savings in bandwidth usage you’ll experience if your pages are half as large as they had been.

Information from http://www.raisemyrank.com/services/css.htm

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The Top 10 Rules In Link Popularity Building

The term “link popularity” refers to a websites online visibility and the number of links the search engines can find pointing to a website. The introduction of link popularity metrics helped the search engines to control spam by shifting their ranking algorithm from purely on-page factors to off-page factors such as counting inbound links.

By combining the ranking scores of on-page, and off-page factors, the search engines can deliver more relevant search results for the web searchers. While it is still possible to achieve high search engine ranking for non-competitive terms without a great deal of link popularity, it is unlikely your site will rank well for very popular terms without it.

The benefits of link popularity

Link popularity building is one of the most important and critical aspects of any effective search engine optimization campaign today and it will be most likely the main ranking criteria in the foreseeable future on the three major search engines, Google, Yahoo and MSN. A website’s link popularity score, Google’s PageRank and “anchor text” in the incoming text links plays a major role in how well it will rank in the search engine result pages. However there are a few rules that you should keep in mind to maximize your link popularity building efforts.

What are the top 10 rules to gain the most from inbound links?

1. Inbound links from domains with relevant topics should be your first and foremost aim and this requires the development of great content and a desire to contribute something useful to the world wide web. If you have something useful to offer, other websites will link to you naturally.

2. Inbound links from search engine friendly crawlable web pages. This rule is very simple, if the search engines can’t reach the web pages where your links are located, your website will not gain any link popularity. It’s not always possible to dictate how and where your links are placed, but in most cases you can request a link from a static, indexable web page.

3. Inbound links from older domains with high search engine ranking are classified as authority websites by the search engines and obtaining links from these website is a great way to increase your website’s link popularity. You can find out how old a website is by using the archive.org tool.

4. Inbound links form unique domains with their own class C IP address have a greater weight than multiple links from the same domain. Acquiring inbound links from different C class IP address blocks tells the search engines the domains are hosted on the different web servers.

5. Inbound links should be permanent and static. The search engines can detect when inbound links appear first and by removing and adding links at a great rate can send signals of low quality to the search engines. The search engines love static hyperlinks, but they have trouble following links redirected through server side scripts. Also keep in mind, the use of rel=”nofollow” links in the code will not pass the link popularity benefits to the target website.

6. Inbound links nestled in the content of a web page are more effective especially when surrounded by text related to your website’s topic. When links naturally occur in a body of text, the search engines assign a higher link popularity score to those links compared to links on pages with hundreds of other outbound links per page.

7. Inbound links from .edu, .gov domains are trusted by the search engines over .com, .net or other top level domains. The argument in favor of search engines giving a higher weight to .edu and .gov domain links is that the inbound links are much harder to attain and there is supporting evidence in patent documents filed by Google pointing to a document scoring system that takes TLD information into consideration.

8. Inbound links from authority sites directories like dmoz.org, dir.yahoo.com have long been regarded as important building blocks of link popularity for any website. Since both of these directories employ human editors to review individual websites, the search engines place a greater trust factor on websites listed in these directories. Some of the other well established human edited directories include botw.org, goguides.org and joant.com.

9. Inbound links with a wide variety of anchor text. Most new website owners make the mistake of requesting links to their website using the same anchor text, which is very unnatural and sends a clear signal to the search engines about someone trying to manipulate link popularity and ultimately the site’s search engine ranking. Make your website “link worthy” and people will naturally link to your website using varying link text.

10. Inbound links from local websites can help better target keywords specific to a city, region, state or country. Obtaining links from local businesses, chamber of commerce site or local charities will help your ranking for regionally targeted keyword phrases.

By gaining more inbound links to your website, you can help to improve your website’s link popularity score and the overall ranking on the search engines. The key concept to understand is that, link popularity is not merely about the sheer number of inbound links. In other words, it’s not just about getting lots of links from anywhere. Instead, you want links from established websites that are related to your website’s topics with a high degree of reputation on the search engines.

