As funding & cash flow are always at the front of everyone's minds here is an article especially for MD - how to persuade investors to hand over the sponduliks - especially during an economic downturn:
Wired News: Startup Cash Crunch Eases: "Startup Cash Crunch Eases "
Venture capital funding isn't dead. It's actually picking up a little. But for tech startups in dire need of cash, getting an influx of money remains a very difficult task. By Joanna Glasner.
Most interesting points:
In the case of Solutionary, Humphreys said, executives waited until they had a product and at least 100 customers before looking for private investments.
When wooing investors, venture researchers say, it also helps to show that those most familiar with the business are willing to contribute.
"For companies today that are looking for their first round of financing, the very best thing you could bring to financers would be a commitment by your customers to help fund you," said Kirk Walden, director of venture capital research for PricewaterhouseCoopers. "That's a ringing endorsement of the potential of your product."
This should be worth visiting regularly - a new forum run by Jill Whalen of Highrankings: Two sections grab my attention immediately:
1)
High Rankings Search Engine Optimization Forum: "
Search Engine Friendly Design & UsabilityIf your site isn't spiderable, high rankings will be illusive. Post your questions and tips about creating sites that are spider-friendly, as well as user-friendly.
2)
Copywriting
Learn the ins and outs of SEO copywriting and writing copy that sells.
A "sassy" reminder of how to get the worst possible search engine listings:Lessons in Failure - The Top 10 Ways to Ensure Your Search Marketing Strategy Sucks: by Keith Boswell
Marketleap is always amazed at the amount of effort people spend trying to trick or manipulate their positioning in search engines. People love to focus on the shortcuts to success and not on their website or the value their content provides to their audience.
In the spirit of educating marketers about best practices, we present this list of ten things you can do to sabotage your search engine marketing project in no time at all."
Three-Step, Cut-Out-And-Keep Guide To Surviving And Thriving In The Kingdom of Google.
A real must read....
MediaGuardian.co.uk | New media | Why only fools and children use portals: "here, for the benefit of AOL, Lycos, Yahoo and any other portal that might still be thrashing about, is my Three-Step, Cut-Out-And-Keep Guide To Surviving And Thriving In The Kingdom of Google.
Step one: realise that Nicole29 doesn't really exist and that, even if she did, she wouldn't visit your crappy site. The only people who use portals are children and idiots. These are not people you should be relying on for revenue.
Step two: identify your strengths and concentrate on them. Lycos: you have an incredibly popular viral chart and SMS service, Yahoo: you have brilliant communities, and AOL: you have a strong paid-for ISP business which puts you in a prime position to develop micropayment services. Choose one service, become the market leader in it and stop trying to be jacks of all trades.
Finally, step three: take a leaf out of Spring Street Networks' book. SSN created the web's best dating and personals service but, instead of offering it directly to the public, it licensed it to sites such as Salon, Esquire, the Onion and Nerve, making a stack of money in the process. There's nary a 'fairly web-savvy, smart, educated professional' in the world who hasn't seen one of its ads - you could easily do the same for whatever service you decide to focus on.
And that's really all there is to it - shut up, strengthen up, clean up - a foolproof strategy to transform weak three kings into three wise men. It's so simple that even Nicole29 could manage it."
Hitwise travel top ten 2002 - 3 review:
Teletext pips ebookers in annual travel site rankings - 28 Jul 2003: "Hitwise has for the first time published lists of the top ten performers in its four travel categories over a year long period – with some surprising results.
The results, which cover UK sites only, are based on the number of visits received in the 12 months to June 2003.
In the ‘aviation - commercial airlines’ category there are no real surprises with easyjet.com coming out on top followed by ryanair.com. In third place is britishairways.com - perhaps providing an indication of how successful BA had been at wooing price-conscious travellers to the site up until the unofficial strike by its check-in staff at Heathrow. The same three airline sites also head the Hitwise transport category, followed in fourth place by UK rail reservations site thetrainline.com.
