Yahoo readies iTunes rival for launch

As previously reported, Yahoo has been working on the project along with digital-music wholesaler MusicNet since before the $160 million purchase of rival music company Musicmatch. Sources familiar with Yahoo's plans said the new store and software had been scheduled to debut early this week but that the launch date was pushed back.

Representatives from Yahoo and MusicNet declined to comment for this story.

Yahoo's full-fledged entry into the digital-music retail business could help shift a market that has remained tilted strongly in Apple's favor. Yahoo has already built a large and loyal following for its streaming-music and video service, and could parlay that into music sales.

Indeed, the company's Launchcast radio services was the highest-rated Webcasting service online in January, according to ratings firm Arbitron and ComScore Media Metrix, attracting more than 2.2 million people that month.

However, Apple's dominance has been challenged by other giants, ranging from Sony to Microsoft, without substantially decreasing the iPod maker's market share. Last week, Apple said it had sold more than 300 million songs through its iTunes store since its launch.

"You have to look at how to create a linkage between a device and the online service," GartnerG2 analyst Mike McGuire said. "But given Yahoo's traffic and their very active communities, the potential (for success) is there."

Yahoo has begun to streamline its music and multimedia properties over the past few months, changing the name of its Launch site to Yahoo Music and consolidating its entertainment businesses in a Santa Monica, Calif., office near Hollywood.

The new MusicNet-powered music service will be integrated into Yahoo's existing infrastructure, possibly including features such as links to its popular instant-messaging program, sources said. MusicNet's technology allows companies to offer subscription services or per-song downloads, and is used by Virgin Digital, America Online and others.

Sources close to the company said the new service is likely to launch by the end of the month.

Google Caffeine - A new Search Technique for Next Generation

Google is turning to the public (or rather, web developers) for help testing its next-generation search infrastructure, code-named "Caffeine." The changes have to do with the way Google crawls the web and indexes content, so you shouldn't notice any changes int he search engine interface.

In order to try out the new version, visit www2.sandbox.google.com, and start searching. You can share feedback with Google by hitting the "Dissatisfied? Help us improve" box at the bottom of the page and sending a message with the word "caffeine" in it.

Overall, the search results look pretty similar, but there are a few minor changes. Some items may be ordered a little differently, while the text descriptions of some pages look different.

If you aren't particularly interested in testing the new technology to help Google out, here's another reason to give it a try: As far as I can tell, there are no ads on the Caffeine interface. I've conducted a few dozen searches, and so far I haven't seen a single sponsored result. Of course, that'll change by the time the new code is integrated into Google's main product. But it's nice while it lasts.

What other changes have you spotted? Let us know in the comments.

Why Is SEO So Popular?

SEO is without a doubt, the most popular of all the online marketing tactics. Is it the best? That’s a matter of personal preference and what you’re looking for, but it is the most popular. In fact, SEO has become so popular that its name has become synonymous with internet searching (have you ever SEO you website?).

There are a couple of reasons that SEO has risen to the top of online marketing.

SEO should be performed by a specialist who is ethical and has experience in the optimizing website before. A popular SEO consultant who have been constantly delivering innovative techniques for SEO.

SEO Delivers
SEO delivers a good ROI. When you do optimize a website, the search engine scours the web and brings back what it determines is relevant, content rich, websites. Most of the time, search engines brings back something you can use. It has a massive database of sites, so it gives you a lot of sites to choose from, and does it extremely fast.

How to Start PPC Campaign?

As we’ve briefly discussed before, there are many advantages of promoting your business with Pay per Click advertising; but at the same time, there are also some catches that PPC newbies should look out for.

How PPC works is that the advertisers have to setup an account with Google and/or Yahoo first. Once the accounts are ready, the advertisers then can start building up their Campaigns, Ad Groups, Ads, keywords, and so on. The account managers at Google and Yahoo then will look after the accounts and make sure everything works (no violations of guidelines, ads are showing up, etc).

At this point, a lot of advertisers will assume that everything is done, and they can just sit at home waiting to count their cash. Well, that maybe the case in fairytale wonderlands, but definitely not in the world we live in. The reality is, a lot of times the teams at Google and Yahoo get so overwhelmed by their work and they lost tracks of what have been done and what hasn’t, resulting in a lot of updates being not approved (because no one had reviewed them).