Joel Katona is the founder of Trendmetrix Software a full service SEO Company and the architect behind SEO Studio a leading SEO Software. Don’t forget to check out his free step-by-step SEO Training guide. For more timely website promotion tips and search engine optimization advice please sign up for his free SEO Newsletter

This information is from http://www.selfseo.com/story-18756.php

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Facts About Title Keyword Density

f you’ve done much SEO work for your website, I’m sure you’ve realized just how important it is to include the right text in the <> tag of each page.

As discussed in this article, it is a good idea to build each of your pages around its own primary keyphrase, and somehow incorporate that keyphrase into your <> tag. The question is, of course, what’s the best way to integrate it? The problem is that each search engine has its own unique answer.

MSN (aka Live.com) is generally thought to reward very high keyword density, and often grants top-five rankings to pages with 100% density in the title (that is, pages where the primary keyphrase is the only thing in the title bar).

Google, on the other hand, seems to make a point of devaluing pages on keywords that exactly match their <> tag. This measure was most likely introduced as a way to fight search engine spammers who over-optimize for a single phrase, by excessively placing it in their content, headings, and title.

Overall, you need to make an informed decision about which optimization route you want to take for each of your sites. As mentioned in the algorithm summaries, MSN is a good choice for driving short-term traffic and revenue, while Google has a lot more potential for long-term sustainable content websites.

If you want to optimize for Google, my advice would be to go for title keyword density of around 50%, and no greater than 75%. For example, if your primary keyphrase is three words long, you many wish to add another three-word phrase to your title, consisting of secondary keywords.

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Help Yourself: Link Back Home

This is pretty obvious from a design point of view, but it’s important to remember the SEO benefits as well.

When designing a website, you should try and have a text link back to your homepage on every page of the site. Flash and Java navigation is (usually) okay from a user point of view, but can’t be used by search engine spiders, meaning that you should always include a text link as well.

Where possible, use relevant anchor text in your home page links (dropping in a primary site-wide keyword or two), rather than just using a boring and non-descriptive “Home” link.

As the most important page in your site, there is no doubt that the home page deserves a good backlink from each and every page in your navigation structure. This is one of the easiest ways to create a good internal linking arrangement, and make it easier for search engines to index your site.

Keep in mind that this strategy isn’t just limited to your home page, but can also be applied to other important pages of your site. For example, if you have a blog and want to increase the ranking of a particular article, you could give it a side-wide link on all of your previous post pages.

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The Truth About Meta Tags and SEO

The meta description and keywords tags are often seen as some of the most basic ways to optimize. But are they so basic as to be obsolete?

The short answer is that meta tags are no longer a requirement, and serve very little practical purpose in SEO. This is because they serve absolutely no role whatsoever in the ranking algorithms of Google or MSN, and play a very small part in the algorithm used by Yahoo.

This does not mean, however, that adding meta tags is completely useless. Even though it doesn’t count towards ranking, Google sometimes shows it to users on SERPs (search engine result pages).

Meta keywords are, if nothing else, a good organizational tool. I for one am a great believer in the value of sketching out lists of keywords and keyphrases that you want to optimize for, and keeping track of them on a page-by-page basis. So what better place to put them than on the page itself? This is an especially handy touch for plain HTML sites with no database, where you have to edit each page individually.

Despite the fact that meta tags are virtually obsolete for ranking, there is no doubt that they still have a few useful side benefits. Whether it is worth it to add these tags needs to be decided on a site-by-site basis, and largely depends on the amount of time involved.

As long as you use them in moderation, meta tags won’t damage your rankings. They won’t help them either, however, so if you are adding them to beef up your keyword density, you will almost certainly be disappointed.

