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Bing, Microsoft’s decision search engine, has been chipping away at the market share of its competitors since its official launch on May 28th this year. On an average, Bing has gained about half a percent a month and an overall 1.3% (9.3% in August, 8.9% in July, 8.4% in June and 8% in May) gain in the three months succeeding its launch. In about the same period Google, the market leader registered a fall of 0.3% to 64.7% while Yahoo came down by the same amount to 19.3% (source: ComScore). In August, Bing grew faster than Google for the first time, with a 31.9 percent annual increase in search queries compared to 21.6 percent growth for Google and 16.8 percent for Yahoo. So the rise in the market share of this Microsoft search engine does seem to be at the expense of the other two.

Some experts consider these early gains in the Bing market share the result of superior technology from its recent acquisitions and better algorithms for seeking the context underlying a search. Many users feel aerial photos available via Bing are more up to date and have better clarity than the corresponding Google photos. The eye-catching design too is bound to have helped Bing made inroads with viewers.

Skeptics, however, contend that this so-called increase in market share is driven by any number of factors such as the curiosity engendered by a new launch, the publicity and media hype that a hundred million dollar marketing drive is likely to generate, the fact that Bing is the default search engine on the latest versions of IE and Microsoft’s cash back offer for Bing users and is highly unlikely to last. Some of the skeptics also are casting doubts on the veracity of the statistics by stigmatizing the sources as unreliable.

A strong competitor to Google in the search market can only be good news for users. Google has for too long been almost a monopoly. The more choices that consumers get the more likely it is that necessity will drive more and more innovations in the search engine market.

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Anyone starting a website to promote their products or services online should optimize it for search engines in order to be listed in their results pages (SERPs) and reach the intended audience. Instead of optimizing a site after launching it, it is better to design a website as per SEO needs.

While crawling, web spiders will look for text on the site that is related to the search query. Hence, provide text relevant to products or services offered. The title tags, meta descriptions and keywords per page have to be unique and relevant. Provide keyword rich site content on relevant topics, as spiders judge your site based on these things.

Specify the site URL ( http://www.example.com/) that you prefer for your site and redirect the rest of relevant website URLs like www.example.com/index.html, http://example.com, example.com/home.asp etc to the preferred site URL by adding the 301 redirect (permanent) to the preferred URL, so that user entering relevant website URLs will be directed to your main site page.

Provide breadcrumb trail which is a navigation aid that shows both search engines and humans where their current location is and how far they are from the destination page.

Use limited number of graphics, and if possible, avoid them. Provide relevant anchor text to the image links, as spiders can crawl only anchor text and not images. Also the site uploading time is directly proportional to number of graphics on site.

A website designed by calling JavaScript and CSS code externally is a good one. Stay away from frames as search engine avoids them, and restrict the usage of flash, QuickTime or other plug-ins on HTML Pages.

On the whole, it is necessary to prepare a site with simple navigation and architecture for assisting search engines to easily find information on your site.

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We don’t want to waste your time with unnecessary explanation on link building; here are the techniques to get back-links for your site.

Link submission is the favorite technique followed in practice, to build site links. Submit articles related to services or products offered with your site link, to popular article submission sites like ezinearticles.com, webpronews.com, ideamarketers.com, goarticles.com, articlecentral.com, articlefinders.com etc. Also submit links to articles or your site on the social bookmarking sites like Twitter, Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious etc.

Start a blog related to your products and/or services and update it regularly with great content. Visit other blogs and leave useful comments with your site signature to drive direct traffic to your site. Don’t forget to list it in the best blog directories.

Link exchange pays you well when you drive in the right path. It is the process of exchanging hyperlinks with websites that offer similar or related products/services. The three types of link exchanges are one-way link exchange, reciprocal link exchange and three way link. While exchanging links, keep in mind that getting links from pages with list of hundreds of off topic link partners is meaningless. Try to get links from sites with reasonable page rank, say above 4.

Submit your site to directories like DMOZ that offers free submissions, and you can also use paid directories. Also tag sites related to your site along with it on bookmarking sites like Delicious. This will attract users interested in your products/services, thereby driving effective traffic to your site.

A great way to drive more traffic is to place videos related to our products or services, on YouTube.

We have compiled only the link building methods that really work.

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One can identify their site page rank from the page rank distribution data, based on which, they can improve their site further with quality content, implementing keywords relevant to your site, building quality back links etc.

Today Google has become the most popular search engine worldwide. It provides page rank distribution report to all webmasters and helps them improve their site consequently.
Unfortunately, many webmasters and search engine optimization experts are reporting that Google page rank distribution data is not available for their website in the webmaster tools.

“If you login webmaster tools and click on crawl stats, there will be a message like” No data available. Please check back soon”.

