Developer Shed Weekly SEO News for 2010-08-27

Trouble reading this message? Read it online. August 27th, 2010 Welcome back friends to another installment of the SEO Chat newsletter. We have been working our tails off this week to bring you the latest and greatest in SEO news and how-to's. I know you are eager to get reading, so let's get started! Our first story this week: Yahoo search has finally finished merging with tech giant Microsoft's Bing. The two companies are hoping that they can defeat Google, or at least steal a little piece of the pie. Do they stand a chance? Has the transition been smooth? Only one way to know for sure - read the story below. Next in line, we take a look at Internet technology. It is a subject many SEOs never even consider, but knowing how the technology works can get you big points in the search engines eyes. A great article for veteran and newbie alike! Last up, a five-minute checklist that can tell you why your site is not ranking as high as you would like it to. It's essential reading for every optimizing guru. If you spend hour after hour trudging through your site, you'll want to take a five minute break to read this piece. Finally, we top it all off with our Spotlight and Thread of the week you won't want to miss. As always, thanks for reading. Until next time, SEO Chat Staff ARTICLES Yahoo Search is Now Powered by Bing Internet Technology Lessons for SEO Google: Why Websites Rank High SEO on Tutorialized SEO Thread of The Week SEO Chat News Spotlight TOOLS Get Our Content on Your Site with DevText! New Articles, Right To Your E-mail         ADVERTISEMENT     top It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's News You Can't Use, and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions: Keith showcases the best of Tech News. No - it is not just five minutes of credits. Watch the video!     ADVERTISEMENT   top Yahoo Search is Now Powered by Bing by wubayou 2010-08-25 With Google being the current champ in the search engine kingdom, other companies face a huge mountain to climb if they want to level the playing field. Research firm comScore reported that in July, Google claimed a whopping 66 percent of the total search traffic within the United States. Trailing far behind were Yahoo and Microsoft's Bing search engine, with 17 and 11 percent, respectively. As the saying goes, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em, and that is what Yahoo and Bing have decided to do, in a way. Rather than joining Google or being absorbed by them, Bing and Yahoo decided to join efforts in their quest for supremacy in the search engine market. Within the last couple months, Bing and Yahoo announced that they would become partners in order to consolidate their efforts to take up the number two spot in search engine market share and take direcbt aim at Google's top spot. The merger is a welcome move for Yahoo, who has seen its market share drop over the last year. Meanwhile, Bing, which started in 2009, has seen its share steadily climb. While Yahoo brings plenty of search engine experience to the table, Bing can bring more of a fresh start to the partnership. Read Yahoo Search is Now Powered by Bing ADVERTISEMENT Links From PR5-PR9 Sites Permanent, one-way text links 12 Months Permanent Link Guarantee Unique link building service Increase your site rankings , traffic , and sales ! Check Our Low Prices   top Internet Technology Lessons for SEO by Codex-M 2010-08-24 This is an introductory lesson for new SEOs that are not familiar with how the Internet and websites work. An SEO with a clear understanding of Internet technology will be able to understand a lot of technical processes that can help to diagnose SEO-related issues. If you are ready, let's get started. Technical definition of Internet Let's start with the most basic lesson about Internet technology. The Internet is a network made up of a vast number of computers. The computers are either connected through the use of wire communications (through cables) or wireless communications (antennas). Each of the computers on the Internet has been assigned a name with which to identify itself as unique in the network. This is called an IP address. An example of an IP address is 209.35.17.17. It is a numerical naming convention assigned to a network computer; this convention has existed ever since the birth of the Internet. Read Internet Technology Lessons for SEO ADVERTISEMENT Fast, Low-Cost Access to World-Class IT Infrastructure Aug 30, 2010 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern / 11:00 a.m. Pacific (60 minutes) In this eSeminar, join speaker Jerry Cuomo to learn about virtual technologies from IBM that are designed to deliver robustness and agility to business applications. Register today to enable your organization to adapt to changing marketplace conditions--all while lowering costs. Click to Register>>   top Google: Why Websites Rank High by Codex-M 2010-08-23 If you've ever wondered why certain websites rank high in Google - or, more specifically, why certain website are ranking higher in Google than yours - wonder no more. This article will show you how to find out, and