When you are involved in RSS everyday you get to see the fantastic opportunities RSS can bring to the web and how it can contribute to bettering the browsers experience and the webmasters bottom line. Unfortunately there is a dark side of RSS use.

It continues to amaze me how some webmasters always see ways to abuse new communication mediums. It is well know that email has become synonymous with spam. Email was a great communication tool when it arrived, but individuals soon started to abuse email by sending unsolicited messages to everyone with an email address. Now the same seems to be happening with RSS.

More and more webmasters are starting to use RSS to improve and maintain a good relationship with their readers. They are using RSS the correct way by keeping their readers informed and using RSS to syndicate content around the web. I talk more about this at http://www.newsniche.com/ where I help to inform and educate webmasters about RSS.

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What do the words “Search Engine” make you think of? I get immediate mind-pictures which vary but all have similar themes. Sometimes I see one of those tiny submarines which are used to explore the deepest parts of the ocean bed. I have this picture in my mind of the tiny submarine underwater in complete darkness apart from the beam of its searchlight which is probing the gloom. Other times I see a horse-drawn carriage driving through dense fog with only its weak lamp relieving the darkness. This scene is from a movie where the police are racing through London in search of Jack The Ripper. The final picture is of a line of policemen in old-fashioned uniforms advancing across a moor in darkness through rising mist with only their flashlight-beams to light their way.

It can get a bit scary inside my mind at times. If these were dreams rather than passing thoughts, they would probably be analysed as meaning an obsession with darkness and getting lost. Maybe the lights penetrating the darkness symbolise a fear of ignorance (or maybe a fear of getting found out). The obvious link is that these pictures all relate to a search of one kind or another. The first one might represent a search for knowledge, the second one is obviously the search for a criminal and the final one a search for clues at the scene of a crime.

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Four Fabulous SEO Tools
 by: BJ Novack

So, you’ve just built a website, or had it built by someone, and you want to kick it into high gear with the search engines. How?

Use these four kickass tools and they’ll tell you exactly how to do just that.

Silktide Sitescore (www.silktide.com/tools/sitescore) offers a fairly comprehensive website critique, which will tell you what you’re doing right . . . and what you’re not doing so well. This rather comprehensive mini report tells you of what’s good and bad in your design, in the accessibility of your website, and in how google sees your site based on your site content. As of right now I’m an 8.9 and climbing, how about you?

Faganfinder Url Info (www.faganfinder.com/urlinfo/) is the best way to not only find out how you’re doing getting linkbacks, but can also be used to find out information on your competition so you can see what you’re up against and, if they’re doing better than you, how they’re doing it.

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The steps to gaining exclusive rights

You will need to give valid reasons to the manufacturer as to "why" you should have exclusive rights to his product for your specific niche markets. Don’t be in fear of this requirement, believing you must be a fortune 500 company or at least doing millions of dollars per year in sales to be deserving of it. Nothing could be further from the truth. You may be a new Internet marketer with no real sales track record, but you have valid reasons why you believe you can do a good job for him.

In this case suggest a performance agreement. After 6 months your agreement specifies you are to have sold a specific number of units and after one year another number, and so on. If you meet these sales quotas, you keep your exclusivity. This way both you and the manufacturer are not locked into a long-term unproductive relationship. But if you perform, you are protected for your work performed, retaining you exclusive marketing rights.

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Search engine optimization can take a long time to show results. The Google sandbox alone can delay optimization results by 6 to 8 months. So, what can you do to get traffic while you wait? Pay-per-click ["PPC"] campaigns fill the time gap. This article discusses the basics of PPC advertising.

What Is A PPC?

A PPC search engine allows you to bid for placement in search results. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and most others bolster their organic search results with sponsor advertisements. If you search on Google, links in blue across the top and the little ads down the right side of the search results are PPC listings. In one form or another, similar listings appear on every major search engine.

How Does It Work?

When you use a PPC, you will bid for placement in the search results under particular keywords. Instead of optimizing your site to appear high in the listings, you simple pay for the position. While this may sound great, keep in mind you are paying for the listing and have to watch the return on investment closely.

