1. Keyword Focused Content - Keep your content laser focused on your keywords. While you can write about anything, you need to make sure that your article stays on topic. Any straying from the main topic at hand could confuse the search engines - and your readers.
2. Proper Keyword Use - Always remember to put the keywords of your article in three places: the title of the post, the beginning of the post, and several in the actual content of the post.
3. Don’t over-do Keywords - While using keywords throughout the article is a good idea (see the above tip), the next logical progression - to use the keywords early and often - only results in the search engines thinking you’re nothing more than a spammer. Try to keep your keyword density down to about 3% of the article.
4. Use Tags, People! - Tagging is an uber-important part of a blog. they give internal cross-reference links, as well as links from other non-Google search engines like Tagjag and Technorati. Ultimately the right tags are just as important as the right keywords.
5. Link Back - Linking back to earlier articles that reference a similar topic helps - a lot. Sure, getting links from popular outside locations is important, but internal linking, especially within articles, is also very important and should not be overlooked.

Do you have any SEO tips for bloggers?

You might want to be very careful before entering your username and password on any “new” services from Google. Developer Eric Farraro has uncovered a potential hole in Google’s Public Search Service that allows a malicious (or mischievous) person to put up a fake Google sign-in page to collect usernames and passwords for real Google services.

I found a question this morning on Ask MetaFilter about a supposed new service called Gmail Plus. The URL, www.google.com looked legit. In my pre-caffeinated state, I almost entered my Google username and password to see what sort of pre-announced Google service this MeFi-er had turned up. Instead, I went ahead and checked the comments and found that signing in would have been a very, very bad idea.
Turns out, it’s a page created by Farraro to demonstrate a potential exploit in Google’s Public Service Search… Source: NewsForge

So MSN Search Switched to Live.com the other night. Guess what… Live.com is not passing referer data. I.e. you will not know what type of traffic you are getting from live.com. You won’t know you got 10 or 100 or 1,000 visitors from Live.com. You won’t know what keywords they searched on in Live.com to find you in the free results. You won’t know!
MSN Search did pass referer information, but Live.com is not, at the moment at least.
I verified this with my stats from yesterday, nothing from Live.com and I know I used to get some MSN Search traffic (which has now been replaced by Live.com). Source: Search Engine Roundtable

Google’s free Web email offering may be available for correspondence in 40 languages, but efforts at worldwide expansion using the moniker “Gmail” continue to face complications.
Last October, the search giant grabbed headlines — and miffed some British users — when it voluntarily renamed its service “Google Mail” in the UK, following an out-of-court trademark dispute.
The woes don’t end there. Across western Europe, a quiet battle rages on between Google and Daniel Giersch, a German-born venture capitalist who insists he’ll never relinquish his six-year-old trademark registration of “G-mail…und die Post geht richtig ab” (translation: G-mail… and the mail goes right off)…. Source: ZDNet

Taiwan-based PC maker Acer and Yahoo signed a multi-year partnership to set Yahoo as the default search engine on all Acers sold globally.

According to Gartner Dataquest, in the second quarter of 2006, Acer was the number three notebook vendor worldwide, and the top vendor in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.
The partnership will give Acer’s customers access to a number of Yahoo services, and will include a co-branded toolbar and start page on all its PCs…. Source: NewsFactorNetwork

The popularity of online videos - mostly short, quirky clips of people doing the darnedest things - has exploded this year as consumers upload more and more rich media content on their computers. But sifting through the millions of videos on the Web to find only the ones you want to see is a daunting undertaking.

Dabble, a Berkeley, California-based startup, is trying to help cut through the clutter. The company, which officially launched in July, is building a video search engine that includes descriptions and links for every Web video in the world. Dabble says it has formed partnerships with 240 sites that have agreed to supply descriptions of the videos they host. Video-hosting giants like YouTube and Google, as well as tiny sites that feature only a few clips a day, send Dabble so-called “metadata” that includes the creator’s name, what it’s about, who’s in it, and who has watched it. [Source: Red Herring]

Google is asking surfers with time on their hands to help it categorize and label the images indexed by its search engine, building a database of knowledge about the contents of the images.