quickly. Once you know, you can take steps to fix your own site's standing in Google. One of the most common questions asked in SEO forums is: Why does website X rank high in Google? Other variations of this question include Why is website URL x ranking higher in Google than website URL y? or Why is not my website ranking? This article will attempt to sort out these common questions once and for all, by utilizing a five-minute complete check as to why certain websites rank high in Google. In this case, you will not need a detailed SEO analysis report; you can easily do it yourself to find out what is going wrong with your website, in exact detail. Charles F. Kettering once said: A problem well stated is a problem half solved. After checking your website in about five minutes, you will have a clear idea of the problem, and it will be easier for you to correct these problems to get your website the Google ranking you think it deserves. Read Google: Why Websites Rank High ADVERTISEMENT   top Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other tech related tutorials. Submit Your Tutorial Today! How Can I Boost My Google Rankings? A definitive guide that teaches you how to boost Google rankings. Read the tutorial. How to get ahead with RSS! A tutorial on using RSS feeds to increase traffic in your niche. Read the tutorial. Submitting your URL to Search Engines How to get search engines to crawl your site as often as possible. Read the tutorial. Submit Wordpress Sitemaps Submit your Wordpress sitemap xml to Google and verify it. Read the tutorial. Learn Techniques Required for Creating Content WordPress Business Blog from average to extraordinary. Read the tutorial. Basics of SEO The basics of SEO in plain, easy to understand writing. Read the tutorial.   How can this SEO Newsletter be better? What do you like or dislike about this issue? Is there a topic you want to learn more about? What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement, so please email us. Email us.   top When you're checking some aspect of your site for SEO purposes, it helps to know how accurate your tools are, as you'll see from this week's thread. Be sure to stop by and join the conversation. christyy Google and Yahoo - Backlink Comparision My site is getting 435 backlinks in Yahoo, but Google is displaying no links when I check it with the link: command. Why? Matilda Google doesn't like to show what backlinks sites have. In fact, if you check what links Google.com has, using Google's link operator, they show you only 15,400. When in reality Google .com probably has several million, accrued over 10+ years! In other words, they aren't even telling you what links they have. So don't worry about it. Rest assured that they will have picked up everything Yahoo has found, and possibly more, as they index more of the web than Yahoo. sensei I can see about 3 times more links reported for certain sites inside my Google account compared to Yahoo!, so make sure you get yourself a Google account if you're interested in having a pretty accurate report of the backlinks pointing to your site. Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts. Read More top Know SEO and Avoid BS Like medicine or law, search engine optimization is a profession. And like doctors and lawyers, SEOs are professionals. But unlike doctors or lawyers, SEOs aren't required to go through any kind of certification process. This means that anyone can claim to be an SEO, whether or not they know what they're doing. What does that mean to you? If you're a client, you know the doctor or lawyer you consult with must have a certain level of understanding of their field. You don't know that about any SEO you consult. If you don't know something about SEO yourself, the professional SEO you hire could be feeding you a line, and you wouldn't even know it. One fallback, if you're not familiar with SEO, is to get references and look at testimonials. Indeed, even when we're looking for a doctor or a lawyer, we ask people we know to refer us to a good one; I chose my current doctor and dentist based on recommendations from my closest friends, and to be honest, they're probably the best I've ever had. So you would think that would work for SEOs as well, right? Well, you may be surprised to learn that even a testimonial from a thoroughly satisfied customer doesn't mean that you're dealing with a very good SEO. A respected member of our forums found one recently that made a number of other SEOs laugh. He clicked an ad for an SEO company to see what they were all about, went to the Testimonials section of the site, and found this sentence leading off the top one: My Colleagues and I have evaluated numerous search engine marketing companies. I say without trepidation that [name of SEO company] is a 'Best in Class' company. I challenged them to produce results with some difficult and obscure keyword terms. If you know nothing about SEO, this testimonial sounds pretty impressive. If you understand enough about how search engines work and what it takes to rank keywords, however, you're shaking your head. Why? It's EASY to rank for obscure keywords because