Sync Your Computer's Firefox with Your Phone's

Original Article: A couple years ago, Mozilla launched Weave, which is a Mozilla Labs project aimed at letting Firefox users sync their personal preferences with Firefox browsers on other computers or on their phones. Now, Mozilla has announced a new version of Weave Sync in Weave 0.5.

What Can You Do with It? - Get the same results on the Smart Location Bar on each of your Firefox browsers.

- Open any tab that is open in any of your other FF browsers

- Keep the same list of bookmarks throughout multiple FF browsers

- Easily sign in to all of your favorites sites using saved passwords

- It is all secure as Weave Sync encrypts user data before uploading it to Mozilla's servers

The new version includes additional improvements including a major upgrade in performance when uploading and downloading. Sync waits until you're not actively using the browser, and support for bookmark tags and smart folders has been improved.

Support has also been added for changing passwords, and there is better error handling and reporting. Weave Sync now supports Fennec on Windows Mobile and Firefox on x86 OpenSolaris now as well.

More information is available about Weave here, and it can be downloaded here. It requires Firefox 3.5 or higher.

Microsoft Granted Motion to stay Word Injunction

XML-Related Patent Issues Cause Trouble for MS, Company Will Appeal

Update: The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has reportedly granted Microsoft's motion to stay an injunction that would prohibit the software giant from selling Word. The injunction had an effective date of Oct. 10, but the motion to stay blocks the injunction until the appeal process is complete, according to The Microsoft Blog.

Original Article: A Texas judge has reportedly ruled that Microsoft cannot sell any version of Word in the US that can open .XML, .DOCX or DOCM files (XML files) containing custom XML. Seattlepi's Microsoft Blog points to an announcement by the plaintiff, i4i.

In May, i4i in Toronto got $200 million from Microsoft, when a federal jury found that Microsoft infringed on the company's patent. That patent is 11 years old. The abstract reads:

A system and method for the separate manipulation of the architecture and content of a document, particularly for data representation and transformations. The system, for use by computer software developers, removes dependency on document encoding technology. A map of metacodes found in the document is produced and provided and stored separately from the document. The map indicates the location and addresses of metacodes in the document. The system allows of multiple views of the same content, the ability to work solely on structure and solely on content, storage efficiency of multiple versions and efficiency of operation.


The entire thing can be read here.

"We are disappointed by the court's ruling," a Microsoft spokesman is quoted as saying in a statement. "We believe the evidence clearly demonstrated that we do not infringe and that the i4i patent is invalid. We will appeal the verdict."

Four New Gmail Themes Released

Gmail users who require that everything be just so may be in luck; a few new personalization opportunities have been made available in the form of four new themes. And in fact, one of the four themes caters to indecisive types, so members of the Gmail team really covered their bases.

All right, we admit it - these Gmail themes aren't going to generate Google's next billion dollars. In all likelihood, they won't even convince more than one or two souls (if that) to switch from Hotmail or Yahoo Mail.

Still, these are the first new themes in about ten months, so on we go.

Pictured on the left below is a screenshot of what Googlers Jake Knapp and Manu Cornet identified on the Official Gmail Blog as the "Orcas Island" theme. Knapp promised "a new image each day of the week."

On the right, you can see what Cornet called "High Score." It should seem familiar to anyone who spent more than a few minutes playing the original Nintendo.

The third theme is called "Turf." It shows some green grass and not much more. Finally, Cornet wrote that the "Random" theme "merely cycles through all the others."

Knapp and Cornet welcomed feedback if you're inclined to give it, and they also indicated that still more themes might wander down the pipeline at some point.

Bit.ly Shortens URL Shorteners

On Twitter, Every Character Counts

URL-shortening service bit.ly, the favorite of Twitter, has introduced a new URL-shortening service, or an extension of the original one rather. The new one is j.mp, which as you can see by looking at it resides at a domain with very few characters.

That is exactly the reason bit.ly has introduced it. The company says that for some people, "every character counts," and that is certainly true in the Twitter age, where a maximum of 140 characters is allowed per tweet.

"j.mp has the same short URLs, metrics, history, user accounts (you’ll have to login again, but your bit.ly accounts will carry over), and customization you’ve come to enjoy on bit.ly, all on a short, memorable domain," says bit.ly on its blog.

So by simply using j.mp instead of bit.ly, you will be saving two characters automatically. This doesn't seem like a major difference, but it could be the difference between including one more word or not.

To some people - particularly marketers, tweets could almost be thought of like an email subject line. Having the right words can be key in getting someone to click a link (the tweeting equivalent to an email open).

Then there is the subject of being found in real-time searches. Keywords play a very important role in what tweets appear in these results. When there is a 140-character max, every character certainly can count. Either way, using a service like j.mp could save you from having to abbreviate certain words, which can frankly, sometimes make your message sound dumber.

We've certainly seen a lot of URL-shortening services appear over the last year or so, and I suspect we'll see quite a few more. I have a feeling that we might see more going for this as-short-as-possible approach with them in the future. J.mp has a pretty good advantage being an extension of bit.ly though.
source: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/09/04/bitly-shortens-url-shorteners

Windows 7 Promises Faster Graphics

Windows 7 operating system will offer significantly improved graphics performance over its predecessors due to the new OS's ability to more efficiently delegate work to 3D graphics cards, according to an official from a major GPU vendor.

Nvidia product manager Chris Daniel said Windows 7 is "the first Windows operating system to treat the graphics processing unit (GPU) as a real peer to the CPU."

Daniel, writing in a blog post Friday, said that with the introduction of Windows 7, "Microsoft is really opening up the immense parallel computing horsepower of the GPU natively right in the operating system."

That could be good news for a range of PC users with heavy graphics requirements, including gamers, engineers, artists, and others.

One key to Windows 7's graphics performance is a new application programming interface known as DirectX Compute. The API enables computers to take full advantage of the parallel processing power built into today's high-end cards from Nvidia and other vendors.

"Parallel programming is the next big thing for the world of computing—it has started already," said Daniel. "DirectX Compute will accelerate this discontinuity by enabling massive parallelism to the masses. What we are talking about is co-processing—essentially using the right tool for the job," said Daniel.

He added that DirectX Compute, in concert with Windows 7, will enable use of advanced technologies like SLI-based, multi-GPU gaming, 3D Vision, and PhysX real-time physics.

Microsoft last week released Windows 7 to manufacturing, meaning it's now available to system builders and other industry professionals. The company plans to release the OS to consumers on Oct. 22nd.

The software maker is hoping Windows 7's release will revive flagging software sales.

Microsoft last week revealed that Windows sales slumped 29% in the most recent quarter, compared to the same period a year ago. Windows Vista, Microsoft's current version of Windows, has proven unpopular with many consumers and has been shunned by most corporate users.

Resources: http://www.informationweek.com/news/windows/operatingsystems/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=218600722

Hidden Content Sources for Your Website

As I travel through the Google search engine, there is one element that defines almost all of the top-ranking websites. It's great content. People come online for information and those that offer the best content reap the greatest rewards.

Unfortunately, this type of content is hard to come by. In most cases, you either have to spend hours in front of the keyboard or outsource the job to others. Both of these options are very costly. One requires your valuable time and the other requires an investment of around $10 - $20 per article.

That's why I have scoured the net in search of valuable free content sources. I'm still not quite sure why I'm revealing my treasured piles of free content, but I certainly hope you enjoy them.

One of my favorite sources of content is public domain. This comprises the body of knowledge without a copyright. Anyone can use this material for commercial or non-commercial purposes. Below are some excellent sources for public domain material.

