Microsoft’s Bing Looks Nice. What About the Usability?

November 19, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment 

The new search engine from Microsoft looks nice. At least for the front page, which displays a different, nice picture every day.What is Bing all about?The home page fails to communicate visitors what the website is all about. While everybody know what Google or Yahoo! do, almost no one knows what the heck is Bing.com. I would have inserted a nice tag line below the logo, something like “Microsoft’s Search Engine” or similar.How do I perform a search?There is no “Search” button on this page or the search results page. You should always display a web button properly and label it correctly. In this case it should have been “Search” or similar.The search results pageLet’s go to the search result page (probably the page users will spend the most time on). Here the search button is missing again, the value proposition also. The page is too crowded and the information on the page is hard to read. I would give user the option to hide the related searches and the history (by default they will be hidden).Give me my eyeglasses!Notice how hard the links on the top left-hand side are to read? Why would you have such important links overlaying on a background where it’s distracting for the eyes?Where’s my search, dude?So, Bing, I searched for “2 person tent” and you decided to show the results for “2 person tents” (notice the added “s”) at the endThere are other problems on the page (strange play buttons on video search results, the strange vertical line on mouse over the snippets, etc.), but I will give Microsoft time to fix some of them before I take another look.

Pitstop Media is a top Internet marketing company located in Vancouver, providing affordable services to companies of all sizes, from start-ups to corporations. Please contact us at http://www.pitstopmedia.com if you need assistance with any of your projects.

Learn How to Make a Blog for Greater Online Success

November 19, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment 

Everybody has heard of blogs and how popular they are and most people either visit them themselves or know someone that has one. If you want to start a blog of your own it’s pretty simple, all you need to do is find a good blogging service and half the battle is already won.The best blogging service/software is Wordpress, it is without a doubt the most popular blogging software on the internet. It’s used by everyday people and major companies alike because of it’s versatility and easy usability.  To get a Wordpress blog, visit the main Wordpress website and click the huge sign up button located on the main page. You’ll be asked to create a username and password for your blog account and once you’ve down that you can start creating your blog.One of the many good things about Wordpress is you don’t have to design your blog completely from scratch. They provide templates that you can use for blog designs.  So if your not the real creative type there are lots of templates that you can choose from to design your blog around and if you don’t find any that you like in Wordpress you can search Google for free blog templates. After you’ve selected a template you’ll need to fill your blog with content. The content of your blog depends on what kind of blog you have and what the subject of your blog is.  If you created your blog because your a fan of music for example, you can post pictures of your favorite artist and discuss concerts that you attended etc…If you created your blog to make money you can place adsense on your blog or promote products.  You can pretty much sell anything on your blog as long as it’s not illegal. The great thing about blogs is that there easy to update. You can make a new blog post whenever you want to without much hassle. And you can create a new blog whenever you want one so you can have blogs on many different subjects.

To learn how to make money using blogs visit – http://www.seegarsproducts.com/bloggingonsteroids

I enjoy writing and building businesses.

The Ways to Go About Organic SEO Services

November 13, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment 

We all know what SEO(Search Engine Optimization) services are. Organic SEO is a set of techniques or methods that are used to beat competition with other websites and competitors at a local level. It takes into account the keyword of your location. If Silicon Valley is where you are located, then what an Organic SEO service will do is that it will use the techniques that combine that keyword and link it up with your business.

By doing so, you are putting forth your website ahead of your competitors in most of the search engines giving you the extra edge that is required in order for you to compete in this competitive market.

A lot of companies lack the technical expertise to tackle organic SEO. What they are essentially using is techniques like Mata Tags, keyword stuffing, internal linking etc. These techniques as such have no meaning in the new organic SEO techniques. So what are the techniques involved in Modern Organic SEO services? They involve techniques such as customer psychology, site usability, semantics, analytic etc. Even Interactive techniques such as Video and Instant Messaging are included in Organic SEO.

What Organic SEO Services are essential for is actually to drive a long term passive flow of traffic to your website. This makes organic SEO indispensable. It may take a lot of time, but then it does not turn out to be a constraint a the end of the day when you look at the results. If executed properly, it provides you with a long term and a sustained flow of traffic. The best part of this is that it is a one time investment.

The best part about organic SEO is that it lets your customers find your websites in the best possible way, naturally. It appears that customers prefer using natural results as opposed to paid listing or sponsored listing.

So, what do we do on order to get the best and most effective organic SEO services. It is always advisable to chose the right company. Always ensure that you chose an effective SEO company for your organic SEO goals. Do some research on the background of the company, the projects they undertake and do always work up the cost before you sign up a contract.

