Google Makes Free Holiday Postcard Offer

It is, of course, the thought that counts. A message from a friend or loved one means a lot regardless of what form it takes. Still, physical items tend to have more of an impact, and Google's made a very nice gesture by offering to send out real postcards this holiday season.

A Google representative wrote in an email to WebProNews, "As a token of our appreciation to our most enthusiastic fans, we're snail mailing (!) one free holiday postcard on their behalf."



People who take Google up on this offer can choose from six card designs ("M-velope in snow," "Rudolph," "Mittens," "Snowflakes" "Do-it-yourself dreidel," and "Comic"), and can write a message up to 255 characters in length.

Also, in case you were concerned, Google promises not to keep any of the information individuals supply after it sends the cards on their way.

Now here are all of the disclaimers you should keep in mind: destination addresses must be in the United States. This is a one-per-person, while-supplies-last kind of deal. And Google hasn't specified how many total cards it's willing to send, so they may be in very short supply indeed.

YouTube, Univision Announce Partnership

YouTube's struck another content-sharing partnership, and it's a big one. Univision, which is the top Spanish-language broadcast network in America, has agreed to supply the video-sharing site with both short clips and full shows.

On the YouTube Blog, Strategic Partner Development Manager Laura Lee explained the importance of this arrangement by noting that the size of YouTube's Hispanic audience has increased by 80 percent in the last year. She also stated that this deal counts as "one of YouTube's most comprehensive partnerships for full-length content to date."



Lee then continued, "Expect to see programs from Univision's three networks - Univision, TeleFutura and Galavision - as well as unique footage from celebrity interviews and special events such as next year's 'Premio Lo Nuestro a la Musica Latina' (Lo Nuestro Latin Music Awards)."

So as soon as Univision's content makes it to YouTube (and this may take a few months), the site is likely to become much more popular with native Spanish speakers. And it's not hard to imagine that many people who are trying to learn Spanish will appreciate the new content, too.

As for the partnership's financial details, nothing was disclosed, but Univision will take advantage of YouTube's Content ID system, meaning it should receive at least a little bit of money.

New Trend Tracking Feature in Google Finance

Google has introduced Google Domestic Trends on Google Finance. This is a feature that tracks search traffic (on Google) across specific sectors of the economy.

"The changes in the search volume of a given sector on google.com may provide useful economic insight," Google says. "We have created 23 indexes that track the major economic sectors, such as retail, auto and unemployment. Each index value is baselined at 1.0 on January 1, 2004 and is calculated and displayed on the Google Finance charts as a 7-day moving average. You can easily compare actual stocks and market indexes to these Google Trends on the charts."

The trends the feature tracks include:

- Advertising and Marketing
- Air Travel
- Auto Buyers
- Auto Financing
- Automotive
- Banking and Personal Finance
- Business
- Computers and Electronics
- Construction
- Credit and Lending
- Durable Goods
- Finance and Insurance
- Furniture
- Industries
- Investments
- Jobs
- Luxury Goods
- Mortgage
- Real Estate
- Rental
- Retail Trade
- Travel
- Unemployment

Google shares an example of the Luxuries Index, which tracks queries like [jewelry], [rings], [diamond], [ring], [jewelers], [tiffany], etc.

Data from the indexes are available for download, letting users utilize it in their own models. More information about the indexes can be found here. The Domestic Trends feature comes as the result of research from Google's Chief Economist Hal Varian, who explains his methodology here.

Google News SEO Tips - Ranking in News Search

I thought that one of the more interesting topics addressed at Search Engine Strategies San Jose a while back was that of SEO and the publishing industry. This is an industry seemingly at war with entities like Google (at least partially), even though there are clearly measures publishers could take, which would make Google and Google News in particular work to their advantage.

Have you had success ranking in Google News? Comment.

Google News is a very useful resource to online news seekers. It seems to get more and more useful as time goes on. For example, they just started incorporating real-time search suggestions into news queries. Publishers should embrace such a tool (Google News) that users themselves embrace, and can ultimately gain them more traffic.



his week, Google has shared some insight into search engine optimization practices for news search. Publishers could learn a lot from the following video.
In addition to the video, Google's Maile Ohye answered a couple of questions about Google News SEO on the Google News blog. For one, she says that adding a city to the title of the publication will not help publishers target their local audience, because Google extracts geography and location information from the articles themselves.

"Changing your name to include relevant keywords or adding a local address in your footer won't help you target a specific audience in our News rankings," she says.

She also says that Google only wants recently added URLs in publishers' News Sitemaps, because they direct Googlebot to the publishers' breaking information. "If you include older URLs, no worries (there's no penalty unless you're perceived as maliciously spamming -- this case would be rare, so again, no worries); we just won't include those URLs in our next News crawl," says Ohye.

A few weeks ago, a patent was granted to Google for "systems and method for improving the ranking of news articles." The patent was originally filed way back in 2003, so there is no question that some of the details have changed, but within it there are a number of factors highlighted, some of which may be ranking factors Google News considers.

In one "implementation consistent with the principles of the invention," here are some factors that are mentioned:

- a number of articles produced by the news source during a first time period

- an average length of an article produced by the news source

- an amount of important coverage that the news source produces in a second time period

- a breaking news score

- an amount of network traffic to the news source

- a human opinion of the news source

- circulation statistics of the news source

- a size of a staff associated with the news source

- a number of bureaus associated with the news source

- a number of original named entities in a group of articles associated with the news source

- a breadth of coverage by the news source

- a number of different countries from which network traffic to the news source originates

- the writing style used by the news source

A couple months ago, Google posted a Google News publisher FAQ page. That answers questions like:

- Can I suggest my personal website for inclusion in Google News?

- What requirements do I have to meet in order to be included in Google News?

- My website was accepted in Google News a few days ago, but I still can't find my articles. Is something wrong?

- Why aren't my images showing up in Google News?

- Why do all my articles have a strange title in Google News, like "Share this" or "By Jane Q. Journalist"?

- What is the "unique number" or "3 digit" rule?

- Should I submit a News sitemap?

- Why can't I see the option to submit a News sitemap in Webmaster Tools?

