Peak Over The Shoulder of An SEO Guru...

Peak Over The Shoulder of An SEO Guru...

http://www.ecombuffet.com/Webinar/

Learn The Insider Tips That We Use To
Dominate The Engines and Drive Massive Traffic For Clients.

"Search Engine Optimization Step By Step – We Reveal It All"
You’ve read the books, listened to the conference calls, read the reports and critiques on your site but you’ve never peaked over the shoulder of our Director of SEO and watched her work! Now you can.

For the first time ever we are doing a special exposé – a live Webinar where we reveal our SEO techniques.

You are truly getting an inside look at Bonnie's work. You'll not only watch her work, but you'll get play by play - as she explains optimization each step of the way. It'll be like sitting right there in her office. You may even hear her dog Lucy barking in the background.

Why are we letting you in and revealing our optimization process?
The truth is, we would love for you to hire us to handle your SEO but we know not everyone can afford it, and not everyone wants to outsource.

So, rather than not do any business with you at all, we realized it would benefit us (we are in business to make money after all) and more importantly YOU if we opened the door to Bonnie’s office and shared all of this vital information with you.

You might expect to pay a thousand dollars or more for this kind of personal, insider information. It’s definitely worth that and more! We are willing to offer this special Webinar one time only at the hugely discounted rated of $147 per person – but only for a limited time. Go here for full details: http://www.ecombuffet.com/Webinar/

So, how does your web page get selected to be the one we optimize during the Webinar?
Sign up for the Webinar today and we will select one person at random to be featured as the web page that gets optimized live on the Webinar.

This amazing opportunity at this low price is not something that comes along every day – in fact, I have never seen something like this offered at such a low price before. Act now before the price increases. This Friday, February 29, 2008 the price will go up to $247 – a full $100 more.

The date hasn’t been set for the Webinar yet, but it will be a Saturday. If you regiater for the event but are unable to attend live, it is OK – you will receive a copy of the live Webinar that you can watch any time, over and over again!

Sign up today for only $147 to watch a 10 year optimization expert at work. You’ll learn step by step everything she does to optimize a web page. http://www.ecombuffet.com/Webinar/

Yahoo New Algorithm Phrases Based Indexing And Your Current Rankings

How Yahoo's phrased based indexing affects your website rankings

Search engine spiders are becoming more intelligent. It was possible to fool search engines with a simply meta keywords tag some years ago, but search engines have now a deeper understanding of the contents of a web page.

Yahoo! recently published a patent applications that gives some insight on how Yahoo finds and evaluates keyword phrases on web pages.

What's the new patent all about?

The patent application explains how Yahoo! parses web pages to find related keyword phrases. Yahoo breaks down the content of web pages into several possible phrases and matches them with a content dictionary.

Yahoo! also seems to consider searches and query refinements to determine the topic of a search query. For example, Yahoo! might monitor a users queries and find out that the terms "woods", "club" and "green" appear during a given query session.

The patent application also contains a lot of information about how Yahoo! might work with the gathered information.

What is the essential point of the Yahoo patent application?

The patent application indicates that Yahoo! tries to understand concepts instead of single words. For example, someone looking for "tiger woods" isn't just searching for web pages that contain this word combination.

If a page contains the phrase "tiger woods" as well as some related keywords such as "golf", "green" and "clubs" then it is more likely a match for a search for "tiger woods" than a web page that has a story about a tiger in the woods that threatened a boy with the name Mowgli that doesn't contain the related keywords.

What does this mean for your website rankings?

When writing web pages, it can be helpful to use related keywords on a web page that has been optimized for a certain keyword. That will make it easier for search engines to understand the content of the keywords that you use on your web pages.

According to the patent application, it seems to help to use these related keywords close together on a page to make it easier for search engines to find the relation.

It will probably also help to optimize different pages of your web page for different but related search terms. That way, you can show search engines that your website is relevant to a special topic.

Need assistance with your organic rankings. Contact www.ontheavenues.com for SEO help

Google To Beta Test Medical Record Storage

Google To Beta Test Medical Record Storage

SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc. will begin storing the medical records of a few thousand people as it tests a long-awaited health service that's likely to raise more concerns about the volume of sensitive information entrusted to the Internet-search leader.

The pilot project, announced Thursday, will involve 1,500 to 10,000 patients at the Cleveland Clinic who volunteered to an electronic transfer of their personal health records so they can be retrieved through Google's new service, which won't be open to the general public.

