For those who doesn’t know, TechWeb Media launched in November 2007 to replace our old ManhattanService website. We did not concentrate on link building and spend most of our time to write content which might be useful for many webmasters, web marketers, bloggers, and business owners. The only thing we did was active participations in social networks like Digg, Sphinn, Mixx, Zimbio, Stumbleupon. Also, our friends we knew from working with ManhattanService helped us a little.

   Our results… so far.

• 93 posts.
• 143 comments.
• Over 80 bloggers wrote about our site providing backlinks.
• Stories went “hot” on Sphinn.
• 900+ clicks from Google (January).
• 400+ clicks from other search engines (January).
• Technorati rank: 272 410 (January 31, 2008).
• Alexa rank: 270 512 (January 31, 2008).
• 2 new clients who applied for SEO services only during the last week.

 As you see, it is not bad for a website which only 2 month online. Moreover, majority of our traffic is returning customers. Thank you for all our visitors.

According Technorati, every day over 40 news posts appear which explain Google rankings. At the same time I did not find any posts which appeared today about MSN rankings.

  We shouldn’t forget that MSN / Live search engine share about 15% of all searchers worldwide. Also, MSN is the 5th the most popular website in the world. This search engine could provide extremely high traffic for some websites and it is important to rank well if 1-2 clicks could bring quite a big amount of money for your business.

  MSN and new websites:
  MSN crawl websites pretty fast and could index new pages faster than Google or Yahoo. New sites which just appeared could be indexed in less than 1 day if they made in HTML / XHTML. Delays in indexing are possible for PHP sites like Wordpress blogs or Joomla content.

  MSN and rankings:
  It is easy to rank top 10 on MSN if you target keywords in anchor text but your other content could rank pretty low at the same time. Submission on free directories could have an amazing effect for keywords you have targeted. Many websites which rank well on Google and work only for Google ranking are losing MSN positions. It is easier for small firms to get good positions from MSN.

  MSN algorithm changes.
  MSN / Live search engine changes algorithm pretty often. Sudden drops and increases are typical for any website and there is no reason to panic when you lost some traffic. Easy to say, MSN / Live traffic are not stabile and you cannot rely on this.

  MSN and paid links.
  MSN claims that they can recognize paid / sponsored links. At the same time, MSN team says that it is not MSN policy to punish websites for buying or selling links.

  MSN and “nofollow”.
  Google, Yahoo, and MSN agreed not to index links if it with “nofollow” tag. So, it is better not to spam blog comments, forums, and guest books.

  MSN hates.
  Back in 2006 it was a big issue when websites which use reciprocal link exchange services lost all MSN rankings. MSN punish websites for link exchanges with unrelated sites. Forget about your MSN rankings if you joined Link2me or any other link exchange program.

 David Meerman Scott is a big name in blogosphere and web development industry. He held executive positions in an electronic information division of Knight-Ridder, at the time one of the world’s largest newspaper companies from 1989 to 1995. He moved to the Boston in 1995 and joined Desktop Data, which became NewsEdge Corporation. In his most recent corporate position he was vice president of marketing at NewsEdge until the business was sold to Thomson Corporation in 2002. Source from Wikipedia page about David Meerman Scott.

 From 2001 David developed seminars called New Rules of Marketing, which is taught to corporate groups around the world. He run weblog called WebInkNow. 

 New David Meerman Scatt eBook called The New Rules of Viral Marketing. This book avaliable for free and you can download it here.

1.   Digg - community based web 2.0 social network which combine social bookmarking and news share. Provides extremely hight traffic for popular sites.
2.   Delicious - social bookmarking service to share and discover links to useful resources.
3.   Furl - social network created by Looksmart. Allow users to bookmark pages using toolbar.
4.   Reddit - website where users can post links to content on the web.
5.   MyBlogLog - Yahoo owned social network for bloggers and webmasters.
6.   Simpy - old social bookmarking and tagging network.
7.   StumbleUpon - one of the most popular network which allow users to share their web discoveries. Provides extremely high traffic.
8.   Magnolia - network to create groups, discover, and discuss bookmarked links.
9.   Blogdune - social site for bloggers to create profiles and find friends. 
10.   BlogCatalog - social site for bloggers to submit weblogs, discuss information, and find friends.
11.   SpicyPage - community which allow to submit and rate news / blog posts.
12.   Outpost-Earth - RSS feed submission network.
13.   9Rules - share, learn, and discover information. 
14.   Plime - social bookmarking network.
15.   IndianPad - the most popular Indian web 2.0 social site which provides incredible traffic.
16.   NewsClowd - social site which gives visitor a chance to discover and share news.
17.   Mixx - similar to Digg network with little different features.
18.   LinkInn - social bookmarking site and community.
19.   Facebook - portal for student. Allow to share links with friends. 
20.   EarthFrisk - site to find friends in blogosphere and share information.
21.   Technorati - popular web 2.0 blog search engine, news provider, and community for bloggers.
22.   BumpZee - site to submit RSS feeds for interested topics.
23.   Zimbio - Web 2.0 media network which combine rss feed submission, blog submission, article submission, discussions etc…
24.   Searchles - social site to search popular links.
25.   Squidoo - allow members to create a Lens (personal pages) to share information.
26.   Genwi - online community to submit a website or blog.
27.   Hugg - another network which are similar to digg.
28.   Blogoria - newest social / web 2.0 community for bloggers.
29.   Sk-rt - site to share interesting links and information.
30.   Stirrdup - newest social bookmarking network.
31.   NewsVine - news / media social site which doesn’t allow to submit links to websites user own.
32.   Blo.gs - ping service for blogs and websites with RSS feeds.
33.   OthersOnline - community for bloggers to create profiles and submit blogs.
34.   MyFeedz - RSS feed submission network which provides latest news.
35.   Explodeus - community based website to read popular posts and articles.
36.   Propeller - social site to read popular news and opinion.
37.   MetaFilter - blog which are running by community. Allow members to submit blog posts.
38.   I-Am-Bored - one of the oldest social network.
39.   ShoutWire - similar to Digg and Reddit network which gives members a chance to rate stories in positive and negative mood.