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is a library of 18,000 free ebooks whose copyright has expired. "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes", "Pride and Prejudice", "The Time Machine", "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and "The Canterbury Tales" have all passed into the public domain.

This means that you can put these on your website or even sell them in electronic or book format.

Explore a wealth of free content at Gutenberg.org.

Archive.org

At Archive.org you can find thousands of works that are currently in the public domain. Want to put some cartoons on your web site? Check out the "Film Chest Vintage Cartoons", which is full of classic animated cartoons from the 1930's and 1940's. The collection includes Popeye, Porky Pig, Bugs Bunny, Woody Woodpecker, The Three Stooges and Betty Boop. They also provide tons of other reproducable content including:

Brick Films: Commonly called "LEGO Movies". Brick films are dedicated to the art of stop motion animation.

SabuCat Movie Trailers: The world's largest collection of theatrical trailers.

Feature Films: A large number of classic feature films and shorts.

Universal Newsreels: Newsreels were shown before every feature film in the pre-tv era.

Computer Chronicles: Was the world's most popular television program on personal technology during the height of the computer revolution.

Net Cafe: Television series covering the revolution during the height of the dot com boom.

All of these content sources are available for you to put on your website. check them out at Archive.org.

Another popular public domain destination is Wikipedia.org. Here you will find over 1 million articles ranging from Greek mythology and Egyptian history to business, health, and technology.

Go to Wikipedia.org for a huge collection of articles you can reprint on your own website.

Creative Commons

Every creative work receives copyright protetion as soon as you put pen to paper, hit save, or press record. Because of this, no one can use that work without express permission from the author.

Creative Commons provides a new content license that allows you to share your work with others. If you want, you can even allow other people to expand upon your existing work. This allows for creative co-authorship.

The Creative Commons license has made piles of content available for use on your web site. Whether you are looking for audio, images, video, or text, you can find an abundance of reusable information within the creative commons.

To search for content to put on your own web site, go to CreativeCommons.org.

Government Web Sites

Works produced by the U.S. Federal government are not copyrighted. If you obtain a government document from the net, you are free to copy and distribute the document. I have found plenty of great content about finance, retirement, health, business, and traveling on government websites.

To search for content offered by the United States government, go to http://www.google.com/unclesam.

Article Directories

There are thousands of writers on the internet and many of them would love for you to reprint their articles on your website. You can find thousands of free web articles at the following article directories.

GoArticles.com
EzineArticles.com
ArticleCity.com

Interviews

I consider interviews to be one of the best sources of quality content for your site. Simply interview industry professionals and post the recording and transcript on your website. This allows you to create original content very quickly.

Don't be afraid to ask for an interview, most experts would be delighted to speak with you. Remember, this is probably one of their greatest passions. If you ask them politely, your chances for landing an interview are good.

You can conduct an interview in person, over the phone, or even through an e-mailed questionaire.

RSS Feeds

RSS is changing the way we consume information online. In addition, it has also provided thousands of new content sources for the online publisher. RSS is simply a file format similar to XML that is used by publishers to make their content available to others in a format that can be easily understood by web publishing software and content aggregators.

By using RSS feeds, you can enhance the content on your site without ever writing a single word. And remember, on the Internet, content is King.

Want to put Amazon products on your site, updated news from the New York Times, financial advice from Motley Fool, or press releases from PRWeb?

This is all possible with RSS. No matter what type of information you are looking for, RSS can provide you with a constant stream of updated content for your web site.

To search for an RSS feed to enhance your own website, go to Syndic8.com. You can even mix and match a variety of rss feeds at RSSMix.com.

Facts & Statistics

Looking for facts or figures to put on your website? Take a look at some of the sources below. You'll likely be surprised how many facts, figures, and definitions are available in the public domain.

The CIA World Factbook provides a number of statistics on countries, territories, and dependencies. Each profile tracks such demographics as population, ethnicity, and literacy rates, as well as political, geographical and economic data.

http://www.census.gov/: One of the largest repositories for data and statistics related to the U.S.

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Main_Page: One of the best encyclopedia's ever written was published over 90 years ago. Search over 40,000 articles, all of which are available for publication on your own site.

http://www.bibliomania.com/2/3/257/frameset.html: A searchable interface of the 1913 public domain Webster's dictionary.

Private Label Articles

Private label articles can be bought for pennies per article. This is possible because they are sold in bulk.

Many people criticize these articles and have declared them as worthless. However, I am here to tell you that private label articles can be very powerful when used appropriately.

Unless you have hours of free time every day, it is unlikely that you are going to be able to create the amount of quality content that your web site deserves. This is where private label content enters the picture.

You can use private label articles to:

• Add content to your web site.
• Acquire hundreds of inbound links by syndicating the articles to article directories.
• Create a free report for your visitors and other website publishers.
• Create an information-packed RSS feed.

However, the key to using private label articles effectively is to optimize them. Straight out of the box, these articles are near worthless. To give them value, you must add your own touch.

Inject your personality into the article. Combine multiple articles and do some additional touch-ups to ensure that the article is in top shape for your readers.

Once you are finished you can add your resource box and send it off to article directories and website publishers.

If you are looking for one of the top private label article providers, go to InfoGoRound.com.

Images

Quality images can make your content much more inviting and keep people at your site for longer periods of time. Fortunately, there is a site that offers thousands of pictures completely free of charge. Find it at Stock.XCHNG.

Quotes

Quotes can give your website a special touch. Quotes provide interesting content in addition to an element of credibility. I often like to add related quotes to my web site simply to engage the reader's attention.

To find some quotes for your website, go to QuoteLand.com.

In the end, you always want your content to be unique. Not for the search engines, but for your visitors. With quality content comes quality links. Once you have built up a reputation for delivering unique content, you will never have to worry about having an audience eager to visit your website.

Reduce loading time of your website

Optimizing your web page loading time is essential for keeping your visitors. If your pages load time is too long due to un-optimized images, people simply leave your site before it is loaded! This way, you might miss out many visitors and also Comes with Latest Seo Tips.

Move all HTML code present inside tags to an external CSS file. Styles embedded in webpages make them bulky while the CSS file is downloaded just once on the client computer.

Remove Excess “Whitespace” Whitespace is the spaces between your coding, removing the unneeded tabs and spaces can help a lot! Doing this will take a lot of extra bytes off the total size of your page and will speed up load time quite a bit. (Careful using automatic squishers, I find they often squish too much and makes it rather hard to edit later).

If your pages have lot of Javascript code, move all the code to a separate external file that would load just once.

Large pictures should be avoided on webpages. But if you can’t do without them, slice them into smaller pictures.

Reduce the HTTP Requests: when opening a web page every object (images, scripts and the line) will require a round trip to the server. This latency can add several seconds to the load time of your site. Make sure to reduce the number of objects and to combine CSS files and scripts together.

It is important to have a reasonably fast loading web site so that viewers are not made to wait for a long time and to accommodate users on slow internet connections.

One-Way Link Building: How To Explode Your Online Business With One-Way Link Building Strategies

If you want a proven way to get high rankings on the search engines and ultimately succeed online, then you need to know how to apply one-way link building to your marketing ventures.

Why is one-way link building an effective marketing strategy?

Because it is the only way for the major search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) to recognize your web pages.

You need to get as many one-way back links to your website, so that search engines will rank your pages higher when browsers type in your targeted keywords.

You could exchange links with other sites, but one-way links are given more weight by the search engines than reciprocal links.