Each health profile - including information about prescriptions, allergies and medical histories - will be protected by a password that's also required to use other Google services such as e-mail and personalized search tools.

Google views its expansion into health-records management as a logical extension because its search engine already processes millions of requests from people trying to find more information about an injury, illness or recommended treatment.

But the health venture also will provide more fodder for privacy watchdogs who believe Google already knows too much about the interests and habits of its users as its computers log their search requests and store their e-mail discussions.

Prodded by the criticism, Google last year introduced a new system that purges people's search records after 18 months. In a show of its privacy commitment, Google also successfully rebuffed the U.S. Justice Department's demand to examine millions of its users' search requests in a court battle two years ago.

The Mountain View-based company hasn't specified a timetable for unveiling the health service, which has been the source of much speculation for the past two years. Marissa Mayer, the Google executive overseeing the health project, has previously said the service would debut in 2008.

Contacted Wednesday, a Google spokesman declined to elaborate on its plans. The Associated Press learned about the pilot project from the Cleveland Clinic, a not-for-profit medical center founded 87 years ago.

The clinic already keeps the personal health records of more than 120,000 patients on its own online service called MyChart. Patients who transfer the information to Google would still be able to get the data quickly even if they were no longer being treated by the Cleveland Clinic.

The Cleveland Clinic decided to work with Google "to create a more efficient and effective national health-care system," said C. Martin Harris, the medical center's chief information officer.

Google isn't the first high-tech heavyweight to set up an online filing cabinet in an effort make it easier for people to get their medical records after they change doctors or health-insurance plans.

Rival Microsoft Corp. last year introduced a similar service called HealthVault, and AOL co-founder Steve Case is backing Revolution Health, which also offers online tools for managing personal health histories.

The third-party services are troublesome because they aren't covered by the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, or HIPAA, said Pam Dixon, executive director of the World Privacy Forum, which just issued a cautionary report on the topic.

Passed in 1996, HIPAA established strict standards that classify medical information as a privileged communication between a doctor and patient.

DIY SEO: www.ontheavenues.com

Google Postion 6 Penalty

Google backs out of the position 6 penalty

Some weeks ago, we informed you about Google's new position 6 penalty. At this time, it was unclear why Google assigned this penalty to some websites.

The theories were that Google considered usage data when calculating the rankings and that Google had a better understanding of word and phrase relationships.

Was this just a bug in Google's algorithm?

In a discussion about this problem, Google's Matt Cutts recently wrote the following:

"When Barry asked me about 'position 6' in late December, I said that I didn't know of anything that would cause that. But about a week or so after that, my attention was brought to something that could exhibit that behavior. We're in the process of changing the behavior; I think the change is live at some datacenters already and will be live at most data centers in the next few weeks."

This statement means two things:

It seems that Google made a mistake that sent many position 1 rankings to position 6.

Google has released a patch for this.
Indeed, many webmasters who experienced problems with the position 6 penalty reported that their rankings are now as good as before.

What was Google trying to do?

Even if Google says that the position 6 penalty was not intended, it is clear that Google tried to do something with the results.

What was it and will Google continue to do this without the unwanted position 6 effect?

The changes might have something to do with Google's increased integration of Universal Search in the results. In addition to the normal 10 web page results, Google now often returns results from Google Images, Google Maps, Google News or other Google services.

The way Google integrates Universal Search results into the normal search results changed during the last weeks. These changes also might have caused the temporary position 6 problem.

If your website has been affected by the position 6 penalty you can relax. Your web pages should have regained their high positions by now.

7 Ways To Improve Your Web Site Link Structure

7 Ways To Improve Your Web Site Link Structure

The internal link structure of a website is a search engine optimization factor that is often overlooked by webmasters.

Why does the link structure of your website has an effect on your rankings?

The internal link structure of your site allows you to spread the link power of your home page to the individual pages of your site.

For example, if 1000 other websites link to your home page, then your home page has a certain link power that can be spread to the other pages of your site. If you link to 50 pages on your home page then each page will get 1/50 of the link power. If you link to only 10 pages, then each page will get much more link power passed to it (1/10).

The more link power a page receives, the more likely it is that the page will get high rankings on search engines. Your internal link structure allows you to direct search engines to your most important pages.

