Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Boost your site traffic with Publicity Wheel

If you are looking to boost in traffic and exposure for your website at absolutely no cost you need to check out for this cool website Publicity Wheel. It is a new startup that adds a new spin on promoting your website. Mark who built edutagger, a K-12 social bookmarking site for educators and Fame Experiment also built the Publicity Wheel.

The concept is so simple, just sign up and provide some simple details about your website and upload the banners (125 x 125 pixels, 200 x 200 pixels and 468 x 60 pixels) and then your banner may well be seen on other members websites thereby resulting in more exposure of yours website. Each time they spin, a new site is selected which features on the banner image or text link that users places on their websites. Each time if someone clicks on the image you will be gaining a certain publicity points which in turn increases yours chance of winning when they spin the wheel.

This looks like a great idea of promoting new websites to increase their traffic and exposure in the internet world. However the amount of traffic that one receives is going to depend on where the user places the banner ad on their site and how many users are going to sign up for Publicity Wheel. But this is certainly something to look out for newbies.

Friday, October 24, 2008

Microsoft continues to grow despite poor Economic crisis

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Microsoft Corp, the world's largest software maker, which cashed in on new releases of computer server software such as Windows Server 2008 operating system and database software SQL Server 2008 reported a 2 per cent rise in quarterly profit. The results that exceeded analysts' expectations, with profits up 2 percent to $4.37 billion.

Microsoft posted a net profit of $4.37-billion (U.S.), or 48 cents per diluted share, in its fiscal first quarter ended Sept. 30, against a profit of $4.29-billion, or 45 cents, in the year-ago period. Microsoft's chief financial officer Chris Liddell said - 'In a challenging economic environment, the first-quarter results exhibit the strength and diversity of our business model,'. Revenue rose 9 per cent to $15.06-billion.

Bloomberg financial news reports that the software giant plans to save $500 million by slowing down on its hiring, travel and marketing processes. Microsoft which has many clients with long term contracts can endure any economic slowdown longer than its rivals.

Thursday, October 23, 2008

Integrate Analytics with Adsense and Check your Earnings

Through an AdSense Publisher Google finally officially announced in its blog that it is rolling out the functionality to its publishers where one can check out for an invitation link at the top of their 'Overview' and 'Advanced Reports' pages when its been enabled into their accounts. Google says though this new feature is not yet available to all its publishers it may roll out this feature to everyone in the coming days.

In the meantime Google has released a video demo on this to know more about the features which you can have access to:
Click the Link

Validation - MAMA says How often you do this

In the recent webmaster chat Google says that only 5% of the websites are according to the W3C validation standards. Stunned !!. Yes, this might be true guys. Interested to know further read on...
Enter MAMA (Metadata Analysis and Mining Application) a web page search engine which crawls Web pages and returns results elaborating the page structures, including what HTML, CSS and script is used on it, as well as whether the HTML validates.

What Information you get from MAMA:
MAMA intention is to help the opera web browser users with an unique tool which gives live examples of markup and other Web page structural components. MAMA also concludes that it can provide information on discrete issues such as "what is the 18th most popular element?" or "how popular can a Flash be?". For key findings from MAMA visit the link "MAMA key findings".

Now coming to our topic - Do people get everything validated on their website?. MAMA markup validation report says out of the every URL which it has in its data base it was able to validate 3,509,180 URLs in 3,011,661 domains, and only 4.13% of the URL set passed validation (with 4.33% of the domains having at least 1 URL that passed validation).

Some key information in MAMA report include:
1. XHTML Doctype pass validation at much higher rates (13.4%) than HTML flavors (6.6%).
2. A majority of pages specify a document's encoding, and do so via the META markup syntax (89.9%).
3. Doctype flavors pass validation at much eminent rate (17.5%) than Transitional (8.4%) or Frameset (7.2%)
4. More URLs are using Doctype statements. In MAMA's URL set, the number has passed the 50% threshold (51.0%).
5. Most popular detected encodings are iso-8859-1 (43.1%) and utf-8 (26.9%).
6. characters are used that aren't allowed by the detected character set (8.6%) is the most frequent fatal validation error found.
7. The most frequent validation errors encountered both deal with attributes:
* There is no attribute X (64.2%)
* Required attribute X not specified (57.4%)

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Chat Live with Google team

If you some doubts regarding the Google tools you can contact the Google team and make your uncertainties clear. Tomorrow i.e., 22nd of October, at 9:00 am, Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -07:00, San Francisco) Google is organizing an "Tricks and Treats" event where in you can chat online to Googlers ranging from Matt Cutts in Mountain View to John Mueller in Zurich to Kaspar Szymanski in Dublin and many more folks.

