By David Utter

While eBay has enabled thousands of sellers to convert old items into new money, a subset of those sellers have become PowerSellers, driving lots of revenue to eBay and in many cases creating new careers for themselves.

What is a PowerSeller? eBay defines them as “top sellers who sustain a consistent high volume of monthly sales and a high level of total Feedback with 98% or better positive rating by other eBay users.” When a seller meets eBay’s criteria for entering the program, eBay invites them to become PowerSellers, an acknowledgement of their success.

By Andy MacDonald :: Swift Media UK

Treat Yahoo as both a directory AND a search engine. Yahoo offers a number of different search results. Part of their search results come from an actual search engine, and some of their results come from human editors, called surfers.
Every Yahoo directory submission is viewed by a person. (Search engines use spiders and indexing software). Admission into the Yahoo directory is entirely at the discretion of the Yahoo surfer viewing your site. That’s why the free submission lead time can often be 8-10 weeks, without using the Express Submit service.

By Rob Sullivan

There are many ways to increase content on your site, from manually creating it to purchasing software which will auto generate it for you.
While I highly recommend you stay away from anything which is automatically generated I also understand that many people don’t feel comfortable writing.

Therefore, in this article, I look at another way to make your site appear as if it’s changing. That is, incorporating feeds into your site to improve return visits and build your brand.

Feeds have been growing in popularity for some time. In fact, there are people who measure such popularity.

By Mark Daoust

In webmaster circles, fessing up to being a FrontPage user is akin to inviting your mother as your date to your senior prom: you just don’t do it. In fact, admitting that you simply use a WYSIWIG editor can often be enough for experienced webmasters to quietly chuckle, look at you with a “someday you’ll learn” look, and give you a nice pat on the back encouraging you to keep learning. ‘Real’ webmasters know three things: 1) Hand coding is the only way to make a website look nice, 2) The more your web programming looks like the screen from “The Matrix”, the better your website will be, and 3) that FrontPage was actually programmed by Beelzebub himself.

By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor,
StepForth Placement Inc.

Does anyone remember how, less than a year ago, several commentators suggested Google was compiling a series of products that could emulate an online operating system? At the time, Google steadfastly denied such rumors. Yesterday, Google purchased Upstartle, the maker of a browser-based word processor called Writely.
Writely is an online word processor that enables multiple users to access and work on documents from any location. It can be used as a collaborative editing device and offers users online publishing options including the ability to convert Writely documents into “normal-looking web pages” or blog postings.

I recently met with a client to review design proofs for a new web site and to begin discussion on home page content and web copy requirements. The subject of search engine optimization came up, and as I was generally discussing basic notions of keyword inventory research, meta tags, page titles, headings, word count, keyword frequency and prominence - the usual SEO stuff - I was interrupted by another fellow at the meeting who dismissed the importance of SEO work and suggested it was inexact and unimportant.

Google’s Shuman Ghosemajumder, Business Product Manager for Trust & Safety, provided answers for some common questions about click fraud after Google disclosed it was nearing a settlement in a lawsuit filed against it over the problem.

For one thing, Google isn’t going to tell how they detect invalid clicks. Ghosemajumder noted in the Q&A posted at the AdWords blog that a lot of smart people developed the methods and technology used in tracking those down. “Doing so would make it easier for fraudsters to try to defeat our systems,” he said.

By Gary McHugh

How many times have you heard “A link has to have this PR or that PR to be of value” or “link only to relevant sites” and a myriad of other “Expert” advice on the value of links and reciprocal links?
As a webmaster myself I grew increasingly weary of hearing how “important” my links were in the eyes of a search engine. Now this may sound brave or stupid of me but believe me when I say it is neither. I could not give a FLYING HOOT how important Google, Yahoo, MSN or the “Gurus” think my sites are and I don’t care what my PR is.

By Joel Walsh

How do you grow your search engine traffïc without adding a single new link or making any changes to your existing webpages?
It’s simple. Just add content.

Simply having keyword-optimized pages of content on your site won’t rank you high for competitive search engine keywords – that’s a fact of life. But keyword-optimized content can really bring in the traffïc for low-competition and unique keywords. The low-competition and unique keywords are typically longer multi-word variants of the keyword. For instance, instead of “search engine ranking,” “ranking for search engine traffïc niche keywords.”

By Joe McVoy (c) 2006

Everyone wants “organic” or “frëe” traffïc, but it’s a full time job to try to keep on top of the search engines changing rules. Instead, if you build a good content-rich site and do the things on this list, you’ll get traffïc and help your ranking at the same time.

1. Use Pay-Per-Click (PPC) - Get traffïc in an hour with PPC. Google and Overture (now Yahoo). Don’t bother with others until you make these two work. The key to this is to know your visitor value, bid on hundreds of key words and phrases and split test your ads and track each keyword, phrase or ad separately.