How to improve the internal link structure of your website

There are several things that you can do to improve the rankings of special pages on your website:

Make sure that the most important pages on your site can be reached with as few clicks as possible from your home page. The fewer clicks you need to get to a web page, the more important it looks to search engines.

Link to the pages for which you want to have high rankings from all pages of your website that are related to that page. The easiest way to get related links to a web page is to link from your own website.

Use your targeted keywords in the links to these pages. Make sure that you use keywords that are highly relevant and targeted.

Show search engines for which keywords your web pages are relevant.

Make the links on your website absolute. Do not link to mypage.htm but to www.yoursite.com/mypage.htm. If other people scrape your web page contents, you'll get backlinks from these sites.

Add a nofollow attribute to all links that aren't important for your search engine rankings. For example, your privacy policy page or the web page with your terms and conditions probably needn't be listed in search engines.

The fewer links you have on a page, the more important is the single link to the other pages on your site. If possible, remove unnecessary links from your web pages.

Use your robots.txt file or the robots meta tag to exclude duplicate or irrelevant pages from indexing. This is very similar to tip 5. If search engines don't have to parse your unimportant pages they can take a close look at the pages for which you want to be ranked.

Check your website for 404 not found errors and redirect these old links to the most appropriate pages. You might want to use the link checker that you can access in the new IBP 10 beta.
By optimizing the structure of how your web pages pass their link power, you can influence how search engines treat the content of your website.

Once you have optimized the link structure of your website, you should try to get more links from other websites.

It's hard to beat a website with a great internal and external link structure.

SEO Tip: Update Your Web Site Several Times A Week

Update Your Web Site Several Times A Week

Remember that you can get much more relevancy for "content freshness" than you may expect.

Content freshness: Don't just dump a bunch of new content on your Web site, but consistently add new articles or content on a regular basis. Watch how the search engine robots behave when you start doing this consistently.

So, spend some time each day, or at least 2-3 times a week to make updates to your web site. The time spent will be well worth it

Ultimate SEO Resource for Real Estate Agents

Ultimate SEO Resource for Real Estate Agents

Note: OnTheAvenues Blog achieves top recognition for real estate SEO

SEO, as a rule, isn’t easy. Of course, this goes double if you’re a real estate agent with hundreds of competitors in your area–all targetting the same keywords. The real estate industry is large, it’s competitive, and the average realtor has a million other things to worry about besides their SEO strategy. But that doesn’t mean you should give up–leveraged successfully, the Internet has the potential to be the largest and most profitable sales channel in an agent’s marketing mix.

The following list is filled with tools and resources that will help any real estate agent achieve their SEO goals. You can choose to learn from blogs, tutorials, or forums, and we’ve also pointed you to specific blog entries and forum threads that will get you started. You can study search engines to learn what they require from you, and you can choose among some professionals to help you refine your Web site or to take over completely. The choice is yours. The links to each tool are listed alphabetically within the categories listed immediately below. The numbering does not indicate that we favor one site over another or that they are listed in order of value. Finally, all the sites listed below are targeted specifically to real estate professionals.

The following blogs are written by individuals who are in the real estate field, yet who also have become experts in the SEO realm. While some blogs focus specifically on SEO, other blogs contain a category that holds their SEO articles.

OnTheAvenues: Bonnie Burns provides web site analysis and search engine optimization services specifically for real estate web sites and shows her expertise through her blog.

See the complete list of Real Estate SEO resources here

7 Ways Your Site Can Be Sabotaged

7 Ways Your Site Can Be Sabotaged

Google Bowling
Google and Yahoo! rank Web sites based in part on how many other sites link to that page. But they're wary of sites that create links simply for the purpose of artificially inflating their ranking, and search engines punish sites that appear to be cheating by pushing them deep in search results. Some saboteurs claim they can use that policy to "frame" competing Web sites, creating thousands of spam-links to a site in order to convince Google or Yahoo! to drop its ranking. The technique is sometimes called "Google bowling."

Tattling
Some sites buy links from more established sites to improve their Google ranking or hide links on their site intended to improve their placement in search results. Google frowns on such tactics and has asked for Web users to report these and other shady practices. One easy way to drop a competitor's ranking is to catch him in the act and report him to the authorities.

Google Insulation
Rather than directly attack a competitor, search marketers can simply create more content and float it to the top of Google results, pushing competing sites lower in search rankings. The technique is also sometimes used for online public relations: ReputationDefender, a Louisville, Ky.-based company, creates what its founder calls "Google insulation": flattering blog entries and other benign content that floats to the top of search results, hiding online criticism that affects the company's clients.