One-Way Link Building Through Article Marketing

Article marketing is an ideal way to get one-way links that are proven to get lots of free organic traffic.

One-way link building through article marketing could produce effective results. Not overnight of course; but in time, you can slowly (but surely) take advantage of one way link building and article marketing to make good money online – on autopilot! How do you do that?

Write informative articles and include an attention-grabbing resource box (also called author bio) in the article. The resource box is where you will put the anchored text of your link. The anchored text should contain your targeted keyword, so that your link gets a “vote” for that keyword, aside from getting a “vote” from the article directory site too.

This is not the only merit of article marketing. It could also elevate your reputation into an expert of your niche.

Thus, before you embark on submitting articles in article directories, you may first need to research your keywords and niche extensively. Look at what issues your audience face and find solution to those problems. Then, create keyword-optimized articles to help them solve that problem. As a result, people will regard you as a specialist in your field.

Article marketing is an effective promotional campaign to get your sites known and be an authority on your chosen niche.

Other Powerful Methods Of One-Way Link Building

1) Buying Links

Aside from writing and submitting articles, some internet marketer resort to buying links from other sites, preferably those with high page rank. However, if you do not have the money to buy those back links, don’t worry. There are free methods you can use (see below).

2) Forum Postings

A free and effective way to generate one way links, and also improve your chances of inducing trust and respect in your niche, is by posting at forums relevant to your niche.

Find the problems your target market faces and give them the solution to those problems. You may use the link to your website as a signature, but make sure they allow sig files and that you have made some valuable contributions. Give first, and the money will follow.

3) Blogging

Blogs can likewise help you in your one-way link building pursuits. If you’re passionate about your niche, you can easily write your own comments, opinions, or viewpoints on various topics related to it. Post updates in your blog regularly and include links to your business websites.

4) Content-Sharing Sites

You may also post your content (with your one-way backlinks) on social marketing or content-sharing sites. Some reliable ones include:

Squidoo.com
Hubpages.com
Wetpaint.com
Quizilla.com
Qassia.com

5) Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in your one-way link building arsenal, but you have to be very careful. Many of them prohibit any marketing activities, so you need to be very subtle and “fly under the radar.” You could accomplish this by posting around 5 times more non-self-serving sites than your own sites.

You could also gain their trust by joining groups, writing comments on other people’s bookmarks, and be a helpful contributor to their community.

Some of the more famous bookmarking sites include:
Digg.com
Stumpleupon.com
Del.icio.us
Technorati.com
Reddit.com
Fark.com
Propeller.com
Kaboodle.com
Mixx.com
Furl.net

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

While one-way links help your sites rank higher on the search engines, you could also get top rankings by optimizing your web pages with your keywords.

You can do this by strategically putting your keywords in the title tag of your site, in the headings (H1, H2, etc.), in the alt tags of images, meta tags, and of course, in the content of your site (especially effective if you put the keywords in the beginning of your content). Selecting a domain containing the keywords would also help.

Keywords help web spiders to crawl into your web pages, and this will help you rank well in the search engines.

Aside from one-way link building and SEO, don’t forget that your main purpose is to help your target market solve their problems. So positioning yourself as an expert and having a truly quality product, combined with the right link building and marketing strategies, could skyrocket your profits to new heights.

source: http://www.article-buzz.com/Article/One-Way-Link-Building--How-To-Explode-Your-Online-Business-With-One-Way-Link-Building-Strategies/298260

How To Start An Internet Marketing Business Without Mistakes

People tend to forget about other things in life once they decide and start a new business as they get single minded. They will forget about friends, family, relatives around them once they start selling in the future which is not a good idea. But once you think about the objectives it helps to make sure that you are going forward in life that all your dreams come true.

Your attention is required as life is involved in different things all at once. But people who know about all ambitions and goals will carry on performing well. Every person should look for items that aren’t optimizing your resources and times as the business goals are set up and the items are added to succeed in life. Other people are also affected some times we make decisions in one place as work and life are interconnected. In order to succeed your objectives you should do activities that are related to both professionally and personally.

A mission statement is the big picture vision that all of your decisions revolve around. This big picture prevents you from getting caught up in the details of life, and allows you to keep some perspective as to why you are really doing something. It is easy to start for one reason, and keep going for another. When you achieve and start to experience and live your life of vision, remember to incorporate the real purpose of your life.

Internet marketing can be one of the most overwhelming fields anyone could choose, because it is so vast and it’s like getting a Harvard Education every week with the content and value of information we receive every day, especially if you are a newbie. Starting with an organized slate means getting some strategies in place to help you stay on top, and not under this market.

Internet marketing newbie should follow these strategies:

(1) For each internet marketer you are following, open up an email folder for them and start to put each of their emails in there. This is for 2 reasons, one it is easier to follow what they are talking about and do any lessons you have missed, and two, it can serve as a swipe file to get good ideas from in the future.

(2) The previous things should be organized in such a way that the new information should be allocated in their respective folders. This can be done in many ways, take an example, like all the files in the hard drive should be arranged in PDF, audios, e-books, videos, data with resell rights and stuff with private label rights. Along with this you should include a new folder to each mentor program in which you are interested and place all the details regarding that mentor’s program. Just allocate some time to clean up and arrange all the stuff in the way you receive on top.

Always be among the most encouraging and positive friends and avoid other people slowly. According to Forbes Magazine there are 1281 billionaires in this world. Is it possible to reach that number? If some person tells it can be achieved then others will start following. The number looks like 4 minute mile but once you star your journey towards your aims and ambitions you will get excited about the adventures you face and try to celebrate every small success step in life.

source: http://www.article-buzz.com/Article/How-To-Start-An-Internet-Marketing-Business-Without-Mistakes/311122

5 Ways To Drive Sales During A Recession Using Email Marketing

What’s the most important thing you can do during these turbulent economic times?

a) Drown your fears with a bottle of wine and hope things will be better in the morning. Repeat each night as necessary.

b) You know this can’t be Kansas! Click your heels three times fast! Hey, it worked for Dorothy.

c) Embrace the reality of the situation and use email marketing to drive sales right on through this recession!

Now isn’t the time to slow down. Don’t take your foot off the gas, and get ready to fully utilize the most effective tool in the box - email marketing. Even though you’re probably already using email to send out offers or highlight the occasional promotion, you may not be employing all of the tips and tricks you could be to keep your customers happy and prospects knocking on your door. Take a look at these 5 ways to help ensure success.

1. Let’s stay in touch: what’s your email address?

Do people want to receive your mailings? You have to keep your customers coming back for more by sending them emails they want to see. Most people are quick to delete the overflow of email they receive, and if it looks like spam, you know it’s gotta taste like spam. And where is the best place for spam? The trash. If done correctly, email marketing is the most inexpensive way to reach and positively impact your audience and keep your sales rolling in. The keys to the kingdom are right there in your hands, you just need permission to unlock the gate.

If you don’t have a sign-up form for folks to hear about special offers and promotions, get one up both on your website and at your store counter. People who sign up are handing over their email addresses willingly. They want to hear from you. So you really need to make sure your message counts.

How do you make sure your message counts? Offer some content that’s tied in with what you are promoting, and if you don’t have a newsletter, start one up. Keep it light, and keep it short. If you’re an auto parts store, offer up some “car care tips,” or if you’re a nursery, suggest “5 easy ways to make your garden grow”. You get it. Even a couple of short entries with nifty tips or “how-to” sections are helpful to the recipient. It will catch their attention and make them want to read on.