John, the employee of Google says “We are working on resolving this issue. This data is informational and does not affect your site’s crawling, indexing or ranking”.

We hope Google will solve the issue soon and help webmasters improve their site to get higher page ranks.

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The recent buzz in the net world is the Microsoft/Yahoo! Deal according to which Microsoft will integrate Yahoo! search technologies into its search engine Bing and Yahoo! will become the exclusive worldwide relationship sales force for both companies’ premium search advertisers. Through the deal, Microsoft has taken a brilliant move to capture the search market.

According to figures released by Hitwise last month, Microsoft’s search market share will rise to around 21.5% or roughly one quarter of Google’s share. Ergo, SEO people have to concentrate on Bing while promoting their clients’ sites for reaching all the net surfers.

When we focus on search algorithm, it is clear that Bing concentrates on keyword placement in the sub or root whereas Google focuses on exact keyword matches. By default, Bing’s results are richer than Google and Yahoo. It is more likely that the market for search engine Bing will expand.

If you don’t have an account with the Bing webmaster tool, it is time to start your account and learn the difference between Bing and Google to optimize your site for Bing.

Even if Bing does not overtake its rival Google, it will be the second largest search engine. Hence you have to work for Bing to reach global audiences irrespective of search engines used. Obviously the changes will not take place overnight, but potentially Google could have a much bigger, consolidated competitor in the near future.

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Widget marketing is a great way to drive viral traffic to your site from other sites. YouTube has got a lot of inbound links by allowing users to easily embed any hosted videos on blogs and web pages, thereby driving traffic through a natural search which is essential to increase its page rank.

It is just a onetime investment in man power for development and deployment of a widget. Once a useful widget is made available for the public, they will start embedding it in their site to expose your brand and drive traffic to your site. Webmaster embedding your widget in their site will become your marketing team. Thus widget marketing provides an extremely good ROI based on the resources available.

Here are some guidelines that will help you build an effective widget with the best SEO value for driving maximum traffic to your site.

Keep your widget informative, useful, interactive and simple to understand, as people will embed widgets only when they find it really useful for them.

The Internet technologies like Javascript, HTML, Adobe Flash etc used in the development of web-based widgets do not expose their content to search engines. Hence having a link inside widget’s embed HTML code is a must.

Don’t forget to add relevant keywords in the anchor text. If the technology that you used to generate the widget has the facility to randomize the embed HTML code generation, then make use of it to vary the anchor.

It is important to include both the logo and the name of your organization in a widget, to increase brand awareness while promoting your website.

If possible track the widgets and find which keywords work best for you.

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Firefox has become popular among net browsers due to its attractive features including tabbed browsing, spell checker, live bookmarking, an integrated download manager, keyboard shortcuts, and an integrated search system that uses the user’s desired search engine.

Firefox offers thousands of add-ons that provide users the capability to customize Firefox according to their requirements. Here, we have compiled add-ons that help webmasters in search engine optimization.

Twitterfox
Twitter is one of the social media used by SEO experts to share their activities like recently posted articles, press releases, recent updates on products, with millions of people around the world. Twitterfox add-on will place a small icon near Firefox’s bottom tab. It will notify you when your friends update their status in Twitter, and also offers a text field to update your status. Thus you can follow up on tweets and update your twitter status without logging in to Twitter.

SearchStatus
SearchStatus is specially designed for Search Engine Marketers (SEMs) to provide extensive search related information like Google PageRank , Compete.com ranking , Alexa popularity ranking, Alexa incoming ranking, Linkscape mozrank, backlinks etc, of a visiting site. From this information, SEM can get a balanced view of a site efficacy. Analyzing a website or blog is so easy with SearchStatus.

Firebug
It is a Firefox extension that includes web development tools such as editor, debugger, error console, command line and inspectors for debugging. With FireBug, you can edit, debug and monitor CSS, HTML, Java Script, and Ajax live in any web page conveniently. It is the ultimate editing tool for webmasters to find errors in Javascript, XML and CSS, and rectify them.

IEview
As IE is used by more than 60% of internet users, it is a must for web masters to check how well their website works on IE. IEview is a simple Firefox extension that opens a current page or a selected link in IE with a single right-click, to check how their design works on IE without leaving Firefox. This add-on is useful for cross-browser testing.

Colorzilla
Colorzilla is a color picker tool which is useful in choosing colors for advertisement headers or web design. It integrates a number of color-related analysis tools with your browser to get the exact hexadecimal code of colors. On placing your cursor on any specific pixel, the Eyedropper feature of colorzilla will display the RGB numbers, hexadecimal code, X-Y axis location and CSS properties of that pixel. Color plays a major role in attracting visitors. If you find attractive colors on any site, you can get its color code and use it in your site’s CSS design.