Naman Jain is an Internet marketing professional, presently working with Rupiz Media, one of the leading online marketing company offering expert SEO services, pay per click, affiliate marketing services,UK web development services and website designing solutions over the globe.

For effective marketing use Google advertising

November 11, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment 

Google is perhaps the most popular search engine on the internet and millions of people use its service for growing their business. Because of its unlimited usability it has gone much ahead of being a mere search engine. Google today is one of the top most advertising sites online. Google advertising offers all sorts of facilities to the sellers as well as buyers in relation to a product. Google advertising uses number of tools like Google AdWord, Google AdSense and Google SEO.

Google AdWord is one of the Google advertising tools that serve both advertisers and buyers. When people are looking for product related to their search in Google, the organic search results appear according to their importance and relevence. On the right hand side of the page and on top you get to see sponsored links. This list of sponsored link is known a Google AdWord. For advertisers it serves as a platform through which one can reach to targeted buyers searching on Google. AdWord makes it easy for people who are actually searching for your products or services online. It is also cost effective because you pay only when someone clicks on your ad.

To place an ad on Google you have to create your ad in a way which has your business related keyword or phrases. By Google advertising your ad appears on the Google search page based on your keyword. Viewers may click on your ad to see what you are offering and subsequently may buy the product. You can reach a huge number of people through Google advertising network as Google will place your ad on high quality website or blogs so that millions of people see the AdWord ads and a conversion happens. Google uses Google content network to reach viewers all over the net to drive traffic to your ad. 

 

Google advertising is a part of Google SEO program that takes the help of Google AdSense for the owners of the sites. In this you can maximize your income with ads which are contextually targeted. It is easy to monetize a site with Google AdSense. You add codes to your page and use AdSense to deliver the right ad that matches the content of the page. The chose keywords by the advertiser correspond to the ads selected by Google AdSense. Google advertising follows Pay per Click model. Every time a viewer clicks on an ad revenue is generated.

Google SEO refers to your ranking on the search page of Google. It is very important for your business to rank high in Google SEO. You have to decide the topic you are going to deal with and find related keywords and phrases that are relevant to your theme. You should also keep in mind that they are in demand in Google SEO.

 

Proper Google advertising optimization relating to a website involves creating link to your page, creating content which is rich with appropriate key word, web design which is search engine friendly and proper interface. If you want to stay on the top page of Google you have to include all Google SEO criteria. This way you will also attract relevant traffic to your site.

Use Google advertising to generate income from your ads. Make your ads more targeted and keyword rich to rank high in Google SEO so that you receive targeted web traffic.

Increase Your Organic Traffic by Transcribing Podcasts

November 9, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment 

Copyright (c) 2009 Ajay Prasad

Organic traffic is the web based traffic which you are naturally able to attract to your site without using any short cuts or paid submissions for the promotion of a website. This traffic is unpaid listing at search engine or directories.

One method to increase the organic traffic is having as much unique content on your site as possible. Using keywords to write a powerful content gives an edge to your site. These keywords attract search engines to your site just as the bees are attracted to nectar.

Another unique method may be transcription of Pod casts as most of the search engines do not index your audio file but they do index quality rich text. A pod cast is an audio or video made available via web syndication. It can be a radio record or video for mobile downloading. Pod casting takes name from iPod, which is an immensely popular audio player by Apple computer, and broadcasting. Without the transcribed version, your pod casts may remain invisible to all except to those dedicated Internet users or to those who have already heard about it.

One may argue about the usability of the transcription when the audio or video is already available. But that is the whole point. In the video or audio if you have any unique content that will increase SEO. Some of the visitors do not bother to open the video, they rather read the content. Having a transcription of the video will serve two purposes. First it will convey what the same thing what the video wanted to convey and thus fulfill the purpose of the visitor. Secondly, if you have a transcribed version of the video or audio on a similar subject posted on another website the visitor will prefer your site!

Some people have difficulty in understanding the accent or pronunciation while others do not want to put in so much effort to listen as listening requires more concentration. And for the vision or hearing impaired people transcribed form of video/audio is no less than a boon.

There are some people who want to use the content of the video for further research or reference and they will automatically avoid your listing if you do not have the transcribed version. Some like to screen the text before downloading the pod cast. Lastly, for that category of people who like to listen and read simultaneously, the transcribed version along with the audio is found useful.

