Search Engine Optimization

IAC, parent company of Ask.com, is planning to launch several new niche sites that incorporate search and social media. First up is RushmoreDrive.com, which has already launched and is targeted at the African-American community.

It’s bad our society still hasn’t got over the black, white and pink crap that purposefully separates us into groups. Let’s have a look at what the “different” groups want.

Black. Make a load of money, nice house, car, wife/husband/kids, do the hobby that’s in the heart, follow the dreams, be loved.

White. Make a load of money, nice house, car, wife/husband/kids do the hobby that’s in the heart, follow the dreams, be loved.

Brown. Make a load of money, nice house, car, wife/husband/kids do the hobby that’s in the heart, follow the dreams, be loved.

Chinese. Make a load of money, nice house, car, wife/husband/kids do the hobby that’s in the heart, follow the dreams, be loved.

This “just for this group” separates people into packs. Those packs are then directed against each other on the basis of minor differences such a color, beliefs, social status, interests or different hats. Like George Carlin said, if you see two groups of people killing each other, chances are they wear different hats.

This distracts participants to the crap that has no real meaning, while the truth is like an elephant in the room – minor differences are nothing in comparison to the similarities.

By engineering the “us and them” social masterminds keep people hating each other, blaming and fighting. People are distracted with differences and nonsense that doesn’t threaten power monopolies. Masses are divided, subdivided further and then pushed against each other (both on global and national levels).

Step one of managing large masses is accomplished. Divide and Conquer.

Of course Ask.com just wants to cash in. Understandable. The problem is that Ask.com marketers unconsciously added fuel to the fire that’s burning hot.

I’m not against healthy marketing research, which is the holy grail of marketing. Gotta know who you gotta pitch, nothing wrong. Just keep it quiet.

Moving on.

Even though people are expression of love, they are now divided because they got different hats on(or equivalent). What’s next in perception management cookbook?

Scare people into submission and into accepting authoritarian state of permanent war (terrorism, communists). This permits the powers that own the state to strip people of liberties in the name of “security” and proclaim anyone who doesn’t go with official line as a “threat”.

Piece of Cake.

So What Do I Want to Say?

The divisions distract the attention from real issues. Couple that with 24/7 dumbing down via mainstream media and you can do pretty much anything in front of people’s noses.

Keep fighting between each other and watching dumb shows, while we…. well… everything is OK. Turn the TV back on.

Harsh?

This is Britain today, right NOW

Anyone Remember 1984?

This is England 2005

Big Brother is Watching

And this is Nazi Germany 1934

Hey what’s on TV tonight? American Idol sweetie.

Microsoft Corp. announced plans to bring its Web search and search ads to social-networking site Facebook Inc., deepening ties between the two companies. – Wallsteet Journal

The deal includes search and ad delivery. Microsoft already has $240 million stake at Facebook and the relationship has gone deeper with search.

Only US user base is included for now, which will probably be expanded in the future.

Microsoft is looking to expand its search engine market share and Facebook is a perfect target. 30 Million users can lure some searchers from Google. No wonder Google called it their nightmare.

Microsoft Releases BrowseRank to Topple Google PageRank

In obsessive, passionate, multi-billion dollar battle against Google, Microsoft made another move. BrowseRank is a new algorithm that looks at user behavior as a cue to the quality of web pages.

• Browse Rank White Paper

Microsoft claims that PageRank has few downs that BrowseRank fixes:

• The link graph, which PageRank relies on, is not a very reliable data source, because hyperlinks on the web can be easily added or deleted by web content creators. For example, purposely creating a large number of hyperlinks is a favorite technique (e.g. link farm and link exchange) of web spammers [7], and such kinds of hyperlinks are not suitable for calculating page importance.
• PageRank only models a random walk on the link graph, but does not take into consideration the lengths of time which the web surfer\ spends on the web pages during the random walk. Such information can be a good indicator of the quality and thus importance of the pages.

Browse Rank has 3 main variables: URL, TIME and TYPE.

URL is a page visited by user

TIME is the time each user spent on a page

TYPE denotes the type of each visit which is a hyperlink or a direct input into the address bar.

Microsoft Engineers randomly sampled 10,000 sites from 5,6 millions index and ran spam test between PageRank, Trustrank, and BrowseRank.

Where Microsoft Gets Data For BrowseRank

• User behavior data can be recorded by Internet browsers at web clients and collected at a web server.
• Many web service applications assist users in their accesses to the web; sometimes they record user behaviors under agreements with them.

Microsoft still holds around 70% in the browser world, so Internet Explorer is the logical application for this algorithm.

Optimization for Browse Rank

I see companies growing out of sand with 50 + employees at 10 bucks per hour doing nothing but browsing client’s websites, with hack tweaks (forgive me tech savvy) like different IPs, proxies and other voodoo to get sites on top with BrowseRank. Don’t miss new opportunity! SEO is entering into a new dimension!