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How to Properly Utilize Headings in SEO

So we all know that the title is the most important single element to optimize on a page, but it’s all to easy to forget the power of headings. Headings are like little titles that can be worked into a site’s content, and while no one heading can affect rankings as much as your title, having several keyword rich headings on your page can be an extremely powerful optimization strategy.

It is important to remember that there are actually six different kinds of headings ranging from H1 to H6. H1 tags have the most effect on your ranking followed by H2, and so on. To turn a piece of text into a heading you simply need to place it between and tags (where * is the heading value of 1 to 6).

The best way to use headings in the optimization of a page is to include a single H1 tag near the top, containing a word or phrase similar to (but not necessarily the same as) your primary keyphrase.

In addition to this, it is a good idea to scatter a few H2 (and possibly H3+) tags throughout the page containing as many of your secondary keywords as possible.

A word of caution, however: it’s not a good idea to overuse headings on any one page as search engines might see this as spam. In the vast majority of cases, you should be using only one H1 tag per page, and include at least two paragraphs of content for every H2 tag.

Overall, heading optimization is just a matter of common sense. Just write a good page of content, then spread a few relevant, keyword rich heading tags throughout your page, and your search engine ranking should be affected for the better.

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42% of Searchers Click the First Result

A recent study examining the behavior of search engine users, and led by Professor Thorsten Joachims of Cornell University, has uncovered some interesting findings.

The study showed that 42% of users click on the first available result when conducting searches, while only 8% click on listing #2. Although it has long been known that the #1 result is favored by searchers, these figures do a good job of illustrating how strongly so.

Where the findings got really interesting though was when SERPs were fed through a script to reverse the order of the top two results. In these cases, 34% of users still clicked on the top result, while 12% clicked on #2.

This demonstrates that the exact same search result can go from a CTR (click through rate) of 12% to a CTR of 42%, by moving up a single spot. A very staggering difference, to be sure, and it seems to suggest that search engine users care

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When it Comes to Search Engines, Links are Power…

One of the fundamental driving forces behind a website’s ranking is the number of incoming links it has. If another webmaster links to your site, the search engines see that as a vote of confidence. If a lot of other webmasters link to your site, you get a higher link popularity, and thats where your ranking skyrockets and the real fun begins.

Of course, the other part of the formula is that the more incoming links that a site linking to you has, the more it will benefit your ranking.

The original theory behind this formula was the Pagerank system, developed by Google in the late 1990’s. Google still uses an evolved version of this system, and many other other search engines, including MSN and Yahoo use similar formulas of their own.

Because of the popularity of this “more links = higher ranking” system among search engines, it is completely safe to say that when it comes to getting a better ranking, links really are power.

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Basic SEO for every online website

1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing targeted traffic to your site.

Make sure that the title tag contains text which a human can relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up in a search result. Treat it like a headline.

2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.

3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.

Adding the exact same text for your h1 tag will tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine result that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page where they intended to visit. Robots like this too because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the headline.

Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.

4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

I always use the headline of my pages as the title tag to help the robots know exactly what my page is about. A good place to insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is the same as the title tag text.

5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were. I just place my headline once within the keywords and description tags.

6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods. A good rule of thumb is if your pages do not contain any words that reflect the content of the site you are linking to, do not link to it.

7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.

8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.

My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. The links are keywords. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this tag to your links.

9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.

10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not submit your site to often. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.

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Importance of Sitemaps

There are many SEO tips and tricks that help in optimizing a site but one of those, the importance of which is sometimes underestimated is sitemaps. Sitemaps, as the name implies, are just a map of your site - i.e. on one single page you show the structure of your site, its sections, the links between them, etc. Sitemaps make navigating your site easier and having an updated sitemap on your site is good both for your users and for search engines. Sitemaps are an important way of communication with search engines. While in robots.txt you tell search engines which parts of your site to exclude from indexing, in your site map you tell search engines where you’d like them to go.