Online retailer Lastminute.com tops two of the Hitwise travel categories - ‘travel agencies’ along with ‘travel - destinations and accommodation.’ In the agencies category Expedia takes second place. Perhaps more surprisingly teletextholidays.co.uk occupies third place in the agencies category - ahead of the cheapflights, ebookers, thomas cook and netflights sites."
Intro to hyperlinking:Internal Linking Structure Elements Strategy: "The basic component of a hypertext link includes a URL and a set of words that are known as anchor text. An example of a simple hypertext link looks like
anchor text. The < a href='page.html'> is the code that specifies where the Web visitor should be sent when clicked on the anchor text.
Search engine spiders prefer the simplicity of the hypertext link to any other form of linking structure elements. In fact, the anchor text is deemed very important in the eyes of the search engines and is assigned more weight within the search engine algorithms then ordinary body text. The reason search engines assign more weight to the anchor text is based on the simple logic that search engines believe that you would only link to a page that you deem important. If you deem a page important, so should the search engines. So when creating hypertext links, make sure to link to your important pages and use specific keywords for the page you are linking to."
MSN & search engine developments inc submission details:
MSN Capsule: "Because MSN is a Inktomi powered service, relevancy and spamming rules are similar to Hotbot and other Inktomi engines. Inktomi's Paid Inclusion Service is recommended.
You only need to submit one page from your site via the Add URL page. From there, MSN will crawl and index your page. However, your listing will be placed below those Paid Express submissions. Inktomi's paid inclusion would guarantee your site gets re-spidered every 48 hours. "
List of ClickTracks features:
ClickTracks Product Review: "Description
� ClickTracks displays visitor activity for each page of your Web site along side the actual web page."
Cost & trial version:
ClickTracks Press Release: "ClickTracks Pro pricing begins at $1995; visit www.clicktracks.com to download a 30-day trial version or for more information."
From this experiment I conclude that planning how to get your blog into the top 10 search results is not much different to "normal" web pages -
be usefull & relevent..
Do Blogs Spam Google Results? - Blogging News - Microdoc News: "Results of the Blog Test in Google
Of the 5,000 searches in Google we were rather surprised to find that only 1.7% or 85 searches obtained a blog in the top five search results positions, and only 2.1% of searches obtained a blog in the top ten -- 105 searches. Phil Wolf estimates there are approximately 3 million blogs worldwide and if we further estimate that each has about 50 webpages, there are about 150 million webpages that belong to blogs. Out of 3.8 billion webpages 150 million is about 3.9% of all pages in Google and blogs appear in the top ten results only 2.1% of the time. It seems to me that blogs are being under-represented and not over represented in Google.
In all of the tests, there were only 5 searches where I considered that blogs got in the way of really finding a webpage where better information could be obtained.
Conclusion
In using searches sampled from the AllTheWeb feed and then applying them to a search in Google, we found that Google does not appear to over represent blogs in search results. We found that only in 5 individual cases (or 0.1% of the total sample) that a blog was inappropriately placed and could have got in the way of an information seeker actually obtaining relevant results. "
From the horses mouth...GoogleGuy Says: "GoogleGuy Says:
Okay, I'm waiting for something to finish compiling, so I thought I'd write up a few webmaster tips. Most of these are on our help pages somewhere, but not many people know all of these tidbits. So here goes:
Tip #1: Use If-Modified-Since (IMS). IMS lets your webserver tell Googlebot whether a page has changed since the last time the page was fetched. If the page hasn't changed, we can re-use the content from the last time we fetched that page. That in turn lets the bot download more pages and save bandwidth. I highly recommend that you check to see if your server is configured to support If-Modified-Since. It's an easy win for static pages, and sometimes even pages with parameters can benefit from IMS.
