Traffic Flow SEO

Larry Kim over at WordStream let me know about his other FREE SEO/SEM Tool to help find profitable keywords. Below is the actual description from the website:

Targeting keyword niches is essential to running profitable PPC campaigns and will identify the best SEO content to add to your site. Just enter your keywords below and The Free Keyword Niche Finder will suggest the most profitable verticals to explore for PPC and SEO.

Check it out now for FREE - Keyword Niche Finder

Thanks again WordStream!

Just strolling around the web and stumbled into this great, free new keyword tool from WordStream. Here is all the information from the actual site:

Narrow keyword groups are essential to a good PPC account structure and will help you develop an SEO-friendly information architecture. Just drop in a list of keywords and The Free Keyword Grouper will show you the most effective way to group them for more profitable PPC campaign structures and effective SEO information architecture.

Check it out for free here - WordStream Keyword Grouper Tool

Thanks WordStream!

Want to have some fun with the search engines? Check out these interesting, entertaining and educational hidden Easter eggs within the search engines:

1. Google Countdown Clock
- Go to Google search homepage, do not type anything in the search box and click the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button. Up will appear a countdown timer counting down to the end of the year.

2. Yahoo! Yodel
- Go to the Yahoo! homepage and click on the period in the Yahoo! exclamation mark (within the graphic logo) at the top of the screen (to the left of the search box). What you will hear is the ever fun Yahoo! trademark yodel and a bit of laughing at the end.

3. Obscure Google Language Interfaces
- Ever wanted to have a Google search interface in Klingon, Pig Latin, Hacker or even Elmer Fudd? If, so here they are for your enjoyment:
* Google Klingon
* Google Pig Latin
* Google Hacker
* Google Elmer Fudd


4. Google Easter Bunny Game
- Go to Google search homepage, type in, 'google easter eggs' into the search box and click on the 'I'm Feeling Lucky' button and you will be treated to an interesting Easter bunny game on the homepage of Google.

The online ad network Chitika just released there newest research reporting that AOL Search, Ask and Bing perform very well against Yahoo and Google when it comes to the willingness of their users to click on ads. Below are the details around the study from the Chitika press release:

Back in July, we looked at how often Bing users clicked on ads when compared to Google and Yahoo! users. Bing users showed a 50% higher ad click rate than Googlers, so at the time our preliminary conclusion was that Bing’s success was being driven in a big part by Microsoft’s huge, expensive advertising blitz.

Now that December is upon us, and Bing keeps showing its ability to push Google from a technology standpoint, we decided to revisit and see how the numbers were looking. As it turns out, Bing users are still clicking on ads at a prodigious rate – in fact, the CTR of users who come to the Chitika network via Bing is over 75% higher than those who come from Google.

Now, it must be mentioned that Bing is still a distant third place in terms of traffic sent – Google dominates with 84% of search traffic, followed by Yahoo! at 7.40%, and Bing holding at 5.75% (AOL and Ask both have just over 1% of search traffic coming into the Chitika network). However, all things being considered the same, driving one Bing user (or AOL or Ask user) to your site can be more valuable than driving one Google user.

Just another reminder that there is more to the search world then Google....

Keyword research is always a daunting task. Many people use one or more keyword research tools (free or paid) to help. What I thought might be helpful is to provide a list of the top 10 best free keyword research tools for your enjoyment.

7 search Keyword Research Tool (free)
Good Keywords (free download)
Google AdWords Keyword Tool (free)
KeywordIndex (free)
Keyword Country (free online version)
Keyword Discovery (free online version)
Spacky (free)
Wordpot (free online version)
Word Stream (free online version)
Word Tracker (free online version)

Good luck!

Everybody is doing it, but Yahoo gets caught. Just saw an article on Download Squad Blog about Yahoo selling subscriber information here - Yahoo's price list for spying on its users leaks. As they point out in the article, Yahoo! even offers discounts for the more you buy, so make sure to stock up and save money (kinda like the Costco/Sam's Club of personal data)...:-)

As all search engines probably sell this type of data to the law enforcement agencies, two things come to mind.

1. Why do they sell it and not offer it free as it is our tax dollars paying for this data, correct?

2. How much money is made by selling this type of data? Is it it's own profit center? I would be very curious to see.

Between Bing going down for 45 mins the other day and someone leaking this embarrassing Yahoo information it only makes Google look better (do I smell a conspiracy?)......

Just found an offer for $75 in FREE advertising for NEW (only new) Google advertisers. It is hard to beat free.....below is the link:

Link - $75 Free Google Advertising Trial

Found a great list of 'dofollow' forums organized by Google Pagerank (PR) at the Selinks Website that I thought I might share.