  Online consumer is better educated, younger, wealthier, and more affluent than the general U.S. population.

  It is estimated that 20% of online consumers spend $1000+ per year generating 87% of all online retail sales (does not include subscriptions and downloads). About 70% of internet users purchased at least one product or service online in their lifetime. It is fact that women tend to purchase more goods and services online than men.

  How people visit online stores and when they buy.

 Over 80% of online sales occur Monday through Friday. For regular retail store like Wall Mart, 35% of customers come to shop over weekends. Wednesday is the busiest shopping day for online stores.

 Over 40% of online consumers say they visit online stores from the place of work.

  Browsing behavior.

 For every industry there are 3 types of Internet users: active shoppers who actually buy something, users who research product online to buy in regular store later, and people who look products for curiosity but never buy anything.

 51% Internet users confirmed that they like to make research about products online to make purchase later in the regular store.

 75% travelers have researched travel information but less than 20% of them have actually made online reservations. The rest 5% researchers go to agency office to book hotel or buy tickets.

 Over 70% people who buy cell phone from dealer stores (offline) in the researched them online. Only 5% of users actually bought a cell phone online.

 80% of people who are looking for a car visit dealer office after browsing a website.

 Interesting fact:

 Victoria’s Secret (retailer of intimate apparel for women) reported that 60% of their online customers are man!

 Credits: Marketing. The Core (2nd edition) by Kerin, Hartley, Rudelius.

 Every experienced SEO expert will tell you that it is the best way to have one-way links from related websites. Established / popular websites receive natural backlinks all the time from different resources, sites, blogs. For new site it is hard to receive good backlinks and regular submissions could hurt business in the beginning when site owner add his link in too many directories or exchange links with too many sites (especially unrelated).

  Google gives a good recommendation on their webmaster guidelines page by telling:

“Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online”

Picture source: SEOmoz

  Contacting other webmasters for backlink could look little spammy. There are some good strategies to contact site owners turning yourself as friend and staying away from spam.

  Over 2 years ago we promoted classical music website called Everynote. We realized that there are millions people worldwide who loves classical music and many of them run their personal blogs and websites. We Google over 600 websites which belong to musicians, classical music fans, composers, teachers, and others. We send personal email to all of them asking for support by writing reviews. It wasn’t just similar letters, all site owners received personal email with information they might be interested or suggestions about their business. In less than a week we got over 40 responses with thank you letter and link back for our client. It was enough to get domain trust and extremely good Google rankings for targeted keywords.

Sitelinks on Google for Everynote. It tells that Google trust this domain.

 How to ask site owners:

•  Use contact forms and e-mail which site owner provide for public. Never use client / customer applications because people are really mad when they think about getting a new clent and see just another link request after they open email. Don’t use WHOIS to find email because most of them are outdated (active webmaster change email adress several time a year to get rid of spam).
•  Write regular mail - letters for those who givess home / office adress refusing to publish email.
•  Good thing if you find that webmaster is active on some social media site like Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn etc. In this case try to become a good friend who provides some good information.
•  Asking for link back explain why your site is important, tell about unique information you provide.
•  Benefit site owner with something. It is good if you give valuable advice or exelent feedback.
•  Send personal emails and messages trying to stay away from massive direct mail with the same request to everyone.
•  Offer support such as content writing or membership.
•  Don’t tell that you can give link back right away. Talk about link exchange only if site owner will reply with this offer.

 Spam and poor written emails reduce success and increase chance to appear in all spam databases.

 We asked different people to tell what they hate when they visit a website and what kind of websites they will never visit again.