This is more of a problem with Google than with Yahoo. With Yahoo’s system, if the newly submitted updates are still under review, you can see their status being editorial pending”. If it’s been ten days since you first submitted your update and the status is still editorial pending”, you know someone has forgotten to do their job. Just send an email to your account manager at Yahoo and state what the problem is and the problem should be sorted out in a day or two.

Google is somewhat different. Once you’ve submitted an update to Google, you will immediately see its status being reactive”, same as all the existing ads, keywords, ad groups you have. So if after ten days and you are still getting no impressions from the new update, and you intuitively check to see if the update is actually running, and when all you can see is it being reactive”, you will just think oleo, I guess no one has searched for it yet”, when in fact, Google’s just forgot to review them.

So monitor your accounts frequently, and the moment you sense something’s weird, fire an email to your account manager. Don’t be shy to send multiple emails in a day if that’s what it takes to get things fixed.

Summary: As we’ve briefly discussed before, there are many advantages of promoting your business with Pay per Click advertising; but at the same time, there are also some catches that PPC newbies should look out for.

Google Browser Size - Tool to see how others view your website

To help you understand how everyone sees your website, Google have created a tool called Browser Size. Browser Size is based on a sample of data from visitors to google.com. Special code collects data on the height and width of the browser for a sample of users. For a given point in the browser, the tool will tell you what percentage of users can see it. For example, if an important button is in the 80% region it means that 20% of users have to scroll in order to see it. If you're a web designer, you can use Browser Size to redesign your page to minimize scrolling and make sure that the important parts of the page are always prominent to your audience. People can use this tool to make their websites better, in turn making the web better for everyone.

To try it, simply visit browsersize.googlelabs.com and enter the URL of a page you'd like to examine. The size overlay you see is using latest data from visitors to google.com, so this should give you a pretty good indication of what parts of your UI are generally visible and what aren't.



How Google Browser Size Works:

Google Browser Size is a visualization of browser window sizes for people who visit Google. For example, the "90%" contour means that 90% of people visiting Google have their browser window open to at least this size or larger.

This is useful for ensuring that important parts of a page's user interface are visible by a wide audience. On the example page that you see when you first visit this site, there is a "donate now" button which falls within the 80% contour, meaning that 20% of users cannot see this button when they first visit the page. 20% is a significant number; knowing this fact would encourage the designer to move the button much higher in the page so it can be seen without scrolling.

To view your own Web site with this same visualization overlaid on it, simply type its URL into the "Enter URL here" textbox at the top of the window and click Go.

Avoid Getting Banned in SE

Most of webmasters do know the importance of having high search engine rankings. High rankings means high traffic, translated into increased profit.. Webmasters look for all sorts of tactics to improve a website’s position in search results.. However you need to avoid some tactics, generally termed Black Hat SEO, because it may cause a website to be penalized/Banned from search engines.

So below are the six popular Black Hat search engine optimization tactics:

• Keyword Stuffing

The more often you use your keywords on a page, the higher you keyword density. However, search engines don’t look for exceptionally high keyword density, but reasonable keyword density. If you repeat your keywords too often, search engines might think that your website is spamming.

• Cloaking

Cloaking is when websites serve one web page to search engine spiders and a different to human visitors. This can be used to mislead the search engine with regard to the content on the website. There are, however, some methods of cloaking which are not regarded as a deceptive, such as delivering unique content to users based on their location, or allowing search engines to index password protected pages.

• Hidden Text

Another method of deceiving search engines with regard to a website’s content is by including hidden text. Text can be rendered invisible by setting it as the same color as the background, using negative margins, or placing it in an invisible containing element.

• Gateway Pages

Sometimes additional websites or web pages are created with the sole purpose of ranking highly in search engines and generating traffic for another website. If these pages provide no value to visitors and are only used for rankings, your website may be penalized.

• URL Redirection

This occurs when a user, or search engine, is unknowingly redirected to another website. Sometimes this practice is used to acquire the pagerank of the destination page. At other times, it is used to redirect users to a malicious website.

• Link Farms

Google Pagerank and other similar ranking algorithms for other search engines place a lot of weight on link popularity. Black Hat search engine optimizers often take advantage of this by creating something known as a link farm, which is consists of a community of websites which link to each other.

Search engines have gotten progressively smarter in their quest to deliver highly relevant search results. So even if these tactics give you some success, it will only be temporary and could result in an indefinite ban of your domain name.

