Search Engine Optimization News

More businesses are developing a web presence than ever before. Design houses and SEO shops are extremely busy these days as small businesses try their hands at online commerce for the first time, and established businesses are having sites redesigned. Even with a great deal of technological innovation in both design and search, preliminary SEO strategies have not changed radically. The rules are basically the same but the campaigns have gotten larger with clients wanting their SEO providers to cover more ground than in previous years. In a two part series, I want to look at the first steps of an SEO campaign for smaller and larger sites. Today, we'll look at smaller sites and how to get your ascent up the rankings off on the right foot.
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Brian Didier, partner owner of MakeGlobalCash.com, a niche market search engine catering to the needs of the home-based business owner states that for the home-based business owner using the big guys is just not profitable. For example, several advertisers’ maximum bids on Overture exceeded $2.00 per click for the keyword “home business.”
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How do you persuade someone to do what you want them to do?

A whole world of marketing exists around us trying to do that every minute of the day. Do you even notice it anymore or, like your prospects, have you subconsciously set up a system of "radar defenses" against the daily bombardment of marketing messages?
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Lower Cost and Better Virus Protection Drive Thousands of Computer Users to Abandon Their Current Anti-Virus for Grisoft AVG Antivirus Software distributed by Walling Data Systems - http://www.avg-antivirus.net
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Microsoft is trying to help governments stop reinventing the digital wheel.
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After weeks of reading about Blogs, folks have been left wondering where they could find ones that meet their interests. Enter the new Blog Search Engine, “... a web search resource for finding web logs.”, created by Search Engine Journal's Loren Baker. Earlier today, the Blog SE announced a partnership to provide Blog and MoBlog results to Mark Cuban's search engine Ice Rocket. (A MoBlog is a “mobile blog” consisting of images captured by mobile phones)
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If you're a real estate agent, you already know that up to 75% of your customers can come to you over the Internet.
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Google has published its long-awaited AdWords content policy, which outlines what is and is not acceptable in its text ads.
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In a thread over at Cre8asite Forums named Organic vs Paid traffic ROI?, there is a discussion going on about the different conversion rates and ROI seen between the pay per click traffic (paid traffic) and organic traffic (free traffic). I have personally heard at conferences that people are more likely to click on organic results over paid results. However, I do not remember hearing the differences in terms of conversions or ROI when it comes to paid versus free search.
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Having relevant high quality sites link to your web pages will help their search engine rankings. But how do you get them to link back to you?
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Prominent Placement, Inc., a leading Atlanta search engine optimization company, received AMY Award accolades from the American Marketing Association (AMA) for the firm's strategic Internet marketing campaigns for clients CompuTaught and The Banker's Exchange.
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Mozilla Firefox has Google, Yahoo and other search tools baked in, but they are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to search capabilities available with this innovative new web browser that launched its first official version today.
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MT Blog users can now choose from a selection of readily made MT Style sheets.
Visit Movable Styles

By clicking on the new Local tab, the Ask.com homepage is immediately re-rendered with 6 local search tabs: Web, Local Listings, Maps, Driving Directions, Local News, and Weather. By clicking on one of these "sub-tabs", the homepage is again seamlessly rendered, prompting users for the input to increase relevancy for that particular type of search. For example, if a user selects the Maps tab, the standard search box is replaced with two search boxes that prompt for address and city/zip, respectively. Clicking on the Local News tab brings up a search box that asks just for city/zip. And so on. Ask Jeeves has found this seamless navigation to be more intuitive for its users.
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Overture is considering offering advertisers a flat-rate pricing model to make paid search simpler for small- and medium-sized businesses, according to Ted Meisel, president of Overture and SVP at Yahoo! "We're focused on simplifying from several directions, and that's what it's going to take," he told an audience at the Kelsey Group's Interactive Local Media conference today. "We need to help marketers to think about their objectives, not on the keywords they're picking. Not whether they're bidding $0.14, but whether they're meeting their objectives. We're entertaining subscription models. It's going to take all of that."
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The company [UpSNAP] will offer its customers a new way to extend their reach off-line and directly to consumers via text-enabled cell phones under a pay-per-click/call model...Until today, consumers had to pay to find merchants in the cellular world," said Tony Philipp, President and CEO of UpSNAP!. "UpSNAP! reverses this model. Consumers can contact merchants for free, and local merchants can now take advantage of a performance-driven advertising model even without a web presence. LookSmart, with its large base of advertisers and flexible paid listings platform, was the obvious partner to work with to power this advertising service...For the first time, advertisers have a performance-based revenue model via text-messaging on cellular telephones.

SMA, the Search Marketing Association currently have ad-hoc setups in both the UK and EU (Denmark) and are, one would fervently hope, a viable alternative to the kids playing office.
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SBC Communications and BellSouth will acquire YellowPages.com with the goal of making the site a better nationwide online business index, the companies said Thursday. Based on the deal, the two companies said they plan to launch a joint venture between their respective directory affiliates that will aim to capitalize on the visibility of the Yellow Pages name and assemble a comprehensive online directory of U.S. businesses. The carriers said they hope to tap into the growing market for regional Web search.
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For so many web surfers, it's almost automatic to type Google.com in to our address bar when we want to search. So big and well-known is Google that many browsers have a built-in search box or typed shortcut for Google searches. In fact, we tend to associate Google with search so much now that the word itself is commonly used as a verb, as in "let me Google that". It's much the same as Band-Aid, Kleenex, and Xerox, where the brand name is so pervasive that it's very often substituted for the generic function of the item the brand is applied to. We're used to searching from home, where we've had Internet access for years now. But Google Wireless search is also available for use from Internet-ready cell phones and some wireless PDA devices such as PalmOne and Palm VII.
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This new tool makes most Toolbars obsolete, including our own Trellian Toolbar. A Single toolbar to rule them all! A bit about the ToolbarBrowser. It is a Toolbar management tool and a complete Toolbar authoring system. Its aim is to put an end to the Toolbar insanity that has been invading our browser space over the last few years. Toolbars can be very useful, but the problem is that everyone seems to have one these days and most only have one or two features that you actually want or need.
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