I came across this item in Slashdot which took my interest, mainly because it has to be one of the dumbest ideas I have heard of.
This reminds me somewhat of the old “Irish Invention” jokes in which one of them involves a torch powered by solar energy - the joke being that if you had solar energy to run the torch, why would you need the torch for light. Of course, now we have solar powered garden lights which store up energy during the day and emit light at night from the electricity stored. But this idea is nothing like that.
The problem is, people draw their curtains during the day to let light in, and close them at night - so during the optimal time to be catching the suns rays, the curtains are bunched up to the side of the window frame, and at night, are fully extended (at the optimal position for catching light) but the sun has gone. Sure, I guess if you live in a very warm environment such as Australia in the summer, you may have your curtains closed during the day and have airconditioning on, but the amount of electricity generated would not amount to enough to cover what would be consumed by air conditioning anyway.
Of course, there is also the fact that the curtains are draped vertically in the window, not the ideal position to catch available sunlight during the day, as the sun is most often directly above. Surely time would be better spent looking for a way to create photovoltaic roofing tiles or something of the like…
Most people look at search engines to find what they want on the Internet. To have your own website spotted, it needs to be on the first page of a search result. If your website is fairly new or unknown, getting it listed on the first page can be a great challenge.
Apart from having your website listed on the search engine, there are many other ways of getting lots of visitors to your website. Some people use traffic exchanges. The good thing is you will definitely get a least one visitor. The bad thing is you need to spend a lot of time surfing the other members site one after another under the constraint of a timer without any chances of choosing which one to view first in order to get back at least a visit. If you wish to spend less time on surfing, you have to pay a certain among of money to buy credits that can be used to get more visitors. For this reason, I have recently created a unique way that can help you greatly increase the number of visitors to your website. You can know more about it at www.nicepods.com. With this method, members can view one another’s websites via the Webbypod and the directory. Members can submit their sites under specific categories that allows easier search. A member can also know who has visited his or her website so that he or she can return the visit. This means when member A visits member B’s website, member A can expect a visit from member B in return. Each member must visit at least one of the other member’s website to keep his or her membership. On the first of each month, a member who views the most websites, and have visited at least 1000 of them, will become a Gold member who then can have his or her website listed on the Gold list to attract even more visitors.
The viewing of the websites listed on Nicepods by members is not restricted to members. Members of the public can also view the websites with the Webbypod and via the directory. Every member of Nicepods is given access an attractive graphically based Members Pod to manage his or her website submissions, and to perform activities to get more visitors. You can read more about it at http://www.nicepods.com/mpodnews.php.
Off course, there are many other “get more visitors” sites out there. The choice is yours.
Rainier Wong is the webmaster of http://nicepods.com.
If you have read the recent July Headlines you will see captions like-
* Microsoft Ambushes Google with Live Search Club, Search Share Surges
* Yahoo! squares up to Google in paid-search game
With the Big Three battling it out for the prize of % of market share one thing is not mentioned in this equation.
How much does it cost to create “Value to Market” and increase your Validation as a search engine returning quality results?
As with any industry with a high degree of growth, Search Engine visibility is still the master of profits for companies on the first page of Google. The difference in sales from Google rankings compared to Yahoo or MSN are not even comparable when you talk to medium companies who rely on Search Engines for their revenues.
I have really never met a company who said their business has been better influenced by Yahoo or MSN over Google.
Why does Google Dominate Search Revenues?
The answer is Validation.
val’i
It’s morning and John wakes up, same as he does everyday. He starts the computer and begins checking his email and reviewing his website’s stats. ” $15 in Adsense and 1 sale .. good, good… but still I’d wish those were $500 and 10 sales “. He closes the stats and goes to work in order to get the payment that helps him live a good life.
Mark is also waking up, making a cup of coffee and then sitting comfortably at his laptop. He opens his website’s stats and his heart starts beating a bit faster while he reads on the screen ” $399 in Adsense and 5 sales last night… good, but I WANT IT BETTER” “. He closes the stats, eats a quick breakfast and then sits back again at his laptop and starts working on his websites in order to improve the stats. He doesn’t need to go to work as his websites bring enough income to help him live very well.
Now the question is simple: who would you prefer to be? John or Mark? Do you like to go and work for your boss and help him make money so you can earn your living ? Or do you want to be your own boss and have your own business? Because yes, these days, having a good site IS a business. If your answer is “John” then you’d better stop reading this article and get to more serious things. But if instead you would prefer to be Mark then it may be useful to continue reading. Ok, ok but what does “having a good site” mean? I have a great design, I have great online support, great products and offers, great site functionality… but still I don’t get the expected income? If you ask yourself this than take 2 minutes to think about: “Who am I receiving money from? The design? The functionality of the site? No, what really brings the money is, in fact, the traffic, the people who visit the site and order the services/products or who simply click on the Google ads.”
