In order to use social networking effectively you’ll need to exercise some common sense. First, you shouldn’t put anything on your site, anywhere, that you wouldn’t want a potential employer or a potential customer to see. It’s ok if you have some weird hobbies or if you like to party on the weekends – just keep that information to yourself and off of the Internet.

You want to set a good impression, and sometimes you have to keep things off of your profile in order to do that. That doesn’t mean that you should lie, because employers and customers don’t like that, but you have to watch what information you offer to others.

The best way to make sure that the press release is effective and does what you want it to is to make sure that it’s SEO friendly. If you don’t have any phrases in there that people search for when looking for your product or company, people might completely overlook your press release and the amazing things that you’re doing. You obviously don’t want that to happen because you paid for the press release, so having SEO embedded into it is a good choice. You can essentially kill two birds with one stone that way, and it will make your advertising dollar go a lot farther.

In today’s struggling economy, that could be very important for your business and its continued success.

The best way to do that is to make sure that your SEO is set up with a lot of holiday words and phrases. The names of the holidays, words like ‘gift’ and ‘present’ and other common holiday-time phrases are important for SEO around this time of year, and it helps to ensure that people who are looking for gifts will keep visiting your site to see what you have to offer.

Without any holiday SEO your business might go down around this time of year because people aren’t searching specifically for what you have to offer. Make sure that people still know that you have a lot to offer them in their gift giving.

Basically, you put a link to their site on your Webpage and they put a link to your Website on their page. It takes a little bit of time to do that, but it’s really not difficult. Some people wonder what the point is, but you get free advertising by trading links, and that can be a great thing, provided the site that wants to trade with you is a good one. You can also put a lot more links on your site that way, and search engines like links, as long as they are legitimate. With that being the case, the more the merrier.

Just make sure you pay attention to the sites that you’re linking to. If they don’t represent the kinds of values that you have or they would be detrimental to your site or your customer base, you don’t have to trade links

Getting other sites to link to yours is pretty important, because Google crawls the Web and the links make it easier to find your site. Natural links are the ones that you want. If you start buying a lot of links or placing links to try to make your site look more popular to the search engines it can really work against you. Your site will not rank as well and you might find that you have to make a lot of changes to make friends with Google again.

By following the rules and making your site easily accessible, you and Google can get along great.

* Check out:  What’s Your Google Rank?

The way that BrowseRank works is not be measuring incoming and outgoing links but by whether people visit a page, for how long, and how many of them do this. That’s vital for people who have a lot of content but don’t have a lot of links. They largely get ignored by Google and seen as unimportant when they may actually be great sites that just don’t need to have a lot of outgoing and incoming links to do what they do.

Microsoft hasn’t been doing that well when it comes to coming up with ranking systems, but this new one seems like it’s going to be something that other sites will actually have to contend with.

However, they search differently than Google does, and some people don’t care for that. Many of them have incomplete directories, and they can also be quite far off the market. However, for some kinds of searches they actually work better because of the different opportunities to find search results. There are also copyright, censorship, and privacy issues that Google is starting to struggle with, and it makes people stop and consider doing things a bit differently.

The newest thing is query reprocessing. This actually requires logical analysis so that the intentions of the searcher are actually determined. It sounds like a good idea but can be difficult to implement. Improvements are being made, though, so it could be the next big thing.

They mostly work like this: for every piece of information that you provide (article, etc.), you get a link back to your site. It has to be something that you wrote or that you have permission to use. You can’t just steal something from someone else’s site, lay claim to it, and try to get links that way.

By doing it the legitimate way it brings traffic in, it’s not spammy, and it doesn’t require you to buy links from sites that might be less than reputable. Most of these sites make their money from advertising, so they don’t have to worry about charging you money.

First, SEO is very important, because it keeps you up there in the search rankings and makes people come back to you. You want that. You can also use pay per click advertising. A lot of people don’t want to spend any money, but sometimes you have to spend money to make money, and it’s really not that expensive. In addition, affiliate marketing is something that you can look into, and thousands of places can promote your

Website. Email marketing, direct mail marketing, and joint ventures are other things that you can explore, as well, and by using a lot of different strategies you should have no problem surviving the recession.