New Direction in Search Engine World?

Aaron Wall said long ago search engines will incorporate user data into algorithms.

Google has personalized search. Click through data is another one.

Now Microsoft officially rolled out an algorithm that looks at nothing but user behavior. SEO is getting harder.

Future algorithms will include a blend of on-page factors, link analysis, human editorial and user behavior. We already have on-page, link analysis and some human editorial.

Expect user behavior to affect search results more in the next 5 years.

Read More:

• Microsoft tries to one-up Google PageRank – CNET

Hey folks, I wanted to let you know that new toolbar PageRank values should become visible over the next few days. I’m expecting that also in the next few days that we’ll be expiring some older penalties on websites. – Matt Cutts Blog

Google is updating PageRank again. Old penalties refer to the war Google opened back in November 2007 agaist paid links lowering pagerank for sites that bought or sold links.

Discussions About Page Rank Update

Digital Point:

Matt Cutts: Google Toolbar PR Update Coming!

Google’s Q1 (2008) Page Rank Discussion Thread

SEO Chat:

Page Rank Update Started

Page Rank Update

Last PageRank Update was in April 2008.

A few months ago we announced that we were testing a new product called Knol. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. Today, we’re making Knol available to everyone. – Official Google Blog

Anyone can write a Knol. All you need is a Google account. Get one now.

It was rumored that Google was upset with wikipedia dominating search results so it came up with Knol.

With Google Knol:

The authors of the knols can take credit for their writing, provide credentials, and elicit peer reviews and comments.

Users can provide feedback, comments, related information.

Knol project is a platform for sharing information, with multiple cues that help you evaluate the quality and veracity of information.

• You can export PDF and Word files.
• Can use basic HTML formatting
• Can link out. According to Search Engine Land all links are nofollow

Two of the biggest features:

You may use Knol to create articles for your business or to promote your lawful products or services that are not otherwise prohibited by our Content Policy or Terms of Service, unless you are in Cuba, Iran, Burma (Myanmar), North Korea, Syria, or Sudan.

Another big one is:

You can choose to run adsense on your Knols. Great motivation for authors to create high quality articles.

What’s Not Allowed

No porn and perverted stuff.

View Content Policy

How Google Knol Works

Writers create articles and publish on Knol. Run adsense or allow other users to moderate articles. All Adsense profit goes to the author(and Google).

There can be as many articles on any topic as there are writers. So a search for SEO(right now it’s empty) can return 20 articles, from 20 different authors. Users then vote on the articles and my guess is one with most votes gets best search positions(on Knol).

Partially Closed Access is Better

Wikipedia is haunted by black hatters, white hatters and just bored people who want to have a little fun by vandalizing articles.

So will Google Knol.

The bigger problem is with “black ops” like CIA, Information Awareness Office, DARPA and Department of Defense who censor high ranking and very controversial articles about 9/11, Iraq, Iran, voting machines and other topics, where big interests are at stake such as military contracts, oil, BIG dollars and control.

Knol allows multiple articles on the same topic, from different authors, with set permissions. This way readers will hear CIA story on Iraq, one from some journalist and maybe from a veteran or an Iraqi…..?

Wikipedia Killer?

Wiki got market share.

Microsoft entered into search too late to establish a brand and market share (technology sucked too) and now is at 5%. I say Google will be like Microsoft in search – it’s there, it has users, but it’s a minority.

Wiki got 7 year start ahead, has a lot of mind share and fanatics. Knol is unknown and has no PR to rank.

Knol.com Still Goes to Vacuum Cleaners

If you type knol.com in the address bar you get to a Dutch website selling vacuum cleaners!

This site received millions of visitors when Google announced Knol 6 months ago and my guess is they will get more visitors in the coming days. Read the story.

To get to Google knol you have to type: knol.google.com

Knol (the steam cleaners) said they will not sell the domain name. I wonder how much Google offered?

David Thomas, a PhD student in La Trobe University’s archaeological program in Melbourne, has used Google Earth to safely uncover historic sites in a remote part of war-torn Afghanistan. – ABC

Student found up to 450 archeological sites throughout Registan, south of Afghanistan.

The decision to use Google Earth was “partly born out of adversity”, Thomas says when a planned field trip was cancelled because of security concerns.

It took David 9 hours to go over Google Earth images to spot 1800 “suspicious” sites, where he thinks he can find ancient structures, villages, animal remains, mosques and other ancient goodies.

David hopes to convince archeologists that Google Earth is a wonderful tool to use for archeological research.

Google Earth Crop Circles

Crop circle enthusiasts aren’t sleeping. Google Earth is also great tool to uncover mysteries.

According to the forum post at Keyhole, Google removed those circles with new updates. Hmm.. so much controversy, what’s going on?