Now that we found out that the traffic is what makes the webmaster happy, we should ask ourselves how we can get this traffic to our sites. Well, there are several methods of doing this, but nowadays, search engine optimization (SEO) is the method that brings the best targeted traffic. If you want to build a strong business which could provide you more than a decent income, than you should use SEO.
To succeed with a SEO campaign, one must follow three major steps: keywords analysis, on page SEO and off page SEO. The keywords analysis part has to be done in order to assure that you have picked the best keywords ( the ones that will get you the highest number of visitors in the shortest time ).
On page SEO is the step where changes are done directly on your site by modifying it’s files. You have to sort out the titles, metatags, images, text, page structure, internal linking, proper tags and much more things related to your site. In all this process you will use the keywords you found during the keywords analysis part. This will ensure you’ll have a well optimized site focused on those keywords.
Last but not least, off page SEO - considered by all the great SEO specialists out there the most important part of a SEO campaign - related to the external links you can point toward your site. As each link toward your site is considered “a vote” the more votes you have the more “powerful” your site will become.
If you do all these correctly then your site will end up in the tops of the search engines and start getting the best-targeted organic traffic that exists at the moment. So what are you waiting for? Go out there and start doing SEO…. Because SEO it’s the future.
Razvan Marian Jr is a SEO specialist with more years of experience in the field. He is also the leading manager of http://www.cheapsubmissions.eu, developing services such as cheap web site submissions and cheap articles submissions.
Search engines are being highly used to target specific traffic. Major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and MSN etc. have gained worldwide popularity in terms of finding information online. Webmasters have changed and they are developing search engines friendly websites now. Such websites helps search engines to provide relevant information when users query anything in the search engines query box. Everyday countless websites are coming into existence. It’s becoming very competitive to get ranking in various SERPs (search engine result pages) because of regular changes in search engine algorithms and increasing search engine optimization awareness among webmasters. Search engines keep changing their algorithms to provide best relevant result to its visitors. The scenario seems to be increased to the extent of complexities that its becoming tougher day by day to gain ranking in SERPs of search engines. A webmaster can easily optimize their website to follow search engines guidelines, But is it sufficient to gain ranking in SERPs? You are required to do a huge tasks to gain ranking in SERPs. A few guidelines are available to help you in optimization but there are many parameters which matter during optimization. Do you have sound understanding of all these parameters? do u have sufficient time? are you a big or small business? can you handle the complexities of gaining search engines rankings?…very rarely will you say yes, and this is why you need an Internet Marketing Search Engine Specialist. A search engine marketing specialist is that person who can stand to the trouble of all the complexities and can deliver you the results to your desire. She/He has sound understanding of search engines and its algorithms because it’s their core work domain. They can alalyze your website the best. You can rely on their services for ranking in SERPs and deriving relevant traffic to the site. SEO web site promotion and website positioning services are being rendered by many SEO optimization companies but only a few of these website optimization firms are fulfilling customer’s expectations. An SEO agency has specialist to provide consultancy in optimization for Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines. They have their own standard to follow search engines but anything improper can hamper the site popularity. SEO white hat techniques are always preferred and black hat techniques should be avoided. You need to be very careful before finalizing any SEO firm. Deepak Rajput is the author & co-creator of e-commerce websites and information products. His involvement in developing, marketing and other online businesses for himself and clients is noticiable since 2002. You can also check his blog for SEO & SEM related articles at — http://www.semflicks.blogspot.com. Webmasters Siteexplorer Submit Alexa Webmasters Siteexplorer Submit Alexa Webmasters
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What are social bookmarking sites? Basically, these are sites that allow users to post their favorite sites, using tags (or keywords) to categorize and organize them; then other users can take these bookmarks and add them to their own collection or share them with even more users. Here are some of my favorite social bookmarking sites that I use every single day.
del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site that has rapidly taken off even more in popularity since being purchased by Yahoo. I use del.icio.us probably the most out of all these top picks, particularly to post interesting sites that I’ve found around the Web. I also subscribe to quite a few del.icio.us tags, such as popular and reference, and I get all the sites tagged with these keywords in my RSS reader of choice, Bloglines.
Digg is social bookmarking and social networking gone a little crazy due to the fact that anyone can submit a Digg (site), and then anyone can comment on those same Diggs. For me the most interesting feature of Digg has to actually be the comments on the sites and stories, since the Digg community is not shy about letting folks know how they feel about a particular Digg. Primarily focussed on geeky, technology-type items.
Listible hasn’t been around very long, but already it’s one of my must-visit sites. Probably because I have a weird thing for lists. Anyone can start a list about pretty much anything; I’ve seen lists for Firefox extensions, TV theme songs, and much more. Listible users can rate the items on the list and add comments.