People have lots of good ideas when it comes to what they should do on the Web and how they can teach you to make money doing the same thing. Unfortunately, the market has become so saturated with these kinds of people that it’s to the point where no one’s doing that well and nobody else can get into the market. There’s too much competition and everything has overflowed so badly that there aren’t any new niches for people who want to get out there. So they just start recycling everything that’s out there and trying to put their own spin on it.

It doesn’t often work well, and without a great new slant there’s little you can do. You have to be an innovator instead.

You want the Website name to promote who you are and what you do. Or your product. Or your service. Or whatever you’re trying to convey to others. You also want it to be short enough that people don’t get a cramp typing it in, and you want to make sure that it’s catchy. People should remember the name and not associate it with anything but you. If it’s too close to a competitor’s name there can be a lot of confusion. You should also research it and make sure that it doesn’t come too close to something political, religious, or pornographic. That can lead people down the wrong path very quickly, and you want to avoid that.

There’s a lot in a name, so you’ll want to choose yours carefully, and there are a lot of places where you can purchase your domain name, so be sure to shop around for what you need and want.

Links need to be legitimate to be out there on the Web, and buying them means that they aren’t legitimate at all. However, a lot of people do it and they get away with it for a long time without getting caught, so they must think it’s alright.

The bottom line is that there is risk with it, just like there is risk with anything that you do in the Website/link/SEO field. If you think that there’s too much risk, don’t do it. If you’re going to do it, be completely open and honest with your clients about it so that you can sleep at night. If something does go wrong, your clients will have been warned beforehand, so coming back on you is less likely.

For the most part, they don’t protect anyone. The bottom line is that most SEO companies don’t even offer guarantees anymore because they know that they really have no control over rankings, even with good SEO. The only things that they can guarantee – and some of them do – are things like how much time they’ll devote to your campaign or how much experience the person working with you has. They can also guarantee performance improvements and customer satisfaction, but these are also hard to nail down.

There are risks for both the SEO company and the client, so it’s important to be sure what the real risks are before you offer or accept any type of SEO guarantee. Remember, there really are no guarantees when it comes to how well your site will perform, even with the best SEO in the world, so be cautious of such claims.

What you may not be aware of, however, is how golden they are for SEOs!

Let’s take a quick look at some effective uses of these features on well-known sites:

1) Yahoo! News. Yahoo! News features an entire page of ‘most popular’ stories, which is obviously popular with many. But the lack of a similar widget decreases the chances of pulling someone away from the current page to send them off to another.

2) Slate.com. A widget that displays both ‘most emailed’ and ‘most read’ which, I assume, measures standard page views.

3) Newsweek.com. This one is pretty ingenious. Not only does this site combine Slate.com’s feature of ‘most emailed’ and ‘most viewed’, it also allows you to post to your own website. It also provides a time scale that shows which story is most popular as little as 12 hours ago.

4) NYTimes.com. We have a winner! This gem has a three-tab system that that shows the ‘most-emailed’ and ‘most searched’, it also shows which stories has been blogged the most! Talk about pandering to bloggers!

These features give SEOs the opportunity to know their audience more effectively, earn links to the site, and can benefit your site’s rankings in news searches.

I think I can speak for all of us when I say that we’ve all seen some SEO get berated or pressured because a particular SEO campaign isn’t going at the ‘right’ speed. Even when every procedure is followed to the letter and every option explored, sometimes it’s truly out of our hands.

Let’s look at several reasons why SEO’s don’t function as well and as quickly as we all might have hoped:

1) Even algorithms take time. High quality links, for example, withstand the test of time. Shoddy ones, links that attempt to manipulate the crawler and create an illusory sense of legitimacy, simply don’t. In other words, earning the algorithm’s trust is essential.

2) Patience with engines is vital. I know we’ve all seen a colleague, or maybe even ourselves at one point, luck out and get highlighted in a week or so. But that’s not very realistic. Sometimes the crawler process can take months.

3) Don’t forget those link partners. It can be a frustrating wait while that new viral content you posted or some other feature gets the attention it deserves.