Sitemaps are not a novelty. They have always been part of best Web design practices but with the adoption of sitemaps by search engines, now they become even more important. However, it is necessary to make a clarification that if you are interested in sitemaps mainly from a SEO point of view, you can’t go on with the conventional sitemap only (though currently Yahoo! and MSN still keep to the standard html format). For instance, Google Sitemaps uses a special (XML) format that is different from the ordinary html sitemap for human visitors.

One might ask why two sitemaps are necessary. The answer is obvious - one is for humans, the other is for spiders (for now mainly Googlebot but it is reasonable to expect that other crawlers will join the club shortly). In that relation it is necessary to clarify that having two sitemaps is not regarded as duplicate content. In ‘Introduction to Sitemaps’, Google explicitly states that using a sitemap will never lead to penalty for your site.
Why Use a Sitemap

Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don’t have a sitemap.

Also, when you have a sitemap and submit it to the search engines, you rely less on external links that will bring search engines to your site. Sitemaps can even help with messy internal links - for instance if you by accident have broken internal links or orphaned pages that cannot be reached in other way (though there is no doubt that it is much better to fix your errors than rely on a sitemap).

If your site is new, or if you have a significant number of new (or recently updated pages), then using a sitemap can be vital to your success. Although you can still go without a sitemap, it is likely that soon sitemaps will become the standard way of submitting a site to search engines. Though it is certain that spiders will continue to index the Web and sitemaps will not make the standard crawling procedures obsolete, it is logical to say that the importance of sitemaps will continue to increase.

Sitemaps also help in classifying your site content, though search engines are by no means obliged to classify a page as belonging to a particular category or as matching a particular keyword only because you have told them so.

Having in mind that the sitemap programs of major search engines (and especially Google) are still in beta, using a sitemap might not generate huge advantages right away but as search engines improve their sitemap indexing algorithms, it is expected that more and more sites will be indexed fast via sitemaps.
Generating and Submitting the Sitemap

The steps you need to perform in order to have a sitemap for your site are simple. First, you need to generate it, then you upload it to your site, and finally you notify Google about it.

Depending on your technical skills, there are two ways to generate a sitemap - to download and install a sitemap generator or to use an online sitemap generation tool. The first is more difficult but you have more control over the output. You can download the Google sitemap generator from here. After you download the package, follow the installation and configuration instructions in it. This generator is a Python script, so your Web server must have Python 2.2 or later installed, in order to run it.

The second way to generate a sitemap is easier. There are many free online tools that can do the job for you. For instance, have a look at this collection of Third-party Sitemap tools. Although Google says explicitly that it has neither tested, nor verified them, this list will be useful because it includes links to online generators, downloadable sitemap generators, sitemap plugins for popular content-management systems, etc., so you will be able to find exactly what you need.

After you have created the sitemap, you need to upload it to your site (if it is not already there) and notify Google about its existence. Notifying Google includes adding the site to your Google Sitemaps account, so if you do not have an account with Google, it is high time to open one. Another detail that is useful to know in advance is that in order to add the sitemap to your account, you need to verify that you are the legitimate owner of the site.

Currently Yahoo! and MSN do not support sitemaps, or at least not in the XML format, used by Google. Yahoo! allows webmasters to submit “a text file with a list of URLs” (which can actually be a stripped-down version of a site map), while MSN does not offer even that but there are rumors that it is indexing sitemaps when they are available onsite. Most likely this situation will change in the near future and both Yahoo! and MSN will catch with Google because user-submitted site maps are just a too powerful SEO tool and cannot be ignored

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Internal Links

In order to get the best page rank possible for your website, you need to think about using good internal links for your website that point back to your homepage. Good Internal navigation of a website is very important and if done correctly, it will improve your page rank a lot.

Obviously the more pages your website has, the more important this becomes.

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How to Deal with Telemarketers

1. If they want to loan you money, tell them you just filed for bankruptcy and you could sure use some money. Ask, “How long can I keep it? Do I have to ever pay it back, or is it like the other money I borrowed before my bankruptcy?”

