Written by Mark Daoust

Consider Yahoo the first major casualty of the search engine wars. Yahoo has admitted that they cannot reasonably expect to take away any significant amount of the search market share from Google, so they have chosen to be happy as the second most visited search engine on the Internet. On the surface, this may seem strange. Why would Yahoo ever publicly announce that they are ‘throwing in the towel’ in the search engine war? That would be similar to Pepsi recommending that people drink their product only if Coca-Cola is not available. From a business standpoint, it is absolutely ridiculous and makes absolutely no sense.

Bloggers who use MSN Spaces for their posts can place advertising on their blogs now, with options for Amazon associates and Kanoodle ads offered.

MAKE MONEY FA$T! That’s the implicit message behind two of the many changes MSN implemented recently, as they added a couple of options for monetizing a blog on MSN Spaces.

The service now permits users to have associate links to Amazon on their sites. Associates receive a piece of the action whenever someone purchases an item through the Amazon link containing the associate ID.

By Rok Hrastnik (c) 2005

Truth be told, most blogs aren’t really optimized for marketing effectiveness. Even more so, some blogs are absolute marketing machines, but they at the same time fail to fully capitalize on that fact by not being really optimized marketing-wise.
Blogs may be Web 2.0, but bloggers should not ignore some of the good old internet direct marketing tactics that have been working for marketers online almost for a decade or more.

Hëre are the absolute 101 basics you really shouldn’t ignore …

1. Don’t Forget E-Mail Delivery

Written by Steve Shaw (c) 2006 and published in SiteProNews

Site promotion gimmicks and traffïc techniques come and go, but the ones that really work are those that stand the test of time. This article highlights what I consider to be the most effective methods to promote your web site of all time.

1. Get Your Site High In The Search Engines

Getting your site linked high in the search engines for your keywords and keyphrases.

One of the best ways to do this is to ensure your site has a good number of incoming links from quality sites - I discuss how to achieve this with relative ease below.

(This article was writte by: David A. Utter for WebProNews)

The November 2005 figures from Nielsen//NetRatings on search share
didn’t change a bit from the month prior, as nearly 70 percent of
searches passed through Google or Yahoo.

Writing about search engine share is like watching Bill Murray in
“Groundhog Day”, where every day ends just like the one previous to
it. Maybe Nielsen/NetRatings should start calling it “Google-hog
Day” when releasing a statement on search share and percentages.

A few days ago we posted an article on this blog about the new SEO competition being run by http://www.v7n.com/, the aim being to be placed first in Google (organic rankings) for the search term on May 15, 2006, noon, Pacific standard time.

Surprisingly, and without really trying, we have found that in posting that entry, this blog has started to feature reasonably well for the phrase in Google.

Currently (24th January 2006), we are featuring in position 57 on http://www.google.com, position 36 on http://www.google.co.uk (the web) and position 5 on http://www.google.co.uk (pages from the UK). I will keep posting updates on our position so long as we don’t completely disappear off the face of Google.

Google rolled out Gmail to tremendous applause, Google Earth found a devoted following for its services, but Google Video has received nothing but grief from the online world.

Google refunded The Register and other Google Video users for download purchases that were never fulfilled. Despite an apology from Google…

“You may have noticed some problems with some of the video(s) that you downloaded and we have issued you a full refund for these purchases,” Google wrote in a customer service e-mail. “Rest assured, the affected video files have been replaced and are now available on Google Video. In addition to the refund, the episode that you purchased are available for re-download at no charge.”

Written by David Utter for WebPronews

The habit of going to a search engine has become so ingrained a behavior for Internet users that many input names like eBay or Yahoo into a search box instead of the address bar of the browser.
A lot of users have home pages set to various portals, like Yahoo or MSN or Google, all of which contain a handy search box on the page. To get to a well-known destination like online auctioneer eBay, quite a number of those users type eBay into the search box, hit Enter, and then click on the link to the site that appears on the search result pages.

Written by Joel Walsh and published in seo-news.com

How does web content really affect SEO? It’s often said that the answer is simply that content does not affect SEO very much – it’s all about more technical issues. Yet a website’s content still plays an enormous and fairly direct role in search engine ranking.
Of course, the whole goal of the search engines’ ranking schemes is precisely to deliver good, relevant content to users. The mechanism for how search engines select and reward good, relevant content is essentially just a technical issue, though admittedly an extremely important technical issue.

A couple of years ago an SEO competition was started by http://www.darkblue.com/. They are an internet marketing company that provide affiliate marketing solutions to ecommerce companies.

The idea was that the winner of the competition would be the person that had their web page listed a the top of Google’s listings for the phrase ‘Nigritude Ultramarine‘, on 7th June 9am GMT, 2004. 

The words were chosen because up until that point there were no pages indexed by Google for that phrase, most likely because, as a phrase, it has no meaning. This meant that everyone participating was starting on a level playing field. As a result of this competition, 510,000 web pages were created that contained that fictitious phrase.