2. Have I met you somewhere before?

Make sure the recipient of your email knows it’s you by making sure the email “from” box is your business name. You don’t want them to delete it because they don’t know where it came from, or worse yet, mark it as spam.

3. The subject of subject lines

You need catchy subject lines that are relevant to the offer. “Free Puppies” will only get you a one-way ticket to Trashville. Folks don’t like to be tricked into opening emails. If you’re offering a special sale or discount, include it in the subject line. Example: “Save 25-75% off Winter Fashions” or “Free shipping - 1 Day Only!”

4. Make them an offer they can’t refuse

Frivolous spending is so last year, so you have to make sure your offers are good ones. When you’re putting your offering together, be objective. Does the offer appeal to you?

Limited time sales. The urgency of it all! If it’s a good sale, the autopilot comes on, and out comes the credit card. After all, if they wait until next week, they’ll have to pay full price.

Real Discounts. 5% off an order of $500 - Seriously? Turn out the lights and lock the door. No one is going to bite. Of course, you need to be smart and not lose the bank, but make it worthwhile for people! Repeat after me: “Good discounts = good sales.”

Loyalty programs. You know the old punch card trick: buy nine cups of coffee, get the tenth one free. Employ this simple strategy to something your business has to offer.

Contests. Encourage folks to enter a cool contest, both online and in your store - this is a great way to collect all of their contact info. Be sure to include a check box for a subscription to your newsletter and send alerts for upcoming sales and promotions.

And don’t be cheap. Make sure your prize is a nice one. Many people can’t help themselves; there’s a certain thrill at the idea of winning that sought-after item. Oh, they’ll enter all right, and the prize for you is going to be all of the opt-in email addresses you can market to. Get ready for some more sales.

Be sure to offer your discounted products or services on a regular basis. Be consistent, but not annoying. You don’t want to let your relationship grow cold, but sending an email out more than once or twice a week is overkill, and a surefire way to breakup blues.

If the recipient wants to find out more information about your services or products, make sure it’s as easy as one click in your email. Don’t take them to a Web page where they have to dig around to find what they are looking for. They’ll simply abandon ship and there goes your sale, right along with them.

5. “Hi, I’m Molly. How can I help you?”

Make sure you add a link, email, or phone number for customer service or support. Make it easy for people to reach you and get their questions answered or their problems solved. Even if that neon orange jumpsuit isn’t flattering to their skin tone after all, good experiences here will make them want to do business with you the next time around.

Always employ good email marketing practices by making sure that everyone on your target list is supposed to be there. Only add names if you’re executing and measuring a test. Make sure to give readers the opportunity to hop off the list by unsubscribing, but remember, if you treat them right, that thought won’t even enter their mind.

Times may be looking a bit tough, but email marketing is highly effective, and it’s here to stay. Employ the strategies above, and the benefits can’t be denied: lead generation, increased sales, strong brand awareness, and improved relationships with your customers. So, get out your umbrella and weather this storm. Utilize the tools you have at your fingertips and you’ll see that the forecast suddenly becomes clear.

Source

Top 10 Website Design Don’ts

1. Don’t be ‘Mrs. I Don’t Know What I Want, But I’ll Know it When I See It.’
This kills budgets and…sometimes…graphic designers. Have a clear understanding of how you envision your site, including what you want and what you don’t want. With the help of the project team, nail down your aesthetic values and preferences. If you’re lost, start with 5 sites in your business vertical and make lists of 10 visual likes and 10 visual dislikes. Write them down. If there are several people involved in design decisions, you may want to hold a meeting with them beforehand to make sure there aren’t any internal conflicts. Have everyone do this exercise and then compare notes. This will allow the design team to better meet your needs and expectations and avoid wasted budget.

2. Don’t play “Stake-holder Surprise!”
Waiting too long to involve decision-makers can lead to costly changes, timeline extensions, and frustration for everyone involved. If the words “time and materials” fill your heart with joy, then by all means wait to unveil the designs to your boss or your owners until the last moment. But if you want a product delivered on time and on budget, keep all stake-holders involved from the beginning. Time invested upfront reviewing progress, will save these busy people more time later...

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

Why Blogging Important For Business?

Blog being an essential social marketing tool forms to be a great way to communicate with colleagues, friends and more particularly with potential customers and to turn them as regular buyers as well. In recent times, blogging forms to be the main platform for making money online. Most people use it as a basic source of their income.

Blogging is considered important for most businesses as a blog with good and authentic information can help in driving traffic to your main website through your blog. By providing a link of your main site in the blog; it will drive the traffic to offer you double exposure to the world and your customers or buyers as well. ...

source: http://seodiscussions.blogspot.com/2009/07/why-blogging-important-for-business.html

3 Way Links: Why and How

Want to boost your link popularity, increase your Google PR, and improving the amount and quality of your traffic, just discover the secrets of a successful link exchange.

Don’t want to meet up your goal through sending bulks of emails as these will be treated as spam mails, instead look for qualitative and professional way. You have to follow the tricks, which is to know your market and understand your customer. You also know what other type of website your customers would look at if they were interested in your product and judge it to put yourself in your customer’s feet. Type the targeted search phrase into a search engine now and look at what results come up. Just overlook the competition and look at the other websites. Try to match these criteria: relevance, design, content, and navigation. Stick out to the website’s design as it plays a vital role in the exchange process. The sites should have good contents to attract the visitors. Try to achieve links from a page with good contents, not from pages only having links as they are treated as link farms, and of course websites navigation must be search engine friendly, because you will prefer to have the location of your link to be indexed by search engines.

source: http://seodiscussions.blogspot.com/2009/07/3-way-links-why-and-how.html

List of Top Search Engine Marketing Blogs

As ususal, while surfing around in the blogosphere, I keep stumbling upon the same old places and everytime I do, I get to pick some thing or the other that I cannot help but mention in my blog.

Today I came across this list of 380 search engine marketing blogs that Lee (Lee Odden) has mentioned in his blog. While some of these search marketing blogs are already in my favorites list, I found a few new ones that offers a good read for anyone interested in SEO, SEM or other search marketing activities.

If you are reading this post you must be someone who is already addicted to the ever changing world of search engines, web marketing and internet promotions and am sure this list will provide you with more resource to take your addiction to the next level.

Back Tweets Beat Twitter Search

There has been a lot of buzz going around about the Twitter search, how it can be used and even speculations on whether Twitter is going to have a monetization plan using Twitter search. However, one key area where Twitter search fails miserably is in its ability to read URLs. In Twitter, people typically use short URLs and Twitter search doesn't have the capacity to read the actual URLs hidden under them.

As a result, if you are one of those marketers who has been putting some effort to spread the word about your website or blog through Twitter and would like to see how it has been working for you Twitter search would probably not be the best tool to use.

Back Tweets fills this gap just perfectly.

Search for any URL and it can read through all the posts with shortened URLs ( irrespective of the URL shortening service used ) and show you the ones that talks about your website. An excellent way to see how your links are traveling through the Twitter world.

I liked the interface that they have for Back Tweets and it is pretty similar to the Twitter search interface. While I loved the way this worked one thing that set me off a bit is the lack of a RSS feed. Its good that I can search about my website URL and happy about the results but why not throw in a small RSS for me to grab the search results and add it to my feed reader and monitor it regulalrly ? I think getting a RSS feed for the search results would be a great addition for BackTweets.

However, while Back Tweet is great for searching Tweets containing your URLs they are no good if you are just searching for a topic or message.