Furl, a service of LookSmart, gives users the ability to save copies of any Web page, search within your own personal archive of Web pages, and share what you find. People use Furl to create their own personal shopping lists, real estate directories, job searches, student research papers, etc. This may just sound like a fancy way of saying bookmarks; but the thing about Furl is that you can access it from any computer, which means that your Favorites will go with you.
Yahoo My Web 2.0 is a social search engine, which means that people and search technology are working together to create both better searches and a better search experience. From the site: “What if you could tap into a directory of favorite web content bookmarked by thousands of people? And what if that content was organized so that you could browse through it by keyword or instantly search to find content on a particular subject?” It’s a great way to network and bookmark at the same time.
Flickr is a social bookmarking and social networking site with a twist: it’s all about photos. Users can upload and tag their favorite photos, then other users can bookmark those photos as favorites and share them with even more people. You can also comment on individual photos and share why you like (or dislike) that image.
Slashdot is the original social bookmarking site. Slashdotters can submit stories or links they find interesting and then users comment on them (usually the comments are extremely active). The only drawback of Slashdot is that stories and sites have to be pre-approved; this has actually driven a lot of very fervent Slashdot users to other social bookmark sites such as Digg.
YouTube is another social bookmarking site with a twist; it’s all about videos. Users upload their favorite videos and their fellow YouTube users can comment, pass these videos on around the Web, or paste them on their Web sites or blogs. YouTube is a great way to find popular homemade (mostly) videos.
Simpy is a social bookmarking site that allows users to “save, tag and search your own bookmarks and notes or browse and search other users’ links and tags.” There’s a lot of technology-related stuff here but then again, there’s also a lot of very eclectic links on here as well.
Popurls.com is one of my must-read sites every day. Popurls is a lovely conglomeration of about 10 different social bookmarking sites, some of which I’ve already mentioned in this list. Popurls is a great way to get all your potential bookmarks in one place.
When it comes to web brands, you’d be hard-pressed to find ones more popular than Google, Yahoo and Digg. These sites are becoming so well known (2 already are as popular as any brand out there), any major Internet marketing campaign must consider leveraging these sites.
Yahoo!, Google Apart Of Mobile Phone Hype
The early part of the New Year has been especially kind to the mobile phone industry in terms of positive buzz - culminating with yesterday’s Apple iPhone announcement that knocked the social media side of the web off its feet. Standing at the center of this social media storm (well, perhaps not in the middle, but definitely major players) are none other than Google and Yahoo!.
During yesterday’s iPhone announcement - presented by Steve Jobs - Engadget’s coverage revealed the iPhone would very supportive of Google’s cavalcade of web applications (a Google Maps demonstration was presented during the announcement) as well as confirming a partnership with Yahoo!. Surprisingly, the iPhone is not the only device these competitors have partnered with.
According to numerous reports, both Yahoo and Google have also partnered with Samsung for the recently launched SGH-Z720 phone. Google’s partnership allows users to access three of Google’s web applications - search, Gmail, and Google Maps.
Yahoo!’s partnership calls for the phones to come preloaded with Yahoo! Go 2.0; Yahoo! oneSearch (Yahoo’s mobile web search feature); Yahoo! Mail; Yahoo! Messenger and Yahoo! Personal Information Management. Of course, all of these services are intended to provide potential owners with a more robust user experience and considering all of the applications available, Samsung has succeeded in doing so.
Partnerships like these are good indicator of what powerful search engines like Google and Yahoo are focusing on (not solely of course): the mobile Internet. As more and more users adopt this method of Internet interaction, partnering with the mobile phone companies to provide mobile web services goes a long way towards securing a future beyond organic web search.
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Where Did Digg’s PageRank Go?
Apparently, either the current Google PageRank update or someone at Google doesn’t like Digg because the nexus for social media currently has a PageRank score of zero.
That’s right, when you navigate to Digg.com, Google’s green bar turns white (this goes for both the www. version and the non-www. version). I’ve got a screenshot if you are interested in case this gets corrected anytime soon. Although, when you consider How PageRank Works, then perhaps this wasn’t an accident at all.
Hat-tip to DazzlinDonna for pointing this out at her SEO Scoop blog.
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Sandman’s Son Coming To Google
Google’s geek cred, which has long been established, is about to get another shot in the arm. Neil Gaiman, author of the Sandman graphic novels and a host of other writings, has revealed his son is about to join the ranks of a company that was recently voted the best place to work at.
Over at his blog, Matt Cutts can hardly contain his geek excitement and rightfully so when you consider the pedigree young Gaiman will bring to Google. From the bragging rights perspective alone, Gaiman’s hiring should be seen as a bonus for Google, although the search engine has never lacked a significant buzz factor.
Gaiman’s hiring can only increase Google’s already strong social media buzz (consider how many fans of the Gaiman genre are bloggers and will undoubtedly comment about this move), while further endearing the search engine to geek crowd.