You can also watch a video with Google Earth Crop Circles.

Message boards and online communities devoted to crop circles now play host to Google Earth maps and screenshots, allowing swift comparison of their locations and designs. Here are some more pictures:

• Google Buys Russian Contextual Ad Service For $140 Million

Google announced that it had acquired “Begun,” a Russian contextual ad service, for $140 million. The service had been a unit of Russia’s Rambler Media. Rambler also owns the Russian portal Rambler.ru. As part of the deal, Google-enhanced search results and ads will appear on the Rambler portal site.

Begun is a sister company of the third largest search engine in Russia – Rambler.ru. Yandex holds number one spot with over 40% market share in search and in ads, followed by Google as number 2 in search and Begun as number 2 in ads.

Acquisition makes Google number 2 search engine and number 2 ad network in Russia.

Rambler will operate as an independent search engine, but with ads delivered by Google.

•   Microsoft 4Q profit rises

Revenue increased 18 percent to $15.8 billion from $13.4 billion last year, just ahead of Wall Street’s average forecast of $15.7 billion, according to a Thomson Financial survey. The revenue rise would have been 14 percent if not for weakness in the dollar.

The growth rate is not good enough for Wall Street, however, as the stock was down nearly 5% at the time of this post. Analysts see Microsoft as struggling in a weak economy.

If making $15.84 billion in three months is struggling, then I want to suffer! – Search Engine Watch

LOL. Google also released Q4 profits(coincidence?) the same day with $5.37 billion. That’s a third of Microsoft’s quarterly profits.

Hitwise also reported that Google is nearing 70% market share in the States, while Microsoft is still learning to walk at ~4%.

• Yahoo Board Wins Legg Mason Backing in Icahn Fight

Legg Mason Capital Management Chairman Bill Miller plans to back Yahoo! Inc. Chief Executive Officer Jerry Yang in his fight for control of the Internet company, pitting himself against billionaire investor Carl Icahn.

Carl teamed up with Microsoft in battle for Yahoo. Bill and Jerry against Balmer and Carl is an interesting fight to watch.

The bell rung and opponents entered the stage. In the red shorts and left corner is Jerry Yang backed up by Bill Miller. On the opposite side is Steve Ballmer, in black shorts, backed by Carl Icahn. It’s a game old men play and honor is not always a factor.

Carl is plain after cash. He couldn’t give a whip for search market share, competition nor the employees. Gain control of the board and sell Yahoo on garage sale.

Ballmer needs Yahoo like blind man needs a walking dog. Microsoft isn’t getting anywhere without Yahoo.

Jerry just got big balls. His child, Yahoo, needs care, love and attention and he’s willing to fight for it. If he cant keep it, he’ll make sure it will be adopted by caring parents. I think Jerry cares less for shareholders.

Bill Miller. Who’s this guy? Is he up to no good? Or is he a new ally for Yahoo? Come back for the next episode of “Summer Stories: Yahoo Dates Microsoft – When Cookies in the Bag are Too Big”.

Part 1 talks about search engines that show snippets of web pages as screenshots(3D Search). This part covers 3 search engines that offer different search result layout styles.

• Quintra
• Kartoo
• Grokker

Quintra

Perhaps the most useful of all visual search engines reviewed.

Quintra gives semantic keyword information for each keyword query. Clicking on one narrows search results.

Quintra is useful if you’re entering into a new field and want to have a feel for keywords and semantically related phrases. Search results are provided by Yahoo.

I could see Quintura coming in handy in certain contexts. If you’re trying to brainstorm for keywords, this isn’t a bad place to experiment. If you’re new to search or trying to teach someone how to search on the Internet, showing them how to use Quintura could help, especially if they’re somewhat visually oriented; it might help them think of ways to make their search more specific, seeing that word cloud. If you’re stuck on a query at a different search engine and want to refine your approach, using Quintura’s search cloud could help reorient your thinking a little. Certainly, if you’ve been very frustrated with regular search engines, Quintura may be worth a try. But as an experienced web searcher, Quintura didn’t show me anything to make me want to switch from the search engine(s) I use every day. - SEO Chat.

Take Quintra Virtual Tour

Kartoo Review

Kartoo was co-founded in France by two cousins, Laurent and Nicholas Baleydier. It’s a meta search engine, meaning it gathers results from other search engines.

Features:

It’s hard to describe Katoo’s search interface, so here’s a screenshot.

On hover Kartoo shows relationships between websites in form of green connectors. Are those links? No idea, so users are left clueless. On the left side Kartoo gives website description, along with advertisements.

You can also refine search by topics. Clicking on a topic simply adds more keywords to the search.

Biggest problem with Kartoo, as with other visual search engines is lack of information about websites. Although you get short descriptions on hover, you have to hover over each result to see all of them. Worse, you can’t compare them against each other, since by the time you hover over a new site, new description takes place over the old one. Tricky if you want to compare 10 sites.

