SEO Earnings

Search for the phrase SEO myths in Google without quotes and you ll get 243 hits. With all the major search engines keeping their algorithms under lock and key and making modifications without notice it s no wonder that false beliefs get perpetuated. It s time to clear the air.... Villanova University Six Sigma & IT Certificate Programs 100% Online programs in Six Sigma, IS Security, CISSP Prep, Business Analysis, Proj. Mgmt. and more!

If you've been frequenting the Yahoo! Search Blog, you've certainly read about our initiatives for a more open ecosystem. Complimentary to that, we've discussed semantic web standards and how Yahoo! Search is supporting this technology. Just last week, Yahoo!'s Peter Mika dug a little deeper into the semantic web and explored how it's helping to shape the next generation of search -- transitioning from syntactical search to semantic search. The article first looks at the current limitations in a syntax-based search engine before paving the way for semantic search. Peter outlines the two roads to achieving semantic search as Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology and semantic web technology and highlights the common denominator in both as access to metadata. The fundamental difference is the way in which content is obtained -- implicit metadata extracted from text (NLP) versus explicit metadata provided by publishers (semantic web). Sharing his view on the similarities, Peter suggests the best way to get to semantic search is a blended approach using both NLP and semantic web. And, as an integral member of the Yahoo! SearchMonkey team, Peter refers to the benefits that SearchMonkey is experiencing with the semantic web and calls out the opportunities to integrate with both NLP and semantic web technologies. It's an interesting read, so take a look. If you have any questions for Peter, feel free to drop them in the comments below. Yahoo! Search Blog team

Danny Sullivan's SMX Local & Mobile event starts Thursday, July 24, in San Francisco. We're peppering the show with a keynote from Yahoo! Local and a panel presentation from Yahoo! Connected Life. Kicking off the festivities, Frazier Miller, Yahoo! Local's General Manager, will focus on Yahoo!'s vision for weaving local information into users' primary Web starting points in his keynote address on Thursday at 9:15 a.m. Following, Michael Bayle, Yahoo! Connected Life's General Manager of Global Monetization, will participate in the "Mobile Advertising Opportunities & Tactics" panel on Friday at 9 a.m. And to give you a better sense of what you can expect from Frazier, the Yahoo! Search Blog team asked him some questions to give you a sneak peek. Yahoo! Search Blog team Yahoo! Search Blog (YSB): Can you give us a sneak peek into what you plan to talk about at the show? Frazier Miller (FM): For the last several years, we've spoken about how expansive the local search market opportunity is, so I'm going to lay out how much progress we've made in fully realizing the market potential and where the industry is at large. I'll walk through which usage cases have caught fire with people, how we're doing in terms of monetizing on PC and mobile devices, and -- probably most interesting -- what it's going to take to get to the next level. YSB: What are you most focused on for Yahoo! Local today? FM: Over the last 12 months, we've focused heavily on making the site more social in eliciting user feedback and comments. We've introduced features that allow users to connect with each other by making comments on ratings/reviews and added the ability to subscribe to favorite reviewers. Also, earlier this month, we announced updates to Upcoming that include a new interface and greatly increased number of hyper-local events on the site to make it easier for new users to find things to do while maintaining the community aspects that regular users know and love. YSB: What kind of innovation do you see happening in local search today? What are some of your favorite up-and-coming sites? FM: I'm trying to be "greener" these days, so some of the sites that have really caught my eye fall into that category. Walkscore.com is a cool site that analyzes how well your community is laid-out for walking, rather than driving. Greenopia is one that rates businesses and services based on their environmental responsibility. There's a ton happening in the Mobile space too. Fire eagle is a project sponsored by Yahoo!, which enables users to register their location and share it with a number of other apps and services. There's going to be a lot happening on this front in the coming months. YSB: What about the local search market do you think offers solid potential? FM: I can't overstate the upcoming importance and growth of local search enough. For example, by 2010, mobile phones are expected to outpace PCs by three times and local info is the most sought after on mobile devices. We have a perfect storm brewing between user demand, advertising desire for targeting and mobile evolution that's going to make this an incredibly rich arena for the next few years.