And perhaps the last thing I should mention on this topic: it may take awhile to attract links and increase your standing from that, especially if you’ve just created new content. You won’t get counted by the search engine until those links start coming in, so sit tight!

After suggesting that every webmaster study Google guidelines meticulously, it seems the dilemma revolves around just how to handle these creeps.

Responses from site owners range from apathy (survival of the fittest) to more community spirit (sweeping up Google’s SERPS is advantageous to all of us) to a lukewarm hostility (why do the job Google is supposed to be doing on its own).

I for one don’t see anything wrong with exposing others who put others at risk by benefiting off of ignorance and outright lies. What do you think?

There are a few tactics you can employ to ensure that you’re branding yourself appropriately and perhaps most important: effectively.

Choosing a Name:

SEO, reputation management intentions, and branding itself should be key considerations when creating a name for your profile.

• First, and you should really only use this if it’s part of your branding goal, you need to seriously consider adding a geographic modifier to your name.
• Secondly, but no less important: use the precise name of the company. Don’t do silly play on words or a name you picked out of the ether. And an addendum to both of these: own the exact match brand name.

Don’t Underestimate the Power of Personal Branding:

• Full names must be included. Let’s face it, those cute little usernames we created seven years ago may start to haunt us—or already have and we just don’t know it.

Search Ranking Boosters:

• Use a photo that’s funny or appealing, but be careful to not have it associate directly back to your brand or even yourself.

We’ve seen it all before: a client’s website gets banned immediately after you greenlight them, and even though it wasn’t your fault, the timing is, let’s be honest, awful.

Normally, you try your best to improve aspects that are immediately within the client’s control. That’s just common sense of course. Most average to large websites have link equity they aren’t utilizing wisely, so naturally technical and structural stuff is normally investigated early on.

Let’s look at pre-sales due diligence. Our tactics for onsite investigation include:

1) Site querying to see how many indexed pages they have in relation to the actual size of the website;
2) Searching for our potential client’s keywords across the site;
3) On crucial pages, peeking at their source;
4) And of course, checking the site’s own linking structure.

For back links (off site), we do things like:

1) Optimizing anchor text on numerous occasions;
2) Sitewide links;
3) Shadow (hidden) links;
4) Sponsored links;
5) And last but certainly not least, links from low quality sites.

There is more than one way to accomplish the goal of ranking well.  A concise, straight to the point site, can do very well.  TeenModelStar.com is a site with few pages, but seems to be a top ranked site for terms such as teen model.  The lesson here is:  keep it simple, if simple is all that your visitors require.

Use Keywords: Many new advertisers fail because they ignore the basis of all search engine results - keywords. A targeted keyword phrase should be inserted in every one of your headlines, for each advertisement and preferably something that entices the visitor to click on the ad.

Target Your Landing Pages: Instead of creating links that lead back your homepage, set up a landing page that is targeted for specific users. This should provide the visitor with all the information they need and spares them of navigating through your site to find it.

Stay Away from Multiple Campaigns: Using too many campaigns can be your biggest downfall. In fact, there is really no need to take this route unless you are marketing two or more different products, or targeting different regions. By sticking with a single campaign, you can invest more time into making it successful.

There are several misconceptions about what SEO methods really work at achieving higher search engine rankings. Below we have listed some proven facts that are sure to help with your SEO efforts.

#1 - Manual submission is unnecessary: A few years ago, submitting your site to Yahoo or Google was beneficial in SEO. This is no longer necessary as search engine spiders are now configured to automatically find your site through relevant keywords and links.

#2 - When you’re, you’re in: Once your site is indexed into a search engine database, it will remain there unless you happen to get banned for one reason or another.

#3 - Link popularity works: Links are one of the most essential factors of SEO. Similar to keywords, links going to and from your site should be relevant to your content.

#4 - Title tags are important: Whenever possible, keywords should be fused into the title tags of your pages. This is what will be displayed in the results page of a search engine.

#5 - SEO isn’t everything: Some get so enthralled in SEO that they actually forget about the base of their business. During your campaign, continue to market your site and focus on making sales.

# 1 - Present a question - even impulse can be triggered by curiosity. Place a question in your PPC headline and take advantage of that curiosity, by trying to relate on a personal level.