The company launched a new online game on Friday, Google Image Labeler, which it describes as “a fun way to help us organize all the images on the Web.” In the game, two randomly selected players are each shown the same image, plucked at random from Google’s search index, and given 90 seconds to suggest as many keywords or phrases as they can to describe it. They score points if any of their descriptions match.
Google’s image search engine currently returns results based on captions and other text adjacent to images on Web pages, without reference to the content of the images themselves. The game will allow it to improve the performance of the search engine by returning results based on the players’ descriptions of the images…. Source: PCWorld

Things started cooling off for Google in July, when it ended a run of 11 consecutive months of gains in the U.S. Internet search market, according to comScore Networks Inc. In July 43.7% of all search queries conducted in the United States used a Google search engine, down from the 44.7% attributed to Google the month before.

The number of search-engine queries is part of the complex formula used to gauge its successes or failures. In theory, more searches would result in more revenue from advertising…. Source: MarketWatch

TOKYO (Reuters) - Google Inc., the world’s biggest Web search engine, said on Thursday it was seeking partners to contribute contents for a video service in Japan.

“We haven’t yet been able to introduce Google Video in Japan, and hope to do so soon,” Google Japan’s President Norio Murakami said during a conference in Tokyo. “Going forward, Google’s services can’t work without cooperation from contents partners.”

Murakami said video was the next step for Google in Japan, following the company’s online news and book searches.

Google Video, a free service launched this year in the United States, lets users search, watch and buy television shows, music videos and other clips submitted by both companies and individuals.

Yahoo Japan Corp., the country’s biggest portal site, already offers a free video search engine.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, is trying to expand its services such as video and map searches beyond the United States. More than half of the traffic to Google.com comes from outside its home country. Source: Reuters/ibtimes

A WebmasterWorld thread discusses, what they suggest to be, issues unique to UK based sites, within the UK only Google search results. One such example;

A site:domainname search lists the pages in the site ok when performed in the default search, but lists all pages APART from the homepage when done with the ‘pages from the UK’ option. Also, a search for the domain name shows the homepage in the #1 slot in a default search, but a search for the domain name using the ‘pages from the UK’ option shows the same list, but no homepage anywhere.

The site is hosted in the UK on a shared IP, physically located in the UK. I have located other .coms on the same IP and their homepages show up fine when the domain name is searched for using the ‘pages from the UK’ option.

Can this be related to last week’s Google update (not specific to the UK only)? I think it may. Source: Search Engine Roundtable

We are pleased to announce that APIlitAx v1.0.1, an open source AJAX GUI for AdWords, is now available for download.

Version 1.0.1 includes many new modifications including:

* a more compact UI design, more consistent icon layout,
* a WYSIWYG creative editor,
* better support for Javascript multi-window interface,
* support for creative exemption requests, and
* better support for many browsers including MSIE, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, and Camino on the Linux, Windows and Mac platforms.
* support for the AdWords API sandbox.

APIlitAx is an open source project founded by AdWords API Specialist Thomas Steiner. As with all open source projects, we encourage any and all developers to submit external contributions. For more information, or to learn how to contribute to APIlitAx, please visit http://sourceforge.net/projects/apilitax. Source: Jon Diorio/Google

Microsoft said yesterday that it would provide advertising for Facebook, a Web site aimed primarily at college students, over the next three years.

The two did not disclose the terms of the deal, in which Microsoft will be the exclusive seller and provider of banner advertising and sponsored links for Facebook. The site, a social network that allows users to set up pages about themselves, post pictures and create discussions, attracts a youthful demographic that is highly prized by advertisers.

The deal follows an announcement earlier this month that Google had agreed to pay a minimum of $900 million over three and a half years to the News Corporation to provide search functions and advertising to MySpace.com, the hugely popular social networking site.

Microsoft was one of the competitors for the deal with MySpace, which earlier this month registered its 100 millionth user, compared with Facebook’s 9 million registered users. “It’s basically a consolation prize,’’ Phil Leigh, president of Inside Digital Media, a market research firm specializing in digital media, said of the deal. “But Facebook is also a legitimate test bed, a place where Microsoft can test new technology in a commercial context,’’ he said…. Source: NYT

When AOL researchers released three months’ worth of users’ query logs to a publicly accessible Web site late last month, Jon Kleinberg, a professor of computer science at Cornell, downloaded the data right away. But when a firestorm over privacy breaches erupted, he decided against using it.

“Now it’s sitting there, in cold storage,” said Professor Kleinberg, who works on algorithms for understanding the structure of the Web and searching it. “The number of things it reveals about individual people seems much too much. In general, you don’t want to do research on tainted data.”