2. If they start out with, “How are you today?” say, “Why do you want to know?” Or you can say, “I’m so glad you asked, because no one seems
to care these days and I have all these problems, my sciatica is acting up, my eyelashes are sore, my dog just died . . .” When they try to get back to the sales process, just continue on with telling about your problems.

3. If the person says he’s Joe Doe from the XYZ Company, ask him to spell his name, then ask him to spell the company name, then ask where it is located. Continue asking personal questions or questions about the company for as long as necessary.

4. This one works better if you are male: Telemarketer: “Hi, my name is Judy and I’m with Canter and Siegel services….
You: “Hang on a second.” (few seconds pause) “Okay, (in a really husky voice) what are
you wearing?”

5. Crying out, in well-simulated tones of pleasure and surprise, “Judy!! Is this really you? I can’t believe it! Judy, how have you
BEEN?” Hopefully, this will give Judy a few brief moments of terror as she tries to figure out where the heck she could know you from.

6. Say, “No,” over and over. Be sure to vary the sound of each no, and keep an even tempo even as they’re trying to speak. This is the most fun if you can keep going until they hang up.

7. If MCI calls trying to get you to sign up with their Family and Friends plan, reply, in as sinister a voice as you can muster, “I don’t have any friends . . . would you be my friend?”

8. If they clean rugs: “Can you get blood out, you can? Well, how about goat blood or HUMAN blood - chicken blood too?”

9. Let the person go through their spiel, providing minimal but necessary feedback in the form of an occasional “Uh-huh, really, or, “That’s fascinating.” Finally, when they ask you to buy, ask them to marry you. They get all flustered, but just tell them you couldn’t give your credit card number to someone who’s a complete stranger.

10. Tell them you work for the same company they work for.
Example: Telemarketer: “This is Bill from Watertronics.”
You: “Watertronics!! Hey I work for them too. Where are you calling from?”
Telemarketer: “Uh, Dallas, Texas.” You: “Great, they have a group there too? How’s business/the weather? Too bad the company has a policy against selling to employees! Oh well, see ya.”

11. Tell the Telemarketer you are busy and if they will give you their phone number you will call them back. If they say they are not allowed to give out their number, then ask them for their home number and tell them you will call them at home (this is usually the most effective method of getting rid of Telemarketers). If the person says, “Well, I don’t really want to get a call at home,” say, “Yeah! Now you know how I feel.” (smiling, of course…)

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George Costanza’s Tips for Working Hard

1. Never walk down the hall without a document in your hands. People with documents in their hands look like hardworking employees heading for important meetings. People with nothing in their hands look like they’re heading for the cafeteria. People with a newspaper in their hand look like they’re heading for the toilet. Above all, make sure you carry loads of stuff home with you at night, thus generating the false impression that you work longer hours than you do.

2. Use computers to look busy. Any time you use a computer, it looks like “work” to the casual observer. You can send and receive personal e-mail, calculate your finances and generally have a blast without doing anything remotely related to work. These aren’t exactly the societal benefits that the proponents of the computer revolution would like to talk about but they’re not bad either. When you get caught by your boss -and you *will* get caught - your best defence is to claim you’re teaching yourself to use new software, thus saving valuable training dollars.

3. Messy desk. Top management can get away with a clean desk. For the rest of us, it looks like you’re not working hard enough. Build huge piles of documents around your workspace. To the observer, last year’s work looks the same as today’s work; it’s volume that counts. Pile them high and wide. If you know somebody is coming to your cubicle, bury the document you’ll need halfway down in an existing stack and rummage for it when he/she arrives.