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If you're an avid Inside AdSense reader, you know that we frequently post about the latest developments in AdSense and new features you can take advantage of. However, we've heard from some publishers that they want to know more about what's happening in AdWords, and what we're doing to bring more relevant, targeted ads to AdSense sites like yours. With that, we'd like to take a moment to give you insight into a few recent AdWords developments, and what they mean for you as an AdSense publisher. One of the main changes is the ability for advertisers to be more specific with their ad targeting through a combination of contextual targeting and placement targeting. As you may know, contextually targeted ads will appear on your pages if an advertiser's keywords match your content, while placement-targeted ads will appear if an advertiser has specifically selected your ad placement or site. Now, advertisers can target your site or placements, but can also specify keywords for them so that their ads only appear in the most relevant pages. These ads will still need to compete with the available inventory of ads for a particular placement, and so only the highest-paying, most relevant ads will appear on your pages. At the same time, you'll still be able to use your Competitive Ad Filter to prevent ads from specific URLs from appearing.What does this mean for you, as an AdSense publisher? Your users may see more relevant ads on your pages, and advertisers who become more confident that their ads are reaching the right audience may increase their ad spend -- both of these can result in higher monetization for you. In addition, while advertisers previously could only change their bids for all ads running across multiple sites, they can now adjust their bids for individual sites. This means that advertisers can spend more of their budgets on the specific AdSense sites which perform well and generate high-quality leads for the advertiser.With these recent improvements, we're looking forward to expanding the number of advertisers who use the AdSense content network and increasing the relevance of their ads on your sites. Not only will this increase your earnings potential through the AdSense program, but it will also strengthen the ads ecosystem that benefits publishers, advertisers, and users.Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

A picture may be worth a thousand words but you still need the words to get the job done. That s what I found out when I read an article written by Robert Gorell recently about updating a website that sells to a niche audience. If you think you can t improve the way your site sells its goods to your customers keep reading.... Development Consulting Services Hubbard & Hubbard, Inc. is an international organization and human performance consulting corporation. We supply companies with quality organization development services.

(To the tune of "Strangers in the Night")"Publishers with websites, creating contentWondering about their sitesIf with their content, they could show some adsBefore the day was doneSomething in AdSense, was so invitingSomething about those ads, was so excitingSomething in our Help CenterTold them they must be onePublishers with websites, yearning for earningsThey were just publishers with websitesUp to the momentWhen they placed their first ad codeLittle did they knowRevenue was just a click awayA happy-user-generated click away and --Ever since that day, they've been monetizingNewbies at the start, they're now optimizingIt turned out so rightFor publishers with websites.Newbie, newbie dooo, da da da daaaa da..."If my lyrical effort didn't clue you in, and our Newbie Central resource wasn't a big enough clue, let me come right out and say it: we care about new publishers. For the next few weeks, we'll be sharing that caring every Friday, with posts especially intended for all the publishers who have recently joined AdSense, fresh and green like a newly mown lawn in the summertime.Now let's see if we can apply that same spirit of new beginnings to your sites.Posted by Julie Beckmann - AdSense Publisher Support

Last week we launched our new search web services platform, Yahoo! Search BOSS, and pointed to a few folks that already started using BOSS. We mentioned that Daylife is integrating the BOSS API as part of the Daylife To-Go customization wizard. They're also encouraging participants in their DayPI Developer Challenge to integrate the BOSS API in their mashups. The challenge awards developers who build the most interesting, original and innovative applications using the Daylife API. As part of the challenge, Daylife will be also be awarding a bonus prize of $2,000 for the best BOSS / Daylife Mashup. If you have an idea to share, sign up for a Daylife account, build an app and submit your mashup. Make sure you tag your entry with 'boss' and 'contest08' to be eligible for both the Yahoo! BOSS-DayPI mashup prize and the Developer Challenge. The challenge ends on July 25th, so get your entries in quick! Yahoo! Search Blog team

Every web site owner wants more traffic and higher rankings in the search engines. In the midst of an SEO campaign however it s easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. So before you change a single title you might want to shift your focus to answer some important questions.... Save Big on Software Titles for Your PC We have a huge selection of software products at super low prices.

Since our announcement about retiring AdSense Referrals during the last week of August, we've noticed a number of questions in your blog comments and in our Help Forum. In this post, we'll address some of the most frequently asked questions.When you say 'AdSense Referrals' are being retired, does this only mean the program where I refer publishers to AdSense?No, all referrals will be retired. This applies to referrals for AdWords advertisers, as well as for Google products.What's the deadline for generating referral conversions once the program has been retired?In order for you to be credited for a conversion, the referred user must complete the required action by the last week of September 2008. However, please keep in mind that your referral units will no longer display after the last week of August.I have referral earnings in my account, but they haven't been included in a payment yet. Will I lose all past referral earnings?No. If you've had successful referral conversions in the past, they'll still be included in your earnings and future payments. As mentioned above, any additional conversions must occur by the last week of September 2008 in order to generate earnings for your account.Can I sign in to the Google Affiliate Network with my AdSense login information? At this time, no. You'll need to create a new login and password on the Google Affiliate Network site at http://www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork/ .Will my ad units and search boxes be affected by this Referrals change?No, AdSense for content and AdSense for search will still be available to publishers in our supported languages, and you can continue to generate ad and search code by visiting your AdSense Setup tab.Thanks for your feedback, and we hope this helps provide clarification. Feel free to visit our Help Center for additional details about the AdSense Referrals retirement.Posted by Arlene Lee - AdSense Publisher Support

Metadata in its simplest form is information about data. In this tutorial we are going to look at the HTML and XHMTL elements known as Meta Elements and learn to use them. Not all are still used by search engines to determine rank but they still have their purpose and that is what this article is all about....

Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Creating PPC Campaigns: the 'Live or Die' Settings; Another Microsoft Offer, Another Yahoo Rejection; Now States are Investigating Yahoo-Google Deal; and more.

Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: What Can TV Learn from Search?; Olympics 2008: Which Search Advertisers Get the Gold?; 24 iPhone Applications That Accelerate Mobile Search; and more.

Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: Link Building via Word-of-Mouth; Has Facebook Found the Key to Making Money via Search?; Yahoo Launches BOSS: Build your Own Search Service; and more.

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In addition to participating in the AdSense network, you may also be interested in having your site ranked in organic Google search. In this post, I'll highlight some important points for search optimization. While there's no a magic formula to make your site show up first on a search results page, there are some good practices when it comes to links, design, content, and the structure of your site.First of all, as a reminder, Google organic search and AdSense are independent of each other. Displaying AdSense ads on a site won't change the ranking of the site in Google search in any way. So it follows that sites containing AdSense ads don't receive special treatment in Google search. Ranking in Google search is based on many different algorithms, and optimization for search is a long, continuous process. For these reasons, and because the techniques might violate our guidelines, we recommend avoiding any techniques that claim to optimize your ranking very quickly or radically. If you have concerns or questions, you can consult other webmasters on a number of forums, including Google's official forum for webmaster-related issues.We encourage you to monitor the quality of your site's backlinks -- links from any site directing to your site. To increase your site's popularity, check if other sites that discuss similar topics or have a similar reader base are aware your site exists.Outgoing links are also important and should comply with our guidelines. When you create a link to another site, we recommend first asking yourself: "Is this link going to be useful for my visitors?" or "Is this link likely to be clicked by my visitors?". Don't participate in link schemes or buy/sell links that pass PageRank, as it is against our guidelines and may hurt your site's performance in our search results.Here are some tips for structuring your site:

• Your pages should have a clear hierarchy and relevant internal links. We also recommend creating a Sitemap and using Google's Webmaster Tools. These tools are useful, user-friendly and will provide information such as where your backlinks come from or which queries visitors used to reach your site.
• Use tags that are explicit and useful for the user. For example, avoid a title like "Homepage" or "Welcome to my site".
• For images, use ALT attributes to describe appropriately what the image is about. We've recently created a quick and useful YouTube video to further explain this topic:

Also, adding original and compelling content on a regular basis may help Google crawl your pages regularly. It can have the added benefit of attracting links to your pages too. Finally, design your site with your users in mind, and be patient and consistent in your efforts. To attract quality backlinks and develop your optimization strategy, it's important to keep a clear structure for your pages and regularly add organic content.Posted by Ambroise Fensterbank - Search Quality Evaluator

Back in May, we kicked off the SearchMonkey Developer Challenge. After hundreds of submissions over the course of a month, the contest came to a close a few weeks ago. Our all-star judges picked their favorite apps and today we're announcing the five winners: Innovative Structured Data - The StumbleUpon team won this category for an Infobar they built that draws in ratings and tags as well as links to other users who like the page. Best Infobar - The team from BooRah, a restaurant review site, took home the prize for an app that deep links and reviews to local restaurants, helping to get users to the dinner table faster than ever. Best Enhanced Result - Greg Schechter, a computer scientist from Deerfield, Illinois, built an Enhanced Result that spices up search results for Xbox.com with photos, prices and release dates for Xbox games. Best Data Service - David Hinckley, who owns a genealogy web hosting site, wrote a data service that allows other SearchMonkey developers to showcase rich results from his site in their own apps. Grand Prize - Marco Vitanza is taking home $10,000 for his Blogspot Infobar, which displays links to recent posts for all Blogspot search results. Thanks, Marco, we here at SearchMonkey HQ are all loyal users of your app! In addition to all of the participants in the Challenge, we also want to thank our judges (Michael Arrington of TechCrunch, Rasmus Lerdorf of Yahoo!, John Musser of ProgrammableWeb, and Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand) for their help picking winners. Congratulations to the winners and a huge thank you to all who submitted SearchMonkey apps! The SearchMonkey Team

Today's search engine marketing news and opinion: What's on your Mind?; Coherency in Landing Page Testing; Google Lively: Comprehensive Guide to Getting Started; and more.