Register for a Live Conversation here

What all you need to join this event are:
1. An hour of free time
2. A computer with audio capabilities that is connected to the Internet and has these additional specifications

Some more information Regarding the Event
Date and time:

Wednesday, October 22, 2008 9:00 am
Pacific Daylight Time (GMT -07:00, San Francisco)
Wednesday, October 22, 2008 12:00 pm
Eastern Daylight Time (GMT -04:00, New York)
Wednesday, October 22, 2008 5:00 pm
GMT Daylight Time (GMT +01:00, London)
Wednesday, October 22, 2008 10:00 pm
Central Asia Standard Time (GMT +06:00, Almaty)

Duration: 1 hour 15 minutes
Description:
We welcome you to join Google's third Webmaster Central chat. We'll be debunking some tricky ghoulish myths and treating you to an extensive question and answer period... using the new Google Moderator tool! (http://moderator.appspot.com).

All attendees must register prior to the event, but registration is free, quick, and absolutely NOT scary.

Monday, October 20, 2008

Google Lifts ban on Paid search for UK gambling sites

Google has finally decided for the first time anywhere in the world to allow gambling advertisements in its search results in Britain from Oct 17, 2008 since a self-imposed moratorium in 2004. According to industry experts estimate, Google could generate more than £100m in revenues from rule changes.

Google has been reviewing its gambling advertising policy "to ensure it is as consistent as possible with local business practices", said James Cashmore, industry leader, entertainment and media, at the company. "We hope this change will enhance the search experience for users and help advertisers connect with interested consumers."

According to a statement from Google’s industry head, James Cashmore: ‘Gambling ads will automatically be classified as non-family safe which means they will not show on any search where the user has applied the safe search filter.’

Casinos, lottery's and bookmakers which make collectively the third largest advertisers in online display ads only behind mobile phone operators and automotive manufacturers are going to take immediate advantage of this.

Timing couldn't be much better than this. "Google is certainly going to hit the jackpot now." :)

Friday, October 17, 2008

Audio/Video on your Website

On the internet, it's all about finding information fast. Audios and videos have their place in the business. Some say Audio works Brilliant ! and some prefer Video. HOWEVER, if they are used appropriately they can be handy. Billions of Videos and Audios are watched every month and the number tends to grow rapidly, so apparently videos and audios are a great way of transferring information, without having to read lots of text all the time.

Important factor to note here is the loading time. Many times visitors drop off a web page if it takes entirely too long to load and they move to the next in line. So make the audio simple and interesting and of minimum time. Discourage the use of bad background music.

Nevertheless If we compare Audio Vs Video, some people love to or very much prefer to find information Visual rather than playing an Audio because they can scan something visual which they can't scan through audio. But still, a combination of Audio and Video can be something which can't be ignored wholly. Good pictures and sounds if you can add in a video the more engaged the visitor will feel.

Audio Acrobat can be helpful to stream the audios which allows the reader to start/stop/pause manually. It allows the users to have an on screen player (a customizable appearance) and you can have it auto start when the page loads.

However crucial points to keep in mind:

1. Don't force it on the user - let them launch it.
2. Keep an eye on your bandwidth!.
3. Offer some of your audio as downloads, too.
4. Don't replace the printable documentation.