# 2 - Add some humor - everyone likes to laugh. Scripting your ad copy in a manner that draws some positive emotion is more likely to get a response.

# 3 - Go regional - depending on your niche demographics, you could make your ads more appealing, by including the name of a particular city or state. The ad will appear more relevant to the visitor and possibly inspire them to click it.

#4 - Tell a story - instead of using an all-out advertising approach, your PPC campaign could be more effective with a captivating storyline. This creates empathy and often parallels with the visitor’s own experience.

#5 - Call to action - some of the most successful PPC campaigns are those using a call to action. This could be something as simple as “subscribe here” or “download free e-book.”

#1 - Once you reach the top, you can remain there permanently - there is no such thing as permanent ranking. Thousands of new pages are being added to the web every day, thus shifting the rankings frequently.

#2 - You can receive guaranteed positions - SEO experts can show you the results of past performance, but nothing is guaranteed. Anyone making such promises is someone you should avoid.

#3 - You can achieve instant link popularity - anyone promising instant link popularity plans to do so by spamming search engines. Genuine link building takes time and is far more rewarding.

#4 - Search engines are attracted to blogs - this is not true. A poorly optimized blog can be ignored, just like the poorly optimized e-commerce site.

#5 - Sub-domains can boost your rankings - while they can help, sub-domains will not automatically boost your rankings. You should always perform optimization on your primary domain, as it holds the bulk of your content.

Big websites carry out big marketing schemes, because they can afford to. In a sense, they have to, as competition is fierce. These companies often go to the extreme to reach the top of the rankings, investing in expensive services and staff to make their sites more search engine friendly.

If you find yourself competing with a company ranking higher in the search engine, don’t sweat it and certainly don’t break the bank trying to keep up. Instead, focus on a set of keywords that compliment your site and appeal to your audience. Most importantly, build your site with rich content, that will encourage the conversions for which you’re looking. Just because the big companies outrank you, doesn’t mean that they will have more traffic or sales than you.

A breadcrumb trail is simply a group of structured links on a web page, that allows visitors to access other pages which are higher within the structure of your site. For example, you can start with the Homepage, move onto Categories, then your Article page and so forth. Not only does this make navigation easier for your visitors, it aids SEO efforts, by allowing you to implement anchortext in the form of links on your pages. This is a great way to naturally attract the search engine spiders, without overdoing it.

Breadcrumb trails have become very common, as you typically find them at the top, side or bottom of a web page. This navigation system is simple, yet effective; definitely one of the easiest ways to please your visitors and the search engines at the same time.

Branding gives you a means to step away from the industry and establish more of a connection with your audience, going far beyond the basic robotic strategies of SEO. When using such an approach, keywords remain important, but the key here is emotion. Instead of building your site strictly for the search engines, you need to build for prospects, while putting your products and services on the front line. Don’t sell yourself short or your potential clients. Most people know what they want, so if you’ve got it, it should be branded into your SEO efforts.

Deep keyword research, scalable content in the form of captivating landing pages, appealing product descriptions and compelling images, all offer your brand to visitors in a tailored fashion - far more attractive than the stale, industry-standard strategies employed by most of your competitors.

The reason why so many webmasters fail with their SEO efforts is because they optimize with too much of their industry in mind, rather than the average consumer they are trying to attract. They incorporate keywords that are familiar to them, but foreign to the average web surfer. In this instance, all of that vast knowledge backfires, as the overuse of technical jargon buries them deep within the search engine.

To make the most out of your SEO campaign, you should stick to keywords your potential audience is more likely to reference. This practice involves learning how to back away from the business aspect, by bringing yourself down to the customer’s level and language. Sure, it’s your business, but it might not exist too long, if nobody can find it.

The truth is that most SEO services end up doing more harm than good in the long run. Those so called experts, claiming that submitting your site on a weekly basis, are blowing nothing more than smoke. The best way to boost rankings is to make your site search engine friendly, with relative keywords and inbound links. If the content is relative to what people are looking for, the search engine spiders will come crawling.

SEO is challenging, but it can be achieved on your own. However, there is no way to purchase a spot at the top, regardless of what the experts tell you.

