Unless you've been living under a rock you've seen the devastation of Katrina - we have some clients down south that we haven't heard from yet. Please continue to keep them in your thoughts and prayers and if you want donate something as well.

http://www.redcross.org/

http://www.salvationarmyusa.org/

SE Conference Review -

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=7257

Earning money with Adsense and others -

Tidbits -

There are more folks that pay publishers than Google.
Yahoo is in beta with something that will compete with Google.
A note from About on mixing up your ads.

Just a quick note today - say up a prayer for those that may face Katrina today or her remnants in the days ahead. Tomorrow we'll start working again on the SES conferences.

Have a great Monday.

Since the kiddies are back in school - it won't be long till they have to do research and reports. Google has a new search engine that may help them.

http://scholar.google.com/

So why do you think Google has made these changes... these are just some of my thoughts.

1) They are moving toward a "portal".
2) The more real estate they have - on your desk, when you search, your home page - the more "eyes" they have, the more advertising opportunities exist - although for now they say they won't. Recently they eexpanded the number of ads at the top of listings from two to three - there is only so much more they can do there .... unless they choose to fill up the whole page with paid ads . Don't ever forget ... they're in this to make money.

Have a good one.

Google has had a couple of big announcements recently:

1) They've revamped their desktop product -
Click Here

2) They have a new IM Product -
http://www.google.com/talk/

More details about it can be found here -
http://www.google.com/talk/about.html

So.... why do you think Google launched these products. I'll let you think about it for a bit and I'll give you my thoughts about it tomorrow.

We'll talk some this week about things gleaned from the last SES Conference.

First thing is about "mobile search". If you've not thought about it - now is the time to do it. Why because everyone has a cell phone - soon they will all be able to surf the web. Some details about research etc. can be found at the following link.

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?t=7254

Just a link to check out today - hopefully by next week I'll be feeling up to par.

It's about "good" writing and Google.

http://www.searchenginejournal.com/index.php?p=1874

I'm in the process of getting a cold.... achoo... wasn't going to post today but saw this in my inbox and got me to thinking.

http://photo.stamps.com

You can now put pictures on a stamp - they are a bit expensive but if you mail a lot of things for your business (advertising / etc.), it could make the difference of someone opening it and not. How much of a difference the only way you would find out would be to test it.

Just make sure that the only change on the envelope is the stamp.

Have a good one.

The latest SES conference has wrapped up - today we're going to give you some links to review - we'll talk a bit about each one this week as well as things for you to do... so for today just read them.

The links to the summaries are here -

http://forums.searchenginewatch.com/showthread.php?threadid=7186

Whew... first week of school is over. I think we're all getting back in the swing of things. If you've been keeping up with things you should pat yourself on the back :o) Remember we're working on tweaks a little at a time - one tweak won't make much of a difference but together they amount to quite a bit.

Continue working on the project from yesterday - here's some info you may (or may not) be interested in.

Trump has a blog - hopefully my blog is not as boring.
http://donaldtrump.trumpuniversity.com/

Lots and lots of cool stuff on "how things work".
http://science.howstuffworks.com/

Have a great weekend.

This project will probably take a couple of days -

1) Find your niche in this directory -

http://directory.google.com/Top/Reference/Directories/

Say my niche is paintball -

I would click sports -
Then paintball -

2) Visit each of the sites in that list
3) Request a link from each of those sites / add your site to their listings.

Today's optimization tweak is pretty easy - make sure that domains that you are promoting / marketing are renewed for at least 2 or 3 years. Why? When we spoke about Google's patent, one thing it does is allows them to check on things regarding your sites domain status - so domains with longer expiration dates will likely not be spam sites - will it help? It's hard to say. Will it hurt? No... so do it.

Hope you enjoyed your weekend - I can't believe that school is getting ready to start. Since the next couple of days we'll be dealing with that - can't believe my daughter will be in the third grade - we'll resume posting on Weds.

Tell then enjoy 30 things you can do on the internet - some things I didn't even know about.

http://www.pcworld.com/resource/printable/article/0,aid,120784,00.asp

Got this in my inbox today - some interesting stuff on increasing your sales as people leave your site.

http://www.bizweb2000.com/gazette/

Some articles that you may find of use while you work on testing the pages in your site.

http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3524751

While you are working on testing your pages - this article was pretty interesting about Divurging results.

http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/3524411

Have a great day.

Remember a while back I asked you to create an account for Google Ad Sense - divide your site into 4 or 5 sections - If you have 20 pages on your site - then it would be four pages to work on each day.

Now take the snippet of code and add them to your site - does the content for the ad reflect what you're optimizing the pages for. If not then ....

1) Tweak the title tag.
2) Add content to the page.
3) Tweak the product descriptions / names on the page.
4) Tweak the other meta tags.

Upload the page changes.

Refresh the page - does it reflect what you want now in the ads - if not tweak some more. If so delete the ads and go to the next page. Work on every page of your site. This will be your project for this week.