Live chat on your website

To maximize your's web site lead generation you need many different options including e-mail, phone, fax, live chat, etc... because your customers have changing communication needs over time and varying degrees of comfort with the different channels. Live Chat may not be a primary way of reaching the new and existing customers but it certainly does provide the customer one more option to connect with you. Installing a Live chat application on your website can help you in a great way especially in handling yours customer queries. Visitors may respond very positive on this service. Chatting with the visitors/customers on yours website not only helps increase the service of your website but also the direct communication with them, wherein you can solve their personal questions regrading your products and services. There are many of Livechat applications available like meebo, coffeecup, triolive, google talk badge, chatango, jabber, userplane, boldchat, livechat, liveperson, etc. Some are these comes free & some are paid. Here i am compiling a list of Live chat Applications which may be of some help to you.

boldchat
meebo
chatango
jabber
userplane
google talk badge
live-chat
triolive
whoson
liveperson

Finally in order to have a successful Live Chat program make sure you have a well trained Chat team, have your chat icons highly visible in your site, and make the steps to chat as easy as possible.

The Top 20 Popular Websites in US and UK

Hitwise released the list of Top 20 most popular websites based on US and UK Internet usage for the month of September, 2008.

Top 20 Websites in US:


Top 20 Websites in UK


The stats suggests that:
1) Google search dominates both the US and UK search markets.
2) Yahoo's combined share of services seems to be of higher than that of Google in the US Market where as the combined share of services of Google ranks higher than that of Yahoo in the UK market. An interesting point to watch out for.
3) In terms of popularity of mail services Yahoo! Mail comes first followed by Windows Live Mail, Gmail and AOL in US where as Windows Live Mail comes first followed by Yahoo! Mail and Gmail in UK

Thursday, October 16, 2008

Important Keyword Factors to consider in SEO

Advertising your business or product or service or something which is different on Websites has become popular these days and people of all ages are relying mostly on web for faster modes of communicating. With the growing number of websites on the internet everyone wants to rank on top of the search engines for better business. Attaining top results on SERP's isn't easy given that there are number of websites competing for that position. But it isn't tough too if you follow some simple SEO strategies to optimize yours website. As most of us are aware that Google tops the search engines and everyone wants to gain top positions in Google. To attain a top position in Google SERP's here i am going to figure out some Important Factors which you need to consider:

1) Use the targeting Keywords in the Title tags of the HTML page header(Caution: dont spam yours title by placing all the keywords. Ensure that title should not be 150-170 characters long)
2) Use the keywords in the body context.( use 2-3 keywords in a paragraph of 150-250 words)
3) Place the keywords into the H1 and H2 tags.(use no more than 2-3 of yours targeting keywords in the header)
4) Use the keyword name in the Domain name and in the URL's.
5) Use keywords in the Anchor Text of Inbound Link.
6) Use yours keywords in the Navigation menus.
7) Use keywords in the footer page during the optimization process.
8) Use keywords in the internal navigation of the pages.
9) Keywords in the Alt-text of the images.
10) Save your folder names with keywords

Note: In all the above mentioned factors try to ensure yourself that you don't spam by the excessive usage of keywords

Wednesday, October 15, 2008

Underscores or Hyphens or Spaces - Which one is better?

There has been long discussions going among different Search Specialists regarding which one is better to use in the URL optimization process either Underscores are better or the Hyphens or Spaces?. To find out this i have run a simple experiment

On Google SERPS
1) xml sitemaps generator
2) xml-sitemaps-generator
3) xml_sitemaps_generator

I could find out that there is no significant differences in either using spaces or hyphens or underscores in the urls for the above three results. Interesting point to note here is that underscore parsing seems to be showing only few results on Google SERP's in 3 case, probable reason behind this might be people not using any underscores in their URLS (according to my opinion)

On Live
4) xml sitemaps generator
5) xml-sitemaps-generator
6) xml_sitemaps_generator

Similar search on live showed that even here it doesn't show any major differences in using either space or hyphen or underscore. An interesting point to note here is that if we could compare the results of 3 and 6 from Google and Live, we could observe that Google performing better than Live in showing the results as in Google we can find a result with an underscore where is in Live we cant observe any such.

You can run a similar experiment on Yahoo! and find the results

Which URLS to include in yours sitemap

I have been checking out for some information regarding which Urls we need to include in our sitemaps. Is it good to include dynamic URLS into your sitemap or only the URLS which you find important on yours website?. While i was surfing the web i could get this information which i gonna share here, might be helpful for you too

1) Sean Suchter from Yahoo! suggets - Put all the important pages in your sitemap, rather than every page on your site as Yahoo! considers sitemaps when figuring out which pages are valuable on a site, and if they believe this to be a trusted signal from a publisher, will use it more (the other engines seemed to agree).