- Once I've submitted a News sitemap, do I have to resubmit it each time I publish a new article?

- If I submit a News sitemap, will Google News stop crawling my regular section pages?

- How often does Google News crawl my News sitemap? In Webmaster Tools, it appears to be crawled only once per day.

- Why have my articles stopped appearing in Google News, even though they've been showing up previously?

The moral of the story is that there are a lot of things you can look at if you are serious about getting traffic from Google News, whether you are already being picked up or not. The best part is that most of it is straight from Google itself.

Google Homepage Patent Gratuitous?

In early 2004, Google's lawyers didn't have nearly enough to do. A patent on the design of Google's homepage (AKA its "[g]raphical user interface for a display screen of a communications terminal") that they applied for at that time was granted Tuesday.

Let us know what you think in the comments section.

What Google's going to do with the patent is, frankly, anybody's guess. No corporation with the ability to approach Google's effectiveness at search would be dumb enough to copy its exact design. And it'd be a rare judge who would let Google take action against Yahoo or other search rivals on the basis of similarities born out of identical functions.

There's a question of prior art, as well, since Google might not have been the first entity to stick a search box in the middle of a mostly-blank page.

Anyway, in case you're curious, part of the patent states, "The single view is a front view of a graphical user interface for a display screen of a communications terminal."

Also, "The broken line of the display screen and the broken line showing of certain words and numbers in the drawing are for illustrative purposes only and form no part of the claimed design."

source: http://www.webpronews.com/

Windows 7 on MacBook Pro: Nice, but still has poor battery life

I have had Windows 7 Ultimate RTM (release to manufacturer) for a few days. This is, of course, a legitimate copy, not the leaked copy that you can download from the Internet. That's the good news.

The bad news is I have to test it, which has been lot of work. We tested the new operating system against Windows Vista SP2 and Windows XP SP3. Overall, Windows 7 offers a much more pleasant experience than Windows Vista. Everything works more smoothly. The new OS takes less time to launch applications, and it's nice just to browse around its functions and features--it's also very pretty. However, it is slower than Windows XP, except for the boot and shutdown times, where XP has always been a drag.

Version 2.0 of Boot Camp (included on the Mac OS X Leopard DVD) wouldn't run unless you make it run in Windows Vista/XP compatibility mode.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

You can read a lot more about the new operating system via our official review done by my colleague Seth Rosenblatt. I want address something here that's not very mainstream (yet): running Windows 7 on Intel-based Mac hardware, specifically on a unibody 15" MacBook Pro.

Setting up Windows 7 on a Mac is easy, just as it is with Windows XP or Vista. First, you use the Boot Camp Assistant (which is found in the Applications\Utilities folder). The application helps you resize the hard drive to create a new partition for Windows. (Pick the size carefully, as you can't resize this partition again without having to reinstall Windows from scratch). After that, the installation starts and goes on just as it would on a PC.

(If you have been using Windows XP or Vista on your Mac, you can just start the installation of Windows 7 from within the existing OS. You will have the option to do either an upgrade or a clean installation on the same partition).

It took about 30 minutes for me to get Windows 7 Ultimate RTM installed on the second partition (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions took about the same amount of time). Now the trick is to install Boot Camp, which includes all the drivers and the Boot Camp control panel, and lets you control other functions of the laptop such as mouse, shortcut key, and the multitouch trackpad.

Apple includes Boot Camp on the OS X Leopard DVD; however, I ran into an error stating that it required Windows XP or Windows Vista to run. This could be fixed simply by changing the properties of the installer file to make it run in Windows XP or Vista compatibility mode.

Once Boot Camp has installed, you will need to update it to the 2.1 version that can be downloaded here for Windows 32-bit and here for Windows 64-bit.

Boot Camp 2.1, despite the message, works fine with Windows 7; just make sure you run Windows Update after installing it.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

When I ran Boot Camp 2.1's installer, a message appeared, saying that there were known compatibility issues, but I decided to install it anyway. After the installation, when the computer restarted, Windows 7's Action Center appeared and pointed me to download the update for Nvidia chipset. (Alternatively, if you run Windows Update, that would have downloaded from there, too). The update seemed to fix the incompatibility, and the Action Center was happy at the next boot.

But I wasn't very happy yet, though, as the right-click function, which is one of the most important features when using Windows, didn't work with the laptop's muiltitouch trackpad (it worked fine with a USB mouse). After doing more research, I found a multitouch trackpad update that solved it. The right-click function was now the two-finger tab on the pad. And that was it; I now have myself a Windows 7 machine running on a nice piece of Mac hardware, and everything seemed perfect.

The two-finger tab right-click takes some getting used to but works great.

(Credit: Dong Ngo/CNET)

It was almost perfect, that is. What's missing has been a known issue with Mac laptop running Boot Camp: the battery life. According to Apple, the MacBook Pro offers about eight hours of battery life (in my experience it's more like about five hours, which is still very impressive). However, when running Windows XP and Vista, this reduces the life to just merely an hour and a half. And you guessed it: it's the same with Windows 7. The battery somehow drains really fast, even when the screen brightness turned down, I couldn't get two hours out of a full charge, even when just doing regular work on the machine.

While I don't know the exact reason, my best guess is this is because the Mac hardware is not optimized for Windows drivers. I hope that Apple (or Microsoft or hardware vendors) would look into this and make the MacBook, or any other Mac laptop, a truly great platform for Windows 7.

Other than that, Windows 7 has been working great on my MacBook Pro. After some anecdotal testing, it felt faster than the machine's original operating system. It looks good, too, even prettier than when it is installed on PC hardware.

I believe that Windows 7 will work fine on other Intel-based Macs, too, though some tweaking might be necessary. My colleague Ina Fried tried the release candidate of the OS on the Mac Mini and it worked fine. Considering the fact that the OS is not even out to the public, this level of support is really encouraging.

When the battery life issue is resolved, if ever, I cannot see myself having a computer that can only run just either Windows or Mac. Windows 7 on a Mac might be the solution that unites both schools of fanboys.

