5 Killer Ways to Improve your Writing Right Now
Improve Your Blog Writing with this post written by Rob Siders from 52 Novels.
Technorati Tags: blog
Google Yahoo MSN Live Sitemaps: Cross-Hosting Grokked by SEOs for SEOs
With sitemaps cross-hosting (or cross-submission), Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft cracked open the door for corporations to outsource search engine optimization.
How big a deal is this?
Not enough to make Robert Scoble cry. Or join the circus.
When SEL broke the news at SMX (described in excellent summary by Vanessa Fox of vanessfoxnude fame), I was hoping for a revolutionary change. Then I read the blog posts at the Google Webmaster Central, Yahoo Search and Live Search Webmaster Center blogs so you don’t have to. (I’m just kidding all you search engine PR gals … and guy.)
Robots.txt ruined my night. I felt like I was decepticonned - hoping for the breakthrough that would make outsourcing SEO much easier for major corporations. Or an announcement that might provide guidance for SEOs to improve rankings for their clients.
SEW Experts SEM Crossfire columnist Chris Boggs ended the robots nightmare: “I think it’s a big step forward in making it easier for companies to outsource, but the caveat is having full access to the robots.txt. Some industries such as banking and pharma may still have issues.”
Still, we don’t want to beat up on the search engines (unnecessarily). In the past, search engines required companies with multiple Web sites to have “one set of servers to rule them all.”
In short, search engines required sitemaps to be on the same host and path as the URLs they contained. That meant the same server needed to host both sitemaps and site content.
Google, Yahoo and Live Search put […] Read more »
7 Ways Brands Can "Get Social"
Many brands are wary of exposing themselves on social media sites, but as anyone who’s been involved in social media for more than five minutes knows, they’re too late. In today’s SearchDay, "The Role of the Brand in Social Media Marketing," Userplane's Mike Jones shares seven social marketing tactics to help your brand "get social" and join the conversation:
1. Boost the Fun Factor
2. See the Forest and the Trees
3. Widgets are Welcome
4. Conversation is King
5. Engage
6. Research and Listen
7. Don’t Go It Alone
Technorati Tags: blog
Have Blogs Killed Conventional Websites?
This post looking at conventional websites vs blogs is by Suzanne Falter-Barns from Get Known Now.
Have Blogs Killed Conventional Websites?
It’s a question that’s been bugging me profoundly since I got into blogging over a year ago. Blogs are cheap, easy, efficient, wildly easy to find on the Net, super marketing-friendly, and just plain fun. They work rings around websites.
So are conventional websites no longer necessary? To find out, I interviewed Andy Wibbels, the original blogging evangelist and author of the excellent book, Blogwild!. Here’s the short version of what I learned.
Technorati Tags: blog
Schedule optimization for SES New York
The biggest Search Engine Strategies conference of the year will be held the week of March 17 in New York City. Whether this will be your first SES New York, or the fifth one in a row that you’ve attended since 2004, you might appreciate some free advice on schedule optimization.
Technorati Tags: blog
Yahoo Changes Minimum Bid Policy on Search Ads
Yahoo this week changed the way it will set minimum bids on some keywords in Sponsored Search ads in the U.S., bringing it closer in line with Google’s policy. Instead of setting all minimum bids at $0.10, Yahoo will now allow the market to set a variable minimum bid. That means that in some cases, the minimum will be above $0.10, and in other cases it could be lower.
The minimum bids will be set based on the relevance of ads to a keyword, the number of bidders and their bid amounts. It will not be based on advertiser conversions. These kinds of factors are already used by Yahoo to rank ads based on a quality score, but the difference now applies to the minimum bid, or reserve price.
Google changed its minimum bid structure in July 2005. Many advertisers were not happy with the move at the time, but so far there does not seem to be much outcry in blogs or search marketing forums.
A key difference between Yahoo’s new method and Google’s is the institution of alerts and a grace period when the bid on a given keyword is about to fall below the minimum. Yahoo will notify advertisers in their Account Dashboard if a bid is about to drop below the minimum, and will offer a grace period of up to a few days to allow the advertiser to raise their bid to keep the keyword active.
The first batch of keywords goes live in the U.S. with the new […] Read more »
Technorati Tags: blog
The Search Engine Watch List, Part 1
Tamara
Chris
Ron
Patrick
Liana
David
Lauren
Jeffrey
Jordan
Greg
Jacob
Joan
Greg
Kevin
Heather
Brian
Perry
Paul
Lee
Mark
Steve
Ed
Phil
Eric
Jill