PR6
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/
http://www.startups.co.uk/
http://forums.searchenginewatch.com
http://www.webmasterworld.com/
http://www.searchengineforums.com/

PR5
http://www.ozzu.com/
http://www.dnforum.com/
http://www.namepros.com
http://www.v7n.com/forums/
http://www.highrankings.com/forum/

PR4
http://www.webmaster-forums.net/
http://www.acorndomains.co.uk/
http://forums.ukwebmasterworld.com/
http://www.affiliateseeking.com/forums
http://www.warriorforum.com/forum/default.asp
http://forums.digitalpoint.com/
http://www.domainstate.com
http://www.webmastershelp.com/
http://forum.vbulletinsetup.com
http://forums.ukwebmasterworld.com/
http://www.affiliates4u.com/forums/
http://www.ihelpyou.com/forums/
http://www.seo-guy.com/forum/

PR3
http://forums.seroundtable.com/
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/
http://siteownersforums.com/index.php
http://www.clicks.ws/
http://www.experienceadvertising.com/forum/
http://paymentprocessing.cc/
http://www.webmastertalk.in
http://talk.iwebtool.com/
http://www.webmaster-forum.net/
http://www.dnlodge.com/
http://www.webmastertalk.co.uk/
http://www.australianwebmaster.com
http://forums.seochat.com/
http://www.webworkshop.net
http://www.webdesignforum.com/
http://www.geekpoint.net
http://bbs.adultwebmasterinfo.com/
http://www.seoforum.net.au/seoforum/index.php
http://www.im4newbies.com/forum/index.php

PR2
http://www.pakadtrader.com/forum/index.php
http://www.nameslot.com

PR1
http://www.webmasterforumsonline.com/

PR0
http://www.webicy.com/
http://www.domainforums.com

n/a
http://www.cambodiaxp.com/
http://www.searchguild.com/
http://www.marketingchat.org/forum/

While Ask.com is a distant fourth in the top 4 search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing and then Ask.com - AOL is not included as it uses Google's index even though it has about the same marketshare as Ask.com) it can provide traffic and is an important part of any SEO effort.

Ask.com does not allow URL submissions as most other search engines do, instead the ONLY way to proactively submit your site to Ask.com is via an XML sitemap ping. This ping is VERY EASY and takes no time at all. Here is all you have to do.

Use the URL listed below and replace, 'www.MYSITE.com' with you URL and make sure you have an XML sitemap at this location - www.MYSITE.com/sitemap.xml. It is that easy.

http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http%3A//www.MYSITE.com/sitemap.xml

If you do not have an XML sitemap you can create a free one online here:



Link - XML-Sitemaps.com

Since Bing is all the rage as of late, I thought I might provide some quick tools to help all those webmasters in need:

Bing XML Sitemap Loader:
Use this URL and replace, 'www.MYSITE.com' with you site URL - it is that easy

http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=www.MYSITE.com/sitemap.xml

Bing Website Submssion:
Link - Bing Website Submission


Need to create an XML sitemap for FREE? Check out this free service:


Link - XML-Sitemaps.com

GET INDEXED TODAY!

Remember, "if you are not dialing, I am not smiling"...:-)



For those die hard fans there is even a live version (broken into two parts for whatever reason):

As you may have seen in my previous posts that I do not care much for RedZ (formerly known as RedZee) as outlined here - Seeing Redz - The Story of Click Fraud and RedZee and here RedZee - Good, Evil or Just Animated?. They are an outright scam and provide fraudulent traffic to site owners who buy into their program.

I received a lot of feedback in the comments section of that first article that ranged from, "I worked for RedZ and they were a compete scam" to "thank you for alerting me to this before I sent them my money". I am glad to all those that we could reach before they spend their money and I am providing this update to help further my quest to make everyone aware of their fraudulent practices and hopefully save others.

So, below is a collection of additional articles on the RedZ scam for your review:

Click Fraud and Live Chat Software

RedZee Search Engine - The Top 3 Scam

RedZee Won't Stop Trying to Scam Charlie's Boss

RedZee Complaints Pile Up - Read This Before Using RedZee

RedZee on the Ripoff Report

These are just a few of the many articles and forum posts about RedZ (RedZee). As always, please keep the comments coming and spread the word.

Just give it time...:-)

Bing has been up to A LOT over the last week or two. Below is a round up of all things BING!

- Bing Goes Live in the UK
- Bing Integrates Wolfram Alpha
- Bing Updates Home Page with Task-Focused Functionality
- Bing Adds Instant Answers
- Bing Adds Additional Additional City Data (attractions, neighborhoods, local data from newspapers, etc.)
- Bing Upgrades Preview Feature
- Bing Adds Event Search (sort by performances, civic activities, music, etc.)
- Bing Integrates Facebook and Twitter into Search Results
- Bing Updates Maps

and that is just to name a few of the recent upgrades....:-)

Well, if we look at the new data from Experian, Bing got a 7% gain in October, while Google and Yahoo both lost 1%.