2) Nathan Myhrvold from Microsoft suggests that URL structures in sitemaps are very important. Use the shortest, most authoritative, canonical version of the URL you want in the search engines' index in your sitemap file and they'll use that to help automatically filter duplicates and figure out which version to display.

3) Vanessa Fox ex Google employee suggests to put up a comprehensive list of URLs in the Sitemap. Here is what she suggests regarding her statement

" There are several ways people approach what to put in Sitemaps:

-Put the important pages in the Sitemap. This method is a good one is if it’s problematic to put all pages in the Sitemap. The point of the Sitemap is to let search engine know more about your site, particularly about the pages of your site, and this approach tells the search engines about the pages you care about most. That should give search engines a signal that all other things being equal, you’re telling them that these pages are the ones you care about. (Of course, all signals normally aren’t equal, so instead this will be one signal balanced among many, but the same idea holds.) So, that’s a solid approach.

-Put the non-indexed pages in the Sitemap. The idea behind this method is that search engines already know about the rest of your site, so you’re just making sure they know about these as well. This may seem the opposite of the first approach. After all, if from the first approach search engines should get a signal that the pages in the Sitemap are most important, then wouldn’t the search engines use that same signal for this set of URLs? When really they might be the least important (hence the non-indexing). It may seem that way, but actually that’s not the case. Since search engines use the Sitemap as one of many signals, what you’re really saying with URLs in a Sitemap, is hey, search engine! pay attention to these pages! It generally won’t cause the search engine to then forsake all other signals that caused indexing of the other pages. It will just focus some extra attention on these. A Sitemap comes into play the most in the crawling process. So, if some pages aren’t indexed, it makes sense to make sure the search engines know about them so they can crawl them.

-Put a comprehensive list of URLs in the Sitemap. This is my preferred approach when it’s technically practical. Why not tell search engines what the definitive list of pages on your site is? Why limit it to really important ones? One benefit to this is that there’s at least one place other than crawling that Sitemaps can be helpful, and that’s canonicalization. If a search engine has detected that several URLs display the same page, the version of the URL that’s in the Sitemap is a signal as to which is the canonical version.

In reality, any of these approaches are good ones. Sitemaps enable the site owner to have a voice in the long list of signals that search engines use to crawl and index pages. Since they’re a signal and not a directive, they don’t correlate to just one option. The signal tells the search engines that you care about their crawlers taking a look at these pages, and many times, they then do.

I imagine that each search engine uses the Sitemap signals slightly differently, since after all, each search engine has different crawling and indexing algorithms. However, I do think that it would be useful for the search engines to come together and let us know how exactly they use them and how they differ in using them. In particular, it would be very helpful if, as part of sitemaps.org, they got together and made sure they weren’t using Sitemaps for opposing purposes. You don’t want to have a shared standard that is used so differently that if a site owner compiles a Sitemap in a particular way, it helps with one search engine and hurts with another.

When I worked on the sitemaps.org collaboration, it was all about figuring out what the standard should be and coming together to support it. Now that all the major engines do, I think the next step is sorting out more details about how they’re used (particularly since the search engines should now have lots of data about how they can best be used) and give site owners best practices.
"

Importance of XML Sitemaps for yours website

Everyone of us know that Sitemaps are supported by all the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN(Live). Let us look into some general information regarding the sitemaps before we can move ahead with its Advantages. A Sitemap in its simplest form can be called as a list of urls or pages on yours website. Submitting a Sitemap to the search engines (especially google) helps them to know about all the webpages on your website which search engines cannot discover through normal crawling process. Sitemaps are of 2 types
1) The first one is a HTML page listing the pages of your site by section
2) XML Sitemaps often used by everyone

Sitemaps are Advantageous if
1) Primary Advantage being to notify to google that your site is update
2) If your site has dynamic content
3) site has pages which aren't properly indexed by google during its normal crawl process
4) Site has few links in it
5) site has a large number of content pages which are not linked to each other in a proper manner

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

List of terms you must know for SEO

mod_rewrite,
web crawlers
HTML,
301 Redirects,
Google search advanced commands
404 error
Google Analytics,
Google Webmaster tools,
Yahoo Site Explorer,
RSS reader
URL Redirection

Microsofts U Rank

Microsoft is test running in its search labs an interesting search engine U Rank which will help its souls to edit, organize and share the search information with others. This may be of some interest for the geeks.


