In recent years, website marketers were concerned with increasing ?hits’ and the ?stickiness’ of their sites. They were concerned with increasing page views and the amount of time spent on the site. This is definitely a hold over from the paper based businesses of the past, and has proved to not be of much use in the fast moving internet world.

As a result, hits and views are no longer considered useful metrics for evaluating website success. They simply don’t provide the right kind of information needed by online marketers. Now they look at conversions, drop-out rates, return on investment and revenue per visitor.

Over the past two years, both the business and practice of search engine marketing have become much more complex. The same is true of the websites search engine marketers work with. The evolving design techniques and technologies that have made the website of today far more versatile than those of previous years, have also made them harder to work with for third party service vendors such as SEOs.

Mix in rapidly growing levels of keyword competition, new styles of search engine and the continued strength of the Pay per Click advertising option and a sector that once resembled a paint-by-numbers art project is now more of an abstract exercise in impressionism.

Everybody loves lists and statistics. From the annual Top100 movies of all time lists to the Top10 cities in which to live, even the simplest comparative studies can captivate people and inform pop-culture opinions. Folks use lists to prove points, gauge their own successes and get a reckoning on what’s going on around them.

Our love of lists affects us in both profound and subtle ways. Today’s search engine users have long been conditioned to believe that the stuff found at or near the top of a list ranks among the best of whatever vintage is being examined. After all, it was found at or near the top of a list that might contain over 1,000,000 other references. Now, many of those top listings were affected by another group of people who live for lists and statistics, search engine marketers.

…Don’t deny it, you all know the words. So, what’s it all about? Well, not content with just mapping the earth, and in what is the biggest step so far in the currently raring digital mapping race, Google have mapped a section of the moon - to celebrate the day that man first set foot on the moon, July 20th 1969. Google post on their official blog about the mission, saying that it was actually a birthday wish from one of the staff members, and that - amazingly - the whole thing was conceived within a week!

Google Print For Libraries Proves Challenging by: Jason L. Miller

Details, details-such is the Achilles’ Hell of the visionary temperament. When Google put forth a massive online literary digitization effort, the scholar, the literati, the purist self-educator, the mousey, bucked-toothed, four-eyed little girl in all of us cheered the soon-to-be nearer reach of all those words. But visions, especially the grandiose, face the speed bumps, the hurdles, of real world logic-or worse, lawyers.

Two major associations of publishers have sent letters to Google demanding the cessation of the digitization project that involves scanning the entire text of copyrighted material until all pertinent questions are answered and a collective copyright agreement can be reached.

Yahoo, the DMCA, and Blackhat Techniques by Chris Richardson

Apparently, through the use of a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) complaint, you can have sites thrown out of Yahoo’s search index. If you file a DMCA report against a site, Yahoo will remove the “offending” site from Yahoo Search altogether, leaving no trace of the site in its index.

In fact, Yahoo’s system is set-up in a way that site owners with complaints filed against them are not allowed to defend themselves. Once Yahoo receives a DMCA complaint against a site, they act. Brian Turner brought this information to light over at Platinax.co.uk in a revealing report that also indicated the Platinax web site was made a victim of Yahoo’s practice.

The RSS Promise for Internet Users by Rok Hrastnik (c) 2005

The RSS promise for end-users is simple:
–> a unified one-stop-shop to consume online content, without having to visit dozens of sites every day to see what’s new and without having their online subscriptions interfere with their personal and business e-mail communications;

–> complete control over their content consumption, including a quick, easy and reliable mechanism to unsubscribe from content they do not wish to receive;

–> the ability to receive breaking news as it becomes available, without having to wait for a monthly, weekly or daily recap sent to their e-mail addresses;

Zen and the Art of Viral Marketing by Jason L Miller

Let’s begin with some simple tenets we can agree on. Free is better than paying. Cheap is better than expensive. An invitation is better than a command. A smile attached to the eyeballs you want scanning your site is better than a disappointed scowl.

These concepts make up everything that is viral marketing, or as it is referred to outside cyberspace-word of mouth advertising.
Now lets look at how AOL and Juno got schooled by Hotmail and NetZero. Hotmail is a key beginning as it is considered the progenitor of online viral marketing. While Juno was spending $20 million on traditional advertising channels, it didn’t come close to the success of Hotmail’s email service that began with a modest $50,000.

The Three Principles of Image Optimization by George Peirson

Are you losing visitors to your web site due to slow page load times? Is your site being penalized because the images on your site are too large? Are you able to capture your visitor’s attention in the first 10-15 seconds that they are on your site?

All of these problems can be caused by an improperly optimized web page. In other words, the page loads too slowly and your visitor leaves before you have had a chance to hook them.

Strategic RSS Positioning… How to Hotwire Your Site to Google! by Titus Hoskins

There’s no denying it, the Internet has changed. The change was so subtle most people missed it. It was no great momentous event, just a slight sideways flex in how information is exchanged on the web. However, this slight shift has significant ramifications for anyone trying to achieve top rankings in the different search engines. So keep reading to find out how you can use this new SEO wildcard to ‘hotwire’ your site to the major search engines such as Google, Msn and Yahoo.
Of course, the wildcard we’re talking about is RSS!