I think Bing is really trying hard to be a serious competitor to Google, and it is working.

Check out Bing today here - Bing Search

What a year. comScore's new World Metric data shows some surprises all the way around. Microsoft properties still dominate user's time on the Web (September 2009 compared to September 2008).

For all of you who do not believe in the power of search, take a look here:



Search is where it is at, yet many, many agencies focus 90% of their efforts on everything else in the digital world. Hopefully these old timers will catch-up with those in the know.

Dogpile, a meta search engine owned by Infospace (along with WebFetch, Web Crawler, Meta crawler, Nation, Infospace, DoGreatGood search engines) provided this research in 2007, but it is still pretty interesting (and I just found this cool graphic representation that was updated on the Dogpile website, so I thought it was time to share...-)

Link to research document - Search Overlap Study

Search engine link - Dogpile

Also, just a quick side note. Infospace recently got its flagship domain back from another company which it sold it to 2 years ago (a long story, so read about it here - InfoSpace looks to claw its way back into the search business). What I found interesting is that it beat both Google and Yahoo to integrating Twitter into it's search results without much fanfare - just an FYI.

Check it out here - Infospace Search Engine

Wow, what a month for Ask.com!

First they merge with Old Navy, well not exactly, but their new 'Ask Deals' ads appear a bit Old Navy'ish' and they are now all about savings, much like Old Navy. Check out the ad below and make your own assessment...:-)



Next up, Ask decides to update it's blog - kind of. If you look at all the blog posts over the last 6 months there are a total of ten posts and probably only one of them is not self promotional (see July 15 post). Below is a list of all of them in case you care:

October 20, 2009
Ask Is 'Dancing on Air': “Who Wants a Deal? We Do, We Do!”

October 13, 2009
Get Smarter on the Go with Dictionary.com’s Free Dictionary & Thesaurus Application for BlackBerry

October 06, 2009
Ask Deals: Your One-Click, One-Stop Shop for Savings is Here!

October 01, 2009
Ask.com Celebrates the 25th National Breast Cancer Awareness Month

September 14, 2009
Searching for a Cure: Ask.com and Susan G. Komen for the Cure® Partner in the Fight to End Breast Cancer

August 05, 2009
SES San Jose is here! August 10-14, 2009

July 15, 2009
What makes a search engine “semantic”?

July 14, 2009
Thanks, iPhoners! Dictionary.com Makes Apple’s List of 30 Favorite Apps

June 17, 2009
Harvesting the Best Answers from Ask.com’s AnswerFarms!

May 19, 2009
Thanks for Asking! Ask.com is a Webware 100 Award Winner Three Years Running

Ask Blog Link for Reference

Basically why even have a blog if you are only going to use it to praise yourself? Also, if you are going to have Blog Roll why not remove sites that have not been active for over 2 and half years like - ThreadWatch?

I think it is pretty embarrassing and if Ask wants to be considered a player in the search space they need to be a bit less self promotional and more informational and helpful to the search community.Maybe just my opinion, but when was the last time you saw Ask.com really increase it's search market share?

Finally, Ask decides to name a new president. I guess if you current one is not doing a good job why not promote someone within the company who is successful? Why not, it only makes sense. So welcome to Doug Leeds who has been with Ask Networks since early 2006, where he has held several different positions. Most recently, he has been President of the company's Dictionary.com and Chief Operating officer of Ask Networks. Now as President, he will oversee the US business for Ask.com and lead the development, launch, and execution of Ask's strategy in the U.S.

That is about it, except in in effort to help Ask.com become a better more poweerful search engine I have decided to provide a grossly text rich backlink to their search engine:

The Best Search Engine In the World, Better Than Google, Yahoo or Bing!!!!!

Good luck, Ask!

Feature FAQ

Q: Will search ads appear on the www.bing.com/twitter page?
A: Ad units will not be available on the Twitter results page at this time. While this feature is in beta, Microsoft will work to gather critical consumer data and information on how this new feature and functionally perform. We will leverage this data to determine the right time to apply a monetization strategy. Our advertiser and agency communities will be alerted when new ad placements become available.

Q: Why are you doing this deal with Twitter?
A: Bing is a decision engine, and we recognize that making a great decision involves collecting and analyzing material to inform your choices. Twitter provides an amazing amount of information from across the world on nearly any topic and the rise of “URL shorteners” has further imbued the short tweets with meaning. Unfortunately that meaning is often locked up behind an obscure URL that requires a user to click through to see the content someone is talking about. Often, those links are either duplicated of something that’s previously been shared or more nefariously - adult content or spam.