Tip #2: You can use wildcards in robots.txt, and patterns can end in '$' to indicate the end of a name. So if you don't want Googlebot to fetch any PDF files, for example, you could say
Disallow: /*.pdf$
Don't forget that in the robots.txt file, all url patterns need a '/' anchor to be valid. That's a pretty common webmaster error (maybe the most common robots.txt mistake), so keep it in mind and save yourself some angst. :)
Tip #3: Googlebot also permits an 'Allow' directive in robots.txt. This lets you specifically flag areas that are okay to crawl. When there are two directives that could apply, we follow the longest (i.e. most specific directive). See http://www.google.com/webmasters/faq.html#robots for an example.
Tip #4: Avoid session ID's. If you can, use fewer dynamic parameters and stay away from the parameter 'id=' in urls--Googlebot tries to stay away from things that might be session ID's.
Tip #5: Make sure that you can reach every page on your site with a text browser like lynx. T"
The E-commerce for the Travel Industry Forum: "Hitwise United Kingdom List
Top 10 Global 'Travel - Destinations & Accommodation' sites for the week ending 19 July, 2003 based on VISITS (7/21/2003)
(Print Version) (Send to a Friend)
1. (7.90 %) lastminute.com http://www.lastminute.com
2. (2.01 %) Active Hotels http://www.activehotels.com
3. (1.99 %) Holidays Uncovered http://www.holidaysuncovered.co.uk>http://www.holidaysuncovered.co.uk
4. (1.45 %) Cheap UK Hotels http://www.s-h-systems.co.uk
5. (1.39 %) SuperBreak http://www.superbreak.com
6. (1.34 %) Trip Advisor http://www.tripadvisor.com
7. (1.21 %) NEG Rail Booking http://www.nxtrains.co.uk
8. (1.21 %) InterContinental Hotels Group http://www.ichotelsgroup.com
9. (1.16 %) Travelodge Uk http://www.travelodge.co.uk
10. (1.06 %) Travel Inn http://www.travelinn.co.uk
Author:"
Mike hilighted this quote from a great article about Google:
The cardinal rule at Google is, If you can do something that will improve the user's experience, do it.
If only all who have been involved in transport for the UK site had felt the burning desire for the info & links to be the best.....
Fast Company | How Google Grows...and Grows...and Grows: "Here's a search for the growth secrets of one of the world's most exciting young companies -- a company from which every company can learn."....think like a Google engineer -- which pretty much requires being both
insanely passionate about delivering the best search results and obsessive about how you do that"
No comment needed...
Wired News: Furthermore: "Beating Cancer the Hard Way
02:00 AM Jul. 17, 2003 PT Frequent masturbation, particularly in the 20s and at least five times a week, helps prevent prostate cancer later in life, according to a new Aussie study. Apparently the more men masturbate between ages 20 and 50, the less likely they are to develop the disease. Scientists suspect that frequent ejaculation helps protect against the cancer by preventing carcinogens from building up in the gland. Previous studies found frequent sexual activity could increase the risk of prostate cancer by 40 percent. But that research concentrated on intercourse, and infections from sexual activity could account for the different findings, said one of the scientists. 'Men have many ways of using their prostate which don't involve women or other men,' he added."
Google knows....
New Scientist: "SOME people get very serious indeed about their website's Google 'page rank'. Others have fun with it.
Many readers will already have discovered what happens when you type 'weapons of mass destruction' into Google's search line and hit the 'I'm feeling lucky' button: 'These weapons of mass destruction cannot be displayed...Cannot find weapons or CIA error...Click the Regime change button, or try again later...Click the Bomb button if you are Donald Rumsfeld.'"
Thinking about theTrain Stations pages layout & spacing between headers...assume it is a H code embedded in builders code for the "grey" titles...
H1 versus Font Size +3 - Free Search Engine Forums: "Headings vs. Bold Text: Headings good, bold text better than plain text but not as good as headings.
This makes sense. Headings are supposed to convey information about the structure of a document. Headings are an important part of understanding what a document is about."
Because "I highlighted the use of H Tags beyond SEO - in particular, accessibility. Many screen readers rely on H Tags to interpret the structure of web pages. Even if web pages have a structure, without proper header tags, screen readers can't find it. "....."If screen readers like H Tags, it might be fair to say that search engines may also consider H Tags of importance - particularly if they are used correctly."