Resources: http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-10301015-1.html

wordpress blog seo tips and avoid

Recently I have visited the blogs and found some mistakes by the blogs owner. SOme mistakes are serious and search engines can penalize for these careless jobs. Few things are important and it helps you to get more traffic and get benefits. Some of the important points and steps are mentioned below :

Remove the hyperlink of Title from the single post:
Its common mistakes I have seen in the blogs. If a visitor in the single post then the title must not be hyperlinked. It is very easy to remove the hyperlink from the post title. Just go to Presentation > Theme Editor > and open singlepost.php and replace the following line "> with .

Use Wordpress Plugins:
Many plugins available free that helps you to make your website more seo-friendly. Some of the plugins are :
Google Sitemap Generator : Sitemap makes search engine easy to crawl all the pages. With the help of this, you can create the sitemap for your blog and submit it in google webmaster tools.

Optimize your Meta Description Tag : Meta descriptions are not very important, but still helpful in yahoo and other search engines. With the help of this plugin, you can manually insert the meta description for each post separately.

Title Tags Generator : Titles are still important. Install this plugin and insert title tags for each post.

Optimize Images :
Image optimization is the basic on-page seo. The visitors enters the website with the help of images also. So must include alt tags in the images.

Change the default Wordpress Theme:
The default wordpress theme is not very impressive. Lots of free attractive themes available. Download the theme and replace it with default. This makes your wordpress blog more professional.

Add noindex and nofollow to Category and Archieves:
Add noindex to categories, archieves, tags to avoid duplicate content issue. To insert noindex in the archieve, goto Theme Editor>header.php and replace with "meta name="robots" content="noindex"

Essential Tricks for a Website

So for newbies and those others who may not yet know, you can obtain essential information For website just about anywhere in the Internet. However, very few sites will really show you how to resolve an affordable search engine optimization plan. There are some tricks which may help you for your site presentation.

1) Meta Tag - As long as SEO experts have been publishing advice about things like meta tags, it was interesting to see perceptions of proper meta tag use were as varied as the respondents.For meta keywords google and msn don’t seem to use it however yahoo does

The title tag, ALT tagsand some other useful Tags are the most powerful on-site SEO technique you have, so use it creatively! What you place in the title tag should only be one thing, the exact keyword you used for the web page that you are trying to optimize. Every single web page should have it’s own title tag.

2) Link Popularity - Link Popularity is simply a way to measure the total number of links that a search engine has found for your website. Link Popularity is getting more important all the time.It means when a 3rd party site links to your site. If abc.com linked to your site, this is considered a link. When you receive requests for a link exchange, check the site out before linking with them, check for spam (Repeat keywords, hidden text, etc.).

3) Keyword Density - The number of times a keyword is used on a web page divided by the total number of words on the page.It is called “Keyowrd Density”. This is also vital and should be used with research. You should use the keyword(s) once in the title tag , heading tag,bold text, and get the density between 5% to 20% (Don’t over do it!). Also use your keyword(s) both low and high on the web page, keyword(s) should be in the first sentence and in the last one.

4) Page Size - Your web page’s speed is important to your visitors and the search engines. Why? Because the robots will be able to spider your web page faster and easier. Try your best to keep your web page over 5k and under 15k in size.

5) Rich Theme - Search engines are looking at themes more and more. Build content (Articles, FAQ, tips, etc.) much as possible and keep the web pages around 200 to 500 words. Create content that’s related to your market and link them out to other related content on your site. Try to get 200 web pages or more.

6) Web Site Design - This is also important, if you want to get indexed! Text content should out weigh the HTML content. The pages should validate and be usable in all of today’s leading edge browsers. Stay away from flash and Java Script, search engines dislike them both a lot.

7) Insite Cross Linking - This will help you get all of your web pages indexed by the search engines. Your web pages should be no more than three clicks away from the home page. Link to topic related quality content across your site. This will also help build you a better theme through out your web site. On every page you should link back to your home page and your main service(s).

Internet Business Opportunity

Many people join internet business opportunities online blindly. By this I mean they join everything that promises them fast bucks and then one to two years later are dejected and unhappy at their dismal returns online with regards to their capital outlay in terms of time and money. Thus the most important thing you need to do today is to get a proper education in internet marketing. The co-relation is clear the internet is all about information and by learning how to package information online you will make more profits from your internet business no matter what you are promoting.

Now before you start running of to purchase a course online from any of the internet marketing gurus you need to know what kind of knowledge you need to pick up. Ask an internet marketer and many answers will come out. This article will highlight some of the more important skills that you can start reading up on. Always figure out first what area of marketing you want to do and focus on that area. Learn how to succeed in one area then proceed to another area to diversify your internet income.

Search Engine Optimization (”SEO”)

Once you have a website that has good ad copy, you want to learn how to drive good quality and targeted website traffic to your website. A good website that any aspiring internet marketer can spend time learning and reading from good grasp of SEO can boost your online profits many fold.

Spend time learning the difference between single links and reciprocal links. It may be actually worthwhile sometimes to pay for someone from India to do SEO work for you so that you can spend your time doing other things. Someone recently gave me a quote for US$400 per month to do link exchanges for several websites at a time. This SEO actually could do 500 links in day as he heads a team of workers who live and breathe SEO work in India. Outsourcing can reduce your bills and give you better value if you find the right SEO to work for you.

Niche Adsense Portal Building

Some people conclude that they do not want to molly cuddle downlines and do not want to write sales letters. They then start purchasing software which allows you to build keyword specific websites. Satya’s program like Niche Portal Builder and Arnand Morin’s directory Generator are such programs. Google and the other search engines started delisting these websites after a while because of repetitive content. So the solution is to mix rss feeds with these websites. All this is very high level marketing and the best way to figure all of these things out is to go to the various internet marketing forums to read all you can and ask questions.

Internet Business Opportunity

The reason why I put this here in the list of things you would want to learn about is that internet business opportunities like internet mlms are good in that they provide you with the sales letters and followup systems. Your focus in these programs to make money therefore is to work on generating good amounts of website traffic to the company given websites. Such income is residual so that is why internet marketers like Stone Evans promotes his website so that he gets more and more money each month from his online business. Total automation is what you are looking for and website promotion is what you have to learn.