Then there is the question of cost-effectiveness. The transcription cost of pod casts can be reduced drastically by appropriate hiring and outsourcing. It should also be remembered that the organic traffic is natural one, so the amount spend on listing can be diverted to Transcription. In order to make your pod casts visible, for fun, profit and SEO, you must get your pod casts transcribed.

However, transcription of pod casts especially the audios is a difficult task and generally remains inaccurate. It is expensive and time consuming. With the help of correct transcribing partners, these problems can be reduced drastically who give the transcribed version in only three working days.

Ajay Prasad is the President of GMR Transcription Inc., an Orange County, California based Transcription Company. GMR Transcription has been providing accurate and affordable transcription services of all types over the years. GMR Transcription guarantees a 98% accuracy on clear audios. Podcast Transcription takes your podcasts beyond the realm of just audio into world of letters and reaches a much wider audience. Get your podcast transcribed today!

Charlotte Seo

November 8, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment 

Charlotte SEO short for Search engine optimization, is the process of improving the amount of visitors or traffic coming from search engines. By optimizing the website and/or web pages the Search Engine Results Page SERP will yield a larger amount of visitors from search engines. SEO is also used to target specific key terms like Charlotte SEO. By targeting a specific keyword the website can receive visitors from a specific region of where their company is located.

There are over 200 factors in how a website may rank on a search engine. These factors are generally not offered to the public so the SERPs can’t be manipulated by any single user or company. A search engine marketing can offer an individual their SEO theories in how they obtain high rankings for quality keywords. They should also provide search engine results from websites they have or currently working on. This will demonstrate if their mindset for search engine optimization is closer to the 200 factors than other companies. Not all companies have the same experience or expertise, and the amount of knowledge they possess will be the turning factor for your success.

Most business owners do not understand the intricacies of search engine optimization. Business owners normally look for the bottomline of what’s it going to cost, and how much revenue it’s going to bring. Most fail to realize that SEO is a service not a product. A SEO company may complete the task of obtaining high search results, and the client may still not have an increase in sales or revenue. It’s important to understand that a website’s color, navigational usability, content, etc may also affect the sale on a product.

Most banks have white backgrounds on their websites for a reason. Not many people are willing to put their private information on a black background website. Colors are very important in helping a user become a client not just a website visitor.

Most website visitors want to find the information they’re looking for within 1-2 clicks, and not have to search for it on a website. We live in a microwave generation where everything must accessible from out fingertips with a few keystrokes or clicks.

Content is very important for a user to distinguish whether a website is just another sales page or an informational website. Informational websites appear to be more trustworthy, and authoritative. To find out more information please visit our SEO blog for optimization tips.

To find out more information please visit our SEO blog for optimization tips.

or Charlotte SEO

Free Seo Tips for Professional and Affordable SEO Services by Experts

November 5, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment 

 

Worried about not come enough visitors to your site? Do you want to improve your presence in net? One answer to all these questions! Your site needs SEO services.

SEO (search engine optimization) means optimization of a website to increase the visibility and usability to search engines such as Google. SEO services help in generating more visitors to your site which means that more interested customers, which translates to increased sales for your company.

A SEO consultant would you about what should be done to enable a higher placement in a search engine. We, a search engine optimization British company, offer a complete solution for all your SEO services.

The main advantages of SEO services can be summarized as follows. Read on to find out why you need search engine optimization.

Increase in traffic – search engines do better than any other media in motivating visitors to a site. Since approximately 85% of Internet users prefer search engines as the crucial method to start the search. Traffic from search engines is the most important traffic, since it consists of experienced visitors. These are the people actively looking for a product, service or information solution. So, your partner SEO will make certain that you can transport.

Improved Competitive Edge – opportunities to find out if your website are more, it means that your competitors are less likely to find. It means that directly if you have more customers, the more online market distribute you get. This is where we, UK SEO consultants help you reduce your competitors, so that your profits are higher.

Increased customer base – SEO consultants can help you the best search terms targeted not only more visitors to your site, but will ensure that visitors are more likely to be strong potential customers for your company. Millions of searches on each day; websites appear at the top of search results will undoubtedly free web site promotion. In this way, your online market expands. The escalating your online market place your products and services to more motivate and interested customers.

Excellent return on investment – SEO an affordable package has been proven that accept a higher return on investment with a view to generating more visitors to your site, qualified sales leads and customer acquisitions. It offers a very low cost of Internet advertising with a probable high return, which guarantees a high return on investment.
It works non – stop – SEO your partner works for you non-stop 24 / 7 It saves time and effort. After your site, it will continue to be crawled and indexed by search engines and is maintained with minimal effort.