there's relatively little competition; it's the COMMON keywords, such as mortgage loans or real estate, that are hard to rank. A person who is knowledgeable about SEO learns two things from this testimonial. The first is that this SEO company isn't necessarily all that good at what they do; if they were, why would they post such a lame testimonial so prominently on their website? The second, and more important, however, is that they're willing to provide misleading information in order to make themselves look like they're better than they really are. THIS is why you need to know something about SEO, even if you're going to hire someone else to do it for you. Good luck! Read the relevant thread Advertising Advertise in our SEO newsletter and reach informed SEO and search engine marketing professionals! For advertising information, contact us. Unsubscribe If you don't want to receive our emails, please unsubscribe. An email will be sent with additional instructions to confirm your unsubscription. Ziff Davis Enterprise, 28 East 28th Street, New York, NY 10016

Developer Shed Weekly SEO News for 2010-08-20

Trouble reading this message? Read it online. August 20th, 2010 Welcome back to the SEO Chat newsletter. It has been quite the week here at the Shed as we brought you - count them - six new articles. That's twice the usual amount. In the spirit of space conservation, we'll only be highlighting three of those in this week's newsletter, but I encourage you to drop by the site to view the rest. First up this week: Chinese search giant Baidu wants an Android deal. The phone is still small potatoes in China, but the CEO wants to get in on the ground floor. Will he succeed? What will this mean for Google? Only one way to find out... Next, we touch on a practice not ever SEO always considers. Should you use expired domains for optimization? And if so, how do you do so? Read below to find out. Last but never least, we are all aware of the traditional means of business promotion, but what about some outside of the box thinking? What are some unusual ways you can get your business running full steam? Terri Wells has a couple of ideas that may help you do just that. Finally, we top it all off with our Spotlight and Thread of the week you won't want to miss. As always, thanks for reading. Until next time, SEO Chat Staff ARTICLES Baidu Wants Android Deal, and More Using Expired Domains for Search Engine Optimization Business Promotion Outside the Box SEO on Tutorialized SEO Thread of The Week SEO Chat News Spotlight TOOLS Get Our Content on Your Site with DevText! New Articles, Right To Your E-mail         As an entrepreneur, your primary goals include closing more sales, getting repeat business, and building lasting, profitable relationships with your contacts. And email marketing can certainly help you do that. The problem is that so few people actually know how to use email marketing effectively. In a powerful new free report, you'll discover 3 techniques for increasing your sales through email marketing. This free report reveals the secrets of Email Marketing 2.0 and shows you: Why most emails get ignored, and how to make yours stand out How Email Marketing 2.0 can increase your profits while you spend less time at the office Why most entrepreneurs are sabotaging their own efforts How experts send the perfect message at the perfect time to close more deals And much more! If you want to get more out of your email marketing, then this 5-page free report is for you. Download your free copy today!     top It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's News You Can't Use, and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions: Keith showcases the best of Tech News. No - it is not just five minutes of credits. Watch the video!     ADVERTISEMENT Code is just about everywhere you look. So are the challenges of bringing your ideas to life. Fortunately, Visual Studio 2010 simplifies the entire development life cycle, from design to deployment. Learn more today.   top Baidu Wants Android Deal, and More by Terri Wells 2010-08-18 Google may insist they were standing on principle when they left China, but they also had some heavy competition to deal with: Baidu, a search engine that now holds a 70 percent market share in that country. But Baidu CEO Robin Li is hoping for more - much more. And interestingly enough, the next step may take it right onto Google's turf. The Chinese search engine hopes to strike a deal with manufacturers of smart phones that use Google's Android operating system. Li wants to get them to include a Baidu search box on Android phones that will be sold in China. The current numbers don't make the move look that attractive. Androids made up less than one-half of one percent of the 7.25 million smart phones sold in China in the fourth quarter of last year. That's a small market, but Li seems to think that it's set to grow - and he wants to get in on the ground floor. Read Baidu Wants Android Deal, and More ADVERTISEMENT Links From PR5-PR9 Sites Permanent, one-way text links 12 Months Permanent Link Guarantee Unique link building service Increase your site rankings , traffic , and sales ! Check Our Low Prices   top Using Expired Domains for Search Engine Optimization by Codex-M 2010-08-17 Sometimes if you are looking for a domain, one piece of sound SEO advice is to not get a brand new domain name . Instead, you are advised to get an expired/deleted domain name with a reputable or clean history in the search engines. This domain is considered "aged" and can have related back links with some good history attached to them. This means that expired/deleted domains can have some value in them. It is just that the previous owner is not fully aware of the importance of having an authority site and trusted domain. So the original owner changes their plans, and just lets go of the domain when more important life and work priorities come along. This happens often; there are some really great bloggers and writers starting their own domains and for some time their sites start to grab attention and popularity. After a few years have gone by, however, some bloggers lose the habit or interest in maintaining their own website, because they are doing another job outside of the Internet, and do not have the time to update the site anymore. Read Using Expired Domains for Search Engine Optimization ADVERTISEMENT Fast, Low-Cost Access to World-Class IT Infrastructure Aug 30, 2010 at 2:00 p.m. Eastern / 11:00 a.m. Pacific (60 minutes) In this eSeminar, join speaker Jerry Cuomo to learn about virtual technologies from IBM that are designed to deliver robustness and agility to business applications. Register today to enable your organization to adapt to changing marketplace conditions--all while lowering costs. Click to Register>>   top Business Promotion Outside the Box by Terri Wells 2010-08-16 Promoting your business , to my way of thinking, involves several factors. Perhaps the biggest is being in the right place at the right time with exactly what your potential customer wants. Does that sound a lot like selling? Of course. And like selling, you need to be prepared to do it in different ways depending on when and where you approach it. So what does this have to do with SEO? After all, you have probably come here expecting to read an article on how to optimize your site to get a high ranking in the search engines. You are no doubt familiar with the equation: a high position on the search engine results page leads to more visitors, which leads to more conversions, which leads to more profits. At least, that is how it usually works; if you have been doing this for a while, you know there are a number of ways in which this math can go awry. Considering that point, it is a good thing, then, that this equation is not the only one that can lead to profit for an online business . You would have to be living under a rock not to notice the rise of social media such as Facebook and Twitter. Let us not forget blogs and podcasts, or how easy it is for the average person to give their cat videos a worldwide distribution on Youtube. Like a high ranking in the search engines, these are all ways to get the message out about your business. They are a lot cheaper than making a 30-second commercial and buying air time on national TV. Read Business Promotion Outside the Box ADVERTISEMENT   top Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other tech related tutorials. Submit Your Tutorial Today! How Can I Boost My Google Rankings? A definitive guide that teaches you how to boost Google rankings. Read the tutorial. How to get ahead with RSS! A tutorial on using RSS feeds to increase traffic in your niche. Read the tutorial. Submitting your URL to Search Engines How to get search engines to crawl your site as often as possible. Read the tutorial. Submit Wordpress Sitemaps Submit your Wordpress sitemap xml to Google and verify it. Read the tutorial. Learn Techniques Required for Creating Content WordPress Business Blog from average to extraordinary. Read the tutorial. Basics of SEO The basics of SEO in plain, easy to understand writing. Read the tutorial.   How can this SEO Newsletter be better? What do you like or dislike about this issue? Is there a topic you want to learn more about? What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement, so please email us. Email us.   top Many of our members do their own SEO, so their main business is something other than optimization. But every so often one of them faces a career change in which they hope to make the most of their new-found SEO skills. As you'll see from this week's thread, our members are both supportive and full of advice when this happens. Be sure to stop by the thread and offer some of your own! Dr.Marie Challenge! How would you take advantage of this opportunity. So, here I am at an out of town course in the final stretch of getting my real estate license. We started to talk in the class about marketing and it turns out that these new realtors know very little about marketing on the internet.   After talking with my instructor she has given me the opportunity to do a lunch time talk in front of the class to explain the basics of Google Adwords.   