In conclusion, internet marketing is a very wide area, by spending one weekend per topic mention above, you will be able to get a good overview of what area of internet marketing you want to venture into and start making money from that particular area. No one is a generalist, always be a specialist in one area and you will see your internet marketing income skyrocket.

source: http://www.article-buzz.com/Article/Internet-Business-Opportunity/295793

Three Simple Ways To Make Money Online In Less Than Seven Days

Thousands of people are heading online every single day right now battling to keep their heads above the proverbial water and desperate to make a living online. But for most the thought of developing a long term business plan is hardly even a passing consideration as the single question asked of google most often is “How do I make money fast?”.

The good news is that there are several ways to make money online fast. The bad news? Thousands of pitfalls along the way which will cost you a small fortune if you fail to see them coming. So, before heading off and throwing your hard earned cash into a black hole take a quick look at this short article to safeguard your internet marketing profits.

Here are my three ways to make money online in less than seven days. Take a look at these three websites below and see which one suits you.

1. Associated Content.
2. Cash Crate.
3. Forum booster.

Writing for Associated Content requires you to write content, or words (for those unfamiliar with online language), for submission online. Content means articles and if you want to make money fast online and can produce good content you will make money on the internet in days.

You can earn anything from $3 to $30 per article and the more you write the more you can earn. This is a simple way to make money online and has the lowest risk if you’re uncertain about jumping straight into internet marketing.

You may be surprised to see how easy it has become to earn a part time income through writing for Associated Content so take a look.

Cash Crate is a site that pays you to take surveys online. You may have seen a few links to Crash Crate splattered across social media sites by college students who have found a way to make something of all that spare time they have available and wondered if it was genuine or not. Well, it is. Crash Crate pay anywhere from a dollar to possibly a hundred dollars dependent upon the survey so are well worth a look.
They even have a daily survey on the homepage that is guaranteed to make you some extra income; the guaranteed survey on the homepage pays $0.80. Okay, this won’t break the bank but get the calculator out, over a year that is almost $300 extra dollars just for taking a short survey. That’s the price of a great weekend in New York.

Are you still asking yourself the question, how do I make money online fast? Okay, if writing hundreds of articles and taking dozens of surveys doesn’t really sound like your bag of kaboodle, there is always Forum Booster.

Forum Booster is a website that pays you $0.10 for each post you make on a forum. Crazy but true. This is great for those of us that would be searching and posting on forums either way, why not get paid for it? If you can post one hundred posts in 1 hour, you can make $10, which is not that bad for earning money online from the comfort of your own home.
You can be sat in your underpants drinking coffee and eating chocolate cake while posting on forums for extra cash.

The truth is there are thousands of ways to make money quickly online but these are just the tried and tested.

Get Personal With Your Email Marketing

The facts are plain and simple. Personalized emails are more likely to be opened and responded to than a generic, blanket email. Think about it - out of all the emails hitting your inbox, you’re more likely to open the one with your name on it, right?

By personalizing your email marketing efforts, you have a good chance at making your customers feel exclusive - not part of the masses. Use your data to its full advantage by making your next email campaign stand out from the rest - get personal.

Follow these three tips to see for yourself just how effective email personalization can be:

1. Know your target

Know your target audience, and determine what the best message would be to convey to them. In your next email campaign, think about mentioning a customer’s previous purchases or reference information you have handy about their history with a service you provided. Comment that you hope they are happy with the recent sale or service, and make them aware of an upcoming promotion that offers a special discount or limited sale information. For example: “We hope you are enjoying your (insert item) and were happy with the service you received. Since you are such a loyal customer, we’d like to invite you to save 20% on your next purchase”. Give it a try - your customers will feel like you actually know them and in return, they might treat you as a new friend.

Always remember, your initial greeting has a big impact on how the recipient will react to your message. By personalizing your email, you make people want to read what you have to say. Generic emails will make them want to jettison your valiant efforts into the trash bin. Whenever possible, use personalization for your loyal customers.

2. Have a clean, accurate list

Is your email list clean? Is it Fred or Frank? Not sure? Figure it out. It’s super important to make sure your data is correct. Errors will highlight for your recipient exactly how well you don’t know them. If you are missing names for folks, and you aren’t going to get them in time for your scheduled email campaign, you can still work in a bit of personalization. Try putting something like, “A special offer for our very best customers” in the subject line. You still single them out and make them feel a little bit special. Before your next email campaign, think about going after all the data you need to be even more effective at personalization.

Try running a promotion for a drawing where you collect first and last name along with their email, or try a survey where you will not only get their contact information, you’ll also be gathering some valuable feedback on your products or services.

3. Build a relationship, but don’t over do it

Like that friend that manages to never call before they stop by, don’t abuse your familiar friend status. Keep your existing customers, and help convert your prospects into customers by creating the right kind of relationship with them. I’m not saying have them over for dinner, or take them out on a date, just always remember that emails are permission based - make sure they are expected or relevant to the reader. Don’t send unnecessary information, and always follow up with info you promised to send.

Even if you know a recipient well, overly personalized messages are likely to make the recipient feel ill-at-ease rather than important. Here’s an example of going a little too far: “Dear Joan - don’t you just love that blue tank top size large you got for a steal last month?” Be sure to balance personalization with a good measure of concern and respect for the reader.

Follow these tips and sit back and watch the results. Prospects turn into customers and existing customers are happy enough to keep coming back for more.

If properly handled, personalization can be just the ticket to establishing and strengthening the bond between you and your customer, garnering the brand recognition you are looking for, and generating a little something you need most of all, sales.

Source

Tips To Leverage Your Small Business Blog

Over the past couple months there has been a distinct buzz over the use of blogs to complement one’s business. Business owners and marketing leaders alike are beginning to recognize the power of a blog. You may be thinking that blogs are nothing new, they’ve been around for awhile now. Yet blogs continue to evolve and are becoming even more interactive.

One of the biggest issues small business owners have with their website is how to leverage a small amount of content to their best advantage.