4. Voice Mail. Never answer your phone if you have voice mail. People don’t call you just because they want to give you something for nothing - they call because they want YOU to do work for THEM. That’s no way to live. Screen all your calls through voice mail. If somebody leaves a voice mail message for you and it sounds like impending work, respond during lunch hour when you know they’re not there - it looks like you’re hardworking and conscientious even though you’re being a devious weasel. If you diligently employ the method of screening incoming calls and then returning calls when nobody is there, this will greatly increase the odds that the caller will give up or look for a solution that doesn’t involve you. The sweetest voice mail message you can ever hear is: “Ignore my last message. I took care of it”. If your voice mailbox has a limit on the number of messages it can hold, make sure you reach that limit frequently. One way to do that is to never erase any incoming messages. If that takes too long, send yourself a few messages. Your callers will hear a recorded message that says, “Sorry, this mailbox is full” - a sure sign that you are a hardworking employee in high demand.

5. Looking Impatient and Annoyed. According to George Costanza, one should also always try to look impatient and annoyed to give your bosses the impression that you are always busy.

6. Appear to Work Late. Always leave the office late, especially when the boss is still around. You could read magazines and storybooks that you always wanted to read but have no time until late before leaving. Make sure you walk past the boss’ room on your way out. Send important emails at unearthly hours (e.g. 9:35pm, 7:05am, etc…) and during public holidays.

7. Creative Sighing for Effect. Sigh loudly when there are many people around, giving the impression that you are very hard pressed.

8. Stacking Strategy. It is not enough to pile lots of documents on the table. Put lots of books on the floor etc. . . . Can always borrow from library. Thick computer manuals are the best.

9. Build Vocabulary. Read up on some computer magazines and pick out all the jargon and new products. Use it freely when in conversation with bosses. Remember: They don’t have to understand what you say, but you sure sound impressive.

10. * MOST IMPORTANTLY: DON’T forward this to your boss by mistake!!!

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10 Rules of Voice Mail

1. You can always reach the wrong person - that is, the person you didn’t
want to talk to.
2. (Corollary to rule number 1) You can never reach to right person - the
one you really need to talk to.
3. Everyone can say “Leave a detailed message”, but no one has figured out
how to do it yet.
4. All command of the English language ceases when someone tries to leave a
voice-mail message.
5. Anyone who thinks voice mail eliminates ‘telephone tag’ also believes
Dick Tracy is a real person (obviously, this rule was created before the
advent of Milli Vanilli).
6. Beware of voice mail vendors bearing solutions. Make sure your know what
the “problems” are first.
7. The term ‘integrate’, as in “This voice mail system will totally
integrate with your present PBX”, is synonymous with the terms
“virtually”, “kind of”, and “you know what I mean”.
8. MTBF (mean-time-between-failure) is a ludicrous term when applied to
voice mail systems. ANY time is a MEAN TIME for a voice mail system to
FAIL.
9. The three lies of voice mail are:
o “I’m away from my office right now”;
o “Please leave a message and I’ll return your call shortly”;
o “If you want to talk to someone who is taking calls for me, please
dial…”
10. Humans have approximately fifty-billion brains cells. Voice mail systems
have none. In spite of this, voice mail systems usually win out in
head-to-head competition.

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American Businessman

An American businessman goes to Japan on a business trip, but he hates Japanese food, so he asks the concierge at his hotel if there’s any place around where he can get American food.

The concierge tells him he’s in luck, there’s a pizza place that just opened, and they deliver. The concierge gives the businessman the phone number, and he goes back to his room and orders a pizza.

Thirty minutes later, the delivery guy shows up to the door with the pizza.

The businessman takes the pizza, and starts sneezing uncontrollably. He asks the delivery man, “What the heck did you put on this pizza?”

The delivery man bows deeply and says, “We put on the pizza what you ordered: pepper only.”

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What makes life 100%?

Ever wonder about those people who say they are giving more than 100%?

We have all been to those meetings where someone wants more than 100%.

How about achieving 103%?

Here’s a little math that might prove helpful.

If:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

is represented as:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

then:

H A R D W O R K
8 1 18 4 23 15 18 11 = 98%

K N O W L E D G E
11 14 15 23 12 5 4 7 5 = 96%

but:

A T T I T U D E
1 20 20 9 20 21 4 5 = 100%

and:
B U L L S H I T
2 21 12 12 19 8 9 20 = 103%

So, it stands to reason that hard work and knowledge will get you close,
attitude will get you there, but bullshit will put you over the top.

And look how far this will take you…

A S S K I S S I N G
1 19 19 11 9 19 19 9 14 7 = 118%

Think about it… and have a nice day at work…

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How Digg Can Be Used For SEO

n examination of the social network called Digg and how it can be used as part of a successful search engine strategy.

One of the newest places to submit articles that you have written is Digg. This is a huge social network whose readers actually despise anything that looks like marketing. You probably won’t last two minutes on this site, which has a “burial” feature that kicks overt displays of advertising right off the sight. However if you are very clever about the way you position yourself on Digg you can use it as a marketing tool to bring more visitors to your site and that may mean potential link partners and advertisers. If you are successful at posting writing on Digg then you will likely experience a ton of traffic being brought to your site.

Digg is all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the digg community. After you submit content, other people read your submission and Digg what they like best. If your story is popular and receives enough Digg vote, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of visitors to see. So how can you turn this into an SEO tool?

The first challenge is to get people to give a Digg vote to your posting. This means having an article on the top page or linking to someone who has a story on the top page. However even after you manage that you need to have a fantastic title and summary or the savvy, marketing hating readers on Digg may not even glance at any URL that is attached.

The main way that Digg can be part of a good SEO strategy is in driving a lot of traffic to your site quickly by getting in the top ten read articles on the first page of the site. This creates the kind of buzz and credibility for your site that just cannot be bought using keyword articles only.

About The Author:
Christopher Angus is a SEO and Website Marketer. He can be contacted at: Sales (at) Brilliantseo.com http://www.chooseinsurance.co.uk http://www.sbzcorporation.com http://www.crcwritingservices.com

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The Truth about Hyphenated Domain Names and SEO

Most people understand the benefits of having keywords in a domain name, but one question that is often asked in forums is whether it is necessary to separate keywords with hyphens.

Although many people have the misconception that search engines aren’t smart enough to pick out keywords without the help of hyphens, they are sorely mistaken. When you give it some though, it would be pretty pathetic if a search engine like Google, which maintains an index of over 10 billion web pages, couldn’t pick out simple keywords from a string of characters. Fortunately, it has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that they can, and that placing a hyphen in your domain (or not) should have no direct effect whatsoever on your search engine rankings.

When it comes to picking domains, it simply isn’t worthwhile to use a hyphen simply for the imagined SEO benefit. In the vast majority of cases, it’s preferable to pick an unhyphenated name (if it is available) for the simple purpose of proper branding.

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When it Comes to Search Engines, Links are Power…

One of the fundamental driving forces behind a website’s ranking is the number of incoming links it has. If another webmaster links to your site, the search engines see that as a vote of confidence. If a lot of other webmasters link to your site, you get a higher link popularity, and thats where your ranking skyrockets and the real fun begins.

Of course, the other part of the formula is that the more incoming links that a site linking to you has, the more it will benefit your ranking.

The original theory behind this formula was the Pagerank system, developed by Google in the late 1990’s. Google still uses an evolved version of this system, and many other other search engines, including MSN and Yahoo use similar formulas of their own.

Because of the popularity of this “more links = higher ranking” system among search engines, it is completely safe to say that when it comes to getting a better ranking, links really are power

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How to check how many websites are linking to yours

know that a large majority of people already know how to check how many websites are linking to yours, but for those who don’t, all you need to do is the following below

Place this into the search field of a search engine link:http://www.yourdomainname.com and then perform a search.

I usually do this at least once a month.