WNW Design would like to wish all a very merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous new year.

We’re off now till January 4th 2005, but before we go here is a cheerful Christmas poem:

There’s More to Christmas…
There’s more, much more to Christmas
Than candle-light and cheer;
It’s the spirit of sweet friendship
That brightens all the year;
It’s thoughtfulness and kindness,
It’s hope reborn again,
For peace, for understanding
And for goodwill to men!

By Donald Nelson (c) 2004

Many people are afraid to write the meta tags for their websites, thinking that they would have to be search engine optimization specialists in order to do it properly. While you may not have any special expertise in the field of search engine optimization, you should be an expert in your own business’s area of activity, and, if you combine this knowledge with some simple guidelines, you can write accurate meta tags. Let us see how to write one of the most important meta tags, the description tag.

By Jim Hedger

I love New York City. More than any other city on the planet, New York is exciting, expansive and always interesting. As Earth’s unofficial capital city, New York is home to many of the world’s largest entities, some even bïgger than Donald Trump’s ego. No other city has captured the world’s imagination or harnessed its wealth to the degree of NYC. New York is also the home of over 8-million people. As one of the most multicultural cities, every cultural group in the world is represented within its 301 square mile area. New Yorkers aren’t just city-folk, they define what is hip in urban living in the early part of this century. Unlike their counterparts in cities like LA, Rome or Tokyo, New Yorkers don’t fall for fads, set trends, or get giddy over the next new thing, ever. They are one of the most jaded and cynical populations and in their East Coast way, take great pride in their worldliness. That’s what makes them the perfect test market for Yahoo’s local-search engine.

By Tinu AbayomiPaul (c) 2004

Though the answer is in a book I wrote this July, the question is still asked of me repeatedly. Why does it work for some sites and not others? And how come some blogs get indexed in a day and then are dropped, and others stay in Google indefinitely?
Well, let’s take one question at a time. The answer to whether you can blog your way into Google search results is yes, sometimes in six weeks, often in 24 hours.

Yes, you read right, in less than 24 hours. Under certain conditions, the search engines actually want you to succeed at this.

By Mike Banks Valentine (c) Dec. 11, 2004

The Google Suggest Tool Launched Friday in Beta and it’s amazing! How they continue to come up with brilliant, innovative tools that enhance and improve search is beyond me. Having hundreds of genius engineers on staff, listening to their ideas - then implementing those ideas is leading to great leaps in search usability. Try it yourself at: http://labs.google.com/suggest/.

The Google Suggest Beta tool not only completes words in a drop-down list that shows ten possible and or likely ways to complete any word you begin to type in the search box, it shows beside each of those possible word combinations - how many times that option is searched at Google!

While some may wonder what the next step for the search engine industry to take, Google may have already answered that question. Ever evolving, Google has their eyes set on the future with news of their newest innovation, Google Print. Not only will the search engine’s newest entity allow room for an exponential amount of growth, Google’s written word department may also open new avenues for search engine marketers to pursue.

Google is in preparation to one-day launch Google Print. How do you think this will impact the search engine industry? Does the idea of Google as a publishing entity sound appealing? Discuss at WebProWorld.

Webmasters that stick to the old ways and focus entirely on Google are missing out on a lot of search traffic these days if they are not also well ranked by Yahoo and MSN.

For the first few months after Yahoo decided to go their own way with natural search (and MSN decided to get serious about the search business), the search results provided by those two could only be described as bizarre.

Enough time has now passed that the dust has somewhat settled and there are three main (from a traffic standpoint) sites for quality natural searches.

By Mike Banks Valentine (c) Nov. 16, 2004

The 2004 “World of Search” conference at the Las Vegas Convention Center began Tuesday, November 15, with a short welcome and conference kudos and credits from WebMasterWorld.com (WMW) head Brett Tabke. A first session, titled “Big Site Promotion” provided a glimpse into search engine gambits employed by the SE strategists for the big boys at Autobytel.com (Joe Morin of Boost Search Marketing), About.com (Marshall Simmonds, Primedia Search Director) and IBM (Bill Hunt of GlobalStrategies.com).

By Richard Zwicky

A couple of weeks ago I was at a conference, and in the halls chatted with a number of people who were in total awe of ‘local search.’ The latest and greatest! The next BIG thing! It has not ceased to amuse me watching various organizations and the search engines themselves fall over each other in their march towards offering ‘local search.’