Agriya

In what seems to be a shot across the bows of the dreadnought that is USS Microsoft, Google and Yahoo today announced a two week long ‘experiment’ of swapping ads with one another.

Effectively this means that Google can serve ads on Yahoo’s results page. The percentage is around 3% of all Yahoo searches will show Google ads.

Is this a calculated shot from the two internet monsters that they will not accept Microsoft’s pestering of Yahoo lying down?

Read the full story on BBC News

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Just wanted to post a quick note of (admittedly belated) congratulations to the guys over at WordPress.org on releasing the latest 2.5 version of their software.

The newest version is another step forward to what is arguably the worlds best (not to mention favourite) blogging platform - beating other open source and commercial products alike.

The latest version has way too many new features to mention, so we won’t, we’ll let the guys over at wordpress do that here:

http://wordpress.org/development/2008/03/wordpress-25-brecker/

My personal appreciation for WordPress started just over a year ago in January 2007 when I decided to switch my personal blog from Drupal to WP. The ease and simplicity was a step ahead of everything else I’ve used and I’m glad to say that after upgrading this blog they have continued that tradition.

But WordPress isn’t just a great blogging tool, over the years it has also evolved in to what could be considered quite a robust content management system, and infact we are modifying WP right now to power our network of sites - I’ll tell you right now, the programmers wanted to use Drupal, but I stuck to my guns and they conceded that WP would be able to do the job

If you are thinking of using or already use Wordpress for your blogging solution, I strongly suggest you check out this WordPress SEO Whitepaper which contains loads of tips, tricks and plugin suggestions to get the most out of your blog.

Finally, if you are in the market for some custom Wordpress templates or custom plugins, then shoot us a mail to info@agriya.com and tell us what you have on your mind. We love Wordpress at Agriya, and we’re keen to help you get the best out of it!

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There’s a handy little tool provided by Google that seems to have been overlooked by many SEO’s and webmasters in general. The tool is called Google Trends and it allows you to find out the search trend of the keyword phrases you might want to be optimizing for.

Let me first start by saying Google Trends is not a keyword search volume tool. It shows you the general trend, and is relative only to that search phrase.

I have found it particularly useful when researching niches, for example, say you wanted to use Rayzz to start your own video sharing site in the niche of Base Jumping (hey, there’s a lot of crazy people out there), I can use Google Trends to find out if it’s a growing niche based on searches.

Based on the image above, we can see that the overall trend for base jumping seems to be up, great news if we were to start a new site on base jumping.

Some of the limitations of the tool is that it won’t report on every keyword if there is not enough data. So you can probably forget about using most of your long tail words in this tool.

What I find the tool useful for is to search for the higher level or more generic keywords and see what the overall trend is for the niche in general. If it’s a rising trend, then it’s a good sign it’s a growing industry.

Let’s say you were looking at Orbit Social Networking Software, you are wondering if social networking is a growing industry. We head over to Google Trends and do a search…

Awesome! The search has near exponential growth, social networking is definitely taking off. And look at the number of news reports, social networking is a hot topic right now, so it’s definitely time to hop on that band wagon

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social bookmarking websites are important factors for increasing traffic. I write some strategy about Social bookmarking submission. I used for our site http://www.agriya.com. Its very useful for increasing traffic for your websites.

Social bookmarking strategy:

1. Basic Bookmarking
2. Mutiple Account Spamming
3. Blogfarm bookmarking
4. Sitemap bookmarking
5. Tagfarm
6. Random bookmarking strategy

Basic Bookmarking:

This very basic bookmarking strategy. To create one account and submitting bookmarking information. Bookmark a few important social bookmarking websites. that is like,

• simply
• furl
• spurl
• blinklist
• Del.icio.us
• Blogmarks

Mutiple Account Spamming

This is used by spammers to get more instance traffic from bookmarking sites.
To create a lot of account for each bookmarking by using different emails and submitting the bookmarking websites.

The effect for this strategy is get more traffic instantly and delete the account instantly.

Blogfarm bookmarking

BlogFarm is one of the most common tactics used by most blackhats. I have seen whitehats using this tactic to get links to their whitehat sites. It is a very effective tactic to get your site indexed. BlogFarm usually involves the linking of related blogs together.

You can use it to bookmark the blogfarms! If you try to bookmark 20k pages, you will be easilyaccused of spamming.