Kartoo also has classic meta search found here.

Grokker Overview

Another useful visual search engine. Useful from search marketing perspective. Each search query on Grokker produces following suggested sub keyword categories:

You can drill into each subsection and explore real keyword relationships in a specific industry.

Grokker can help you visualize keyword importance and importance of information to specific users. For example, our search for “mortgage” returned phrases like: “Security for a loan”, “Compare Mortgage” and “Law of Property Act” – information that users may want to find on a website.

Search results come from Yahoo. Other features listed by Grokker:

• Viewing Options – Explore your Grokker results in the familiar zoomable map or in the Outline view.
• Federated Search – Simultaneous search across Yahoo!, Wikipedia and Amazon Books. Enterprise versions of Grokker include even more sources.
• Powerful filters including an exclude option for keywords, a date slider, and more.
• Email option to share Grokker results without having to create and attach a file.
• Export results in a number of different formats including RSS feeds.
• Post, email or bookmark individual results.
• A Working List feature that allows you to save results from multiple queries

Conclusion

Kartoo, Quintra, and Grokker are more user friendly and useful than 3d visual search engines. You can actually find web results and use those search engines for other purposes.

Another proposal was rejected by Yahoo. This time Microsoft wants Yahoo’s search business, with rest of Yahoo! going to Carl Icahn.

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Jul 12, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) — Yahoo! Inc. (Nasdaq:YHOO), a leading global Internet company, confirmed today that it has rejected a joint proposal from Microsoft Corporation and Carl Icahn for a complex restructuring of Yahoo! that would include the acquisition of Yahoo!’s search business by Microsoft.

The proposal was made on Friday evening and Yahoo! was given less than 24 hours to accept the proposal, the fundamental terms of which Microsoft and Mr. Icahn made clear they were unwilling to negotiate. After reviewing the proposal with its legal and financial advisers, Yahoo!’s Board of Directors determined that accepting the proposal is not in the best interests of its stockholders.

Source: Yahoo

Review of 5 visual search engines:

• SearchMe
• Viewzi
• PicLens
• RedZee
• Bryns Brain

What is a Visual Search Engine?

Simply – it’s a search engine that has different display format from Google, Yahoo, MSN and other, traditional, 10 blue links. Some visual search engines feature new layouts, some show results as real web screen captures.

Visual search engines:

• Index the web on their own
• Use results from other search engines (meta-search)

Why the need for visual search engines?

I think users are happy with Google, Yahoo and MSN. There’s no real need for visual search engines on the market, but rather a want of making it big by innovators who come up with this stuff.

What are the best visual search engines?

Visual search engines have few users, so it’s hard to say. It’s more of “I like this one, what do you think dude?”.

SearchMe Review

• SearchMe

SearchMe is hip. It’s got page long, interactive images of the sites which you can move around. It shows 1 result at a time.

You can browse vertical search options like: Search Engines, Advertising & Marketing, Stocks, Editing, Software, News, Videos, TV, Football and others. There is no visual difference between verticals. In terms of results, SearchMe brings relevant pages once you select a specific section. “News” gives news results. “Real Estate” gives pages with specific keywords on real estate sites(think SEO+real estate).

It’s very hard to read web pages, sometimes impossible. To check how relevant the page is, users have to visit it. At the rate of 1 result per keyword this process is tedious. It’s easier to scan 10 blue links than it is to visit each page and determine if it relates to the search.

The interface is flash based. You can also search Images, and Video.

Also check video review of SearchMe.

ViewZi Search

• Viewzi

Just as SearchMe, its almost impossible to learn how relevant a page is to the query, because text is unreadable on the screen capture.

Clicking the result brings you to a web page, with ViewZi on top as a frame.

Upon search you are given 15 View types to select.

Web Screen Shot View, Video View, Simple Text View, Site Information View, 3D Photo Cloud, Basic Photo View, 4 Source View and more. All are cool as hell, but how does it help me find what I need? Little. In fact, it’s work intensive.

It’s easier to browse results with ViewZi than SearchMe, but again, it’s impossible to know if a web page is relevant.

PicLens.

• PicLens

First disadvantage: you need to install a plug in. It’s like a chinese wall for users.

Next disadvantage – how do you use it? No explanation.

When you manage to find the button Piclens goes nuts. It Takes you to a full screen mode where you can browse Google Image Search, Yahoo Image Search, Facebook, Flikr and other sites.

3D interface is gorgeous, but does one really need it? Search is for speed and relevance.

This is a cool feature for video clips, so keep it mind if you want to do clip production.

Red Zee Overview

• RedZee

That red zebra is very entertaining. Kids will love it. I suspect the search engine is aimed at kids.