1.  Pop-ups (17 people). Is it a good way to make extra money for pop ups loosing hundereds people who might come back later and buy your product or service? Every company which use pop ups to advertise their products knows that they get extra impressions, clicks, and customers stealing your visitors almost for free.
2.  Slow loading pages (12 people). Visitors are getting freaked out when pages load slow and leave website right away. Clean your pages removing large picture, video, flash etc files. Change hosting company if it is their fault.
3.  Annoying ads / more than 50% filled with banners / flashing banners (11 people). 10 years ago it really worked to place “You are 1 million visitor” flashing banner but today only 80 years old people who access internet for the first time click this. 1-2 quality banners in the right place could make more money than 20 banners and 50 sponsored links.
4.  Small text / hard to read (7 people). Your message will be never delivered to right people if they simply have troubles to read this. Change your text size and make sure that backgound colour are different than text colour.
5.  Hard to navigate (7 people). People are getting confused and don’t want to deal when website developers use to geeky language, make it hard to navigate through peges, confuse people with useless links and information. A lot of people complain that some links and subfolders named similar confusing clients and customers. For example: Person want to open a credit card, on a homepage it gives links to credit center, credit cards, credit issues,  credit support, customer service, enroll, personal credit, credit zone… What would you click in this case? If you have a lot of time you can try to click this links one buy one, but many others will go to another bank site.
6.  Stupid faces and poor designed ads (3 people). Many people don’t really trust when they see a picture of “happy” family with silly message like “We just bought sweeper and saved 40%”. Simple message with small picture which attract human eye makes way better job.
7.  Different design for each subfolder (2 people). For websites which use different content software (main pages, blog, forum, shopping cart, customer center…) it is important to keep at least the same logo and background.
8.  Redirects and hidden links (2 people). People are getting mad when they think that link follow them to another page but it redirect them to another website.

 During my vacation in Cancun, Mexico I heard only bad news about stock market. As active eTrader i decided to let it go and keep my stocks wethout selling them. Only after I arrived in Boston i logged in myeTrade and found that in less than a week I lost 18.8% with all my stocks.

 I went through different resourses to see how crisis could possibly hit technology companies.

 Business Week:

• Motorola CEO Greg Brown announced an 84% earnings drop for the December quarter.
• Apple, despite 58% earnings growth, fell 19%, to 129, after it issued a so-so second quarter forecast on Jan. 22.
• Yahoo! is mulling cuts of up to 700 people, or 5% of its stuff.

 Next week I will be in Cancun, Mexico. Little vacation and rest from SEO work. Anyway, email me if you are there and want to find some answers about web marketing and website promotion… don’t forget that i like Heineken beer and Tropical cocktails.

 I will be back in Boston on Friday (January 25, 2008)

 Sergey Rusak

    Recently I was working with my new client and we decided to check some information about his competitors. We took 10 random sites which related to his industry and checked their backlinks, website structure, promotional strategies. Through our simple analysis we found that 4 out of 10 competitors use different “black hat” SEO strategies. Link farms, link market, doorway pages, and spyware were used to promote 4 of this sites. My client was a nice guy and he asked me not to make any reports to Google. He told me: “It could happen with everyone and this website owners probably don’t even know what’s going on… most likely they just hired wrong people.”

I am 100% agree that most webmasters who pay someone to promote a website don’t even know about illegal techniques which might affect their business in the future. Here I would like to list some “black hat” SEO strategies you should know about:

•  Submission software. When someone offer to use submission software it means that they are going to spam blog comments, free directory owners, guest books, social network users, or to submit site in low quality directories with automatic approval. Software which can submit your links in related content pages on quality websites does not exist and technically impossible.
•  Adding links on their own websites. It means that company or person has hundreds websites (often subdomains and free accounts on networks like Blogger, LiveJournal, Narod.ru etc.) which created not for human eye. Simply, your site will appear in link farms.
• Cloaking. People who want to get good results for a short time with future removal from all major search engines can try this “service”.
• Link dealers. You might find it attractive when someone offers you to find websites with good traffic and Pagerank to buy links. In 2007 Google began campaign to find and punish link sellers and buyers. Violators are risking to lose Pagerank and drop in serps. Today any webmaster can submit complaint on Google about paid link.
• Submission in thousands search engines / directories. This service will take forever if someone will try to submit your site manually. Also, there are only several hundred quality directories which organized well and approve only quality websites. Submission is thousands directories is a scam or submission software. Also it might be a scheme to submit a website in link farms.
• Doorway pages. Some company or individual can collect clients and create doorway pages where sites link each other.
• Traffic from spyware. Your site will receive traffic from computers which infected with spyware / virus.
• Hidden links. Always check where your backlinks appear. If backlink checker tools show you that someone link your site but you can’t see this link it means that it might be hidden in .gif file, under background, cloaking etc.
• Keyword / anchor spam. Creating hundreds backlinks with the same anchor text to improve position for certain keyword called keyword spam. Google can remove your site from top positions for doing this. MSN even more strict about spamming keyword in anchor text.
• Buying old domains. “Black hat” SEO when company or individual are trying to buy old or expired domains to redirect them on your site.

Here what Google suggest if you became a victim of SEO scam:

If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on “File a Complaint Online,” call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:

Federal Trade Commission
CRC-240
Washington, D.C. 20580

If your complaint is against a company in another country, please file it at http://www.econsumer.gov/.