English Dictionary
A website should convey messages clearly without any errors. A website filled with misspelled words, will definitely lose its power among visitors. English Dictionary is a very useful add-on that checks for spelling of English words. This add-on will facilitate your work by checking spelling and grammar as you write texts.

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Wordpress has released the Beta version of Wordpress 2.8 and called the public to test it and file bugs. A lead developer of the Wordpress development team has stated that they have implemented a lot of high-rated features listed in the Wordpress Ideas Forum.

The lead developers have given top priority to widget management, theme browser/installer and performance upgrades for the 2.8 version. Apart from this, they have tried to fix some bugs.

I have listed some of the new features that caught my attention:

1. New Theme Installer routines
2. Add Documentation (function) lookup to Theme and Plug-in editors
3. Use “Custom Header” for menu text and revise Default theme to reflect change
4. Separate Comments into a separate postbox, from Discussion postbox, on the Edit Post screen
5. Make tags accessible without Javascript on the edit screen
6. Don’t ask for confirmation when marking a comment as spam
7. Don’t notify post author of own comments
8. Allow the dashboard widgets to be arranged in up to four columns as set via the Screen Options tab.
9. Improved Admin icons (grey-to-transparent shadows)
10. Add column “Rating” in Administration > Links > Edit
11. Improved Widget user interface
12. Add toggle all button to the Gallery tab in the uploader
13. Support more than one gallery on the same page
14. Improved database performance
15. Improved performance for script loading
16. Timezone enhancements for PHP 5
17. Add a function to output a generic widget anywhere in a template
18. Make login more pluggable
19. Add support for blocking all outbound HTTP requests
20. HTTP API updates and fixes
21. Add filters so AIM, Yahoo, and Jabber IM labels in user profiles can be changed.

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Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian economist who is best known in economics for the concept of the Pareto optimal position. Pareto was one of the first people to analyze economic problems using mathematics. He states that doing 20% of work can generate 80% of the results. In Pareto’s case 20 percent of the people owned 80 percent of the wealth.

The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, describes the common pattern of sales concentration. The concept is fairly simple, 20% of the input creates 80% of the output. For instance, 20 percent of your advertisement creates 80 percent of traffic and 20 percent of traffic is converted into 80% of sales. 20 percent of your staff will provide 80 percent of your production. If you can reliably distinguish the 20% of actions, it will surely produce the disproportionate amount of benefits.

After Pareto developed his formula, many other researchers observed similar phenomena in their own areas of expertise. Quality management expert, Dr. Joseph Juran, recognized a universal phenomenon and he termed as the principle of the “vital few and trivial many” which was similar to the Pareto’s principle. According to him 20 percent of the activities are always responsible for 80 percent of the results.

The 80/20 Rule can be applied in some real life. For example:
• In general, 80% of football teams’ goals will come from 20% of the players
• 80% of the revenue comes from 20 % of the customers
• 80% of the usage comes 20% of the features
• 80% of the problems come from 20% of the defects
• 80% of your product comes from 20% of your inventory
• And so on.

Well. The Pareto principle reminds you to focus on the 20 percent. As, this 20 percent will always produce 80 percent of your results. So focus and work smart on those 20percent and get top most benefits in the marketing field.

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Is a site map necessary for a website? Yes of course. If a website has hundreds of pages, it can get rather chaotic in a navigation bar. Apart from this, both human browsers and search engine spiders need an easy access to find all the pages within a site. Therefore a sitemap is very essential. It gives them a simple navigational tool.

Lack of a sitemap may be the reason why your site hasn’t been completely indexed. If you are using many pages, some search engines have a difficulty in indexing them. So a site map makes it easier for a search engine spider to find and index every page on your site. It will surely improve the search engine optimization of your site.

So, what is a site map? Site map is a textually organized model for a website content that allows the users to go to the website to find what they require. It doesn’t need to include all of your web pages but should include all the site structures.

With a little effort, you can create a Sitemap for your site. Here comes some important guidelines for enhancing the sitemap.

Provide a sitemap to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. This assists the visitors who are using a sitemap as a quick and easy means to find the information.

Provide short description about your products and services at the top of your site map page. This can be a nice introduction about your services for someone who has landed on this page directly from a search engine or else where.

Use layout for your sitemap page as it will provide a clear visual structure for your website.

Make sure that your sitemap is updated frequently. As your website grows, you must update your Sitemap. It helps your visitors know that a new content is being added to your website. If you are selling products or offering services, this is one of the greatest ways for the users to know your latest products or services by visiting your Sitemap.

Without a Sitemap, your visitors may even leave your site, going back to the search engine pages, to look for information that may be in your website. So create an effective site map even if you have a website with few pages and thus grab more visitors.

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