Social media optimization (SMO) is a set of methods for generating publicity through social media, online communities and community websites. Methods of SMO include adding RSS feeds,blogging. Social media optimization is related to search engine marketing, but differs in several ways, primarily the focus on driving traffic from sources other than search engines, though improved search ranking is also a benefit of successful SMO.

1. Increase Your Linkability
2. Make Tagging and Bookmarking easy
3. Reward Inbound Links
4. Help Your Content Travel

Google May Change Your Page Titles

In case you were not aware, Google "reserves the right" to change the titles of your pages in search results. Google's Matt Cutts has released a video discussing why and how they go about doing this.

Cutts says Google wants to show the titles that it thinks are most useful. "For example, suppose the title of your page is 'Untitled' or if there is no title. If that's the case, we try to show a relevant, useful title."

"We reserve the right to try to figure out what's a better title, what's a more descriptive title or snippet to show the users," he continues.

According to Cutts, if you have a title that's really long, they may still use that in their scoring, but in the snippet, they might try to find a "better title." This is presumably based on what the user is looking for.

As Cutts has said in the past, sometimes Google will use snippets right from the Open Directory Project (DMOZ). Sometimes, they'll simply use snippets from the page or the meta description tag. "We do a bunch of different things to find the best description that we can," he says.

"If you have a bad title or a title that we don't think helps users as much, we can try to find a better title, and one we think will be an informative result so that users will know whether that's a good result for them to click on," he says.

Have you noticed Google changing your titles? Did they find better ones?

Free Internet Marketing Methods That is Blogging

Many teenagers have resorted to blogging as an outlet for their emotions, a little online nook where they can blurt out whatever just bugs them or whatever makes them feel elated.

It's been years since blogging has been practiced. But it's just recently that it has been considered as one of the addicting fads.

What exactly is blogging? Blog is the widely used term that refers to web log. Basically, a blog is an online journal. A blog could be set up to no cost at all, and can be used for just for the fun of it or for business reasons.

Blogging for your Internet business is one surefire way to boost the visibility of your products and services. Here are a few ways to boost your internet advertising with the help of a blog:

1. Make your clients or customers abreast on your website's alterations. Your new products and affiliate websites could also be announced through your blog.

2. Keep track of your business goals and plans through open writing. Your blog content can be easily stored through archives. What could be better than searchable information that could be easily accessed by anyone browsing the web, right?

3. Publishing is a very easy process with blogging.Air your opinions, advice or reviews on specific services or products that are related to your business.

4. Include links that will carry back links and consequently improve your ranking on search engines. This could be better executed through putting well-written articles in your website. Affiliate links could also be included in your blog to earn more extra income.

5. Collect reaction through the capacity of blogs to fetch comments from your blog readers. You can learn and improve your products and services through with the feedback from your readers.

6. Connect easily with other bloggers. When other bloggers notice that you have something good in your blog, they will put you in their favorite lists that will automatically link you to their blogs.

So, how do you set up a blog? Here are some of the options you can make use of to take advantage of this fun way to advertise your Internet business.

Either you load a blogging software or let a blogging hosting service do it for you. Host services such as LiveJournal and Blogger.com are the most popular in this field. Those hosts will provide you with easy information on how to put up your blog.

India SEO Services | SEO Expert in India

The 10 Types of Bloggers

Here are the results of my review and the 10 types of bloggers I found. You’ll notice that they range from good to bad to sleazy.

1. Good: People who ask permission to reprint your article and add a bio with links back as requested.

These are people who are generally looking to add some content to their own sites. They usually republish the article in full, and are happy to add whatever bio and links you specify.

2. Good: People who republish without asking permission but at least link back to the original article.

I don’t really have a problem with the folks who haven’t asked permission if they at least have the courtesy of linking back to the original article. Sure, it’s not as great as controlling what the links say in a bio, but it’s generally fine.

3. Good: People who blog about something you wrote and who link to your original article, providing their own unique commentary or spin to go with it.

This is the best type of blog post as it isn’t a complete dupe of yours, and it gives credit where credit is due. Watch out, however, as sometimes these types of blog posts are critical of what you’re written. Personally, I have no problem whether people agree or disagree as that’s the foundation for blogging.

4. Okay: People who blog about what some other blogger blogged about, and link to both the original article and the blogger’s commentary.

I probably should put this one in the “good” category — as it really is fine — but it still is irksome when the secondary blogger’s post seems to get more credit than the original piece.

5. Bad: People who blog about what some other blogger blogged about it (as in #4 above), but who link back only to the blogger and not the original.