The fact is an effective online marketing tool – they are also cheaper. High-level SEO services also enable online marketing of the site. For a SEO program that can help you the most targeted search term more visitors, the strong potential customers for your goods and services, you must look for a partner SEO, SEO offers premium services with their own originality.

In simple words, SEO services make a website to generate traffic from relevant search term queries. SEO an affordable package deals with aspects such as effective search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC), Internet marketing strategies and implementation to bring persistent visitor traffic to your site. Our British SEO consultants ensure correct implementation of search engine optimization, causing a marked influence on where your site is positioned against your competitors.

Dr. Anuj Gupta is an Internet Marketing expert with leading Seo Services Company specializing in Business Process Outsourcing, Seo Company.

Why Build Your Website Using WordPress?

November 2, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment 

Since 2002, the time when online marketing business got its face transformed, many web platforms emerged but WordPress is the most extensively used application for building your websites.

WordPress is undoubtedly a semantic publishing platform that emphasizes greatly on usability and intuitive web standards. It helps in building a website that can bring success at your finger tips.

What makes WordPress stand class apart?

1) WordPress enables you to alter the format of your website by browsing through the core PHP files and modifying the relevant codes.

2) This publishing platform undergoes upgrades from time to time and the only thing you’re required to do is upgrade the version when there is a potential threat of any security breach.

3) Using WordPress, you can modify your website to a static page that promotes your specific products/services effectively.  This would give your website a very professional look.

4) The platform is quite flexible and it’s too easy to jump from one theme to another. You can also enhance the functionality of your website using its plug-ins and integrate custom programming into the same and that too, absolutely free of cost.

5) It’s an impactful content management system that helps you build great web pages and you can manage considerable audio, video, text etc.

6) It’s also quite easy to create article directories, e-commerce sites, portfolio sites etc. using WordPress.

7) You can easily optimize the content of your website using SEO plug-ins of your WordPress, which would fetch your website higher search engine rankings.

8) The platform entails base source code that interlinks PHP with MySql and hence, quite easy to install. It creates your website in minutes and it’s live & running.

9) WordPress is styled by CSS  and hence all its installations compley with the set web standards.

10) It takes a very less amount of time to deploy any installation process and integrate themes, plug-ins etc. hence, it becomes easy to complete your project on or well before time. Also, it offers cost-effective web solution to individuals and SMEs around the globe, which set up small-scale sites.

There are a number of good web hosting providers that support WordPress Hosting such as LimeDomains, Yahoo!, BlueHost etc. So if you’re planning to set up a site of your own and wish to get your online presence noticed, get started today.

Ryan Hudson is an online marketing consultant and has worked with renowned organizations and published authors for more than 5 years now. With stupendous professional business writing related to the topic Web Hosting providers, Domain name, Domain name registrar, Web applications etc… And a penchant for traveling around the world, Ryan has got a lot to say.

Some Of The Best Ever Blog Specific Tools

November 2, 2009 by IBI · Leave a Comment 

Blogging is one of the most popular activities people do on the Internet today. According to Technorati, there currently are seventy-five thousand (75,000) new blogs everyday and about 1.2 million new blog updates everyday. As the activity of blogging gets more popular, there will be more and more tools that will be created to specifically address the needs of the blogging population of the Internet users. This article will attempt to catalog some of the best ever blogging tools created for users. To help users find the tools that they need, these blog tools are classified here into four main categories – blog publishing, blog reading, blog searching and the blog toolbox – a collection of tools important to the serious blogger.

Blog publishing

Blog publishing tools can be further categorized into three sub-categories: Online blogging services, do-it-yourself blog publishing platforms, and accessory blog-publishing tools. Blogging services provide the blog engine that you need to get yourself started in blogging as well as the hosting. Though most of the services offer this for free, some of them require that you become paying members in order to fully enjoy all the benefits.

Blogger – Google’s Blogger is one of the earliest blogging services and it helped popularize blogging. It is one of the easiest ways to get started blogging because of the focus on usability and easy blog creation. The Blog this feature, which is integrated in many Google tools, makes posting to Blogger possible in many different situations. It is also integrated with Google’s Adsense advertising program that makes monetization of your blog quick and easy.

TypePad – Typepad is the largest paid-blogging service around. As mentioned, a paid subscription is required to create a blog using the service. It uses the Movable Type blogging technology but it caters more to the non-technical users.

