Interview with Eric Meyer | Lunarpages exclusive

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Amy Armitage from lunarpages web hosting created a really great interview with Eric Meyers who is a CSS guru. Some informative questions and some detailed answer’s awaite you if you only just check it OUUUUUTTTTT!!!!

Good Job amy!

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Mobile Search, its future and how to optimize it

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What is mobile search? Mobile Search is an evolving service centred around the convergence of search engines and mobile phones. The services allow users an easier way to browse for the growing quantity of content that is being specifically written for, or adapted for, mobile phones.

I was doing some research on mobile search. I have been hearing a lot of things about it and since I know someone over in china they told me how much mobile search is actually used in other countries. Mobile search is pretty widely used in other countries and is gaining exposure in the U.S.. Some of the reason’s why mobile search has not caught on in the U.S. as vigorusly as in other countries are as follows:

1) Mobile phones in the united states are not as state of the art as phones in china and japan and are not compatible with many java applets being used.
2) The amount of people using mobile search is limited (for now)
3) The ability to use mobile search is limited and yet still growing
4) No search infrastructure has been developed in the U.S. that will work across multiple devices.
5) Different browsers and different phones render differently

Since the emergence of higher quality and more technologically advanced phones like the iphone, Blackberry and Nokia E61 (there are many others that have this capability) more phones can browse the internet MUCH easier and with a higher resolution and display capabilities. The problem is that there is still a need to develop a strong infrastructure that can be displayed across mulitple devices.

How does mobile search differ from Computer based search?
Matt Tengler said something interesting over at SearchEngineWatch.com which he lined out in 3 easy steps.

• Content: “Currently, mobile content is dominated by mobile consumables, such as ring tones,” he said.
• Form factor: “The first page becomes the first few search results,” he said.
• Opportunities: “A personal device is always on,” he said, “presenting more customized advertising opportunities.”

So how do we design sites for mobile search?
Pretty simple actually. Have your designer build an additional CSS file that is specific for mobile devices. Remember to always validate these files as with normal PC-web viewing un validated code is much more forgiving then mobile search.

How do you optimize for mobile search?
Mobile search is another section of our favorite search engines. When considering optimization for mobile search its like thinking about foriegn optimization. Obviosly mobile search is not as far behind as foriegn search but it does take some modification’s and you cannot just expect to rank well. So far the standard rules apply to mobile optimization but here are somethings you might want to consider.

1) Build a CSS mobile search external document
2) Move your main navigation to the bottom and use jump links on the top of your page. The reason for this is because when rendering on a mobile device more larger navigations take of 2/3rds of a pages on a mobile device.
3) Submit your sites to mobile search engines. Currently submissions are key. Use Yahoo mobile and Google Mobile.
4) Use one site in order to optimize on regular search and mobile
5) Use basic SEO processes and don’t stray
6) Make sure you are not disallowing mobile crawlers from spidering your site

Here are some other great resources for optimizing your mobile search.

• Mobile Search Marketing
  
• SEroundtable
• Webpronews mobilizing your mobile search

Mobile search monopoly and search software
A lot of phones come with search engines embeded into the phone which means these search engines are paying to be placed on these phones. This raises some concerns as its possible for search domination but there are applications you can download to search your favorite engines. Here are some.

I wanted to leave you with a great video from cindy from blue moon works about mobile optmization.

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Business card competition with Andrea Schoemaker | here are my cards

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Ok so here are my cards. No photo shopping, no tricking just straight cards. I wanted to post a photo of them to see if I can coax andrea in showing her cards as well to determine a true winner ;-).

I think maybe I should have tried to get more cards and lose less money in vegas

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Affiliate Summit West - 2007 Roundup

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I woke up around 8:00 on sunday morning to go to vegas for affiliate summit west 2007. I made the mistake of wearing shorts to vegas which was a shocking 30 degrees with a wind chill factor of a billion! We rolled in like a true crew ready for the summit, drinks and gambling. We immediatly registered and networked for a while and meet some interesting people. Greg and Brian from BOTW, Brandy from webmaster radio, Andrew Wee, Andrea Schoemaker, Jeremy Schoemaker, some people from pay per post and many many other top affiliates and contacts.