I was surprised at how prevalent this one was. I don’t think that most people intend to snub the original author, but it happens a lot! Sure, you could say it’s okay because the post they DO link to posts that link back to the original, but that’s just not good enough. I strongly believe that the original writer should get credit where credit is due in a more direct manner.

6. Bad: People who blog on the topic and then Digg their OWN post instead of the original.

I almost put this in the “sleazy” category, but I guess it’s sort of borderline. It seems to me if the topic is Digg-worthy, it should be the original article or post that gets Digged. Unfortunately, that’s often not the case.

7. Sleazy: People who don’t ask to republish but do it anyway, and don’t even link back!

When they don’t even put the original author’s name on it, I believe it’s copyright infringement. If they do mention the author’s name, but never link back to them in some manner, it’s pretty sleazy in my book.

8. Sleazy: Scrapers who link or don’t link, but add contextual link ads and other crap to the content.

Unfortunately, this is extremely prevalent these days. I would guess that a good portion of those 93,000 results in Google fall into this category. I can’t imagine those pages actually get any traffic, so I’m not sure what the point is.

The next 2 don’t quite fit into the good, bad, or sleazy categories, but were additional types I noted:

9. Strange: People who blog but somehow get their facts wrong.

One post got the name of the organization (SEMNE) wrong and called it SEMPO. I’m not sure why or how, as it was right there in black and white. I don’t believe there was any malicious intent going on, but it was strange nonetheless. (It was corrected immediately upon notification, so that was good!)

10. Dumbasses: People who just blog it cuz everyone else is.

Good blog posts are good for a reason. Simply writing about something because everyone else has is not a good blog post. ‘Nuff said!

And on that note, I implore you to look at your own blogging practices to see if you fit in any of the categories above. If so, here’s hoping it’s one of the good ones!

Avoid SEO pitfalls by Last Click News

Nowadays, Websites cannot afford not to have a search engine optimization (SEO) campaign.

Industry experts advise companies to conduct keyword research on popular search queries on their chosen field. There are many tools on the internet that can be used to boost SEO campaigns, like Google AdWords.

However, according to SEO expert Mark Jackson of Search Engine Watch, many sites still make mistakes on how they run their SEO campaigns.

For instance, content. For companies that are redesigning their Websites (to integrate SEO), content duplication should be avoided. This happens when the new Website stores old content from the old site. This duplication will bring both of the site’s ranking down. Failure to redirect content can lead to browsers receiving outdated content.

For online businesses, SEO is a must! It is a great way to strengthen a site’s online presence—a benefit that no site should forego.

What are SEO contents and its importance?

For every website SEO is most important and mandatory if you want your website to get recognized. What you write has a direct impact on viewers which in turn improves SEO. Website content has to be persuasive with addition of suitable keywords and written in an eye-catching and professional manner. The content should be written afresh or an existing one can be updated.

SEO demands quality than quantity i.e. the length of SEO article does not matter. It may be short but should be written with in-depth knowledge on the concerned topic. One thing should be kept in mind while writing the content that the content written should be in consideration to the marketing techniques and tools that are to be used in search engine optimization. The one who really want to be efficient SEO should take help from professionals. They are more experienced and can guide you better. These professionals can also tell you about the techniques used in it.Keywords and phrases should be aptly placed so that search engine can find your articles easily. This particular technique is known as ’stemming’ used extensively for SEO purpose in websites.

The content used in article should be kept simple and easy to understand. Do not overstuff the article with difficult word usages that are hard to understand. Thus keeping in mind the target audience you should write the articles and increase your productivity.

Microsoft Bing Yahoo Partnership Supported by Search Engine Industry

As soon as this week Microsoft Bing may be powering the search results and advertising at Yahoo, and an overwhelming amount of Search Engine Journal readers support the move, which would establish Bing with an estimated 30% search market share and position a cooperative Bing & Yahoo as a serious competitor to Google.

Yesterday, upon the news leak that Yahoo & Bing may be coming to terms on an agreement which could be announced as early as this week, SEJ polled its readers on the likely possibility of a Yahoo & Microsoft search engine venture under the likely scenario that Yahoo will be powering Yahoo Search and YSM with Bing search technology and serving Microsoft AdCenter advertising.

10 SEO tips

10 SEO Tips (Search Engine Optimization)

The SEO tips below should assist the reader in forming a basic understanding of how to create human friendly web pages which are easily understood by the most popular search engines.