In addition, with over 50 million users on Twitter, it’s hard to know the most authoritative user on a particular topic. Just like in real life when you want to make a decision, you want to listen to people you trust.

Bing saw an opportunity to take Twitter search beyond its current state and continue to further our mission of being the world’s best decision engine. By unlocking the meaning in the links shared in Twitter and promoting tweets about those links by users with a high social reputation, we hope to enable people to use Twitter to make faster, much more informed decisions.

Q: Is the deal exclusive?
A: We’re excited to be the first major search engine to work deeply with Twitter to help turn the amazing amount of real time information into knowledge for our consumers. That said, the deal is not exclusive to Bing and Twitter, but Bing is the first major search engine to introduce this level of Twitter integration.

Q: What are the financial terms of the deal?
A: We don’t disclose financial terms.

Q: Why is this deal good for people who use Bing or Twitter?
A: Twitter is a great tool to understand what is happening in our world right now. As Twitter has grown in popularity, the amount of information shared every second has grown exponentially. Besides the sheer volume of data users have to sift through to find something that matches their interest, the proliferation of information being shared as small URLs (like bit.ly) and the number of people sharing those same links makes it sometimes hard to make sense of the stream. Through this new Twitter feature we are giving people a way to cut through the clutter to find the most relevant Twitter content to their queries.

Q: What is unique about this Twitter feature?
A: With this announcement people will see several new developments in Bing including:

* A search against a real-time index of the Tweets that match customer queries. This feature also makes advances making it easier to follow what’s going on by reducing the amount of duplicates, spam, and adult content.
* Ranking of tweets either by most recent of by “best match,” where we consider a Tweeter’s popularity, interestingness of the tweet, and other indicators of quality and trustworthiness.
* “Top Links” shared on Twitter about your query. Additionally, within these top links, Bing automatically expands those small URLs (like bit.ly) to enable customers to understand what people are tweeting about. Instead of showing standard search result captions, we select 2 top tweets to give users a glimpse of the sentiment around the shared link. Bing also shows the relevant tweets about those links, ranked by the social reputation of those who are posting and based on the popularity of the link and the people that shared the links.
* Finally, a new “Twitter Trends” homepage that lets you see what is hot now and quickly gets you into Bing’s Twitter experience.


Q: What do you expect from Google?
A: We’re focused on our customer, not the competition. With Bing we focus on listening to what customers feel is lacking in the current search experience, which has led us to release new innovative features like the Twitter feature we are announcing today. Today’s announcement is the latest in Bing’s continuing evolution, and we will continue to focus on customers by delivering a new search experience that addresses unmet needs in the market. There is widespread interest in real-time search and we expect to see many companies delivering new models and approaches.

Q: Do I have to go to http://www.bing.com/twitter to search? Does this mean you don’t think social search is important in overall web results?
A: This initial release is still in beta form. We wanted to get feedback on how people use our Twitter real-time index and search functions as we continue to innovate augmenting our core search with the knowledge shared in real-time tools like Twitter.

Q: How is this specifically different from leveraging the Twitter API? What “special” access do you really have?
A: The amount of data available through the public Twitter API is limited. Through this deal we now have access to the complete Twitter data feed. This increased access allows us to uniquely collect, analyze and present the Twitter content most relevant to customer queries. Additionally, the access allows us to analyze back-end data not generally available.

Q: What is “social reputation”?
A: Social reputation enables us to determine which Twitter users are most likely to be providing relevant content and links in response to a particular query. You can think of it as a way that we ‘rank’ Twitter accounts to help ensure we are surfacing the most authoritative tweets and links from the most influential users.

Q: How do you calculate “social reputation”?
A: There are many variables that go into understanding how ‘credible’ a particular Twitter poster is. More than just the number of followers, how often his/her tweets are being retweeted, and how many of his/her shared links are shared by others, and post velocity. We will constantly evolve this algorithm to enable us to bring users the most authoritative sources for their query.

Q: What are the implications in terms of search results quality?
A: Like many of the things the Bing team is deploying, this collaboration with Twitter is helping to improve the quality of search results. We believe people are either looking for this type of content or will be pleasantly surprised to discover something new, and our implementation is designed to have a positive effect on the search experience. With this feature we help people to more fully understand the conversations most relevant to their queries taking place in Twitter, and we are further refining the real-time feed by removing duplicates, links to adult content, and tweets containing spam from the stream.

Q: Are private tweets included in the integration?
A: In our effort to respect the privacy settings of our data providers, Bing displays in our search results only data marked public. If you have data privacy concerns, contact the data provider directly or go to their help section to learn how to change your privacy settings.

Q: How long will tweets be indexed? What if a tweet is deleted, will it still show up in Bing?
A: Tweets don’t last more than 7 days in our index and any protected or deleted tweets won’t show up at all.