Zebra jumps, moves and smiles at you. Below is the search box. It takes a bit to gather results, but when RedZee is done, this is what you see:

Pictures can be dragged from left to right and vise versa. To get to a website you need to doubleclick on a result – took a bit to figure out. Just as Piclens, ViewZi and SearchMe – it’s hard to see text, a big killer.

Relevancy is very questionable. Search for SEO, gave SEO book(to expect), seo.com and lendingtree.com! I’m sure Lending Tree does a lot of SEO, but it’s in no way related to the industry.

In the middle you can see classic text ads, which swap as you swap webpages.

On the good side, hmmm… it’s a time waster.

Kids might love it.

Check their TV commercial(file download).

Bryns Brain

• Bryns Brain

Bryns wins – it actually shows readable web pages.

But it also looses – how do you visit a result? Try it, see if you can figure out.

Did you figure it out? If you didn’t bother, you have to click on the zoomed result, flip the card, and click on “visit website”. Average user will never figure it out and run back to loving Googles and Yahoos.

Current Visual Search Engines Will Die Out or Innovate.

Cruel? There’s no other fate. Usability is zero and web-users can be ruthless creatures if their time is not appreciated. Load times lag on all visual search engines and there isn’t any value in visual search other than coolness factor. In their current state Visual Search has no chances. More innovation and usability might save it.

Coolness alone doesn’t break in search. It’s all about speed and value, testimony to this is Google’s:

….249,000,000 for seo. (0.20 seconds)

Google keyword tool is finally showing numerical search volume data.

You can find search volume statistics in the Keyword Tool’s Approx Search Volume [Previous Month] and Approx Avg Search Volume columns. These statistics show the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network. - Adwords Blog

The numerical data is not limited to Google domains and includes Google search partners – AOL, Alexa and Netscape.

You can see:

• Date range: The Approx Search Volume [Previous Month] column shows search volume statistics for the last calendar month. The Approx Avg Search Volume column shows average monthly search volume over a recent 12-month period.
• Search volume fluctuation: Web traffic is influenced by seasonality, current events, and a number of other factors. The level of search volume on your keywords, therefore, is constantly fluctuating.
• Account structure: You may want to create a new ad group around high-traffic keywords that you find particularly relevant. Closely target ad text and a specific landing page to the small, narrowly-focused set of similar keywords you’ve found through the Keyword Tool.

Google also released Google Ad Planner and New Google Trends with numerical statistics, showing previously mysterious data out in the open. As SE Roundtable put – makes all the sense in the world.

Official Announcement | Help from Google on New Features.

Open Search Volume Data – Move to Dominant Online Ad Platform.

Google is becoming a one stop platform for online marketers in all aspects: PPC, Contextual, Impression, TV and Intelligence. Adwords has Yahoo, Ask, AOL and others under its arm. Google also announced it will allow third party PPC platforms to Adwords network, both search and contextual, expanding its influence and making other platforms reliant on itself.

Google Ad Planner positioned Google as a marketing research platform, allowing marketers to plan campaigns and then launch them through Adwords and Double Click network.

New Google Trends is a move towards completive intelligence research (very raw now), allowing marketers to research competition and develop counteractive strategies.

Google is moving to TV media and aint nothing stopping it. New keyword search volume data and other tools, is a move to give marketers what they want – data, in return for more advertising. Give Google 10 years, it will be the biggest advertising platform in the world. Marketers want more accountability from TV, but cable got a good grip there, for now. It’s a matter of maturing to the point when accountability is a demand. Offering solutions earlier, with little demand, but potential for the big future, gives Google(also Microsoft) time to make mistakes and innovate, before the real game begins… and when it does they are a footstep ahead…

Link building is the most important part of SEO. With Google’s pagerank websites without links do not stand a slightest chance is search results.

Here’s a round up of link building tools.

10 link building tools:

Hub Finder

• allows you to grab the top ranked sites from Google or Yahoo! (requires Google’s API code to access Google)
• allows you to highlight each authority in the results to see what potential hub pages link at them.
• link research results CSV output
• allows you to set the number of matching domain names… this can be used to help filter noise or find the most important hubs.
• allows you to set the search depth… since Yahoo! places many of the best links near the top of the backlink list this can be used to help filter noise.
• optionally allows you to compare the backlinks for the top 10 ranked sites in Yahoo! for any term.
• does mix and match, allowing you to look at sites you entered, top ranked Yahoo! sites, or any mix of the two
• allows a forced inclusion feature. using this feature can require that a site links at a specific page or site and any other combination of related resources.
• lists how many hub pages were found out of the total number of sites analyzed.
• finds hub sites that may link to similar resources from slightly different pages. each link is marked with an X and links to the page the link is on.