One of the best parts of affiliate summit was the Q&A super affiliate panel. You can see the questions and answer over at conversation rater and pay close attention to web hosting questions as me and amy put forth a pretty big amount of the classes questions.

My general take on affiliate summit
One problem I think needs some serious attention concerning affiliate summit is the knowledge base and notablility of each speaker and also making sure each session comes off without a hitch as we ran into some. OVER-ALL I took away something from each class and contact I made at affiliate summit.

Check out Lunarpages web hosting blog to see more info on our trip and photos of the event. We have some funny quotes, photoshopped pics and much more!!

Popularity: 6% [?]

Blogger.com support freaking sucks!!!!

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I don’t normally make post’s on services if I don’t like them. I am more the type to just never use them again but honestly I am not in the mood to do that today. In this case I am just pretty unhappy because blogger is making me double check their work that they ARE NOT EVEN DOING.

I stopped posting information over at my blogger account on directoryrevolution.com about a half year ago. I recently have been trying to upload a pay per post project on that blog to test out payperpost.com service and how well it works for gaining traffic, links and branding.

I have been having problems with uploading and re-publishing my index and making new post’s is absolutely impossible because of an error that is occuring with a problem on Blogger.com’s side. Before posting this and of course emailing blogger.com I made sure I check through there FAQ’s and checked all of my ftp settings to make sure they where correct.

It has been almost 3 weeks now and I have received 2 emails from them over this period of time telling me how I should keep checking their resource section to figure out whats wrong because they don’t have time for me. Here is an email from blogger.

Hi there,

Thanks for contacting Blogger Support. Thanks to your input and feedback,
we have reviewed and fixed several bugs on the new version of Blogger in
recent days. Several FTP issues have been resolved as a result of these
fixes. If you are still experiencing with publishing your blog please
simply reply to this message with the details of your problem. We will
gladly look further into your issue and get back to you as soon as
possible. Thanks for your continued patience.

Sincerely,
Karl
The Blogger Team

This is the second email over a 3 weeks asking me to reply to them if I am still having the problem. Now I can be patient and I am an understanding person but where in this email did they ever say they actually looked into MY problem. NEVER!!! They didn’t even open up my control panel and test it themselves. What kind of customer service is this? I am still having the problem and if someone took 2 minutes to take a look they would not have had to email me asking ME to check it out. Now I have responded to them asking them to just double check their work and make sure this gets fixed. I am pretty sure I will get another email asking me to check it out and it has not been fixed but lets hope that this gets resolved.

I am just hoping to make blogger aware of there horrible customer support and I hope they decide to change this before more people move to other true quality blog hosting services.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I made it to the front of the technology page on Newsvine.com

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Newsvine puts me on top of their technology page within hours of my article release on the newsvine algorithm.
Well utilizing SMO to leverage traffic is a huge advantage to any campaign and knowing HOW to do this is key. I recently created a post on the possible ranking factors on newsvine.com. I examined what could possibly make a article or seed appear on the home page or sub home page for a given tag. Well I just wanted to say “I did IT!!!”.

See the image below showing where I showed up on newsvine.

So what did it take? Let me tell you the state of my profile before making it to the first page.

1) I had about 10 friends
2) I had about 2 articles submitted with 1-3 votes each and NO comments on them
3) I was a member for less then a month and a half
4) 1 person had added me to their watch list
5) Never made a story popular before

What was special about this article that got me on the home page of technology?

1) One of the most popular and well respected people on newsvine made the first comment and that created my first popular comment.
2) In a short period of time I was over 10 votes.
3) I had a large number of comments. About 10 which is pretty decent for newsvine.
4) The article was interesting and inspired controversy.

Any SMO can take this idea and apply it to other social media sites but its all about determining possible ranking factors for each social media site and doing testing, testing and doing more testing.

Somthing I would like to add is the power of seeds Vs. Articles on newsvine. Doing self promotion is against their code of honor but they do provide an area where you can upload full articles of your content. The difference between both is a seed is more like a “digg” and an article is going to be more like uploading content to article distribution sites BUT with more targeted traffic which could bleed over to other forms of traffic redirection.