Once you reach the top of the search engine rankings, your number of visitors is likely to increase significantly. If your pages are loading slow, all those efforts may go unrewarded and you stand to lose all the traffic you worked so hard to bring in. In order to keep visitors around, you want your pages to load as fast as possible, preferably in a couple of seconds.

Generating traffic is hard enough; ranking well, in the search engines, even more so. When visitors come to the site, don’t fail them with web pages that take forever to open. By doing so, you are essentially throwing all of your SEO efforts out of the window. Can you really afford to miss out on business?

This is the shotgun approach – a scatter blast of words that people will search for and that are related to your product. Then, when you see which ones of these are actually working well, you hone in on them and use only those, like a sniper. This is a great way to get your SEO working for you, but you have to do it correctly. If you limit your words too much you won’t accomplish everything you need or get the audience you’re looking for.

If you don’t start to limit your words in the sniper phase, you also won’t get the audience that you’re looking for, so balance is the key.

The Big Three search engines continue to increase their percentage of total search volume. In August ’08 Google produced over 70% of all searches. This is over a 10% gain from the August ’07 figures.

Search Engine Aug 08 Aug 07

1. www.google.com 71.01% 64.03%
2. search.yahoo.com 18.26% 22.89%
3. search.msn.com 5.32% 7.98%
4. www.ask.com 3.45% 3.50%

Source Hitwise

Sure, you may already rank for “YourBusinessName.com” – but when it comes to attracting new customers you must rank well for the keywords your customers are using to search for information about your industry.

Everyday you delay working for a top 5 spot is another day your competition has to solidify their positions. As more and more customers turn to Google before any other source, you will be allowing your customers to develop a relationship with your competitors.If you need an SEO Company, BloomSEO is here to help.

• SEO lasts a long time. Once you do it right and it starts to work for you, it lasts and lasts and takes on a life of its own.

• People who use search engines trust links more if they appear naturally.

• SEO is also a lot cheaper than other advertising. If you do pay-per-click, you have to pay for each click-through, even if you don’t make any money from it.

• SEO helps to keep your Website relevant and in good shape.

• You attract the right crowds when you use SEO the right way, and that helps your conversion rate to be a lot higher.

People are getting better about realizing where the original content came from and so are search engines, so you won’t be penalized because someone took something off of your site and used it on theirs.

Make sure that you syndicate your content only to sites that give you a byline and that link to your site, as well. The scrapers that take content off your site and use it without your permission will continue to do so, but don’t pay any attention. Google is on to them and they’ll make sure that you get the credit that you deserve.

As internet marketers we are in a position to shift our focus from market to market, nation to nation.  I’m not saying America is on a slippery slope, but if you have the ability to spread your risk, it’s time to move into the emerging markets of more stable economies around the world.

Do we need to learn Mandarin?  It couldn’t hurt!  It’s not required though - many English speaking nations are in a more stable position.  Canada and New Zealand come to mind.  Now is the time to globalize your business.  Too many webmasters have a narrow focus on just one country.  Use the medium to your advantage.  Diversify and grow!

Another thing you can do is to use a celebrity – even a minor one or a local one – to generate interest. If those things don’t work for you, try being funny and doing something that no one else has done before. Be unique and creative.

Other good ideas are to be the underdog (everyone wants to help the underdog) and to be controversial. Be careful just how controversial you are, because you don’t want to get yourself in trouble. You’re entitled to your views, though, even if they are against the mainstream, so don’t be afraid to show them.

No matter why they search, they want to find what they’re looking for and get information that’s relevant. Navigational searches, where someone searches for a specific brand name but they search it instead of typing it into the browser bar, are becoming even more popular than ever.

If you want your site to be found no matter how people search for it, your SEO has to be properly optimized. This isn’t always an easy thing to do, and those who aren’t familiar with how to do it often see their sites falling behind and not being properly indexed.

The way to get more people to your site is to ensure that you’re name is getting out there. Social marketing is a great way to do that because you can market yourself by writing great content and then other people can market you because they like what you have to say. And it won’t cost you anything extra for that ‘marketing’ on the social bookmarking sites.