Optilink

The premier Search Engine Optimization(SEO) tool in use by thousands of webmasters and professionals world-wide. OptiLink revolutionized the SEO technology by being the first, and still most complete, tool for analyzing the effect linking has on ranking. The company coined, and a multitude of users subsequently popularized, the term Link Reputation to describe the unique link measurement that OptiLink introduced. Optilink

Rusty Brick’s link analysis tool

This tool enables you to easy gather enough data to analyze a page’s link popularity. The Google Link Popularity Analysis Tool only looks at Google links and the pages associated with those links. The reports show PageRank data, internal and external link counts, anchor text weights, class C IP reporting and much more.

Touch Graph

Visualize relationships between web sties.

Back Link Analyzer Link Popularity Software (Beta)

Free link analyzer tool from SEO Book.

Backlink Analyzer is similar to Link Harvester, with the exception that it is downloadable software, and also does anchor text analysis. You can grab backlink data from Google, Yahoo!, or MSN. It analyzes / grabs anchor text, IP addresses, Alexa data, page title, number of links on page, and number of outbound links on a page. It basically is a big spreadsheet which makes it quick and easy to view linkage data for a particular site.

LinkExplore

Explore reciprocal link partners with over 10,000 websites. Note that Google does not place much value on generic reciprocal links. Aim for theme related quality sites.

SEO Elite

Hardcore hype filled marketing page. SEO Elite is similar to optilink, but also checks reciprocal link partners. – SEO book.

Link Harvester

• quickly find almost every single site linking into a domain or page.
• scrapes past the 1,000 search result limit by making domain filtering a snap.
• grabs number of pages indexed.
• grabs links to any page.
• grabs total inbound links, home page links, and deep link ratio.
• tool is fast and free. which is great considering all it does.
• grabs C block IP address information.
• tool provides links to Wayback Machine and WhoIs Source next to each domain.

Backlink Watch – watch for backlinks to any domain.

Arelis - another reciprocal link exchange tool.

Class C IP checker

This tools check for IP address of each domain. Google may not put as much weight on the links that come from the same domain.

The Allied Network, Ontario’s leading dating service, has been matching single people for more than 16 years. Its members are serious about meeting the right person for a long term relationship and The Allied Network has met that need with excellent success. Thousands of its members have become involved in long term relationships or marriages through The Allied Network’s dating service. The Allied Network believes that its personalized approach to matching is the key to its success. Allied Network members go through a personal interview where a consultant learns about their likes, dislikes, goals and values. Identification is also checked so there is no possibility of misrepresentation which frequently occurs on internet websites.

With over 19,000 members, The Allied Network believes they have someone for everyone. Members at The Allied Network range from young adults who have never been married to people in their thirties, forties and fifties who are divorced and looking for a way to get back into the dating scene. The Allied Network also has many members in their sixties, seventies and eighties who are divorced and widowed and looking for a comfortable way to meet someone special. The Allied Network works personally and confidentially with all of its members to find the right person, making the process of finding someone special fun and enjoyable. If you are interested in meeting the right person call The Allied Network at 1-877-278-8815 or visit www.thealliednetwork.com

Index is the most important part of a website.

• Index appears in search results for main keywords.
• Visitors check index upon landing on your website.
• It’s the face of a website.

The Use of Index

Homepage is a top level page. It must:

• Be search friendly
• Persuade users they’re in the right place
• Tell users why we’re better then them.
• Entice users to explore deeper pages that do actual selling.

SEO - Inbound links, keywords in the title, H tags and text copy are crucial. Learn more about SEO.

Persuading users they’re in the right place – fortunately for websites, users look for exact keywords they used to search, on the pages they land on. So if you rank well on search, you usually have appropriate keywords throughout your index page.

Enticing users to explore deeper pages - achieved with:

• Navigation. Offering relevant choice and information about products and services.
• Snippets of pages. Links to the pages with short benefit packed description of the pages. Snippets are designed to pull in readers to the pages that do the selling or lead to other pages that do. Snippets can be images, or text descriptions
• Links within the copy. Index pages have short copywritings. Links within text can entice readers to explore more.
• Choice of options. This usually takes most real estate and leads users to the appropriate pages. It usually used in large retail websites(overstock.com), mortgage sites(quicken loans) and large corporate portals (PriceWaterhouseCoopers). Choices can take different forms: bulleted links, CSS drop down, database content, and formatted snippets of pages. The point is to lead users to pages of their interest.

A pristine use of the index page is demonstrated by Quicken Loans and WebEx.

Quicken Loans

Right in the center of the page, Quicken put 3 reasons why they’re superior to other providers. They also put a call to action for the shoppers who are ready for business. On the top, we can clearly see 4 main categories of mortgages, with options to calculate and learn more about each mortgage. On the right there’s the mortgage calculator. And on the bottom there’s more stuff to drill into. As a mortgage shopper, I can quickly locate what I need and get to the right page.