I think a mix of Twitter search with Back Tweets would be an ideal solution as it would allow us to search the content along with the links. The Back tweet guys would probably have an edge on this race as they already have the Back Type Connect application in place which allows them to search for conversation. So the next step would be to integrate both the platforms.

Let's see if Twitter Search can keep up with the Back Tweet guys.

10 Extraordinary Ideas to Increase your Twitter Followers

As we see many of our friends have written what twitter is all about free social messaging service for staying connected with friends and followers etc etc, so I don't want to add that content to my post :) in fact for a change we will start with an introduction on how the name came up and what’s the meaning of twitter. Here the meaning "Make high-pitched sounds, as of birds" so we can add some hi pitch text and fun along with the discussions in twitter "What you doing" update section like as I do some mischief with my SEO updates and my personal stuffs. By this followers would be interested in your update and they like to read and share your stuffs and not get bored

Here are the ideas how you can make your twitter profile, web page, blog visitor a follower

(1) Read blog post and comment your valid suggestions with your twitter profile in URL field and don't mind about no follow attribute. If your comment is a valid one, user will check your profile to gain your knowledge and share, by this they may follow and their friends may follow

(2) Retweet valuable tweets, suggestions and discussions and you may follow @retweet so that you can monitor which messages are getting retweeted. This way, you can find your own upon the continuous practice. By this your twitter profile might be followed by interesting people

E.g.: RT @jagadeeshmp Great SEO help resource Blog http://tinyurl.com/btqjz5

(3) Follow people back if they are interesting and update often

(4) Join twittgroups.com and tweetchat.com and add (#) hash tag to your update so that your message will be seen to the people in those groups and if your resource or updates are useful there is a possibility that they would follow you

E.g.: Great #SEO help resource Blog http://tinyurl.com/btqjz5 and check out in

http://tweetchat.com/room/seo
http://twittgroups.com/group/seo

(5) Increase your updates count :), it should have a mix of discussions, questions, feedback and retweet both techy and non-techy. So users may think following you may be useful lolls. Just keep in mind it should be useful and users should like you and your updates :)

(6) Add your twitter profile in all top social networking sites like linkedin, friendfeed, facebook, mybloglog, digg and the likes.

(7) Add your twitter profile in your email signature as well as in your blog or website

(8) Use TwitterFeed to automate your tweets that turns all of your blog posts into tweets

(9) In addition, try to enable you twitter account with twitterholic.com, twittercounter.com and twittervision.com

(10) Agree to the fact that this involves a lot of time and it would happen overnight. Guess this is the most important thing out of all nine :) Put you effort over the above 9 ideas and attract more followers and get more clients through twitter

If you find above post useful feel free to follow me and if any ideas are missed out you are welcome to add in comment section, with your twitter profile which will be an additional benefit to readers.If the idea is good, readers and I may follow you. Are you Happy! Now Howz that?
;-)

Google Talk Gadget lets you chat your online visitors

Google Talk Gadget lets you chat your online visitors
The use of Google Talk Gadget lets you chat your online visitors. Google are providing a lot of different services for its user at free of cost just like google's new product live chat badge. Google Talk Badge will display your online status such as are you online available or busy on web page .

If you have your own web page or blog, you can also add a button to your site so your visitors can pop out the Google Talk Gadget when they visit your page. If you want them to chat with you, just list your username next to the button and ask visitors to sign in and add you as a contact.

Download Google Talk Badge : To add the button to your page, just copy this script into your site's HTML :

< src="'http://talkgadget.google.com/talkgadget/button'">
or you can downlaod Google badge code by follow these step


1. To create your chatback badge, visit http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New.

2. If you're using a Google Apps account, you can create a chatback badge by visiting http://www.google.com/talk/service/a/DOMAIN/badge/New where DOMAIN is the name of your domain.

3. From the page, copy and paste the HTML into the source of your webpage where you want the badge to be displayed. You'll know it's working if you see a large Google Talk bubble showing your current online status along with the message 'Chat with [your name]' (or whatever you selected as your badge title).


Yes you have done if You see badge on your web page like image on top ^

Keyword Tools

If you have your own website,blog or directory or if you are an Internet marketer then Keyword Tools is must for you because if you have not keyword research, then you may be fail, because in order to get traffic, you need to optimize your content targeting specific keywords.There are many keyword rearch tools on Internet thats are free, but in my persional view google keyword Tool and Wordtracker Keyword Tool is best if you are looking for free keywoed reserach tool .Google Keyword Tool provide you information about daily searches, monthly searches, average searches and much more on different keywords ,with the detail about how competitive a specific keyword is and other statistical data.
free google keyword tool are here

Learn and Share about SEM in Search Engine Watch Forums

Hello world, a short information about search engine watch forums and my part.
I would like to share the information that SEW forums is one of the place where I had spent time to learn more and in-depth about SEM industry years ago. There were several topics, which has been posted in search engine watch forums that was helpful and even now it goes on and on. Latter I had chance to reply threads by sharing my knowledge and it was a great pleasure to know that those thread replies were helpful for most of the members.

There are many Moderators and members who actively participate the forum thread posts and comes up with great advice, tips and techniques which tends to bring out their expertise knowledge in specific filed and also in general. I am very much happy to add value for SEW forums and I am glad to say that I am one of the Moderators

If you are a site owner, webmaster, designer, developer or a SEO person trying to improve your ability in search engine marketing, then the right place is Search engine watch forums. I welcome you to Register and get in touch with SEM queries!

search engine optimization (SEO) terms

Machine-generated
Don't use software tools that purport to auto-generate doorway pages. These pages are usually devoid of meaningful content. Google, in particular, is working on ways to identify and exclude machine-generated doorway pages.

Manual submitting
Submitting by hand to an individual search engine, rather than using an automated submission tool or service. Manual submitting is the more polite way to submit, and as such is less likely to land you in trouble with the search engines. But the best approach is not to submit at all and let the search engine spiders find your site through links from other sites to your site.

Meta description
a meta tag hidden in the HTML that describes the page's content. Should be relatively short; around 12 to 20 words is suggested. The meta description provides an opportunity to influence how your Web page is described in the search results, but it will not improve your search rankings. Make sure your meta description reflects the page content or you may be accused of spamming.

Meta keywords
a meta tag hidden in the HTML that lists keywords relevant to the page's content. Because search engine spammers have abused this tag so much, this tag provides little to no benefit to your search rankings. Of the major search engines, only Yahoo! still pays any attention to the meta keywords tag.

Meta Search
Search results derived from several sources and consolidated into a single SERP.

Meta tag stuffing
Repeating keywords in the meta tags and using meta keywords that are unrelated to the site's content.

Meta tags
Meta-information (information about information) that is associated with a web page and placed in the HTML but not displayed on the page for the user to see. There are a range of meta tags, only a few of which are relevant to search engine spiders. Two of the most well-known meta tags are the meta description and meta keywords; unfortunately these are ignored by most major search engines, including Google.


Miserable Failure
A well known example of "Google bombing", it poignantly illustrates how inbound text links can affect SERPs. In this instance, hyperlinks containing the keyword phrase miserable failure seem to reflect America's & the world's opinion of George W. Bush's performance, while positioning his White House bio in the #1 position for that search term.

So effective have the results been that today George W. Bush's White House biography is positioned at #1 on Google for the single word term, failure, forever soiling the reputation of America and office of the President.

Mod_rewrite
A module or plugin for Apache web servers that can be used to rewrite requested URLs on the fly.

It supports an unlimited number of rules and an unlimited number of attached rule conditions for each rule to provide a flexible and powerful URL manipulation mechanism. Which can be used to offer both search engine friendly URLs, thus increasing indexing chances for a dynamic database driven website.