After the data was released for academic researchers like Professor Kleinberg to work with, many were torn, loath to conduct research with it as they balanced a chronic thirst for useful data against concerns over individual privacy….. Source: NYT

If you use Yahoo’s Web search engine to learn about hybrid cars, the site will quietly note that you fit into a group of users it calls “Consciously Cruising.”

If you click on ads for moving van companies you will join the “Home Hopping” group. Shop for wedding cakes and you might be tagged as a future bride or groom.

This year, Yahoo introduced a computer system that uses complex models to analyze records of what each of its 500 million users do on its site: What they search for, what pages they read, what ads they click on. It then tries to show them advertisements that speak directly to their interests and the events in their lives.

Yahoo and the many other companies building similar systems say they are benign because they typically do not collect personal information like names and addresses…. Source: IHT

NEW YORK - Google Inc., the search engine whose clean, minimalist home page was a stark contrast to the link-laden Web portals of the late 1990s, made a tiny tweak to its site last week that may have much bigger repercussions.

On Wednesday, Google removed a text link to its comparison-shopping site, Froogle, and replaced it with one pointing to Google Video, where amateur spoofs uploaded by users mingle with episodes of Dave Chappelle’s show.

While Google explained the switch as a philosophical one — more about helping users find new video content than driving traffic to any particular section — some bloggers and Web watchers saw the change as more strategically significant…. Source: MSNBC

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google Inc. is making it possible for users to find and print coupons from merchants listed in the on-line search leader’s index of local businesses, adding to a slew of free features designed to attract more traffic to its website.

More than 20,000 coupons are expected to be available Tuesday when the new service has its debut on Google’s popular mapping service.

The initial coupon supply is being provided by Cox Enterprises Inc.’s Valpak Direct Marketing Systems, which has been mailing envelops stuffed with coupons and discount offers for nearly 40 years.

Valpak, based in Largo, Fla., plans to provide Google with nightly updates to expand the supply of coupons from a list of neighbourhood merchants that will include pizzerias, auto shops, dry cleaners and handymen…. Source: globeandmail.com

The Wi-Fi network Google built for Mountain View becomes generally available on Wednesday, providing free broadband wireless access in this California city that the search engine giant calls home.

Google’s network includes 380 access points throughout this city, which has about 72,000 residents and covers a 12-square mile area, said Chris Sacca, Google’s head of special initiatives.

It will offer 1Mbps of throughput both upstream and downstream, and that capacity can be increased if necessary, he said.

Google had been shooting for mid-September for the service’s official launch, but it wrapped up its final tests ahead of time. About 1,000 people participated in the service’s test phase, he said.

Starting Wednesday, people with Wi-Fi devices will be able to pick up the Google network’s signal and sign in with their Google account user ID and password…. Source: InfoWorld

How much are friends worth? To Google (GOOG), almost a billion dollars. The search engine giant said on Aug. 7 it will pay News Corp. (NWS) more than $900 million to serve as the search engine for MySpace.com and other sites under the media giant’s Fox Interactive umbrella.

Under the terms of the multiyear deal, Google will provide search capability for Fox Interactive Media by the end of 2006. It will continue to serve as the search engine until at least the second quarter of 2010, when the deal expires…. Source: Business Week

AOL fessed up to leaking hundreds of thousands of search queries yesterday. But it was all a big mistake.

Spokesperson Andrew Weinstein told internetnews.com that the company posted the queries on July 31 on the publicly accessible research.aol.com.

Weinstein said AOL removed the queries, as soon as it discovered them, on Sunday evening.

“This was a screw up, and we’re angry and upset about it,” Weinstein said.

“It was an innocent enough attempt to reach out to the academic community with new research tools, but it was obviously not appropriately vetted, and if it had been, it would have been stopped in an instant.”

According to Weinstein, AOL mistakenly released search data for roughly 658,000 users over a three-month period from March to May.

AOL did not provide personally identifiable data, but it said search queries themselves can sometimes include such information…. Source: InternetNews.com

Google’s free Web log service, Blogger, is once again accessible from Beijing without the use of a proxy server, indicating that apparent government efforts to block the site have been lifted.

Access to Blogger was restored on Thursday. The site has largely been inaccessible from China since late 2002, when government censors apparently blocked access to Google’s search engine and other sites. Last year, Blogger was accessible during a three-month period that stretched from mid-October until December, when the service once again became inaccessible…. Source: InfoWorld