Copyright Takedown Notices
Search engines can legally link to sites that steal copyrighted content--unless they've been notified of the site's copyright infringement. If a copyright holder (or someone claiming to be a copyright holder) files a complaint, a search engine must remove the page from its index for 10 days while the copyright holder decides whether to sue for infringement. So by filing a copyright complaint against a competitor, a site can sometimes have it temporarily erased from search engine results--though a fraudulent takedown notice is often grounds for a lawsuit.

Copied Content
Search engines don't like duplicate content. If the same text appears on two different Web pages, one will be penalized in search results to avoid offering users a worthless entry. So sites that are older and more search-engine friendly than their competitors can sometimes rip off and republish a competitor's content, thereby hijacking its place in search results

Denial of Service
When moderate methods fail, there's always all-out cyberwarfare. One method is a "denial of service" attack, which floods a competitor's Web server with requests for information, overwhelming it with so many simultaneous queries that it crashes. Denial of service attacks are usually performed using a "botnet," a herd of thousands of computers unwittingly hijacked with hidden software. Unlike some of the subtler tactics in this list, denial of service attacks are very clearly illegal.

Click Fraud
Aside from general search results, Google and Yahoo! also drive traffic around the Web with pay-per-click ads. But competitors who want to sabotage their competitor's ad traffic can enlist clicking software to simulate thousands of potential customers clicking on online ads. Since some search advertising programs ask their clients to set an upper limit on their budget for a certain period of time, fraudulent clicks can easily empty an advertiser's coffers, causing their ad to disappear from search results and their traffic to plummet.

Yahoo Rejects Microsoft Bid

Yahoo Rejects Microsoft Bid

Yahoo Inc. has formally rejected Microsoft Corp.'s $44.6 billion takeover bid as inadequate. The response had been expected after Yahoo's intentions were leaked over the weekend.

Yahoo's rebuff raises the stakes in a battle involving two of the world's most prominent technology companies.

Many analysts expect Microsoft to raise its offer by $5 billion to $12 billion to entice Yahoo to sell. Yahoo is believed to want a bid of at least $56 billion, or about $40 per share.

Microsoft's first offer, which was made public Feb. 1, was originally valued at $31 per share. Microsoft also could take its bid directly to Yahoo shareholders.

The decision could provoke a showdown between two of the world's most prominent technology companies with Internet search leader Google Inc. looming in the background. Leery of Microsoft expanding its turf on the Internet, Google already has offered to help Yahoo avert a takeover and urged antitrust regulators to take a hard look at the proposed deal.

If the world's largest software maker wants Yahoo badly enough, Microsoft could try to override Yahoo's board by taking its offer — originally valued at $31 per share — directly to the shareholders. Pursuing that risky route probably will require Microsoft to attempt to oust Yahoo's current 10-member board.

Alternatively, Microsoft could sweeten its bid. Many analysts believe Microsoft is prepared to offer as much as $35 per share for Yahoo, which still boasts one of the Internet's largest audiences and most powerful advertising vehicles despite a prolonged slump that has hammered its stock.

Yahoo's board reached the decision after exploring a wide variety of alternatives during the past week, according to the person who spoke to The Associated Press. The person didn't want to be identified because the reasons for Yahoo's rebuff won't be officially spelled out until Monday morning.

Microsoft and Yahoo declined to comment Saturday on the decision, first reported by The Wall Street Journal on its Web site.

Yahoo's board concluded Microsoft's offer is inadequate even though the company couldn't find any other potential bidders willing to offer a higher price.

Without other suitors on the horizon, Yahoo has had little choice but to turn a cold shoulder toward Microsoft if the board hopes to fulfill its responsibility to fetch the highest price possible for the company, said technology investment banker Ken Marlin.

"You would expect Yahoo's board to reject Microsoft at first," Marlin said. "If they didn't, they would be accused of malfeasance."

But by spurning Microsoft, Yahoo risks further alienating shareholders already upset about management missteps that have led to five consecutive quarters of declining profits.

The downturn caused Yahoo's stock price to plummet by more than 40 percent, erasing about $20 billion in shareholder wealth, in the three months leading up to Microsoft's bid.