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5 things you probably did not know about me!

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Well I am deciding to join the online sensation of giving people the top 5 things people don’t know about me post. I am just going to jump into ok. Prepair yourself!

1. I have a dog named chewy. He is a cocker spaniel and talks like chubaca from star wars.
2. My other passion (besides seo/sem) is playing my guitar and recording my own music.
3. I used to work for the same recording studio and engineer who recording the bone thugs and harmony albums.
4. I was in a industrial rock band called “Rakit”, I played bass and one of our songs made it onto the soundtrack for “Soul Survivor” .
5. I almost became a pastor.

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Newsvine Algorithm and potential ranking factors for exposure.

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As I do more and more social media optimization I can see that there is a pattern to most of these sites. Just like there is a pattern to SEO and Marketing (a formula … if you will). The exciting thing about all of these types of jobs is that every keyword, every site and every social media is different and gives us the opportunity to stay on our toes.

I was recently working on newsvine.com looking into how to draw traffic and how to get articles onto the first page of a given catagory. While I was looking this site over I jotted a list together of potential ranking factors for newsvine.com.

• Reputation of Profile
  • How many friends does a profile have
  • How many people have you on their watchlist
  • How long your profile has been around
  • How well your articles and or seeds have been received
  • Are a majority of users story or articles from ONE url
  • How many times a article or seed has become popular
  • Your vineacity rank
  • How many articles you have submitted and how well they have done
  • How many popular comments you have received
• Reputation of friends profile
  • How reputable a friends profile is gives weight on votes on your own post
• Comments
  • How many comments does a certain story get
  • How many positive votes do the comments get
• Submit a like story related to what has been submitted by newsvine for your specific targeted catagory.
  • A majority of links that are submitted that are related to a newsvine story tend to appear under the top seeds section
• What domain name a story is submitted from
  • A majority of “wires” come from newspaper sites and writers and do not have many comments or votes but are on the top page because of where they are submitted from.
• Groups
  • How many groups you are a member of
  • How active you are in the groups
  • how long you have been in a group
• Number of views
  • A high number of views with no votes could mean no one likes the story and subsequently your entry will never make it to a top page.
  • Length of views
• Hand Jobs
  • Just like some of the major search engines and social media sites there is a good chance they do hand jobs thanks to people like me
• Source of votes
  • Tracking IP addresses
  • Tracking browser id’s
  • Tracking login account ID’s could help newsvine keep track of vote groups who’s sole purpose is to vote, comment and help rank articles on the home page or sub page
• Follow the Code of Honor!
• The “Freshness Factor”
  • How new the article is. Older content will get pushed down eventually.

Something that I found pretty interesting is that newsvine actually gives you some sort of insight into there ranking algorithm by showing you a chart they call “vineacity”. I have posted the image below. Special thanks to Aine MacDermot for some extra insight into how newsvines ranking is determined.

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Andrea Schoemaker’s busines card challange | Affiliate Summit - You are going down sista!

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Today Andrea Schoemaker posted that she is going to accept my challange at affiliate summit. Andrew wee is also taking on this networking approach and he is an advisary I will have to keep my eye on. I’m watching you andrew but maybe we should team up because andrea is going to be tough to beat bro!!! lol. The challange is simply this: The person with the most business cards at the end of affiliate summit wins! Now of course marketing yourself, your company and your services by networking is the true goal at affiliate summit but why not make it a lil more interesting? I am totally challanging Andrea Schoemaker over at planetandrea.com to a business card networking challange.

No rules except one. Be the person with the most business cards or face blog humiliation!!!

Its on andrea and I’m bring my sexy!

I also have a secret weapon… the lunarpages marketing team ninja’s!!!

Popularity: 7% [?]

Optimizing your social media | Digg, Reddit, Netscape and MYspace

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In the last 6-12 months social media optimization has been a very highly talked about and discussed venue for traffic. Although social media sites like myspace have been around much longer then a year over the last year many internet marketers and SEO’s have been focusing their attention on marketing and gaming these sites. With the emergence of proper SMO the need to have top rankings in the SERP’s has decreased and the need to optimze content for sites like digg, myspace, redditt, newsvine etc. has become a very indemand skill.