I wish this had been available to me last year to bang home the possible consequences of plagiarism
The article below outlines ten copyright myths andbriefly explores why each of the statements made is not strictly correct.
Free Pint Newsletter 140 - Copyright, Product Development: "MYTH 2
The information is accessible to anyone on the World Wide Web. It is
therefore in the public domain and internet users have an implied
licence to copy the material.
Untrue. Just because information is accessible on the Web, there is no
implied licence to copy it. Under UK law, copyright material sent over
the Internet or stored on Web servers will generally be protected in
the same way as material in other media"
All sing along now...spam,spam,spam,spam - spam,spam,spam,spam - spaaaam, beautiful spam...
Hormel defends Spam: "It seems the makers of Spam lunch meat are fed up.
For years, Hormel Foods Corp. has watched as the name of its popular product also has come to mean junk e-mail, a source of heartburn and anger for computer users everywhere.
Unable to stuff this problem back into the can, Hormel is asserting its trademark rights in a complaint filed against Spam Arrest LLC, a Seattle technology company that provides spam-blocking software for e-mail users"
Basics - but seems to be some other useful tips on writing....
Ten serious grammar mistakes
Not many, are there? But these errors are very common, and they get noticed. You must get these right or your writing will seem sloppy"
Dodge the grammar traps: "Dodge the grammar traps
You don't have to swallow a grammar book to write correctly. If you can just avoid ten serious and very common traps, your chances of making a grammar mistake drop dramatically.
Latest National Statistics re tourism 2003
National Statistics Online: "The number of visits to the UK by overseas residents during March to May 2003 decreased by 13 per cent compared with the previous three months - from 6.4 million to 5.6 million - according to new statistics from the International Passenger Survey. Spending during these visits fell by 14 per cent - to �2.7 billion.
Over the same period, the number of overseas visits by UK residents remained broadly unchanged at 15.2 million. The amount spent fell by 5 per cent - to �6.9 billion."
SEO in a nutshell...
SEOs Who Party Like it's 1999: "Fortunately, the web site aspects that most search engines prefer are also those that visitors prefer. Build a quality site with plenty of text, up-to-date, relevant content that other sites link to, a solid navigation system, submit it by hand to popular directories and search engines and you will be on your way to high rankings in no time. It's not difficult, it's not tricky and it certainly doesn't involve any black magic."
"you don't put one thing on your page for your
site visitors and another thing on your page for the search engines.
That is the ultimate definition of search engine spam."
From: High Rankings Advisor: Tons of Traffic but No Sales - Issue No. 062
Index for my fav information resource Q's...
FreePint Index :: November 1997 - June 2003: "Home > Issues > FreePint Index
Scroll down to read the FreePint Index which was published on the 30th June 2003.
Available formats: Fully Formatted (Adobe Acrobat)
HTML (scroll down)
Plain Text (downloadable file)
If you enjoy the newsletter, then please consider recommending Free Pint to a friend. You might like to also check out the archive of previous issues."
The tide keeps rising.....but I still have not grown a P*nIs despite all their virile promises -promises i get at least 10 times a day, now there's a thought...
The Deadly Duo: Spam and Viruses, June 2003
BY ROBYN GREENSPAN (profile) | July 08, 2003
There was only a moderate increase in June 2003's spam volume, climbing nearly 2.5 percent, compared to the more than 6 percent that has been measured over previous months"
Interesting re copy length:
" "Disregarding the actual copy for a moment, and considering only the
structure, I quote from a study by User Interface Engineering (UEI),
'One of the most significant findings of our research on Web site
usability is that users are perfectly willing to scroll. However, they'll
only do it if the page gives them strong clues that scrolling will help
them find what they're looking for..." reports the article "As the Page
Scrolls" from User Interface Engineering (UIE).
"In the trade-off between hiding content below the fold or spreading it
across several pages, users have greater success when the content is on a
single page.'"