Q: What about Facebook? You have a pre-existing search partnership, and they are an increasingly important source of real-time content. Will you also be integrating real-time feeds from Facebook?
A: Today’s announcement is the next step in our indexing of real-time content within Bing to improve the search experience. Facebook is a great partner, and the real-time data available on Facebook is of increasing interest to people. We will continue to look for new ways to expand our real-time indexing abilities, and implementing new features and feeds as they make sense. We have nothing additional to share today regarding our relationship with Facebook.

Q: What about BingTweets and the initial Twitter integration you rolled out earlier this year? Does this replace those two features?
A: BingTweets was a stand-alone project that we did in conjunction with Federated Media. Today’s announcement does not affect BingTweets. With today’s announcement, we are building on our initial Twitter integration to deliver a more comprehensive real-time search solution to customers to help them with their day-to-day decisions.

Q: In what markets is this Twitter feature available? When will it be rolled out more broadly?
A: The Twitter feature is U.S. only. As with all Bing features, we carefully assess the market readiness of each feature before it is released to ensure an optimal experience. We have nothing additional to announce today.

I first had a post on this a couple of weeks ago entitled - Microsoft Please Tell Me This is a Joke when I could not believe that Microsoft had created such a stupid video with an even dumber Windows 7 party concept. Basically, Microsoft left the doors wide open for fun and here is the latest...:-)

Original video for reference (and to use as evidence when Microsoft later denies they ever created it):

Poor Matt...:-)

Stumbled across an free and incredibly handy online little utility offering to check a website to make sure Google Analytics Code is correctly installed. Below is the information from the site:

SiteScan is designed to help you configure Google Analytics, whether using the "legacy" urchin.js code or newer ga.js tracking code. This diagnostic tool scans for several common configuration pitfalls and organizes the results in an easy to read CSV file. SiteScan identifies pages on your website that have Google Analytics Tracking Code properly and improperly installed. For pages with improperly installed tracking code, the associated error is noted and described in the report. This makes it easy for you to isolate the pages with tracking problems, fix them, and effectively manage your Google Analytics Tracking Code installation.

Once you submit your site it goes into a work queue. When your website is up, SiteScan collects page information and begins the scanning process. You receive an email confirming the scan was submitted, with a link to check its progress. Once the scan is completed, you receive another email with a link to the results. You must enter a valid email address to receive your scan results. Results include a summary of your scan with a link to the CSV download containing page/URL level problems found during the scanning process.

Please note that you can only run up to three scans per day for a single domain. This allows resources to be freed up for other individuals wanting to use the tool. SiteScan scans up to the first 100 pages of a website. You can submit up to three scans per day per email address. For those with larger websites, or SiteScan "power users" that rely on the tool regularly, we recommend SiteScan Premium. It allows scans up to 30,000 pages, unlimited daily scanning, and with its own dedicated work server, provides more scanned pages in less time! SiteScan Premium is available to subscribers of the AnalyticsView Pro Plan.

Just as an interesting side note, as of this posting here are the stats from the site:
--- Almost 109 thousand websites scanned (with almost 62 million pages scanned)
--- 45% of pages scanned had code missing or incorrectly installed - WOW, that seems a bit larger than I thought it might be...:-)

Check it out for free at - SiteScan

In a great explanation from Bill Hunt in a Search Engine Land article here - How To Get Into Baidu, The World’s 2nd Largest Search Engine he explains about how to get into the organic listings (in addition to paid ads) within Baidu. Read his explanations below:

Is it true the only way into Baidu is via paid ads?

Six months ago, search marketers would have told you the only way to get exposure in Baidu was to buy your way in. For many popular consumer phrases, as many as the first ten to twenty pages of results were all paid ads, which is why many SEO firms in China charged businesses by the click to get them onto the first page of rankings.

Paid ad dominance is no longer the norm under Baidu’s new platform code named “Phoenix Nest” (a.k.a. “Professional Edition”) which was officially deployed in April. Essentially, Phoenix Nest moved paid search listings from the left side to the right side and the top three listings making SERPs look and feel more like western search engines.

In early September Baidu migrated over 800,000 keywords from their old system into the Phoenix Nest platform. This migration has resulted in a significant decrease in the number of paid results on the left side. Those sites lucky enough to backfill the now open SERPS benefit from significantly increased organic traffic.

In a future article I will dig deeper into the characteristics of Baidu’s paid search platform, but for now I can tell you the new platform is very similar to Google’s with many of the same optimization techniques working equally well on Baidu. Just like Google, Baidu has deployed a quality score mechanism called “Comprehensive Rank Index” focused on improving the overall quality of ads for searchers and advertisers.

How can I improve my organic rankings on Baidu?