U Rank is useful for:
a) Creating perfect search results: i.e., to add videos and images for the existing context.
b) Short-cuts: To Move your favorite sites up; and then put an ! in front of the query so that you can go straight to the top result.
c) Lists: Keep lists while you’re researching (“hotels for my next trip”, “DSLRs for me”)
d) Annotate results: Write notes to summarize important information under each URL.
e) Collaboration: Sharing the URLs with friends (“related projects”, “our reading list”)
f) Make Recommendations: Tell your friends what you like (“best books,” “favorite restaurants”)

Some snippets from the research done on the results can be found in these screen captures: click the images to enlarge











As quoted in its website "We believe that finding something on the web is only the first step for many tasks. To better support people as they are exploring a topic, comparing information, keeping track of what they're learning, and collaborating with others, U Rank has general support for organizing, annotating, remembering, and sharing search results." The basic idea behind this project seems to be helping its people to use search technologies in a better way which helps them to edit the results and effectively share them with others.

Cheap and Free tools for your Business Analysis

There may be people who may not be able to spend large bucks for their business and some may able to spend large amounts of money to do some analysis on their websites to know the pro's n con's related to their websites. For the people who cant afford money there are some tools which are available for free of cost and some tools available at a min amount which can be used for their benefit. Here i have compiled a list of Tools which you can use on your sites to do some research activity into it.

Competitive Research Tools

1) Compete
compete is an online competitive research tool, which combines the Site and Search Analytics in one site which helps you to quickly identify rival search marketing strategies. Compete provides the results in 3 ways: according to the Visitors Trending, their Engagement with the site and the Growth of the Visitors towards the site which becomes handy for everyone.

2) Spyfu
Spyfu is another free tool which can be used to find the Top organic keywords, Top Organic competitors, Top Ad Competitors, for a normal seo site. If you are working on PPC it can provide you some handy information on Daily Ad Budget, Total Clicks/Day, Avg Cost/Click, Avg Clicks/Day, Avg Ad Competitors, Avg Ad Percentile, Avg Ad Position which may help in getting useful information regarding yours competitors.

3) SEODigger
SEODigger is another tool which shows the sites rankings for the keywords. Seodigger works by building a reverse index of Google. It helps in finding the keywords a competitor has targeted and whats the position the site is holding for those respective keywords. One needs to Upgrade for a premium account to avail all the advanced features of it!

Keyword Tools

1) Wordze
Wordze is a great tool which can be used to find the Daily, Weekly, and Monthly search trends of keywords. You can also find out how a particular keyword is performing on any given day, week, or month. For about $38.98/month or $7.95/day you can use it to avail all its features.

2) KeywordDiscovery
KeywordDiscovery gives you the volume of search terms. It gives you a free and paid version. This tool gives you the search phrases people use to find products and services, as well as the search terms that drive traffic to your competitors.

3) Word Tracker
Wordtracker is also an extreamly useful keyword tool which comes in paid and free versions. While free version has some limitations a paid version can be very handy and worth a try. At $59USD/month or $329USD/yr this tools has its advantages when compared with other tools

4) Google Keywords Tool
Google keywords tool which is completely free gives you new keyword ideas for yours website. You can type a keyword or use yours own site to generate new keyword ideas.

5) Google Traffic Estimator Tool
Google Traffic Estimator tool can be used to get traffic details for new keywords. Without adding the keywords details to yours Adwords account you can get the keyword costs details for the keywords which is helpful for Adwords Account holders

Monday, October 13, 2008

Different job profiles related to Online Marketing

Online Marketing is on its booming stage but still there are many who not aware about the Job prospects related to it exceptions being those who are already into Marketing and Marketing related fields. Here i have compiled a list of fields which are related to the Online Marketing