It’s a great way to get your information out there and bring people to your site, and it also works well at ensuring that more people click on the links that you have available on your site for Adsense, bringing you more profit.

• Del.icio.us
• Stumble Upon
• Blue Dot
• Magnolia
• Digg
• Simpy
• BlogMarks
• Reddit
• Furl
• Blinklist

There are more. A lot more in fact. People who are interested in the social bookmarking of their sites and their posts find them in all sorts of odd places. This is because people bookmark them from obscure sites that individuals might not have heard of.

Of course, they also bookmark them on popular sites, as well. Any social bookmarking is good for your site because it helps get your name out there and get you links. The more popular of the social bookmarking sites are the places that you want to see your sites and your posts on. Do you best on getting them there. It’ll be worth the effort.

It’s often called collaborative tagging, social indexing, social classification, and social tagging. It’s a method that’s used to collaboratively manage and create tags so that content can be categorized and annotated. There are usually people who index these things but they’re professionals.

With folksonomy, consumers and creators of the content can also make modifications and changes to the indexing. The words come from folk and taxonomy, hence creating a taxonomy that is essentially user generated.

The popularity of this began in 2004 and was seen more commonly with annotating photographs and social bookmarking. Websites out there that support Web 2.0 and tagging are the best choices for easy participation. More sites are set up for this kind of tagging and the trend is likely to continue.

If you link to them and make it easier for people to bookmark your site, there’s a higher chance that they’ll do so. The more people do this, the better ranking your site will get and the better chance you’ll have of getting more links, more traffic, and more sales.

It takes time and patience and persistence to build traffic this way but it can be done, and once it gets moving it will take on a life of its own.

Another great way to build links is to have a section on industry news. If a person wants to know what’s going on in your given industry, they’ll know that they can turn to your site for the latest information.

You have to keep it updated, though, and you have to be honest with the reporting. Keeping it unbiased and fair can be difficult, but you won’t get good linkbacks if you take too strong of a position because not everyone will agree.

The quickest and cheapest way of offering free online games to build links is to just link up to an existing game. A few lines of cut and paste code will do that for you, but you mustn’t brand the game as your own. You can also purchase a license for a game. You can custom brand it then, but it’ll be found all sorts of other places, too, and it’s not unique to your site.

If you want a game that’s completely yours, you can have a custom game developed for you, but it can cost big bucks, depending on what you want and who creates it for you. Of course, this will also give you the biggest link-building benefit. Starting off with a freebie and seeing if traffic to your site increases is probably the best way to get things moving.

Need to generate links fast? Who doesn’t? Here are five quick ways to get those links going:

• Make sure your site is submitted to any and all of the get-listed-quickly directories that are out there.

• Start a blog at several sites. This is free at a lot of places on the Web, and it gets you noticed.

• If you have social media accounts (and you should) you can add your links to them, as well.

• Look for broken links and see if there’s a great domain name you can get for next to nothing. Then do a permanent redirect.

• Make useful comments on recent posts at dofollow blogs. Don’t comment on things from a year ago or spew a lot of random nonsense. That won’t help you out.

Following these five simple tips will help you to get more links quicker than you thought possible. When you’re trying to build a business, who can ask for more than that?

If you’re not and your competition is, guess who’s going to get all the business? People remember things like that, and they do notice who’s first to cover something big or get involved with an important moment in history. You want that person to be you, so people who want what you have to offer remember your name.

You’ll get better customer results, and you can build lifelong relationships that way. Naturally, you can’t be on top of everything all the time, but you can make sure that you plan ahead for the eventualities that you can discover. You’ll be glad you did.

Changes have been made to the industry in recent years, however, because SEO companies have realized that people are demanding more and more of their Internet experience. The code of ethics that some people put on their SEO company sites used to be a luxury.

Now they are becoming a necessity, because of the requirements of Websites that contract with SEO companies.

For sites that are only a few pages of text and images, a CMS would be an unnecessary option that would be extremely stressful and wouldn’t serve its intended purpose very well. If you have a site that has a lot of pages, plus a lot of sections, and if that site is updated very frequently, then it’s much more likely that you’ll need a CMS to keep track of everything that you’re doing.