From: A Bi-Weekly Newsletter About Copywriting Online
http://www.nickusborne.com/excess_voice
July 2003 Issue # 034
re PPC
One PPC outfit to strike off the list of ones to consider....
"Overture, the leader in the Pay-Per-Click search engine world, has partnered with one of the more notorious Scumware merchants: Gator. Yes, your hard-fought for keyword positions are no longer simply being shown as part of search results on most of the major search engines as supplement to a relevant search. They're now being injected and forced into the face of unsuspecting Gator users. "
The Jim World Forums after Jim...
"It's important to point out that we now have 5 forum domains. For those of you that do not know, all of our forums live at one central domain ( ). The other domains exist to help segment the various forum topics into logical mini-websites for ease. If you prefer to work from the master, then please feel free to do so.
http://www.webmasterforums.com (The complete forums)
http://www.searchengineforums.com (SEO and Search Engines)
http://www.gethighforums.com (Internet/Web Site Marketing)
http://www.web-programming.com (Programming and Coding for the WWW)
http://www.jimworldlounge.com (The Water Cooler) "
hmmm
Should Google Deter Reciprocal Linking?
Source: michaelwong.com 2003-07-03
So how can a search engine, such as Google, deter reciprocal linking? I think the answer is simple--give one way links a much greater importance in the ranking algorithms than sites with two way links.
More on the latest google changes from "the oracle".....
Summary of latest Google update: "GoogleGuy provides his summary of the latest Google update."
Vindication for my
"still set to Spanish habits" bodyclock ......in praise of the
afternoon snooze & its benefits for productivity.......
The Observer | Review | Sleep your way to the top... it worked for me: "Phil Hogan salutes the afternoon snooze "
Not much of note going on in the SEO world apart from a few comments re
Googles latest alogorithm changes - designed to throw out "dodgy" linking strategies........
Danny Sullivan's explanation of Google Dance
GDS: The Google Dance Syndrome, Part 2: "How can a search at Google bring up different results if it's rerun just a few seconds later? Here, understanding the dance part of the Google Dance may help. "
Link to the google tool that searches
NINE servers simutaneously
Google Dance Tool: "Search All 'Google' Servers For:"
Sadly, nothing to do with the Google underpants passing on St Vitus dance syndrome although GDS (google dance syndrome) causes extreme twitchiness...
Google Store -- "I'm Feeling Lucky" Boxer Short: "I'm Feeling Lucky' Boxer Short "
total geekdom or what?
BTW - the google dance is best done horizontally......
A service to get onboard????? - London Taxis
: "toptable.co.uk are proud to partner up with the revolutionary world's first mobile phone taxi-hailing service, Zingo. The service enables Londoners to hail a nearby licensed taxi (�black cab�) available for hire by calling a national rate* number (08700 700 700) from their mobile phone. "
Back to it with a few
quotes re SEO from an article I recommend to anyone new to the concept.
Firstly,a neat description from Jill Whalen summing up what lies at the heart of her ethical version of SEO
Work at Home Mom Is Acclaimed Search Engine Optimization Expert:
For those that do not know, what is search engine optimization?
Basically, as I touched upon above, search engine optimization is simply the art of making a Website 'search-engine-friendly.' Which means creating it (or revising it) in such a way that every page is naturally using keyword phrases that are relevant to it, within it's page text and it's HTML code, and that the pages can all be found by the search engine 'spiders.'"
Further on in her history of becoming a SEO guru, Jill mirrors a comment made by MD
"Credibility really seems to be the key to having a successful business. " for transport info this means getting it right....
Despite my angle being SEO I have to highlight Jills warning about being over relient on search engines
"No business should count on the search engines' "free" listings as their sole form of marketing. The search engines are very fickle, and they don't owe anyone a listing. At any time, your position can be up or down or even non-existent, even when using best practice SEO techniques. Don't ever let your bread and butter be based on your positions in the search engines. You should always have an alternate plan in case something happens to them. Ideally, you should be doing lots of different kinds of marketing for your business, even when your rankings are high."