The most important rule to not lose sight of the reason for a blog. What is so great about ranting about the latest Jazz Festival coming to town, if there is no one there to read about it? [People - We are talking Web 2.0 here] If you are not willing to develop a blogosphere of your own, where you take the time to give thoughtful feedback and comments to other blogs, then don’t expect to have visitors drooling at the RSS feeds waiting for your next post. Commenting on other blogs not only gives the chance to make a meaningful contribution to someone else’s post, but you are also encouraging visitors who read the comment chains to follow you back to your blog...

source: http://www.bluetentmarketing.com/blog/

$39,545 by ruthlessly dominating any niche online?

Have you ever looked at the staggering income some marketers haul in and thought...

“No way is that all coming from just one niche!”Dominating Niches Well, you were probably right.

Most marketers operate in several niches at a time, and Internet marketing is usually NOT their
top earner....

source: http://internetmarketingebooks.blogspot.com/2009_07_01_archive.html

Utility of SEO Tools

When you just have got a website to analyze on the SEO perspective, you will first judge plenty of factors regarding the process and would be time consuming, if you do all by hand. So, you as well as client satisfaction can play a vital part over there. Clients always look for principal analysis of his site before optimization and customer’s duty to lend it as soon as possible. There come different SEO tools to monitor your process very fast, which satisfy clients and customers. Look at the following tools for thorough site analysis and try it today!

source: http://seodiscussions.blogspot.com/2009/07/utility-of-seo-tools.html

Two More Rules for SMO

Social Media Marketing has been doing the rounds amoung Internet marketers and Rohit Bhargava of Ogilvy Public Relations has given it a kick start with his 5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)

He has lucidly explained the concept as

“The concept behind SMO is simple: implement changes to optimize a site so that it is more easily linked to, more highly visible in social media searches on custom search engines (such as Technorati), and more frequently included in relevant posts on blogs, podcasts and vlogs.”

Further contributions to the list of 5 rules was done by

Jeremiah Owyang - Rules of Social Media Optimization
Cameron Olthuis - Introduction to Social Media Optimization
Loren Baker - Social Media Optimization : 13 Rules of SMO
Lee Odden - New Rules for Social Media Optimization

Here's a brief list of all the rules that we have got on Social Media Optimisation till now :

1. Increase your linkability
2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy
3. Reward inbound links
4. Help your content travel
5. Encourage the mashup
6. Be a User Resource, even if it doesn’t help you
7. Reward helpful and valuable users
8. Participate
9. Know how to target your audience
10. Create content
11. Be real
12. Don’t forget your roots, be humble
13. Don’t be afraid to try new things, stay fresh
14. Develop a SMO strategy
15. Choose your SMO tactics wisely
16. Make SMO part of your process and best practices
    

After reading through all these 16 rules in details, it inspired me to add the following two :

17) Encourage new participants : "Social media optimization" as the name suggests is a social process and as with any social process, it would be most beneficial and effective with increasing number of participants. Lee Odden sited,

"According to Hans Peter Brondmo of Plum during the SES San Jose session “Marketing with Social Media“, 1% of those involved with social media are creating content, 10% will enrich that content and 90% will consume it."

Now the 10% enriching the content and the 90% consuming it are actually depending on the 1% who are creating the content.So if the existing participants in this process can encourage each other to take up the role of "content creator" or atleast secondary contributors ( who enrich the content) this will inturn increase the total numberof participants in the social media optimization process making it more effective for everyone involved with it.

18) SMO should be a continuous process : For any company to actually benefit from SMO, they should make it a continuous process. While we all understand that SMO is most effective in creating buzz, we need to understand that these buzz that is created has a particular life cycle and is bound to die out at a certain point of time.In order to sustain this buzz we need to continuously fuel it with more linkable contents, more participation and application of the priniciples explained in the previous rules.

How to Build Back Links with Google ?

Building links is a crucial part of any SEO campaign. Most of us understand it and spend considerable time on improving our back link portfolio. There are various techniques to get free back links that I have discussed before but what I plan to discuss in this post is how we can use Google to help find related links for a website.

There are a lot of tools in the market that helps us to find prospective link sources and some of them do more than that by providing other related information. What we often tend to overlook is most of these tools are actually using Google to find the information that they serve. If you are really pro about using Google you can easily find similar results even without using any such tool.

For example, try searching intitle:directory "seo" in Google - you will easily get a list SEO related directories. What this query basically tells Google is to find webpages that contains the word "SEO" and has the word "Directory" in page title.

If you are familiar with the advanced parameter in Google search you can easily frame hundreds of such queries that can help you find various link building opportunities.

For those of you who are not so familiar with this type of Google tricks, this LinkSearch tool can actualy bail you out. Not just that it can probably give you some new thought process on building links ( Have you ever thought that guest blogging can be an effective way to increase your link counts ? )

12 Useful Online Marketing Resources for Small Business Owners

In this post small business owners can find list of Webmaster resources and tools that can help to track and improve existing SEO work performed in Business website or Blog

But don’t forget to leave SEO work to experts :) and suggest your thoughts on your type of business and customers using below Webmaster resources and tools

(1) Google Webmaster Tools to improve traffic
(2) Analyze your visitors, search engine visibility and keyword search through Google Analytics
(3) Find pages that link to your site and competitor site using Site Explorer
(4) Track search engine result placement for your keyword and URL
(5) Check your web page in different screen resolutions
(6) Type out your domain or keywords in search box to find relationship between linking sites and topics, a Visual Meta search engine
7) Check you site load time and fix if it is too slow. This will help search engine spiders to crawl easily
(8) Find out how search engine spiders look at your site
(9) Find how your website is targeted in local search engines
(10) Find insight of your website keyword search terms and location; target your business accordingly
(11) Get quick traffic and cost estimates on your keywords for sponsored listings
(12) Measure your ROI from SEO, PPC and conversion rate optimization

web design step

A website is a collection of Web pages, images, videos or other digital assets.The World Wide Web was initially created to share textual documents around the world.all the website designers create a special document that is intended to be viewed first ,this web page generally contains an overview of the website and/or navigation (Main menu).This web page or document is called as Home page or Index page.