Some large sites may have hundreds or even thousands of pages when it comes to product descriptions and other information, so not having a CMS would make the work of the person designated to update that site nearly an impossible task. If you have a site that stores lots of content, make sure you get a CMS, so that you won’t have to spend every waking moment trying to update your site.

So, watch how many keywords you actually put into the content that you write. Also, make sure that people can read it, not just search engines. If it gets indexed well, but it’s garbage from the standpoint of a human being actually trying to read it, then you should change it.

Write understandable text that makes sense and put the keywords into it at places that are logical and that make good sense. If you do this, there shouldn’t be any problem with your SEO succeeding.

People used to be willing to look through a few pages of search results, so that they could find what they wanted, but anymore they only want to look through the top few results. If you aren’t in the top three or so, you might not even be noticed at all. That’s why it’s so important to make sure that you keep your SEO strong and keep those search rankings up there.

You can do other things to help customers notice you as well and there are some other options you can explore to make sure that other search engines find you, but your Google rank should be a priority for you.

It’s no secret that Adobe and Microsoft have been battling it out for eons, each one trying to gain dominance of the Internet through their various competing web software technologies. At face value it may seem that you stand to benefit, whatever the outcome, but is it really so? Or is the gigantic squabble between the two lumbering giants spelling out a giant headache for you?

Think of it this way…

If you were in a small closed-off field with two heavyweight Spanish fighting bulls and both of them were calm and peaceful, there wouldn’t be much of a problem. But if those two heavyweight bulls decided to fight each other, all that heavy charging and crashing around would be very dangerous for you and you couldn’t be sure of your safety in the final outcome.

Is the Adobe versus Microsoft Internet battle squaring up to be a bit like that for you?

I think it is!

Adobe’s Flash technology has been around for a long time. It’s served the web well, but now there’s a new kid on the Internet block muscling in - Microsoft’s Silverlight.

NBC used Silverlight on their site for the coverage of the recent Beijing Olympics when they screened more than 2,000 hours of sporting video. Over 40 million people downloaded the Silverlight browser plugin needed to watch NBC’s video coverage of the games.

At a time when millions were eager to watch something extremely important to them, should they have been forced to get to grips with a new and unfamiliar technology?

It’s true that Silverlight’s video handling meant that four video playback screens could be accessed simultaneously, and with commentary too. Maybe that made it worth the hassle, for some at least.

Britain’s BBC dumped Microsoft’s technology in favor of Adobe’s about a year ago. Adobe gave the BBC their undivided attention for three full months to ensure a successful rollout, and it worked too. The BBC increased its viewership by a factor of eight and visitors now hang around the site five times longer on average than they did before.

Yippee for the BBC, but the poor lonely web surfer has to struggle with one technology one day and another completely different technology the next. It’s plain confusing! Does being pushed from pillar to post improve your Internet experience? I don’t think it does.

I don’t blame sites like NBC and the BBC for changing to the latest and greatest. They have a duty to serve their loyal followers. I just question if, by bowing to the whims of the Big Boys, they actually are serving their loyal followers in a way their followers deserve to be served!

Maybe you and the Internet would be better served all round if this perpetual puerile push and pull for dominance by Adobe and Microsoft wasn’t happening.

Being prompted to download a plugin or program in order to view or listen to media is irritating at best. The experience is no longer smooth and seamless when you have to concern yourself with changing technology issues. Yet this is the situation that the Adobe versus Microsoft Internet squabble has placed you in. They are putting a stranglehold on YOUR Internet, and the irony is this: you are letting them!

Sources:
Forbes
Techradar

Being number one sounds like a great idea, but it’s not always as great as you might think. A lot of people won’t just click on the first search result and buy something.

Research shows that people want to explore their options a little bit more and make sure that they’re making the right choice. These same people might click on several different sites and look at what they have to offer. They might also be very interested in avoiding the sites at the very top, under the assumption that popularity can bring high prices.

You’ll want your rankings to be high, sure, and your site to be in demand, so that you can bring in more customers, but you might want to leave just a bit of room at the top for someone else. By doing so, you’ll likely make more money and your customers will be happier with what they get from you.