Eventually, I plan to have services offered to realtors for lead capture online. And, as I get skilled enough I want to offer SEO for realtors as well. I currently have a website that I designed for my husband that captures online leads and nets us on average one lead per day. I'd like to sell this service to other realtors.   The problem is that I am new in the business. I don't want to offer more than I should (as I am not an expert). But I think this is a great opportunity for me to start off.   Any ideas? If you were in my shoes, how would you take advantage of this? EGOL If you have LOTS of time and are a great writer... I would start to develop a content site that focuses on a nice size city, dividing that city into zones and describing them in detail with schools, taxes, parks, maps, amenities... ... but then focus on Homes in that zone, commercial real estate in that zone, apartments in that zone, travel time to downtown, employers in that zone. Repeating... this is a content site that will be designed to compete for generic terms about zones in a city... This site will be a heap of work to build and maintain... but it will be a great place to advertize real estate service and will compete for generic real estate terms at the city (zone) level where others are not focused. A heap of work... don't do this unless you are a great writer, photographer and know how to make google maps. That's what I would do... but I am more interested in making money as a webmaster than ferrying people around looking at real estate. fathom If you are going to put your talent to work... (say SEO knowledge, PPC knowledge and real estate knowledge) you are far better to pull a EGOL. It takes time working on your own domain but pays dividends in the long run because you keep your SEO talents to yourself... you're a gifted writer, and knowledge about real estate and that should mean viralability! In addition, for faster cash... building a realtor domain that aggregates realtors according to cities offering them hot leads for resell... you build the landing pages, spend your nickels and make your $10-50/lead as opposed to per campaign. While EGOL's approach is difficult for most to achieve... if you got the talent - it's extremely easy. Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts. Read More top Whither Yahoo Site Explorer? Yahoo Site Explorer has been a very handy tool for site owners and SEOs. Among other things, it can tell you which of your sites and pages are in Yahoo's index; find pages that link to any site or any page; and submit and track feeds for your site. If you've authenticated your own site, you can use it to delete some of your site's URLs from Yahoo's site index, see the numbers of views and clicks your site received on Yahoo's search results for the top 10 search queries for your site, and more. Many SEOs and site owners like to use it to track backlinks to their site, as it's apparently more accurate than Google in this regard. And we all know how important backlinks are! So you can imagine the concerns raised by what Search Engine Land refers to as the Yahoo-Microsoft search transition. Will Yahoo Site Explorer become a victim of the transition? At the moment, it would appear that the answer is still a little up in the air. For now, it seems to be safe, but the organic transition will not be complete until 2012. Yahoo encourages webmasters to continue using Site Explorer, however, because in many parts of the world search results will continue to be powered by Yahoo's systems until after the full transition. And what about those areas that are already seeing results powered by Bing? We will share site information that you provide on Site Explorer with Microsoft during this transition period, to ensure that you get high quality traffic from search results that are powered by Bing also, Yahoo notes. That doesn't tell us what will happen to YSE itself after the transition, however. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land went the extra mile here, though, speaking with Yahoo's Shashi Seth about YSE. The impression is that YSE will be integrated into the new Bing webmaster tools. But there's no word as to when, exactly, this will happen. Currently, there is no link tool in Bing's Webmaster Center. It seems as if the best we can hope for is further clarification in time, when Yahoo and Microsoft release more details about the transition. Where does that leave webmasters and SEOs? For now, YSE will continue to be available. It will eventually be shut off, but it seems likely (to me, anyway) that this functionality will appear in Bing's webmaster tools before then. There is, of course, the Open Site Explorer â€? but users only get to see the first 1,000 links for free, and must pay to see the rest. Yahoo Site Explorer is free. Let's hope it remains so in any future incarnation. Advertising Advertise in our SEO newsletter and reach informed SEO and search engine marketing professionals! For advertising information, contact us. Unsubscribe If you don't want to receive our emails, please unsubscribe. An email will be sent with additional instructions to confirm your unsubscription. Ziff Davis Enterprise, 28 East 28th Street, New York, NY 10016