WebEx

WebEx(designed by Future Now) did a wonderful job. Upon landing, you have CSS top-up choices , “Individual Professional”, “Small & Medium Business”, “Large and Enterprise Business”. Each one offers very relevant links that lead to appropriate pages, without BS in between.

The Use of Navigation on the Index

Depending on the type of navigation you use, it may benefit and hurt you. A right/left side navigation takes a lot of real estate, so it might make more sense to avoid it(on the index). This however depends on your type of offer. Lending Tree uses right navigation quite successfully.

There are no rules to the design of index pages and websites, so coming up with ideas and testing is key. Explore various website across different industries and borrow from the best. Someone already walked the path and you’ll save a lot of time by using their knowledge and mixing it with your own experience.

Eyetracking studies showed that images, relevant to the context of the page, capture people’s eyes. Images can be used throughout copywriting pages with the purpose of catching attention and making pages more eye-friendly.

The Eye-tracking studies.

• It might surprise you that our test subjects typically looked at text elements before their eyes landed on an accompanying photo, just like on homepages. As noted earlier, the reverse behavior (photos first) occurred in previous print eyetracking studies.
• We also learned that the bigger the image, the more time people took to look at it.

Source

More articles on eyetracking:

• Eye Tracking On Universal And Personalized Search
• Eyetracking Research
• ENQUIRO EYE TRACKING WHITEPAPERS

It’s a fact that online surfers do not read, but scan pages. The pattern is top-down, left to right, with the top left corner being the most important part of a webpage – a place for a headline.

Once readers go down the page, their attention span decreases:

One of the ways to induce readers to continue reading is by placing relevant images throughout the copy. It’s well know that short paragraphs, with plenty of formatting, bolding, italics, bullets and emphasis stop reader’s eyes. Adding images to the mix can entice visitors to read more.

Mint.com is a perfect example. On the features page, It has a detailed explanation of the services, with 9 headlines, plenty of bolding and 7 images. Each image is related to the writing and entices interest on it’s own. Bolded text, next to the images, ensures readers notice it once they study the images. If bolded text is interesting enough, readers will read part or the entire paragraph, looking for explanation of the image. This a perfect place to drop some important lines about the product.

It’s important to make images relevant and original. Generic model stock photos rarely entice interest. An image should carry some value, inform reader or entice interest. The advice would be stay away from the following types:

Those images are overused on the net, largely by designers who try to communicate some soft of message. Though no one should blame designers for doing their job, those types of images lost their value. Far more engaging are graphs(relevant to the context), real pictures of staff, and models that look directly in the direction of the content that reader should be paying attention to.

Of course retailers should include as many images as they can, in all possible angles and resolutions. Internet is a 2 sense world – sight and sound. Sound is rarely used on websites and its a challenge to paint 3d pictures with copywriting for over a 1000 products. Underuse of images is no excuse for retailers.

You can learn more about from an interview of the grok’s.

Keyword Spy Review

From the homepage: Keyword Spy is a keyword research tool which tells you exactly which keywords work and which do not by gaining access to your competitors’ keywords. Keyword Spy system helps you pin point easily the keywords that are driving traffic to a particular website.

• Learn keywords your competitors are bidding on – Priceless if you’re running PPC campaigns. With one click you can learn all the keywords your competitors are bidding on. It takes time, effort and a lot of budget to develop effective keyword lists, yet here you get it for a flat fee. You can run reports on as many website as you wish.

Click to enlarge

• See Competitor ad copies, headlines and landing pages – Don’t just learn keywords your competitors bid on – see their ads! For each keyword you can see: ad headline, and ad copy. Here’s the sweetest part – you can see their landing pages for each unique keyword!

• Organic keywords that send referrals. - Learn what your competitors rank for on search engines and in what positions. This service is also free with SEO Digger.
• Keywords used by competitive site affiliates – Many marketers rely on affiliate networks for promotion. Affiliates run their own websites, do their own SEO and pay per click campaigns. Affiliate Keyword feature lets you see the keywords your competitor affiliates bid on. All you need is the domain name of your competitor!

Keywords

Once you select competitive domain and run a search for it, Keyword Spy will produce keyword results. Keyword information includes data such as:

• ROI – Known as Return of Investments it is the measurement of the profitability of a keyword. ROI is computed by dividing the benefit of a keyword investment against the cost of the keyword.

  This is another unnecessary measurement, like Wordtrackers’ KEI.

• Position - Position of the ad on search results
• Competitors – Number of competitors bidding on this keyword
• Clicks Per Day - Estimated number of click per day for keyword
• Price per click – estimated price per each click.

Summary Page

Another cool feature. To get to the summary page , you need to: 1. Select competing domain and search for it. 2. Select a keyword this competitor bid on.

Keyword Spy will flash some real valuable info:

Top Competitors

Market Coverage

The graphs are self explanatory. Real valuable insight.