1. Search Engine Optimizor(often called as SEO)
2. Online marketing Specialist
3. Affiliate marketing Specialist
4. Product Manager
5. Web designer
6. Web Developer (php.asp..Net)
7. Link Exchange
8. UI expert
9. Account director
10. Web Analytics manager
11. Web Content writer
12. SMO (Social media expert)
13. Database / Email Marketing specialist
14. Mobile/wireless
15. New media
16. Operations
17. PPC Specialist
18. Business Analyst
19. Webmaster
20. Communications/PR
21. Pod casting
22. Web Marketing
23. Search Engine Marketing (called as SEM)
24. Web Analytics
25. Social Media Marketing
26. Animation (in various formats)
27. Graphic Designing
28. Video Creation
29. Online Copy writing
30. Online PR specialists
31. Freelancing

1) If it's a web design company or a company not focused on the web industry at all, you may have to be Jack-in-the-box: copywriting, SEO, increasing link popularity, managing PPC campaigns, web analytics analysis etc. This job can be called Online Marketing Specialist or so. Then, as company (and its online marketing needs) grows, they will have to hire somebody to help you - and this is how you become senior specialist or project manager, and then department director.

2) If the company has serious [Online] Marketing Department or focuses solely on online marketing (or one of its niche themes), then you may expect some (or all) of the following niche positions there: Copywriter, PPC Specialist, Affiliate Marketing Specialist, SEO/SEM Specialist, Social Media Specialist, Email Marketing Specialist, Mobile Marketing Specialist, Project Manager, Department Director etc. Depending on the size of the department, there can be also "Senior" positions.
Also, in order to avoid messing up, you should remember that SEO and PPC advertising are part of SEM activities.

Designers and developers (usability specialist or/and interaction designer or/and information architect, webmaster, web designer, web developer, Flash developer, interactive designer, video/audio specialist), marketing/business/PR people (business analyst, market research analyst, PR specialist, sales manager, marketing manager, etc.), general managers (product manager, account manager) are those who facilitate online marketing activities, so there is a chance that you either have them in the online marketing department, or at hand, but in other department or outside the company.

Best or Free SEO tools for keyword analysis

1) Google keyword tool
2) Wordtracker
3) Keyword Discovery
4) seomoz (sign up for free account)
5) spyfu
6) Market Samurai
7) Websitegrader
8) Keywordtopia

Minor mistakes that can kill your SEO efforts

John has created a website and has done all the seo work: created good titles, meta-tags, Content, links, etc. He has been getting good traffic to his website all the time. One fine morning he found that there was a sudden dip in his traffic. He was worried that google might have penalised him. He starting checking his website for relative errors and found out that the reason beyond that was that his client has added hyperlink to a Keyword Phrase which was bringing them a lot of traffic to a new Product page. Google crawled the new page and the traffic dropped drastically by 75%. So, Here i have compiled a list of common mistakes which will might you.

1) Content Changes
2) Renaming of URL'S (Changing old urls to new urls)
3) Missing sitemaps file or site index on your website - a small SEO mistakes with huge impact.
4) Robot exclusion standard and installation of an unnececssary /robots.txt file on the site with a typo or incorrect syntax that basically tells all of the major web search engines "web site uncrawlable".
5) Not having a system in place for when the business picks up for capturing contact information, phone calls, etc.(A blunder i say)

Some Video Sites that perform better than Youtube

YouTube may be one of the best mainstream video-hosting site on the Web until now, but there some other video sharing sites which is worth having a look into them.
1) Viddler

Viddler an online video hosting service is best noted for its introduction of inline commenting and tag annotations in online videos. Viddler is also credited for the introduction of the latest and greatest invention to the embeddable video market i.e., the ability to customize your player colors, watermark brand, and have such link back to your website. Video demonstration can be found here Customizing Viddler

2) Vimeo

Vimeo a video-centric social network site supports video storage, embedding, sharing and user-commenting on each video page. One needs to get Registered with the site to access all these features. Pornography, Adult Videos, gaming videos, commercial videos or anything not created by the user are strictly prohibited on the site. Site gained a higher reputation because of its higher resolution, bit-rate, and relative High-Definition(HD) support.

3) Veoh

Veoh which attracts approximately 17 million unique visitors monthly according to a Quantcast.com study allows viewesr to watch streaming web videos from across the Web. According to the sites internal metrics, it has stated that it has more than 28 million unique users per month. The Video sharing site uses both peer-to-peer (for its Player software application) and Adobe Flash-based streaming video (for its website) technologies.