A website contains hypertext(links), these links connect the web page that may be located at same web site or at other web site.When we click on any of these links,the linked page open in new browser window or in the same window.

why website is Important

TODAY I talk about importance of a website.At this time world is a global village on internet and every one want to become a member of web world. So at this moment make your own website is beneficial to your business. Your website is your business identity. website search is a necessity in today's business environment, bringing personality to the commercial arena and your brand. developing and maintaining a business website is essential for business success, and promoting your brand and expand into the online business.


Design mistakes
Here are a few of the mistakes that novices unintentionally make:

1. - Doesn't look professional
2. -Entire sentences are capitalized
3. - Has a dark background with white lettering
4. -Has no simple way to contact the therapist
5. - Too many fonts and text sizes - sometimes the text is too small
6. - Too many colors
7. - Too little white space
   

• :) If your website is full with images and animations, it will take time to load your website. Transmission time will direct proportional transmission speed.
  

• :)Too much decorations will make your websites over-exaggerated, and too little will make your websites dull. You are advised to use simple and nice decorations which able to deliver the meanings of your website to surfers.
  
  
• :)Wide pages will make surfers difficult to read.It's a very important rule to make your website more interesting is never create pages which is too long until scroll bar is needed.
  

• :)Make navigation easy accessible...To make your website convenient, you are advised to include easy accessible links, preferable on left hand side of the page. Also, ensure the navigation consistent across the pages.
  
  
• :)Use simple and easy readable tex

What's new in Gmail?

If you forget often important work then list of work to do or a Tasks is very helpful for you so take advantage of task in gmail . Once you turn on this Labs feature, look for the Tasks link to the left of your inbox under Contacts. Turn on tasks and more from the Labs tab under Settings.

Colored labels
Better organize your email with new colored labels. Just click the color swatch next to each label to assign a color.

Emoticons – they're not just for chat anymore
Express yourself with emoticons from to or even . Click the button when composing a message in "Rich formatting" mode, or choose the new emoticons tab in chat, and express yourself to your 's desire.

(SEO) terms

Zeal - Volunteer Built Web Directory

First launched in 1999, Zeal was a volunteer-built web directory which was bought by LookSmart for $20 million in October 2000. Combining the work from Looksmart’s paid editors with that of volunteers, they wrote profiles of websites and submitted them in relevant subcategories of the Zeal database.

The directory content was downloaded and used by Looksmart and its partners including MSN, Lycos and Altavista.

To become a Zeal volunteer, one needed to pass an introductory level test prior to submitting website profiles and being able to edit other people’s work. As one gained more experience and kudos, an editor was able to create and maintain special categories of interests. The more experienced editors called Zealots and Expert Zealots were responsible for developing community and assist those people called “Community Members”.

Zeal had volunteer members from all over the world including USA, United Kingdom, Australia, India, Spain, Switzerland, Japan and New Zealand. When MSN pulled from the relationship, Zeal’s traffic had declined considerably which lead to its closure on 28th March 2006.

search engine optimization (SEO) terms

Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)
KPIs help organizations achieve organizational goals through the definition and measurement of progress. The key indicators are agreed upon by an organization and are indicators which can be measured that will reflect success factors. The KPIs selected must reflect the organization's goals, they must be key to its success, and they must be measurable. Key performance indicators usually are long-term considerations for an organization."

Key phrase (or keyword phrase)
a search phrase made up of keywords. See "keyword."

Keyword
a word that a search engine user might use to find relevant web page(s). If a keyword doesn't appear anywhere in the text of your web page, it's highly unlikely your page will appear in the search results (unless of course you have bid on that keyword in a pay-per-click search engine).

Keyword density
the number of occurrences that a given keyword appears on a web page. The more times that a given word appears on your page (within reason), the more weight that word is assigned by the search engine when that word matches a keyword search done by a search

Keyword Matching
Keyword matching is the process of selecting and providing advertising or information that match the user's search query.

There are four types of keyword matching including:

Broad Match
Exact Match
Phrase Match
Negative Keyword

Keyword popularity
the number of occurrences of searches done by Internet users of a given keyword during a period of time. Both WordTracker.com and Overture's Keyword Selector Tool (http://inventory.overture.com) provide keyword popularity numbers.

Keyword prominence
the location (i.e. placement) of a given keyword in the HTML source code of a web page. The higher up in the page a particular word is, the more prominent it is and thus the more weight that word is assigned by the search engine when that word matches a keyword search done by a search engine user. Consequently, it's best to have your first paragraph be chock full of important keywords rather than superfluous marketingspeak. This concept also applies to the location of important keywords within individual HTML tags, such as heading tags, title tags, or hyperlink text. So get in the habit of starting off your title tags with a good keyword rather than "Welcome to."

10 Adsense Tips for Maximum CTR

1. You should make your Adsense ads look as a part of your web page

   They shouldn't look like an Ad. People are negative to advertising. They search the internet for content not ads. Especially Banners have a less of 0,5% response. Their days are over. Imagine if you have an Adsense ad looking like the typical Banner with different colors. It will not be profitable.

2. Text ads are better than image ads

   Like before, people are more responsive to text than images. In a way it is considered as a part of the online document and has higher CTR.

3. No Border ads

   One of the best tricks is to erase the borders of Adsense ads and make them again having the same color with your website's background.

4. No other advertisements

   The first reason is to be legitimate according to Google's Rules and the second more practical reason is that you do not want to distract your visitor's attention and go somewhere else without clicking your Adsense ads.

5. Placement

   Even if you have the best Ad, people will not respond if they don't see it instantly. The best place to see the ad is the top of your web page and the next is aside your document's text. Visitors will click it more frequently since it will look like your text.

6. Traffic

   Try to use legitimate ways of traffic. Some people use Google Adwords and other Pay per Click search engines. The problem here is to search very carefully for the right niche and keywords in order to make your campaigns profitable. Other ways is link popularity techniques like link exchange directories, software or even mass blog submission techniques. Don't use link farms and classifieds for that, because search engine's algorithms are extremely clever and they will ban your listings.

