Internet Marketing Strategy

Au contrair to my previous post dissing on Google’s weird favicon … Google made me feel all warm and tingly with this one!

Google’s new favicon features a white g overlaid on a multicolored background representing the Google colors, which was inspired by the submission of André Resende a CSCI undergrad in Brazil. (Background remind anyone else of the Microsoft flag? Looks cool, but I’m just sayin’ …)

Anyways I’m sure you’ve all noticed it already just had to put in my two bits about it. I’m really happy they changed it, because the old one was starting to be a real drag!

You can check out the official new Google favicon announcement for the runners up in the submissions that inspired the new icon.

It finally here, the booster kit every SEO newbie has been waiting for, handed down to man by the Gods themselves … Okay so maybe I was being a little facetious, who cares?

Due to the repeated questions of many anxious webmasters yearning to climb the ranks of the Google results pages to that #1 spot, that gold mine of traffic, Google released a simple document that overviews what you need to know about search engine optimization, the basics anyway. Google’s Official SEO Starter Guide goes over proper title creation, good practices for title and meta tags, ideal URL structures, website navigation from a search engine spider’s perspective, proper user of anchor and header tags, image optimization, robots.txt, and more!

If you don’t know much about optimizing your site for Google (or any other search engine, for that matter) you should definitely give the PDF a read. Hell, if you feel like brushing up on your SEO fundamentals, you should definitely give the PDF a read.

Check out the post over at Google Webmaster Central or just download the Official Google SEO Starter Guide!

Another great strip by Ranked Hard, this comic depicts The Real Reason Your Site Dropped in Google.

Good thing I use AdWords!

It makes me want to vomit.

Why, Google, why? Why did you take something so perfect and elegant and ruin it?

You make me sick.

FOLLOW UP TO THIS POST: Google Fesses For Freaky Favicon

I logged into my Google AdSense account to check my earnings yesterday, and lo and behold, the mark of the beast was staring back into my face.

Have you ever gotten $6.66 (or $666.00) for your daily income? Or maybe on your check?

But mostly, should I be scared?

There are many heated arguments on the internet (via message boards, blogs, social networks, and other community type sites) over which blogging software can provide the best seo optimization features for your own blog.

Well first of all, you have several options. You can use a free hosted service (the most popular being Google’s Blogger), use blogging software you can upload to your own server and domain (the most popular here would be Wordpress, which also offers a free hosted version, but it lacks the customization options you will want), or using a CMS software to manage your post items and other integrated plugins that come with software like Joomla or Drupal.

Google’s Blogger is GREAT for creating and managing many blogs on a smaller scale. If you want to make a bunch of AdSense ready websites swiftly and with ease, I would recommend using this blogging platform. You can manage posts, themes, and advertisements from the Google Dashboard, and the new widgets coming in Blogger Draft look really appealing.

However, if you want to create one to a few really great blogs with decent traffic and authority, you should option for Wordpress. It’s a fine piece of software with many built in features that Blogger does not have. It’s easier to customize themes (in my opinion) and create your own modifications to the software (or use a user created one that already exists and is widely supported) as well as better for handling larger loads of traffic and spam comments. Speaking of comments, I believe Wordpress is better for user participation, when I moved to Wordpress, my comment rate increased five fold … sure the spam comments increased too, but Akismet has literally filtered them all.

I hope this gives you a better perspective on how to choose your seo optimized blogging platform.

Arrivederci!

At long last, the secrets behind the functionalities of the Google search engine have been revealed!

The way it’s supposed to work.

The way it really works.

Source: Search Engine Journal

GoogleSystem has created a really useful widget for Blogspot bloggers, similar to the Wordpress Top Commentators plugin.

Introducing, the Google Blogger (Blogspot) Top Commentators Plugin!

Utilizing Yahoo! Pipes, it sorts the information stored in your comment RSS feed, and parses out the users who have posted the most comments on your blog. There is also options to filter your own name from the list, which you will probably want to do, and you can set the widget to display however many top commentators you want!

I kind of wish I tried it out a little more before I migrated to Wordpress, but it’s still a worthwhile mention, I hope you folks can use it.

I was browsing through Google’s Webmaster Tools, and after submitting and verifying TYPELiFE, I noticed when I expanded the “tools” tab on the left, there was a menu option that said “set crawl rate” … hmmm, I wonder what this does?

A quick skim over the tool page shows me:

“Google collects documents on the web using Googlebot, our web crawler. You should leave this control at the Normal setting unless you are having trouble with the speed at which Googlebot is crawling your server.”

“We’ve detected that Googlebot is limiting the rate at which it crawls pages on your site to ensure it doesn’t use too much of your server’s resources. If your server can handle additional Googlebot traffic, we recommend that you choose Faster below.”

It also lets you know the current rate Googlebot is indexing your website.

If you think you can handle it, choose a new crawl speed! I set mine to faster, now I’m just waiting to see the results!

This site is currently set at a Faster crawl rate. This rate will return to Normal on Mar 10, 2008.

Many of you probably have heard about the update through the gaggly school-girl type buzz that has been going around the grapevine yesterday of the PR update.

Just reporting in myself to state that TYPELiFE lost its PR, probably due to my laziness throughout the summer. ( Won’t be happening again, I swear! )

Other sites that received PR penalizations were directories and link lists.