4) Stage6
Stage6.com is a high quality streamed video sharing website where users can upload, share and view video clips. In June 2008, CNET hailed Stage6 as one of the greatest defunct websites in history. Its has really good video quality and its only downside is downloading the divx plugin to play the videos. However, Stage6, which in January 2008 had 10.7 million views, announced that it would shut down(check the screenshot) on February 28, 2008. On February 29, 2008, a day later than announced, Stage6 was reduced to its frontpage and suggested that the userbase should migrate to Veoh, another video sharing service allowing high-quality uploads.


Final Comments:
Screen quality appears to be the best with Viddler and Vimeo, and actually the second-worst for Veoh, better only than youtube.

Free Social Media Tools for Pedagogs


Social media is primarily an Internet based tool used for communicating and hashing out information among the humans. There are lot of social media sites which are available in the internet today for commuting among the Educators. General media sharing sites like youtube, etc pose some serious concerns regarding Adult Content, Copy Right issues. To address these kind of issues and to ensure that the content is more education focused there are other sites which helps us.

1) Teachertube
TeacherTube which is officially launched on March 6, 2007 provides its users an online community for sharing instructional videos which is more educationally focused, secure for teachers, schools and home learners.

With TeacherTube, community members can:
a) Upload, share browse and tag hundreds of videos uploaded by community membersworldwide.
b) Upload Supporting Files to attach your Assessments, educational Activities, Notes, Lesson Plans, and Other file formats into your videos.
c) Integrate TeacherTube videos on websites using video embeds or APIs and Mark videos as public or private where users can circulate their selected videos publicly or share them privately with those they invite.

2) Schooltube

SchoolTube takes a complete different approach compared to Teachertube as it is a moderated content sharing site for teachers and students. SchoolTube.com, is a pure and refreshing site where inappropriate content gets blocked through an innovative Chain of Accountability process. All the students who create materials on SchoolTube needs to get approved by registered teachers, follow local school guidelines, and adhere to their standards. SchoolTube can be used by teachers, students, principals, parents, school boards, IT managers, administrators, and school-related associations.

Wednesday, October 8, 2008

Google Co-founder Sergey Brin starts blogging

According to a confirmation from Mattcutts "I’ve checked with folks at Google and they confirmed that http://too.blogspot.com/ is Sergey Brin’s blog". The word "too" in the URL reflects his life outside the work. Writing his first post on blogger Sergey mentioned that he is keen in Developing Parkinson’s Disease when he’s older which is based on the data 23andMe, a personal genetics company co-founded by Sergey’s wife Anne Wojcicki. This clearly states that Good Health is of top priority among every individual.

And the interesting point to note here is that he has Google Analytics already installed on his blog :) driving ahead with the game. Wheww thats Cool. Welcome to the world of Blogging!!!, Sergey :)

Natural Search Listings

An Search Engine Marketing firm iProspect(Original Search Engine Marketing Firm) survey revealed that 60.5% of Google, Yahoo!, MSN(now Live) and AOL users selected a natural search results over paid search results and the most surprising stats are that 60.8 percent of Yahoo! and 72.3 percent of Google search engine users chose natural search results as more relevant. Which is a clear indication that natural search listings are getting more clicks than Paid(Sponsored) listings.
In addition to this studies from Enquiro(a B2B Search Marketing Company) and iProspect(Original Search Engine Marketing Firm) exposed that 60.5% to 70.0% of users trust natural(organic) results while only 30% to 39.5% of users trust paid(Sponsored) results.

This clearly indicates that a listing in the natural(organic) search results is worth more compared to paid(Sponsored) listings in terms of higher click rate.