7. Do not rely on one website

   Yes you can make money with one website but try to make as more as possible.

8. Relevant content is King

   Articles are one of the best tactics to create huge websites that will be crawled by search engine's robots. Don't forget search engines exist to provide relevant content at first. One excellent resource to automate your article directory procedure is http://www.articleequalizer.com .You can create an article database in minutes which otherwise is time consuming and it would take you a week!

9. Use site maps

   Google's site maps visit your site and crawl it much sooner that any other submission process. More information is here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps

10. Relevant ads

    It's one of the most important factors for Adsense success. If the internet user can't find relevant ad in your page he or she won't click the ad. Would you act differently? So it's critical to create relevant resource for your web page. In order to do that, you must do the following steps.

    First the file must be saved with the appropriate name for example: Golf-Secrets.html if your article is about golf. So the webpage will be: www.yoursitesname.com/Golf-Secrets.html. Second thing you must change is your title tag. For example:

    [Title]Golf-Secrets article [/title]
    

    Third is the heading. The first sentence must have this heading:
    

    [h1]12 Golf secrets[/h1]

10 Adsense Tips for Maximum CTR

Top Tips for Advertising

As with any industry in its day-to-day life, such as advertising and business, there are always tips on how best to deal with situations, how best to approach people depending upon the circumstances and the reason for approaching.

For the world of advertising, here are some basic tips that will help you along and help you achieve your desired goal more expediently and effectively.

• Find your target audience

You will have to do some initial research. For online advertising youll want to use an ad tracker, as this will give you an idea of where your ad is going and what industry setting you get the most views from.

• Know your competitive edge

What can you offer that others cant? Maybe they can offer the same thing but can you find a different spin or edge to make your product more appealing?

Maybe you can go one step further in offering up just a little bit more. Maybe you have more experience or knowledge.

There are a lot of ways to form a competitive edge. Know your market and your competitors and be creative.

• Establishing your image can be the best or worst thing for you - depending on how you project it
  

If you project a bad image for yourself or your company, then your sales will most definitely not be where you want them to be.

Always be professional. Be careful of what you say, whether it be on air or in print. Use a catchy logo and tag line. Make your image good and consistent so that it becomes recognizable.

• Spend and make money many people dont like this age old adage - You have to spend money to make money

But it is very true. You will eventually spend money on advertising, even with free advertising as time alone is money.

The more money you spend, generally the better your reach. You dont want to lower your effectiveness in sales by cutting corners.

The cheaper and free advertising may be a good short term solution when youre starting out but eventually you will want to look into different advertising options that may require more money.

While most advertising is budgeted, dont be a stick-in-the-mud with that budget. All industries have seasonal times.

Learn the best times and season for your product or service and during these time increase your budget. Look at places such as Wal-Mart for back to school or holiday sales - they dont stay within their set advertising budget.

Knowing when your high and low sales points are will be will become a cornerstone in determining when to go over budget.

Keep in mind as well that these seasonal times can change according to economy and market changes.

• Know your market; find your niche

You do not want to advertise in the wrong community. If you want to sell rodeo tickets you dont go to a baseball game. Do your research to find your niches.

• Diversification is a great key to advertising

You never want to use just one measure of attracting customers. Generally the wealthiest businesses are the ones that use a many-fold approach in finding new clients and customers.

• Keep in mind that your product or service will not appeal to everyone, no matter what you do

If you spend the time and money trying to appeal to everyone, you stand a high risk of losing more than you are gaining. This is especially so when you are a smaller company.

Even the major fast food chains dont do this. They have a market and they know who that market is.

While these tips dont sound too difficult, you would be surprised at just how many people struggle with advertising.

The key is always to diversify, be persistent and track your results ruthlessly so that you know whats working and what isnt.

Top Tips for Advertising

Clickbank Formula Explained

In ClickBank market place there are many products to promote, one of the best way to promote these product is using PPC marketing. There are some factor to consider before begin promoting. First thing first, would you make profit from it? You have to limit your pay-per-click bid not let it over your about to return profit for each sale. There is tool to do the calculation this formula, I call it ClickBank Formula. But first let me show you how this ClickBank formula works.

First thing to consider, for each of ClickBank's product you sold click bank would take away 7.5% of the product price plus $1 for the transaction issue. If the product price is $100, click bank will take away $7.5 + $1 = 8.5. You're your commission would be calculated from 91.5. Let's say the payout commission is %75 you will earn 68.62, not $75.

The ClickBank formula would go like this

Gross Revenue = Product Price - ((7.5% * Product Price) / 100) - 1)

Affiliate Commission = Gross Revenue * payout commission%

That is the formula on how to calculate how much you will get for each sale.

Now you want to see how far you can go for each pay-per-click bid. You need to estimate how many click you have to pay before you can make one sale. Personally, I would take it from 100 clicks for each sale, if I had 2 sale for 100 clicks it does not hurt, do they?.

Let take it from the above example with the clickback' product price of $100 and the commission of %75, as already said your affiliate commission would be $68.62. You could round it up to $68 for the sake of easy calculation, but I prefer to leave it as it is. Why? because, as you may realize when we talk about PPC revenue we talk in decimal number, which is in cent. With 100 click to be able to sale once, the most PPC rate you could afford paying to promote this product would be $0.69. If you go beyond $0.69 you are likely to lost your money.

The calculation would be like this:

PPC Rate = Affiliate Commission / Click Through Rate Expected

All of this work you can use ClickBank Formula to help you work out these number plus the information of how much the product had been refunded.