The good news is most of the normal on page optimization factors you implement to rank well in Google will also improve your rankings in Baidu. The algorithm is not as sophisticated as Google’s nor does it currently put much weight on inbound links which makes life a lot easier for marketers to make quick changes to their site and start reaping the benefits. Some items that are unique to ranking well in Baidu are:

The site must be in Chinese. The obvious first step to ranking well in organic results is to have content in Chinese. Simplified Chinese is the primary language of Mainland China so it is important to make sure you have used the correct language tags on the site.

The site should be hosted in China. While Baidu has many non-China hosted sites in its database and it is not a requirement to have a .cn domain or be hosted in China, it is a strong recommendation. The main reason for Baidu’s preference for local hosting is due to government firewalls and poor connectivity issues that are common in China. Local hosted sites stand a greater chance of being found and reindexed when they are in China.

Put the most important content at the top of the page. Due to poor connectivity, Baidu’s crawlers want to get as much content as they can and will often simply crawl only the first 100 to 120k of content on a page (remember AltaVista, circa 1998?).

All-Flash sites are a problem. Since marketers could buy their way into Baidu results in the past, many sites did not need to consider the negative implications of Flash only content on their organic search performance. This has been one of the primary reasons many large company sites are having a hard time gaining traction in Baidu’s organic results.

If you are China-ready, look at Baidu’s options to increase market share

The recent changes in Baidu offer a number of opportunities for marketers to maximize their search presence in both paid and organic search. While I am not advocating you jump into the market unprepared, I do strongly suggest you look at the new opportunities with Baidu as a way to expand your market share and sales before your competition does.

To succeed in China it is critical to understand your Chinese consumer, how they use the Internet and how they would engage your products in their local markets. While the opportunities in China are significant, there are still many challenges for Western companies to overcome to be successful. Those ready to embrace these challenges and leverage the new opportunities of Baidu should be on their way to reaping the benefits China has to offer.

If you are interested in advertising (paid ads) in Baidu they have recently introduced an International Support Center in English which can be found here - Baidu International Support Center

The International Support Center also has some great insight into Baidu in general. Here is the information from the 'About Us' page:

Founded in 2000, Baidu, a Chinese language search platform, leveraging the booming Chinese Internet and search engine market , has dominated Chinese online ad market in 2007, generating RMB1.74 billion revenue with at 108% growing rate year on year. Respond to hundreds of millions of queries daily, Baidu represent approximately 70% of total online search queries in China. Over 150,000 small and mid-sized Chinese enterprises, large domestic corporations and Chinese divisions or subsidiaries of large multinational corporations have benefited from Baidu's online search marketing services. Beyond online search, Baidu continues its success in query-based searchable communities with Baidu's Post Bar (BBS) and Baidu Knows (Answers) representing two of the biggest communities in the world.

There is a lot more than covering topics from paid search, brand links, contextual ads, SEM services and the P4P API.

Check it out via the links below:

Search Engine
International Support Center (English)
Advertiser's Website (Chinese)

For those of you in the know using Bookmarking Demon or any other Scuttle Submitter software (as there are many) you know the value of a clean list of Scuttle or Scuttle Plus website, so below is a clean, fresh list of 30 working links:

Scuttle and Scuttle Plus List:

http://alltagz.marketing-boerse.de
http://b.luac.net/tags/fml
http://b24.poel-tec.com/tags/kinder
http://beemylink.de/
http://bookmark.jeuner.de
http://bookmarks.freestuff.gr/tags/business
http://bookmarks.superuser.com.au/
http://brian.carnell.com/bookmarks/tags.php/twitter
http://carolinalegion.org
http://clio.lt
http://coinent.com/
http://community.nuvaa.com/bookmarks
http://cyberfolio.recitmst.qc.ca/recherche
http://debulla.info/
http://designingknowledge.com/
http://distance.ktu.lt/scuttle/
http://do.min.io/
http://edtags.org
http://evilhamster.net/
http://favoris.hetic.net/
http://festic.fr/semanticscuttle/demo/fr/
http://flash-clip.net/
http://gebookt.de/
http://gig.naklo.pl/
http://gonzo.er0k.info/bm
http://ho.tli.st/
http://ipv6links.net/
http://jmtrivial.info/bookmarks/
http://labomedia.lobotomie.org/scuttle/
http://linki.polityk.net/

Good luck and happy submitting!

This actually hurts - WHO really thought this was a good idea? Please fire them now!

The only redeeming thing I can find is the REMIX of the original that makes this pretty funny....:-)

Stumbled on a great little website that does an incredible job collecting data on websites for you. Below is the description from the site:

Quarkbase provides an easier way to find website information. You can find out how good a site is, get comprehensive website details, discover competitors and analyze them. One can call Quarkbase 'whois on steroids' or 'imdb for websites', which provides detailed website information like people, traffic, similar sites, social comments, description, social popularity and much more. Quarkbase saves you from spending hours on search engine finding website details, as it provides you with up-to-date information in seconds for free! Quarkbase is not only a place to get information; it is also a place to contribute website information, share your experience and connect to your webites.