Seizing on an opportunity to expand its clout on the Internet, Microsoft dangled a takeover offer that was 62 percent above Yahoo's stock price of just $19.18 when the bid was announced Feb. 1. Yahoo shares ended the past week at $29.20.

Led by company co-founder and board member Jerry Yang, Yahoo now will be under intense pressure to lay out a strategy that will prevent its stock price from collapsing again. What's more, Yang and the rest of the management team must convince Wall Street that they can boost Yahoo's market value beyond Microsoft's offer.

Yahoo's shares traded at $31 as recently as November, but have eroded steadily amid concerns about the slowing economy and frustration with the slow pace of a turnaround that Yang promised last June when he replaced former movie studio mogul Terry Semel as Yahoo's chief executive officer.

This isn't the first time that Yahoo has spurned Microsoft. The Redmond, Wash.-based company offered $40 per share to buy Yahoo a year ago only to be shooed away by Semel, according to a person familiar with the matter. The person didn't want to be identified because that bid was never made public.

Yahoo now may want that Microsoft to raise its price to at least $40 per share again. That would force Microsoft to raise its current offer by about $12 billion — a high price that might alarm its own shareholders.

Microsoft's stock price already has slid 12 percent since the company announced its Yahoo bid, reflecting concerns about the deal bogging down amid potential management distractions, sagging employee morale and other headaches that frequently arise when two big companies are combined.

Although it isn't involved directly in the deal, Google is the main reason Yahoo is being pursued by Microsoft.

Yahoo has struggled largely because it hasn't been able to target online ads as effectively as Google.

Microsoft believes Yahoo's brand, engineers, audience and services will provide the company with valuable weapons in its so far unsuccessful attempt to narrow Google's huge lead in the lucrative Internet search and advertising markets.

As it examined ways to thwart Microsoft, Yahoo considered an advertising partnership with Google — an alliance long favored by analysts who believe it would boost the profits of both companies. It was unclear Saturday if Yahoo's plans for boosting its stock price include a Google partnership, which would probably face antitrust issues.

A Microsoft takeover of Yahoo would also be scrutinized by antitrust regulators in the United States and Europe. The antitrust uncertainties could be cited as one of the reasons that Yahoo's board decided to spurn Microsoft.

White Hat SEO - Black Hat SEO

White Hat SEO - Black Hat SEO

Search engine optimization methods are divided in two categories: black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Both methods can help you to get high rankings on search engines.

However, one method is likely to get your website banned on search engines and recent developments indicate that websites that use that method will be in trouble soon.

What is white hat SEO?

White hat SEO means that the webmaster doesn't try to trick search engines. White hat SEO means playing by the rules. Web pages that are created with white-hat SEO methods are beneficial to web surfers, search engines and webmasters.

What is black hat SEO?

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. These methods include cloaking, doorway pages, hidden text, etc.

Google and other search engines have made it clear that they penalize websites that use black hat SEO methods when they detect them.

Black-hat SEO methods seem to work. So why not use them?

Some black-hat SEO methods can lead to good results. There are quite a few webmasters who obtained high rankings for their web pages although they optimized them with methods that were not approved by Google and the other search engines.

You have probably also seen some web pages in the search results that looked strange or hardly related to what you've actually searched. So do black-hat SEO methods seem to work? Should you use them?

Nearly all black-hat SEO methods have been detected by search engines sooner or later. Javascript redirects or doorway pages used to work in the past but nowadays, these methods are usually the ticket to the land of banned websites.

While some cloaking methods continue to work at this time (if your competitors don't peach on you), it's likely that Google can detect them soon. The same is true for paid links. Some paid links can still not be detected by Google but it's only a matter of time until Google has the algorithms that can.

You might get in trouble even if you used black-hat methods years ago

The problem is that things that cannot be detected by Google now might be detected by Google tomorrow. And Google might also be able to find out what you did in the past.

A good example for a spam filter that also considers things that have been done in the past is the WikiScanner. WikiScanner can find manipulations that have been made in the past and it can also associate anonymous changes to the people and companies who made these "anonymous" changes.

Combine such a spam scanner which a web page archive like Archive.org and you have an easy way to track the spam history of a web page.

Things that you have done in the past might backfire on you.

Don't use black-hat SEO methods. As technical possibilities evolve, it's very likely that these methods will be detected even if you don't use them anymore. It's better to use tools that focus on white-hat SEO methods.

Websites that continue to play by the rules will have an advantage in Google's search results.