Search Engines Spiders/Crawlers

These are the name of major search engines Spiders (Crawler)Name:-

Search Engines Spiders or Crawler Name
Google :- Googlebot

Yahoo :- Yahoo Slurp

MSN :- MSNbot

Ask :- Teoma

Excite :- Architext spider

Inktomi.com :- Slurp

Alexa :- ia_archiver

Altavista :- Scooter

Lycus :- Lycos_Spider_(T-Rex)

Cuil :- Twiceler (New Search Engine)

Looksmart :- MantraAgent

SEO = Search engine optimization

What is seo? Seo is all about helping the search engines to crawl your site better and give them the best of your site. This requires a lot of things to be done. We will try to post some of the valuable search engine optimization information here.
Blogs and websites get success by achieving a huge traffic. So how do we actually get traffic? For this there are many factors to it. We will try to put up some of the factors here:
1) Google page rank, higher the page rank the better it is. Page rank starts from 0 and goes to 10. page rank 4-6 should be considered decent. Google pagerank is found in the google toolbar. Though it is not all that accurate, so perhaps checking the pr from data centers are a better idea.
2) Backlinks are important, but geting backlinka involves a lot of work.
3) Unique content and fresh content.
If you get backlinks and fresh content, google page rank will go up, so let’s talk about the backlinks first. These are a few methods to get backlinks
1) Article submission : it is one of the easiest ways to get backlinks. Just write a quality article, and submit it to as many article submission websites as you can. And add your website’s link in the article. This is how you get easy and free backlinks. Remember to check the page rank, as higher page rank article submission sites, are the best to get some quality backlinks. Remember this is contextual links, so this traffic is absolutely targeted, so it is adviced to write articles of the same category as the link in it.
2) Directory submission : I don’t recommend the free directories, as there are too many links. If you go for the free directories, then don’t submit all in one day, do it slowly so that the search engines don’t detect a lot of links at once! Too many links are link farms and it can get your site blacklisted by google and other search engines. Try the paid directories, must be pr3+ else it is pretty much waste of time. Some of my favorites are alive, aviva, v7n, gii etc!
3) Link exchange : this is another free method, but don’t do this too much. Find high pagerank websites, that are of the same category of your website. Then do link exchange with them. Do this with caution, and remember not to have more than 5% of your incomming links from link exchange, else it will hurt the rankings.
4) Buy links : well, one of the most easiest ways of getting quality backlink is buying links. You need to be careful to buy link, try getting links from pr4+ sites and get it from the home page. This is the best way, as you get quality one sided links. But then matt’s recent blogs are a bit against it, so perhaps doing this safely will be a lot better. Don’t put paid links or sponsored links in your sites. Do not actively sell or buy links.
You must optimize your keywords also. So for that, whenever you buy links or do link exchange, use your most important keyword to hiperlink your URL. This way your keywords importance in the search engines will increase. This is known as anchor text optimization. It is the best Seo technique.
Meta tags are very important, keep proper Meta tags in the head of your web site, following Meta tags much be present in your pages if you want to get higher rank and better traffic from the search engines:
1) Keywords = must be around 120-150 characters long. 50% of your keywords and key phrases must be on your web site’s content, else it will be considered as keyword spamming. This is not the most important meta tags, these days search engines are more or less ignoring the keywords, so am repeating, that please don’t put up keywords that are not part of your page’s content.
2) Description: this is a very important Meta tags, when the site’s don’t have much contents, the meta description is used by the search engines to determine what type of site it is. This one must be around 150-175 characters, not more than that.
3) Title : this is the most important Meta tag. Title is the main reason why a site dose good in search engines and why a site dose not. A title tag must not be more than 50-60 characters. Try not putting up anything other than text in the title’s field. Also it is very important to put up your most important keyword in the title. Avoid special symbols, and if you want to put two keywords or key phrases in the title use this symbol “ ” between them.
These little things make huge difference for your search engine rankings and search engine traffic. Seo is all about helping the search engines, not finding way to cheat it. Try making nice websites, so that you visitors like them, and come back whenever they want more information.
Then next point is unique content and fresh content. These are two things that are very much necessary to make a successful site. You need quality unique content, and then you need to add these contents everyday. You can bring search engines crawlers by a lot of methods, but then only if you have quality unique content then your site will have better position in the search engines. High page rank and lot’s more depends on the content. So start writing and write, as often you want. Perhaps this is one of the major reasons that blogs works better than most websites.
If you are on the blogger try the feeds. Feeds are one of the best way to bring more people to read your content. The rss and xml feeds are pretty common these days. Blogger feeds are atom.xml and it works great. Use feedburner.com to get the most out of your feeds. Just get a free account there, add your site’s feed in the feed burner, after that make some add to “my google” and “my yahoo” buttons, that’s it! just add those buttons on your site, easy!
Social networking is one of the best ways to drive a huge traffic to your websites or blogs, but then it dosenot really help to much from the seo point of view, as the nofollow tags are available with the link on those sites. But then am getting over a few thousand hits from the social network sites, so it is worth a try, most of all, it is all free!
del.icio.us, stumbleupon, digg, furl etc are a few of these!
A quick link building tips :
Start giving comments on blogs, there are some of the famous blogs with huge pr, and traffic, though the nofollow tags might be there, but then it is still good to go for a try. Just add a link with the comment!
Forum signatures are a nice way to make traffic, good for backlinks.

Make Money Online as a Freelance Graphics Designer

As long as you have the necessary skills, being a graphics designer can be a wonderful opportunity to make money online. As a freelance graphics designer, you can work from home or make money from wherever you please.

In order to excel in this field, you will need the skills and passion for making art. Whether your interest is in designing tattoos, logos, sketches, drawings, or grand paintings, your love for art can pay off in this exciting industry. All you really need is to have a good program like Adobe Photoshop and learn everything there is to know about it. The rest will be up to your creativity and skills.

There’s much money to be made as a freelance graphics designer. People hire graphics designers because they don’t have the skills to create designs themselves. Whether the need is a logo for business cards and letterheads, a cool background for websites, or whatever else it may be, every company out there has needs for design services. It doesn’t matter whether your clients are sole proprietors starting up small businesses or huge enterprises that need fresh designs. You will surely be paid well for your services.

If you already have the skills and knowledge necessary for graphics design, you will want to develop some samples for your portfolio. Once you have done this, you can start promoting your services through freelance websites or forums. As you gain more and more projects and earn more and more money for your services, you may want to develop your own website. This website should show off your talents and allow its visitors to see why they should hire you. Having a website will make your service look more professional and you can use it to improve on your internet marketing efforts.

Once you’ve gained a good set of regular clients and have developed a good reputation online, you can surely gain a good and steady income for your creativity and talent.