Some Tough Questions

Where does keyword spy get data from?

Keyword spy does not specify this. Quick Google search revealed a Google Group discussion where one of the members made this statement:

I recently noticed hits from a keyword spy service on my site. Is there a way to conceal the keywords that I use.  Is this service revealing my Google Adwords keywords or merely puling what is in my meta tag.  I don’t want my competitors knowing my advertising strategy. Thanks

And another member answered:

There are dozens (perhaps hundreds) of “keyword spy” services out there.

They generally follow AdWords (and YahooSM & MSN AdCenter) links, creating a database of:

In some cases, these services may also try to determine some “derivative” data, such as “most common keyword(s) on your landing page” and “pagerank”; some will also suggest the ability to identify your bid rate, based on other data (such as the bid rates paid by their client[s] for the same keyword, and the relative position of your ad compared to the client’s).  They may also gather factual data (for example, extracting your WHOIS data and perhaps attempting to scrape email, telephone, and mailing-address data from your site).

Depending on the depth and breadth of the spybot’s activities, they might also try to identify some of your “negative keywords.”  What they absolutely do NOT have is any data from Google about your AdWords campaigns, which keywords you use (other than the ones they use to find your ads).

So where do they get data?

Not clear. it seems they scrape it from all over the web. Said that – their keyword data set looks very impressive, for many websites.

What ad networks are featured in the results?

From that same post and from a number of other posts, we assume its Adwords, Yahoo and Adcenter.

Regardless, if you got PPC on your hands, give Give Keyword Spy a run – you might find some useful keywords.

Google has some spam in AdWords

Checking my gmail today, stumbled onto to a spam ad on Google Search.

Adobe teams with Yahoo and Google to Crawl Flash

Adobe, Google and Yahoo join to make Flash content searchable. Adobe, Google, Yahoo immediately makes flash and other dynamic content that run in Adobe Flash Player on thousands of Web sites visible to search from thousands of Web sites. – Eweek.com

Adobe made an announcement today.

According to Ryan Stewart Adobe is giving out new technology to search engines. As search engines stumble onto flash websites, this technology, which is sitting on search engine servers, gets activated. It acts like regular user and presses buttons, browses flash website and most importantly extracts text and links.

Webmaster don’t have to change anything on their websites. Technology is designed to work with all flash-based websites.

Adobe approached Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. There was hostility with Microsoft, and according to “The Register” Microsoft is left out:

Adobe told The Register it’s talked to different groups inside Microsoft to use the version of Flash Player with that company’s struggling Live Search service. No agreement has been reached, and negotiations are no longer active, Adobe said. Microsoft of course has a corporate axe to grind with Adobe. Microsoft has an online media content creation and runtime environment alternative to Adobe’s Flash and AIR, called Silverlight. Not so long ago, it also attempted to rival PDF with XML Paper in Office.- The Register

Google proves why they’re #1 – flash crawling active on July 1st

We’ve improved our ability to index textual content in SWF files of all kinds. This includes Flash “gadgets” such as buttons or menus, self-contained Flash websites, and everything in between. – Webmaster Central

• Text and links can now be crawled. Links within Flash are now treated as regular links.
• Non textual content like images and video is not crawled. Google does not see it.
• Google bot does not execute some types of JavaScript. if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
• Content that is loaded separately by the flash file, is considered separate from your website, at least for now.
• Flash in Hebrew and Arabic cannot be indexed yet
• FLV files are not crawalable(videos)

According to Search Engine Land, Yahoo is still working on this technology:

“Yahoo! is committed to supporting webmaster needs with plans to support searchable SWF and is working with Adobe to determine the best possible implementation.”

Search Engine Optimization

• Searcher experience is better served by Flash implementations that provide a unique URL for each set of content.
• Some Flash implementations dynamically load text as the user interacts with the application, but the URL remains the same. In this scenario, Google bot can now follow those interactions (in a limited way) and if the URL doesn’t change, then all content that is dynamically loaded as the interactions progress is associated with a single URL… This means that if the content that is dynamically loaded into the Flash application from the fifth interaction matches a searcher query, that Flash application may be served in the search results. But when the searcher clicks over to that result, the content won’t be found on the page. The searcher will have to interact with the application until that content is loaded. Searchers may instead feel frustrated and abandon the page.

Also keep in mind that most flash websites contain little text and rely on images, video and animations. Flash SEO is still tricky business, but it’s gotten easier. Firms that work with marketers who insist on flash, as noted above – plug in a lot of text and keywords into the flash and provide separate URL for each content set. This way search engines can serve the exact page where relevant content is found.

Microsoft is left out

Bad news for Microsoft and it’s Live Search. Flash crawling is one of biggest developments this year and search engines cannot afford to miss it. This time Microsoft’s ambitions for Adobe market got on their way to a better search engine.