Wordpress.com – one of the newcomers in the online blogging services, Wordpress gets its credibility from the success and popularity of the blogging engine that it uses -Wordpress.

Xanga – Xanga is one of the largest blog-networks, boasting a user base of 27 million users worldwide. It edges over its competitors by offering excellent community features such as blog rings, metros, and a social networking profile system.

MSN Spaces – Although it is relatively a newcomer in the blogging services space, MSN Spaces boasts of a huge user base, because of the ease at which existing MSN services users were able to start blogging. The integration with the rest of MSN’s services (hotmail, messenger) makes Spaces a very good blogging option for the existing users.

Do-it-yourself blogging platforms on the other hand, only provide the blogging engine. Although you have to find your own hosting service, DIY blogging platforms give you more control in configuring your blog. Below are some of the best DIY Blogging platforms.

Movable Type – Movable Type powers TypePad and it adds the usual advantages of a server-side blogging platform: flexibility, more advanced configuration, and total control over your blog.

Wordpress – Wordpress is an increasingly popular open-source blogging platform that is written in PHP and backed by a MySQL database.

Radio Userland – Radio Userland, one of the earliest content management systems used by the pioneering bloggers, is still a good blogging platform choice. It has solid RSS features that include a built-in aggregator. Configuration is done in a desktop web server then it is upstreamed or sync to the web server. This gives the blogger a cached copy of the whole blog.

Blog posting tools are third-party applications that are used to compose and publish blog posts. These tools usually support multiple blogging services and are ideal for those without a persistent Internet connection.

W. Bloggar and BlogJet – these are two of the best blog-posting tools in the market, and both are available for free. They support almost all of the blogging platforms. They do what most web-based posting apps does, including rich text editing, with the added feature of being able to save your drafts offline.

Performancing for Firefox – a Mozilla Firefox extension that allows you to immediately compose a blog post while using the Firefox browser. It is Ideal for active bloggers who use Firefox as their web browser. It automatically saves your unpublished posts.

Blog Reading

RSS/Atom aggregators and other RSS tools belong to this category.

My Yahoo – My Yahoo tried to bring the concept of RSS subscription to the Internet masses. Though it lacks the more advanced features, it serves well as a good aggregator.

Google Reader – Google’s web-based RSS aggregator that features an AJAX-driven user interface. It has a good support for tags or labels, and features a very nice reading interface. One of its best features is its labels-sharing feature that allows you to put aggregated content to your blog.

Bloglines – Bloglines is one of the most widely-used web-based RSS Reader. It uses the traditional two-frame reading interface, and subscriptions are grouped into folders. It has a good blog-suggest feature, that uses linking analysis to suggest which blogs might be of interest to you based on your existing subscription set. You can also share your subscriptions using Bloglines.

Blog Search

Tools used to search information and blogs, and to watch the blogosphere for topics or issues being actively discussed.

Technorati – Technorati is one of the best blog search engine, feature wise, and is indexing over 49.4 million web blogs. It serves as a one-stop shop for those who want to know the current happenings in the blogosphere, including features such as blog ranking based on linking, personal aggregator (for those who login) and many other nifty tools.

Sphere – one of the newcomers in blog search that came even after many other engines have folded down already. It promised to deliver more relevant blog search results, and it rightfully did so, as attested by its early beta testers. It features a “sphere it” feature that allows you automatically query http://sphere.com to see topics that might be related to what you’re currently reading.

Blogger’s Toolbox

A collection of other tools essential to the serious blogger

Mint / Measure Map /Google Analytics – these are three different tools used to analyze your blog statistics. Mint specializes in giving you a big-picture snapshot of your traffic, somewhat lacking in the providing specific details, something that Google Analytics is good at. Analytics can provide detailed information on what’s happening on your blog, which contents are popular, what keywords used in searches that bring you readers, and many others. It features a calendar to specify the time range of the analysis that you want to see. Measure Map, like Analytics is a fresh acquisition of Google, but still in early stages. It somewhat sits in the middle of Mint and Google Map in terms of what information is provided.

Akismet – Akismet is a highly-acclaimed anti-comment spam plugin for Wordpress blogs. It is free for personal use.

Feedburner – Feedburner is a tool that “burns” your RSS feeds in order to add tracking and analysis features. This way you can see statistics regarding your RSS subscribers.

The tools listed above are just a few of the many others that can help users; from those who are just starting to blog to those who want to become even better bloggers. It also includes some tools for searching and aggregating blogs, because a good blogger must learn to watch the blogosphere closely if it wants to be able to make more effective blog contents.

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