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PageRank (PR) is Google’s way of measuring the quality and relative "importance" of your website to searchers. It’s purpose is to give web surfers an idea of the importance of a website

PageRank is measured on a scale of 0 to 10. Your PageRank depends on the amount of web pages that link to yours, and the PR’s of each of those pages.

It can take up to three months for a new website to be assigned a PageRank ? depending on when Google decides to do the Google Update, where all websites’ PR’s are reviewed.

A thousand links from pages with low PageRanks can eventually achieve as high a PR as that from a few web pages with high PR’s. Some website owners research the value of a potential link partner’s PR before deciding whether or not to link with them.

It’s true that a web page with a high PageRank can pass on a high PR to you, but this can be offset if the page has too many links on it, because the PR is distributed proportionally to all the web pages it links to.

A page with a low PR may be worth linking to

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The 3 Most Important SEO Marketing Secrets
 by: Glenn Ford

Follow these three easy marketing secrets and enjoy success as you watch your site climb in the SERPs.

a) Your SEO Marketing Strategy Should Target The End User

Most SEO Marketing strategies may work dramatically in the short term but fail quickly simply because it has been designed without the end user in mind. There is always this obsession to please search engines and to do things to “trick” search engines to give your site the top slot in searches.

In actual fact the real client that every SEO marketing strategist should have in mind is the end user and not the search engines. The end user is that person out there who will use their favorite search engine to seek out all sorts of information.

The end user is always looking for content-rich and well-written sites. This means that any SEO marketing that places emphasis on these qualities starts with a huge advantage.

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… and why I ‘m dying to get finally in the Google SERP

Have you also experienced that getting indexed on Google, despite the Google crawler visits each day your site, is getting tougher and tougher, not to say it’s apparently almost impossible in short term?! Between us, in the corridors of Google, they’re talking about the notorious ‘Google Sandbox’ theory. According this theory, a new website is first ’sandboxed’ and doesn’t get a ranking when the keywords of that website are not incredibly competitive. The Google Sandbox is in fact a filter placed in March of 2004 which new websites prevents from having immediately success in the Google search engine result pages. This filter “is only intended to reduce search engine spam”. The sandbox filter is not a permanent filter for your website, what means you can only wait, wait and wait until Google liberates you from this filter. In mean time, don’t recline, but write original and well optimized content; write, publish and share articles, place a link on other websites etc.

An example:

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If you have a marketing business, chances are you get excited at the prospect of acquiring a new product to sell. One challenge to marketing, especially over the Internet, is the amount of competition. Affiliate programs often create an enormous amount of competitors offering identical products. Experienced marketers realize the benefit and excitement of being the first to make a new product offering of an affiliate product, or even better, their own exclusive product.

Suppose you’ve done your research and located a couple of products that you believe potential buyers are seeking, ones you feel are the next generation of hot, high demand items. You want to offer them and beat the competition to the niche market. You know you could really make a financial killing if you had exclusive rights to them, by marketing them yourself and through your own affiliate program. How do you acquire exclusivity of these products?

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Can You Survive Google’s Jagger Update?
 by: Craig Broadbent

Google recently carried out a major update on its ranking algorithm, dubbed “Jagger” by the SEO community. Many webmasters have been left scratching their heads, wondering why their websites are no longer appearing for search terms they previously ranked well for and gained traffic from. So what can you do in the aftermath of “Jagger”, and how can you safeguard yourself from future updates?

First, a little bit of history. What is a Google algorithm update?

Google, like all search engines, has an algorithm that is used to determine the order of their search engine results pages (SERPs). This algorithm is made up of over 100 factors used to determine the ranking of a page. The reason Google needs to continually update this algorithm is to combat unscrupulous search engine optimisers who figure out factors of the algorithm and then try to exploit them in order to gain high rankings. This exploitation usually results in poor quality, or “spammy” pages, which are irrelevant to the user and therefore not results that Google wants to provide.

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