By: Christoph Puetz

Search Engine Optimization nowadays has a lot to do with building inbound links to your website. Building inbound links is a cumbersome tasks and webmasters have always been looking for shortcuts to do this. Webmasters buy links (as advertising as an example) or contact other webmasters to exchange links with them. The need for inbound links has created a new business opportunity in the search engine optimization industry. The outsourcing of link building emerged from the fact that many inbound links mean a high search engine ranking and/or a high Google PageRank.

Read the rest of this entry »

By: Kim Roach | Source: seo-news.com

There are many changes taking place in the top search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN are all adapting to the many transformations occuring within the search industry. Because of these changes, I thought I would take the time to give you an overview of what’s taking place within the market and how it affects you as a webmaster. To begin, let’s start with Google.

Back in 2003, Google would index and crawl the web about once a month and everything would change all in one shot. WebMasterWorld would actually name these updates with names like Brandy, Florida, and Bourbon.

Google has moved away from these monthly updates to an ever-changing process. You can now see daily changes within the SERPS with the biggest changes occuring during algorithm updates.

Late June and July of this year saw some major changes within the Google algorithm. If your site was hurt from this algorithm change, you should re-examine your site and be sure to follow the guidelines below:

1. Pursue a continuous linking campaign with other quality sites. This can be achieved through article syndication, exchanging RSS feeds, submitting to directories or syndicating a press release.

2. Create a Google sitemap to increase the coverage of your webpages.

There have also been some recent changes at MSN.

They have changed the name of their search engine spiders. Before the changes, they were all called "msnbot,". Fortunately, they are now starting to group their spiders into separate categories.

The MSN Shopping bot is msnbot-products.
The MSN News bot is msnbot-news.
The MSN Image Search bot is msnbot-media.
The MSN search bot is still called msnbot.

Last, but not least, there is Yahoo. This company has experienced some very exciting changes within the past few months.

One of these is the launch of a new Yahoo Search Crawler. The new crawler is faster and more efficient at visiting websites. As a result, website owners should notice as much as a 25% reduction in the number of requests and bandwidth consumed by the Yahoo crawler.

Yahoo also released an index update in mid-July. You can read all about it at http://www.ysearchblog.com.

Read more at seo-news.com

Spread the word: bookmark it/ readit

By: Merle | Source: sitepronews.com

After months of "buzz" online about Google’s proposed "PayPal Killer," they’ve finally launched their new service, "Google Checkout." After all the hype that was floating around, you’d have thought this new creation would be the death of Paypal, but I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

Online payment options are important, so it’s always nice to have another way to accept payments from your web site. But Google’s new service is also good news for consumers who are concerned about their privacy when shopping online.

We all know Google likes to do things their own way and put a little "Google Twist" on their work, so it comes as no surprise that they’ve added some integration with their Adwords program. You don’t need to use Adwords to utilize Google Checkout, but if you do, Google gives you some other nice benefits.

If you are a seller who also uses Adwords, you’ll love this: For every $1.00 you spend with Adwords, Google will allow you to process $10.00 in "Google Checkout" sales for free. So if you’re already using Adwords and start using Checkout you’ll save money on your transaction fees. What are the fees, you say? 2% and $.20 per transaction, which does beat Paypal’s current fees of 2.9% and $.30 per transaction.

Another advantage to offering Checkout on your web site is that your Adwords ads will display a small graphic of a shopping cart next to them. This is called a "Google Checkout Badge," and will identify your site quickly to searchers as one who will take "Google Checkout" payments from shoppers. Some are wondering if this may help your Adwords ranking. This is something that still remains to be seen.

To sign up, you’ll first need to have a Google account, which you can get at no charge by going to http://google.com/accounts. At this time, you must live in the U.S. and have a bank account if you wish to process payments as a merchant. If you’re a merchant you’ll also need to specify your return and shipping policies.

Learn more here…

Spread the word: bookmark it/ readit