Mouseover
Where hovering the mouse over a text or graphic link without clicking displays something new on the page. For example, a horizontal navigation bar may display further sub-section choices underneath the section hovered over.

Mozilla Firefox
Mozilla Firefox is a web browser that has steadily grown in popularity over the last few years. It's currently used by about 15% of the world's Web browsers.

Firefox is free and open source software developed by the Mozilla Corporation and a community of external contributors.

This cross-platform browser, provides support for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

MSN
can refer to Microsoft Network and their search engine

AdSense optimization tips for forums

Owning and operating a forum can be a tricky task. Not only do you have to struggle with the many obstacles of establishing the forum such as working on your initial member build up, getting rid of problem members early, and making sure your forum is easy to use, but there is also the major problem of monetization.

Forums are traditionally considered to be more difficult to monetize (if you are using ads to monetize the forum) than a regular website – mainly because of the type of visitor a forum receives. Typically, a lions share of the visitors on a forum are going to be from members who are there to participate in conversations, not click on ads. Regular forum members know what they are looking for and subsequently develop a very strong “ad blindness” which is difficult to overcome.

It is for this reason that many forum owners completely throw out the idea of using Google Adsense ads to monetize their forums.

But this is a mistake.

Forums, if optimized correctly, can experience clickthrough rates that rival those of normal websites. Of course, you need to go through the process of optimizing.

Adsense Optimization for Forums - The Basics

There is no end to downloadable guides on Adsense - and most of these guides are well worth their money in my opinion. But most of these guides all cover the same basic principles. I don't want to spend too much time on things that you already know, so I'm going to cover the most basic principles quickly. These basics tend to apply to both forums and regular websites.

First, always test and record your changes. This is a rule that applies to anything that you do with your website, not just to Adsense optimization. Never assume that you know what is going to work best on your site - let your visitors decide that for you. You should test ad sizes, colors, formats and locations to see which perform the best. If possible, setup split testing on your site and track your results using Google's channel tracking.

Be sure to give each version of your ad enough time to get real results. You should aim to give your ad at least 500 views (preferably 1,000 views) before making any changes. 100 ad views is certainly not enough to make any good judgment on.

Adsense optimization experts seem to agree that overall there is one ad size and color combination that seems to win most split tests. This ad size is the 336 x 280 ad size, with a blue headline (#0000CC), black text (#000000), and a dark grey url (#666666).

Although this is not always true, often blending your ads appearance into the content of your pages is a good way to increase your clickthrough rate. The reason behind this is simple: people have developed ad blindness. In general, if they recognize something as an ad, they will simply ignore it and move on to what they believe to be regular content. By blending your ads into your site, your website readers will be more likely to read the ad, and subsequently click it.

Now be sure to never "trick" your website users into clicking on an ad. Never use text that would mislead the person into thinking that the ad is part of your content, and never tell the user to click the ad in any way. Also, Google no longer allows publishers to place images next to their Adsense ads in a way that would make the images look like they are part of the ads.

Moving on to More Advanced Optimization Strategies

You know that 336 x 280 ads tend to have the highest clickthrough rates, and you know that you should blend your ads into your site. But users are getting used to these techniques and are growing a new "blindness" to these ads. What can you do to better increase the performance of your ads? Here are a few advanced optimization strategies.

Give Your Users an Obvious Ad and then Feed them a Blended Ad. This is one of my new favorite optimization techniques. The concept behind this technique is simple: when a user scans a page for content, often they will initially scan it and identify where the ads are on the page. If you give your user an obvious ad, they will become blind to that style of an ad, but not necessarily other ads on the page.

I have included an example of this from an earlier version of DebtManagementTalk.com – an Adsense revenue sharing forum that relies on having fairly high Adsense clickthrough rates.

Now this isn't necessarily the best example of this principle in action (this site doesn't necessarily lend itself to this technique), but using this method did produce an increase in revenue.

The ad on the left is obvious. It has a big border, looks like an ad that you would see on many sites, and is in a common location. When a visitor is scanning the page, they will see the obvious ad and assume that other ads on that page will appear the same. Notice that just to the right of the obvious ad is a Google ad that blends into the page much better, is styled differently, and doesn't look anything like the obvious ad.

Source Order Your Ads to Get the Highest Paying Ads Listed First

There is a rather significant problem with the example above. When you use multiple ad units on one page, Google will typically serve up the highest paying ads first and the lowest paying ads later.

In the example above our obvoius ad, which was inserted not to create a lot of clickthroughs but rather to set a "tone" for ad design throughout the page, appears first in our source code. This means that this "diversion ad" will hold the best paying clicks, but will probably rarely be clicked on.

It is not always true that ads that appear first on your page will earn you the most money. When optimizing your Adsense ads, try setting up channel tracking on each of your ads to see which ad spot gets the most clicks and which ad spot receives the most money per click. Once you have determined this, you should rework your code to try and get the ad with the most clicks to appear in the spot of the ad that receives the most money per click.

Watch Out for Cannibals

This goes along with the topic that I just talked about, but there are a few more things to consider. If you have an ad that realizes a lower amount of revenue per click and outperforms your ads that have a higher revenue per click, your ads are said to be cannibalizing each other.

A classic example of this is with Google's Ad Links. Many people include Ad Link units on their page because they are so easy to “blend” into the content on your site. However, ad link units also typically have a lower revenue per click than regular ads.

If you have an adlink unit that is getting a significantly higher number of clicks - and your users leave your page for good, you may be losing money.

Cannibalization can also occur when you place other types of ads on your website. Do you have another approved contextual ad unit on your page that is not as profitable as Adsense? Is it taking clicks away from your adsense ads?

Not all competiting ads will cannibalize each other, which is why it is important to always test your results.

Finally, Sometimes a Redesign is in Order

Most forum designs, unfortunately, are not designed to work well with Adsense. They tend to have fluid layouts which do not fit Google's fixed ad sizes well, and it is often difficult to blend the ads in such a way that it flows with the rest of the content on your page.

There may come a point when you have tested, tried, and incorporated every conceivable ad variation, style, and color on your website only to see marginal improvements. If this is the case, you may want to consider an entire redesign of your forum.

I ran into this problem with DebtManagementTalk.com. Since the site is a revenue sharing forum, it relies heavily on the ads performing well. Although Google's terms of use restrict me from saying what the clickthrough rate was on the site, I can say that it was lower than I had desired, and much lower than what the members on the site were looking for.

Through using the techniques I listed above, I was able to make small improvements to the ads performance, but the overall performance was still less than desirable. It was time for a redesign.

DebtManagementTalk.com moved from a fluid (full screen) layout to a fixed width layout. The colors were changed to be more vibrant and to offer more possible color options with the Adsense ads. The discussion layouts were stylized differently to allow for a much more natural incorporation of ads.

Although testing is still ongoing, the redesign improved the Adsense revenues on the forum significantly.

Adsense and Forums Can Work with Work

Forums obviously have the potential to bring a very large amount of traffic, and contrary to what many people believe about forums, they can actually incorporate Adsense ads very effectively.
It simply takes steady efforts of optimization, recording your changes, and an obsessive desire to always beat your best ad performance.

The Importance of Tracking Your Website Traffic

You have a web site. You have web site visitors. You even have web site sales. Everything seems to be working: why should you go through the effort to track and analyze your web site traffic?