Check it out today at - Quarkbase

Pretty funny...:-)

If you are looking for a great new and free tool to analyze your 'link juice' distribution? Well step right up and check out SpyderMate.

Without creating a free account you can view up to 25 pages of your site, but if with a free account you can view up to 500.

Once you run your site through the system, click on the 'Link Equity' tab and there you will see the below listed data points for each subpage order by Google PageRank (PR):

* Google PR;
* Page full URL;
* Page title;
* Meta description;
* H1 tag;
* Targeted keywords (after the click-through)



You can check it out for free at - SpyderMate

Sometimes the hardest links to acquire are the best for your website. One of the hardest links to acquire are deep links to your website. Below is a list of 50 FREE web directories that accept deep link submissions.

Free Deep Linking Web Directory List:
(source: Best Free Directories)

sonicsyn.com
viesearch.com
counterdeal.com
findinfo.ws
seodir.eu
indexbargains.com
explorethailandonline.com
fringebenefitsparties.com
pluslink.info
ergum.com
globalwebdirectory.co.uk
webnetclick.com
blue-vertigo.net
dhdphoto.com
rwas.org
thailand-hotdeals.com
yvir.com
onemilliondirectory.com
littlewebdirectory.com
etup.org
kk-club.com
ascia2008.com
pmdip.org
webdee.org
netdir.org
directoryexplorer.com
seoaura.com
shadow-x.info
justdirectory.cn
linkdaddy.org
g-seed.biz
http:sitelistings.net
addurl.co.in
linktradecenter.com
top-ten-web-hosting-forum.com
submitlink.info
thecandydirectory.com
ustrustcanada.info
riyi.net
mahikhanonline.com
directorymark.com
diverselist.com
interactive-directory.com
w3c-software.com
directorage.com
temnoticia.com
plainstone.com
gogosun.net
coolwebsitelistings.com
addlink.co.in
fatinfo.com
airedaledirectory.com
discoverism.com

Happy Submitting!

RankSpeed is a very cool new search engine that claims to search by sentiment according to the blogosphere/twittersphere. Here is the information from the actual website:

RankSpeed is a search tool that does a sentiment analysis on the blogosphere / twittersphere to find the best websites, the most useful web apps, the most secure web services, etc...

You can search for any website category using tags and rank by any criteria: good, useful, easy, secure, etc...

For each result a statistical analysis computes the percentage of bloggers who have said it is good, easy, ...

For example, a website is ranked as more useful than an other if its name is more often associated with "useful", "helpful" or other synonyms in blog posts and tweets.

RankSpeed tracks 3 millions of websites, selects the most commented in the blogosphere / twittersphere and ranks them by your own criteria.

Pretty cool is all I can say as it appears to work pretty well and provides some interesting insights.

Check it out today for free at - RankSpeed

As many of you know, I loved SearchMe and their visual search interface. It was better and faster than anything else out there before it's demise not long ago. Well, I just found my new favorite visual search engine. It is called SpaceTime3D and it ROCKS!

It has been around as a standalone browser since the middle of 2007, but who wants another browser? Recently they launched a version of SpaceTime3D that does not require you to use their browser and/or any plug-in software. This completely changes the game for them (and us).

My only complaint is that they do not have their own database or crawlers they use Google, Google Images, Wikipedia, About.com, Answers.com and Amazon for their data which is good, but could be much more robust. If they do not plan on having their own index and crawlers why not at least make it a meta search engine? Just a thought.

Below is a YouTube video of an example of someone using this new standalone engine:



Anyway you can check it out for yourself below - I wish them luck as their engine sure looks good!

Click here to visit - SpaceTime3D

My favorite web directory is at it again with a special and not well known promo code until the end of September. This code is for 25% off any of their services - web directory listing submissions (my favorite), local listing submissions, blog listing submissions, advertising, etc., etc. All the details are below:

Code: SINCE94

Link: Best of the Web Discount Link (use code on checkout)

Good luck and happy submitting!

Just when I thought that Cuil was all but dead, they decided to go and try and reinvent themselves. While I love competition in the search space, especially with the Yahoo/Bing search merger I just cannot for the life of me figure out how Cuil manages to still hang on while great concepts like the now defunct, SearchMe search engine have to die.

So, Cuil has added a couple of new things. First they have added real-time results within their results. While this is interesting, I am not sure why it really matters as others are already doing it much better. Also, they have started to run Google ads (amazingly without the 'Ads by Google' wording next to them) at the bottom of the search results.