Today, Yahoo! Search is taking another step in extending the Yahoo! Open Strategy with the launch of Yahoo! Search BOSS, a web services platform that allows developers and companies to create and launch web-scale search products by utilizing the same infrastructure and technology that powers Yahoo! Search. Our goal with BOSS (Build your Own Search Service) is simple -- foster innovation in the search landscape. As anyone who follows the search industry knows, the barriers to successfully building a high quality, web-scale search engine are incredibly high. Doing so requires hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in engineering, sciences and core infrastructure -- from crawling and indexing technology to relevancy and machine learning algorithms, to stuff as mundane as data centers, servers and power. Because competing successfully in web search requires an investment of this scale, new players have effectively been prohibited from delivering credible alternatives to Yahoo! and Google. We believe the BOSS platform will begin to change that. So what is BOSS? BOSS is a new, open platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo! Search index via an API. BOSS allows developers to take advantage of Yahoo!'s production search infrastructure and technology, combine that with their own unique assets, and create their own search experiences. While search APIs have been available for some time, BOSS removes many of the usage restrictions that have prevented other companies from using them to build innovative new search engines. Here's a quick summary of what's available today:

• Ability to re-rank and blend results -- BOSS partners can re-rank search results as they see fit and blend Yahoo!'s results with proprietary and other web content in a single search experience
• Total flexibility on presentation -- Freedom to present search results using any user interface paradigm, without Yahoo! branding or attribution requirements
• BOSS Mashup Framework -- We're releasing a Python library and UI templates that allow developers to easily mashup BOSS search results with other public data sources
• Web, news and image search -- At launch, developers will have access to web, news and image search and we'll be adding more verticals soon
• Unlimited queries -- There are no rate limits on the number of queries per day

These capabilities are really just a first step -- we're already working on expanding the API functionality and providing more access to Yahoo! Search Technology. In addition to a self-serve API, we're also partnering with a handful of Internet companies with large user bases or unique assets to collaboratively develop next gen search products using Yahoo!'s full suite of search technology. To learn more about BOSS Custom, click here. What's in it for Yahoo! and partners? Why would Yahoo! open up its search infrastructure and technology to developers, entrepreneurs and companies who could use it to compete with us? It's really quite simple. First, we believe that being open is core to Yahoo!'s future success -- opening our network, opening our own search experience via SearchMonkey, and now opening our search infrastructure via BOSS -- will lead to innovation both on Yahoo! and powered by Yahoo!. For BOSS, we see a virtuous circle in which partners deliver innovative search experiences, and as they grow their audiences and usage we have more data that can be used to improve our own Yahoo! Search experience and as a result, improve the quality of results our BOSS partners and their users get. Second, we do see new revenue streams from BOSS. In the coming months, we'll be launching a monetization platform for BOSS that will enable Yahoo! to expand its ad network and enable BOSS partners to jointly participate in the compelling economics of search. What's in it for users? More choice. BOSS will enable a range of fundamentally different search experiences. These new search products will provide value to users along multiple dimensions, such as vertical specialization, new relevance indicators and ranking models, and innovative UI implementations. Our hope is that the resulting expansion in user choice will have the effect of fragmenting the increasingly consolidated search market in much the same way that cable TV dramatically increased programming choices for television viewers. Kick the tires and get started Want to kick the tires on what BOSS-powered search could look like? As part of an alpha program, we've been working with a handful of start-ups and developers who have already begun using BOSS. Here are a few early examples of what's possible with BOSS:

• Me.dium, a start-up that's built an innovative collaborative browsing product used BOSS to build a web-scale search engine that leverages its real-time surfing data. By combining the depth of the Yahoo! Search index with its insight into where users are browsing, Me.dium can provide its users with a unique buzz-based search experience.
• Hakia, a semantic search start-up, is using BOSS to access the Yahoo! Search index and dramatically increase the speed with which it can semantically analyze the web. With BOSS providing this important infrastructure, Hakia is able to deliver a language search experience that isn't available from any of the "big three" search providers or other semantic search engines.
• Daylife To-Go is a new self-service, hosted publishing platform from Daylife. Anyone can use this platform to generate customizable pages and widgets. Daylife To-Go uses the BOSS API platform to power its web search module.
• Cluuz, a next-generation search engine prototype, generates easier-to-understand search results through semantic cluster graphs, image extraction and tag clouds. The Cluuz analysis is performed in real-time on results returned from the BOSS API.

To learn more about BOSS and get started using the API, visit the Yahoo! Developer Network. BOSS is open to all -- so check out the documentation, get a BOSS app ID and start building the next generation of search. The BOSS Team

No new business wants to turn down clients and even older more established businesses hate to do it. That s true in SEO as well. Unfortunately it is sometimes necessary. In this article I ll talk about the kinds of clients you should avoid and if you re an SEO client you ll find out the kinds of behaviors you should avoid....