Know this. There are thousands of search engines but only two of them will bring you most of the traffic. They are GOOGLE and YAHOO. Another search engine that brings me a little traffic is MSN but I do not focus too much on tactics for that engine.

Focus your attention on the engines that will bring you the most visitors first and work your way down.

Basic SEO Tips

1. Insert keywords within the title tag so that search engine robots will know what your page is about. The title tag is located right at the top of your document within the head tags. Inserting a keyword or key phrase will greatly improve your chances of bringing targeted traffic to your site.

Make sure that the title tag contains text which a human can relate to. The text within the title tag is what shows up in a search result. Treat it like a headline.

2. Use the same keywords as anchor text to link to the page from different pages on your site. This is especially useful if your site contains many pages. The more keywords that link to a specific page the better.

3. Make sure that the text within the title tag is also within the body of the page. It is unwise to have keywords in the title tag which are not contained within the body of the page.

Adding the exact same text for your h1 tag will tell the reader who clicks on your page from a search engine result that they have clicked on the correct link and have arrived at the page where they intended to visit. Robots like this too because now there is a relation between the title of your page and the headline.

Also, sprinkle your keywords throughout your article. The most important keywords can be bolded or colored in red. A good place to do this is once or twice in the body at the top of your article and in the sub-headings.

4. Do not use the exact same title tag on every page on your website. Search engine robots might determine that all your pages are the same if all your title tags are the same. If this happens, your pages might not get indexed.

I always use the headline of my pages as the title tag to help the robots know exactly what my page is about. A good place to insert the headline is within the h1 tag. So the headline is the same as the title tag text.

5. Do not spam the description or keyword meta tag by stuffing meaningless keywords or even spend too much time on this tag. SEO pros all agree that these tags are not as important today as they once were. I just place my headline once within the keywords and description tags.

6. Do not link to link-farms or other search engine unfriendly neighborhoods.

7. Do not use doorway pages. Doorway pages are designed for robots only, not humans. Search engines like to index human friendly pages which contain content which is relevant to the search.

8. Title tags for text links. Insert the title tag within the HTML of your text link to add weight to the link and the page where the link resides. This is like the alt tag for images.

My site contains navigation menus on the left and right of the page. The menu consists of links not images. When you hover over the link with your mouse, the title of the link appears. View the source of this page to see how to add this tag to your links.

9. Describe your images with the use of the alt tag. This will help search engines that index images to find your pages and will also help readers who use text only web browsers.

10. Submit to the search engines yourself. Do not use a submission service or submission software. Doing so could get your site penalized or even banned.

Here is the submission page for google: http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Submit only once. There is no need to submit every two weeks. There is no need to submit more than one page. Robots follow links. If your site has a nice link trail, your entire site will get indexed.

My site has a nice human friendly link trail which robots follow easily. All my pages get indexed without ever submitting more than the main index page once.

More SEO Tips

Get the facts here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/. This page will explain most of what you should focus on along with what you should forget about.

If you have been thinking about handing over the task of SEO to someone outside of yourself, you should read some warnings before you part with any money. http://www.google.com/webmasters/seo.html

Google Now The UK's Top SUPERBRAND

Google has moved to the top of another brand survey. This one, in the UK, is based on a consumer survey that involved 1,000 UK brands. Google topped other high-profile consumer brands such as Microsoft, Mercedes Benz, Nike, and BMW.


Earlier this year, research firm Millward Brown (a unit of ad agency WPP) named Google the top global brand based on its own internal formula.


Here's the list of the UK's top 10 according to the consumer survey:


1: Google
2: Microsoft
3: Mercedes-Benz
4: BBC
5: British Airways
6: Royal Doulton
7: BMW
8: Bosch
9: Nike
10: Sony

Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via "natural" ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results for targeted keywords. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results or the higher it "ranks", the more searchers will visit that site. SEO can also target different kinds of searches, including image search, local search, and industry-specific vertical search engines.

As a marketing strategy for increasing a site's relevance, SEO considers how search algorithms work and what people search for. SEO efforts may involve a site's coding, presentation, and structure, as well as fixing problems that could prevent search engine indexing programs from fully spidering a site. Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms and keyword stuffing that tend to harm search engine user experience. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques and may remove them from their indices.

The initialism "SEO" can also refer to "Search Engine Optimizers", terms adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems, URLs, and shopping carts that are easy to optimize.

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