Archive for January, 2007

Microsoft Study Sheds New Light On Search Habits

Microsoft recently published a study that has the Web world rocking. Essentially, the study says that being in the top 5 of a search results page (SERP) is the optimum place to be. This is considered, in the WWW publishing world, “above the fold,” to borrow an old newspaper publishing term. To be above the […]

Sunday, January 21st, 2007

Don’t Redesign Your Website Just Yet, But If You Do …

“I am in the process of redesigning my site, what should I look out for in order to maintain the SEO (and rankings)?”
Site Structure
The existing structure of your site is in most cases the single most important factor behind a safe redesign. If your structure changes, even just a little, you could easily see your […]

Saturday, January 20th, 2007

Optimization Is In The Copywriting

I now propose to go right out on a limb and say that design has very little to do with search engine optimization. This is a sweeping generalization, I admit, and one to which my designer friends will take instant umbrage. But it is true to all intents and purposes. Design can certainly assist in […]

Friday, January 19th, 2007

How Long Will This Retirement Game Last?

Go to this Google SERP and you’ll see someone who has effectively wrapped up a monopoly on the keyword phrase “retirement intelligence.”
You’ll see the same thing at Yahoo.
This company reports owning the top 400 spots on the search for this keyword. How does that happen? Aren’t they guilty of duplicate content?
To answer the second question, […]

Thursday, January 18th, 2007

Search Engine Advertising - One Man’s Beef And A Solution Offered

Let’s first examine the main reasons why advertisers should be abandoning PPC in droves:
1. Cost
According to the Fathom Online Keyword Price Index, the average keyword price paid by online advertisers reversed a downward trend and increased 16.5% percent to $1.48 in the third quarter of 2006, up from a $1.43 per click at the end […]

Wednesday, January 17th, 2007

Blog Optimization Will Be The Next Phase In Social Interaction

Offer Posts Via Email
Some people just don’t get RSS. So cater to them by offering them an option to get your blog posts by email instead. The most popular service to do this automatically is FeedBlitz, although there are also many other tools available to do this.
That’s a good suggestion, especially if you write a […]

Tuesday, January 16th, 2007

10 Sins Of Blog Usability And How To Avoid Them

Top 10 Sins
of Blog Usability
By Linda Bustos
“Sinning” is an archery term, which literally means “to miss the mark.” If you’re blogging to establish a two-way dialogue with the world, the “mark” is the optimal reader experience. The following is a list of ten things that can hurt your blog’s usability.
10. Sending Mixed Messages
The […]

Monday, January 15th, 2007

The Case Against HTML

HTML emails and CSS formatting will take a huge hit when Outlook 2007 starts taking up positions on millions of desktops, and email newsletter publishers will have to take some extra steps to ensure their creations render correctly. But even that isn’t a guarantee against problems with that new email program.
There is a big […]

Sunday, January 14th, 2007

Be Careful With Screenshots, You Could Be Infringing On Someone’s Copyright

Introduction to Copyrights,
Patents, and Trademarks
By Deepak Dutta
What is a copyright? Can everything be copyrighted? A copyright is the expression of an idea. The idea itself is not copyrighted. Ideas can be patented and I will talk about patents later.
Let’s consider the example of a story: a poor man who found lots of cash […]

Saturday, January 13th, 2007

Search Will Likely Change And Not’s Really A Change

Dreaming Of Search In 1994

David A. Utter
Around the time the World Wide Web was being opened to users of AOL for the first time, and 9600 baud was a massive upgrade in speed for modems, some clever people made predictions about the future that held up pretty well over the years.

Someone excavated a piece […]

Friday, January 12th, 2007