Although this may be the fact that natural search results helps in generating high quality traffic and business, there are considerably large number of crowd and still a great deal of companies which are spending higher amount of budgets on Pay Per Click Advertising and doesn't want to shift from it

Reporting Paid SEO Links or Spam to Google

It's always annoying and frustration creeps in when you've put a lot of hard work into making a good website and telling masses about it or getting press releases - and then all of a sudden someone comes along the way and beats it with paid or spam links. Now What to do about this?. How to report about these spam links to Google?. Now here is a way anyone can use to report about spamming to Google and protect your's Privacy

1) Sign in with yours Google Account into Google's webmaster console and use the authenticated spam report form to report the problem to Google team, Copy the exact query from the google search box that shows the problem and the resulting google URL which shows the problem and then yours competitor URL which you have identified doing some unethical business into the boxes provided.
2) Next the most important factor is to report the exact problem that you have identified by checking the proper checkboxes provided in the form
3) If you have some additional details regarding the issue you can mention it in the box which is provided in the end.
Note: Make sure you have mentioned the proper Subject line for better processing of yours request from Google

Links:
Webmaster console : http://www.google.com/webmasters/
Authenticated spam report form : https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport?hl=en

Unauthenticated spam report form : http://www.google.com/contact/spamreport.html

Usage of proper subject in yours report form makes the work process easier every time. Now you are done in submitting the complaint to google all you need to do is wait until google takes action and to see yours competitor burning. Blackhat seo techniques never lasts long !!

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Add Favicons to yours Blog

Favicon is basically a tiny 16x16 .ico graphic file which is displayed in the browser address bar, browser tabs, links bar, favorites menu, and also on your blogs feed in RSS readers. While most of the favicons are static images, some new browsers are now supporting animated GIF's and the PNG formats.

One can create a favicon in an icon editor software or can generate it online. A Favicon is actually short for "Favourite Icon" and serves as a sort of symbol for yours site. Based on yours priority you can also make an animated favicon or a scrolling favicon which scrolls your blog title one letter at a time.

To make one online a free favicon generator google it where you can find lot of softwares to generate it online. Ex: Microangelo Icon Editor is used to crate professional looking aqua style 3d icons

Once you are done with making a favicon download the favicon to your PC upload the icon file to a free server like Googlesites(earlier Googlepages). Copy down the URL of the icon at Googlesites.

Now login to the Dashboard of yours blog and go to the Edit Html section under the Template section. Now Copy the following code just below < title >.....< /title > tags

< link rel="shortcut icon" href="URL OF YOUR ICON AT your GOOGLESITES" / >
Thats it ..U r Done with the favicon to yours blog!!

Dont forget to Save the Template before viewing the change. If you are not able to view the changes still, Refresh the Cache and view blog.

To generate an animated favicon add the following code in the same position :
< link rel="shortcut icon" href="URL OF YOUR ICON AT your GOOGLESITES" / >
< link rel="icon" href="URL OF YOUR ICON AT your GOOGLESITES" type="image/gif" / >

Save the Template now and publish.

Adding meta-tags into blog

http://bloggertricks.com/2007/12/adding-meta-tags-to-bloggerblogspot.html

Dynamic Meta Desc Tag
http://reviewofweb.com/

Top sites for Business Connections

Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com
XING http://www.xing.com/
Ryze Business Networking http://www.ryze.com
Marzar http://marzar.com/
Ecademy http://www.ecademy.com
PerfectNetworker http://www.perfectnetworker.com
Wecando http://www.wecando.biz
UKBusinesslabs http://www.ukbusinesslabs.com
FastpitchNetworking http://www.fastpitchnetworking.com
Yasni http://www.yasni.com
Biznik http://biznik.com/
BNI http://www.bni.com/
Plaxo http://www.plaxo.com/
Perfect Networker On-line http://www.perfectnetworker.com/
Business Scene http://www.business-scene.com
BT Tradespace http://www.bttradespace.com
Tax Advice Network http://www.taxadvicenetwork.co.uk
financial social network IFA Life http://www.ifalife.com

Monday, October 6, 2008

How to Design Your AdSense Ads

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/11/15/how-to-design-your-adsense-ads/

5 Related Posts Techniques for Blogger Blogs

http://www.bloggingtips.com/2008/09/08/5-related-posts-techniques-for-blogger-blogs/

Recent Posts Widget for Blogger

http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2008/07/recent-posts-widget-for-blogger.html

Wednesday, October 1, 2008

Most Effective Adsense Layout for A Two Column Blog Template

http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/12/most-effective-adsense-layout-for-two.html

3 column template for blogger

http://www.bloggerbuster.com/2007/07/create-three-column-blogger-template.html

http://www.cashquests.com/hacking-blogger-beta-building-three_23
 
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