The fact is, the importance of tracking your site traffic is not stressed nearly enough. At most, people say, “Sure, I track my site traffic. We had 5,000 hits last month!” But that, quite frankly, isn’t “tracking your site traffic.” That is a simple datum, and it doesn’t tell you anything about your site or your site traffic.

The importance of tracking your site traffic lies in the fact that proper web traffic analytics will help you answer these key questions:

Am I reaching my target market?

If you went about developing your web site systematically, you probably spent time researching and defining your target market. You then designed your site to reach those specific people.

But all your research was still - at its base - a hypothesis. You made assumptions about how to reach your customer base. Tracking your site traffic will verify what is actually happening on your site (who is coming and what they are doing), compared to what you expected to happen.

How are people interacting with my site?

Sure, people are coming to your web site. But what are they doing there? Do they hit the home page and leave? Do they go immediately to your free section and never browse your sale items? Do 90% of the people who click on your online payment form subsequently abandon it?

Tracking your site traffic will allow you to see how people proceed through your site, where they spend their time, what they do, and any problems they may be encountering. And that information can help you significantly improve their user experience - and your sales.

Where is my site traffic coming from?

To drive traffic to your site, you are likely engaged in multiple marketing efforts. You may have search engine optimized your content, engaged in article marketing, and developed reciprocal links from key partners. You may be involved in a pay-per-click campaign. Perhaps you also explored email marketing or print advertising.

Web traffic analytics will tell you exactly how successful each and every one of those marketing efforts is. You will then be able to cut the fat from your marketing plan and focus on the most strategic and productive campaigns.

What trends do I see?

The web is a constantly changing place. What worked last year may not work this year. You can’t rely on the mantra “we’ve always done it this way” and expect to see consistently positive results for years on end.

By tracking your site traffic, you will be able to see trends as they unfold: trends in who is coming to your site, how they are interacting with it, what they want, how they buy, etc. You will be able to respond proactively to changing patterns, rather than reactively scrambling to fix a situation after it has become a major problem.

If you are serious about using your web site as a tool for business, tracking your site traffic is an absolute essential. The questions above just scratch the surface of what web traffic analytics can do for you. But the bottom line is this: tracking your site traffic provides you with quantifiable data to allow you to make wise decisions for your business.

The Importance of Tracking Your Website Traffic

How to insert AdSense, Chitika or any other Javascript code into new Blogger template

Not long ago Google Blogger platform added new widget-driven templates, which use different approach from the "Classic" template.
Classic template was based on HTML, new Blogspot templates now are based on XHTML which is a branch of XML.

So, classic templates are incompatible with new Blogger templates. New Blogger templates use "Page Elements" (widgets) but the places where you can insert widgets are rather limited. So what about if you need more flexibility than
they allow?

1. Google Widgets are always separated by dashed horizontal rules,
   which can be inappropriate if you want to blend your ads.


2. You cannot insert widgets inside your blog post, so you need to edit template HTML code.

XML is more strict and standardized than HTML, and you cannot insert arbitrary HTML and javascript
code into your new Blogspot template. Sure you can revert to classic template, but you'll lose your widgets and maybe some of your design.

Of course you can use standard Blogger feature for adding AdSense ads between your posts (Blogger - Template - Page Elements - Blog Posts - Edit - Show Ads Between Posts).
After that you can move these ads position using this technique.
But sometimes it is not enough: for example you cannot specify channel, you cannot insert AdSense for referrals code. Also you are not able to insert ads from other
ad networks (YSM, AdBrite, Chitika) with this method.

Maybe you already have tried to insert some javascript code into your teplate HTML, and on Preview/Save template got an error similar to this:

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly.

XML error message: The content of elements must consist of well-formed character data or markup.

So why your template could be not valid when something changed? Here is the some of XML requirements:

• Documents must be well-formed.


• In XHTML every tag should have
  a matching end tag.



• Ampersands (&) used for
  marking entity names, so you cannot use & in your code. Instead of
  it it must be written as &


• Element and attribute names
  must be in lower case


• In XHTML, the script and style
  elements are declared as having #PCDATA content. As a result, < and
  & will be treated as the start of markup, and entities such as < and & will be recognized as entity references by the XML processor
  to <>
  
  
• If you are interested in more, the full XHTML specification is here.

Basically, to make Adsense code, pasted into blogger template, valid, you need to replace several characters with their XML entities. They are:

HTML	XHTML
>	>
<	<
&	&
"	"

Warning: Always back up your template html before changing into a new one!

This change could be quite annoying if doing manually, so we have an online tool for doing this: HTML Encoder. Frankly speaking, purpose of this tool is not only
converting HTML for Blogger templates. It just replaces all special HTML characters into their entities. This is the case we need exactly the same.

If you view HTML source of resulting blog pages in a browser, you will find the exact same AdSense code that Google provides, without any modification.

Since Google allows only certain number of ads per page, the remaining ads will not be shown if you have several post on same page. They have a logic in their javascript code
to suppress the extra-ads display. But it can be reasonable to show not more than 3 posts on the blog's main page.

Disclaimer: Use at own risk. If you have concerns about inserting more than maximum number of ads allowed, you could contact the AdSense team and let them get back to you on their official stand.

Maximum number of AdSense ads, per page (from AdSense Policy):

Ad type	Max count
Context ad unit	3
Link unit	3
Referral unit	3
Search box	2

Hint: It may be more efficient to place your AdSense code enclosed into floating div, so you can style and align it with CSS any way you want:









AdSense Code

Nevertheless, this method of inserting arbitrary code into template could be used not only for AdSense, Chitika, AdBrite but for any html/javascript (social bookmarking buttons ("Digg it", Stumbleupon button, etc.), any javascript widgets
and so on). So if it can accomplished with Blogspot page elements, stick with them, if cannot, you can use the technique described above.

Blog SEO Tips - Optimizing Single Posts

We keep hearing about “organic traffic” and how important it is for our blogs. Well, organic traffic is the traffic you receive from search engines, based on the level of relevance and optimization of your blog posts. The more relevant for the user’s search term, the higher the ranking in search engine’s results.

Let’s say that you wrote a very interesting and helpful post. You would definitely want it to rank well, and by doing so, attract more traffic to it. This traffic can generate both comments, a base for advertising and also potential backlinks to your post. In short: It’s important.

So, how can you optimize you blog posts? By doing 3 simple things:

1. Optimize your titles;
2. Optimize the post body;
3. Optimize the internal links.

Optimizing the titles

In one of my past posts I’ve told you about the importance of writing SEO friendly titles with the use of H1, H2, H3 tags. And since on single post pages your titles should be listed with H1 tags, search engines will give them maximum attention.

Your post’s title should definitely use the primary keyword, the keyword for which you want the post to rank higher in search results. To decide on your primary keyword and the best form that you could use, you need to run a bit of research on common search habits of users.

For example, let’s say your blog post is about websites where you can find and download images for free. People tend to shorten the search query, so you’ll most probably get only a few searches for a keyword like “images for free”. Instead, the chances are much better for a keyword like “free images”.

Considering this, your post title could be one of the following variations:

• How/Where to find free images
• Free images website(s)
• Search for free images

You should also consult some keyword suggestion tools or even Google AdWords Keyword Tool, which is a very useful application. Another useful service from Google is Google Trends, an application that allows you to access statistics of search trends over periods of time and in different regions of the world.

You can also check out Brian Clark’s article on how to write headlines that work. It’s quite a recommended reading.

Optimizing the post body

Optimizing the title is not enough. You need to do a bit of work on you post’s body too. Using the same technique I’ve described above, focus on finding secondary keywords for you blog post. These are similar or related phrases that could boost your article’s relevance.