Basically, it always seems like Cuil half tries everything it does. It claims to have the largest database index (bigger than Google), yet it can't seem to find easily indexed sites. It claims to provide better results, but hell look at any search result and if you can tell me where they grab most of those images and why are they relevant you will win a prize (not really, but you will have fixed their engine). And now they finally try to create a revenue model? Well, they would be hard pressed based on their traffic volumes and where the ads are placed to even generate a $1,000 a day in ad revenue.

So, the question is, why do it if you are not going to do it right? That can be said for everything they do. Everything seems half baked and not well thought out.

That brings me to my final rant about Cuil (for today). If you are going to release new features why not even post information about them on your own blogs? For that matter why not just update them at all as the last posts were over 2 months ago. Seems their blogs (main and Tom's) are as dead as their engine should be.....:-)

I have to give out props to my buddy Zachary at SEO Faction. His new SEO/SEM corporate website is launching soon, but he has already released a great new marketing blog that is sure to become a 'must read' for all online marketers.

His first post is entitled, "Company Branding: Learning From Coca-Cola And Pepsi" is a great read and deeply thought out. I am always amazed (and a little jealous) by people like Zachary and others such as Aaron Wall (SEO Book) who can provide posts with such insight that are not only interesting to read, but make feel like a better person for reading (okay maybe not a better person, but maybe a bit smarter).

Check it all out here - SEO Faction Blog
(in addition you can always find a link in my favorites section in case you forget)

This is a great presentation from Google to better explain how difficult it is for a search engine to crawl and index basically an infinite amount of data available on the Internet. If you make it easier for Google (which has 65-70% of all search traffic) to crawl and index your website and associated content, then you will increase the likelihood (nothing is guaranteed) that your website and content will be crawled and indexed correctly.

Find additional support and help from Google here - Google Webmaster Tools

Want to have some search fun? Then you have to try out Blind Search. This site lets you type in a search query and see the organic results for Google, Yahoo and Bing randomly in columns. Once you have reviewed and you think you know which results below to which search engine than click the button(s) to reveal if you are correct or not.

I have to admit that I am wrong more times than I am right when I am trying to guess which results go with which each and that Bing is actually the winner a majority of the time when I try to find the best and most relevant results for my search query. Pretty interesting and fun stuff...:-)

Check it out for yourself at - Blind Test

Sad, but true.....You know who you are.....:-)

Ever wanted to compare search results between different search engines? If so, here is you answer - biGoog. This ingenious little site allows you to compare search results between the major search engines. Here are the combinations available:

- Google vs. Yahoo
- Yahoo vs. Bing
- Bing vs. Google

Check it out today for FREE at - biGoog

In the highly competitive online world don't leave it up to the search engines to determine what messaging appears for your website rankings within their search results (or SERPs). Take control of that messaging opportunity (while making sure not to disrupt your SEO efforts) by maximizing the content that appears. To make this easier for you I have included an outline for each of the major search engine inclusive of Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask.com as to what each can handle and read.


Google:

- Google shows 69 characters (including spaces) for page titles.
- Google shows 156 characters (including spaces) for meta descriptions.
- Google does not read meta keywords.

It should also be known that if you don’t include a Meta Description or if Google feels a better description for your page could be given by using a web snippet, then the description shown can be up to 320 characters. Of course, they won’t be the characters that you choose so they might not best represent what you wish your audience to see in the search results.


Yahoo:

- Yahoo shows up to 72 characters (including spaces) for page titles (please note that PDFs can have up to 75 characters).
- Yahoo shows up to 161 characters (including spaces) for meta descriptions.
- Yahoo reads up to 12 unique meta keywords.


Bing:

- Bing shows 69 characters (including spaces) for page titles (Bing Webmaster Tools says it will read only 65, but that is inaccurate).
- Bing shows up to 185 characters (including spaces) for meta descriptions (Bing Webmaster Tools says it will read only 150, but that is inaccurate).
- Bing does not read meta keywords.


Ask:

- Ask shows 69 characters (including spaces) for page titles.
- Ask pulls the meta description for it’s results from a snippet of text from the page and can commonly display around 312 characters.
- Ask reads meta keywords, but total amount is unknown.

Keyword Envy is a great (and accurate) free online keyword ranking tool. Even though in free mode the tool is limited to 5 keywords. what I like most about it is that it can track against so many engines and variations of those engines. The current list is this:

- Google (US)
- Google (Canada)
- Google (UK)
- Yahoo
- MSN (separate from Bing, not sure why or how, but it is there)
- Live (separate from Bing, not sure why or how, but it is there)
- Bing
- Ask
- Gigablast (one of my favorite smaller engines)

They also offer an advanced service that combines analytics to tell you how strong your keywords are - how much potential traffic they bring in, what their bounce rate is, and more.....

Check it out today at - Keyword Envy