If we stick to our “free images” example, an interesting list of secondary keywords could be:
- Free photos
- Free stock images
- Stock photography

Make sure you place secondary keywords in your post’s body, but don’t abuse them. It’s OK to want to attract the search engines, but never to write exclusively for them. At least, out of respect for your readers. They don’t want, and won’t read a spam article.

Optimizing the internal links

Whenever linking to other posts of your blog, make sure you use primary (best) or secondary keywords. This will increase the level of relevance, and also help the readers to better identify the content they should expect when clicking a link.

Also to consider

Whenever you want to optimize you posts, it’s always a good idea to run a search on Google and see how others perform for that search, and what form of the keyword they chose to use.

Also, a good idea would be to study your website’s statistics and re-optimize some of your older posts for keywords that returned your blog, but you did not thought of using initially. This will happen, and if the statistics are “kind enough” to tell us, why not use the free tip?

And this concludes another blog SEO tips post on SEO Sundays at Blogsessive.

These 10 SEO Tactics Bring Me Over 2000 Visitors Daily

No matter how hard some people try to mystify SEO, it is not as complicated as many would lead you to believe. Despite all the techno jargon that many in the field will throw at you: SERPs, SEM, PageRank, Keyword Density, Vertical Search, Algorithms... SEO is really simple to do if you understand some basic concepts and follow some easy steps.

Search Engine Optimization is getting your content listed in all the top positions in Google, Yahoo and MSN for your targeted keywords. When someone does a keyword search in a search engine for your particular subject or niche - you want your site or content to be at the top of the list.

Here are 10 SEO tactics that have worked and are working for me at this moment in time.

1. Quality Content is and always will be your number one factor for getting high rankings and keeping them. You must understand search engines are simply businesses that supply a product like any other company. That product is information. They must offer quality results to anyone using their service to solve a problem, answer a question or to buy a product. The more relevant, the more targeted the search solution they return, the higher the overall quality of their product and the more popular their search engine will become. Providing quality content is vital for SEO success.
2. Keywords are your number one tools for achieving high rankings. You must understand keywords and how they work on the web. You must know how many searches are made each day for your chosen keywords. Sites like Wordtracker and Seobook will give you a rudimentary number of searches. Design your pages around your targeted keywords and don't forget to do some deep-linking to these pages on your site. Find and build backlinks to these interior keyword pages and not just to your home page or domain URL. Picking keywords with medium to low competition has worked out well for me. So too has using the more targeted and higher converting "long-tail" keywords been very beneficial for me.
3. Onpage Factors and site design will play a major role in the spidering and indexing of your site/content. Make sure all your pages are SEO friendly, make sure all your pages can be reached from your homepage and no pages should be more than three levels away from it - keeping a sitemap listing of all your major pages makes the search engines happy. Make sure you have all your meta tags such as title, description, keywords... optimized (Title = around 65 characters, Description = around 160 characters).
   
   Remember, your title and description should be keyword targeted and are the first contact/impression anyone will have of your site - make sure you use them to draw and entice interested visitors to your site and content. Also make sure your title and URL are keyword matched for maximum effect. Having your major keyword in your Domain Name also helps, using a pike | to separate different elements of your title has helped my rankings, so too does having your keyword in the first and last 25 words on your pages.
4. Google will send you the most qualified traffic so concentrate the majority of your SEO efforts on Google. Don't ignore Yahoo! or MSN but Google is king of search so give it the respect it deserves. With its new browser, Google's influence will only grow stronger so you must optimize your pages for Google. Use Google's Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics to fine-tune your pages/content. I also use Google Alerts to keep up on my niche keywords and for comment link-building on the newly created pages Google is indexing.
5. Link Building is still the most effective way to boost your search rankings. Make sure you get backlinks from relevant sites related to your niche market and make sure the 'anchor text' is related to your keywords but don't ignore the text and overall quality of the content linking to you. The anchor text is the underlined/clickable portion of a link. Don't forget linking is a two-way street, make sure you link out to high quality, high ranked relevant sites in your niche.
6. Article Marketing is a well established method of getting quality backlinks and it still works. Writing short 500 - 700 word informative helpful articles with your backlinks in the resource box is still very effective for getting targeted traffic and backlinks. Longer articles have also worked for me and I use an extensive network of distribution, including SubmitYourArticle, Isnare, Thephantomwriters... plus other major online sites. Don't forget the whole element of blogging and RSS feeds in your article distribution. And always remember you're also using these articles to pre-sell your content or products. Don't forget to leverage sites like Squidoo, Hubpages... to increase your rankings and traffic.
7. Onsite Traffic Hubs have worked extremely well for me. These traffic hubs are whole sections of your site devoted to one sub-division of your major theme. For example, if you have a site on Gifts, then wedding gifts could be a separate section. This would be fully fleshed out with extensive pages covering everything dealing with wedding gifts - a self-contained keyword rich portion of your site on wedding gifts. Works similar as a sub-domain, but I prefer using a directory to divide it up, such as yourdomain/wedding_gifts. (Most experts suggest always using a hyphen in your urls, but underscores have worked fine for me.) Search engines love these keyword/content rich hubs but keep in mind you're creating content to first satisfy your visitors.
8. WordPress blog software is extremely effective for SEO purposes. WordPress software is easy to install on your site even if you have no experience with installing server-side scripts. Besides, search engines love these highly SEO friendly blogs with their well structured content and keyword tagging. I have at least one of these on all my sites to draw in the search engines and get my content indexed and ranked. I also use Blogger (owned by Google), Bloglines and other free blogs to help distribute my content.
9. Social Bookmark/Media Sites are becoming very important on the web. These include a whole range of social sites like MySpace, FaceBook, Twitter... media news sites like Digg, SlashDot, Technorati... you must get your content into this whole mix if you want to take full SEO advantage of Web 2.0 sites. You should be joining these sites and using them. It's time consuming, but it will keep you in the swing of things. One simple thing you must do is to put social bookmark buttons on all your pages so that your visitors can easily bookmark your content for you. You can use a WordPress plug-in. I like using the simple free site/service from Addthis.com which gives me a simple button to put on all my content.
10. Masterplan! Many webmasters and site owners forget to develop or have an overall masterplan/strategy when it comes to SEO. You must have an understanding of what SEO is and what it can do for you and your site. More importantly, you just don't want SEO - you want effective SEO. In order to achieve effective SEO you must have three things: Relevance, Authority and Conversions.
    
    First, your content/site must be relevant to the topic or niche area you're pursuing - your content must fit in and be related to all the other sites in your niche. That's why closely themed sites do so well in the search engines. They give only relevant content to what's been searched for or discussed.
    
    Second, your content/site must be perceived as an authority site on your subject or niche. Establish this authority position and the search engines will love you and your content. One way to develop this authority, besides offering superior content, is to form links/partnerships with other perceived authority sites in your field. Always strive to make your site an authority site - tops in your niche - the one site everyone has to check before drawing or forming a conclusion.
    
    Third, conversions should be your main goal of any SEO efforts because you want to convert your targeted traffic into site members, subscribers, buyers or just repeat visitors. If you're into online marketing, conversions will be the most important element of the whole SEO process because you want buyers, not just visitors coming to your site.
    
    Most of all, you must convince yourself Search Engine Optimization is not difficult, nor is it the equivalent of the online bogeyman as many would like you to believe. Used effectively, SEO can give you the targeted traffic you're seeking. Just follow some of the outlined steps/tactics listed above and you will have SEO working for you and your site in no time at all.