Anyone who is an SEO/SEM should definitly know about SMO and if they are serious SEO’s they should learn how to be a SMO.

Lets take a quick look at SMO results over at shoemoney.com. Jeremy released a blog post about 10 reasons why Microsoft will aquire Yahoo! in 2007 and soon after that released his traffic stats which shows almost a 100% boost in his traffic from reaching the first page of digg. These results are being seen all over the web but the problem I see is that the boost of immediate traffic is extremely fast BUT the drop in traffic is also fast. Darren Rowse posted a pretty interesting article on how to cultivate your digg traffic into long term traffic which is a great resource for anyone looking to become successful as an SMO.

Here is a quick break down of what Darren mentioned.
-Style of Writing
-Topic of Writing
-Become a Digg User
-Comment on other key sites and blogs
-Drive Traffic to Diggable posts
-Make it easy to digg your work
-Titles and first lines are important
-Digg own stories with caution
-Celebrate Digging subtly
-Quality Content

I think this is a great list but I would like to add onto it if I may and since its my own blog I MAY!!!

-Utilize your My #1
-Notify people of a diggable story (do this with caution as to not spam people but if you have a report with some diggers it is perfectly ok to let them know of a diggable digg)
-DO NOT ask top diggers to digg for you in exchange for cash
-Becoming a member is not enough you need to become VERY active within digg.
-Comment First before you digg an article
-Get involved in community forums NOT JUST blog sites and leave comments and informative posts regarding your posts (do not spam)
-Comment back on people who leave you comments from digg.
-Comment back on comments left on your dugg articles ON DIGG.
-Be concious of the digg community as they are VERY fickle.

There are tons of social media sites out there and the first thing an SMO should do is figure out a sites algorithm. Rand Fishkin over at SEOmoz.org put together a great list of ranking factors that Digg, Reddit, Netscape, and Shoutwire might use. Todd malicoat came out with a great post about how DIGG will be the next google and gave some great suggestions about how to improve digg. He also did a really great interview with web pro news with neil patel and I will post that now. Its kinda long but I loved this interview as todd and neil really gives us a play by play on how to become a SMO.

WARNING: DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO IF YOU DO NOT WANT TO LEARN!!!

By the way if you are looking to create a site like this you can use PLIGG which is a content management system for digg like sites. I put together a test one over at youhypeit.com.

Myspace marketing - everyone is doing it but is the traffic really there?
If you have been on myspace recently you have noticed a HUGE increase on how many profiles have been created that are 100% marketing profiles like the boost mobile profile or the personal marketing profiles like the Tera Patrick Profile.These profiles are pure marekting tools that have been created with the sole purpose of marketing a product or a person. I am sure you get the email and bulletins that are complete spam and you just over look them. This is pretty much the attitude of your myspace community. Here is a list of some things that myspace members are pretty aware of and usually look over and why it seems like the marketer is marketing to other marketers.

-Bulletin spam: the same bulletin over and over again or bulletin’s that are specifically selling a product or service.
-Email spam: Myspace spam emails can get pretty out of hand and since myspace has not truely implemented any kind of spam protection these emails are easily spotted and overlooked.
-Comment spam: comment spam is usally the same message over and over again and not specific to a person or their life so sometimes these comments are actually posted but a click through is usually far from ever happening.
-The myspace community is there for friends, family and networking NOT purchasing a product through your profile. The digg community is kinda like the myspace community.
-Over the last 6 months I have seen real people’s profiles with thousands of friends get knocked down to just there immediate friends and new networking aquantances. The myspace community is pushing away from fake profiles and more towards real people.
-The myspace community finds these spam profiles misleading, bothersome upsetting.

How to tell if you are marketing to other marketers?
-When you mass friend request usualy the people who add you back are other marketers.
-You find a large amount of comments on your site are from other marketers
-Most of your emails are from marketers and not real people inquiring about your product/service
-Your bulletin’s are complete spam

How can you make myspace marketing work?
-Make your profile an attractive womens profile.
-Right your page copy as a real person.
-Do not oversell or over push a product or service. If you are going to mention something be subtle.
-When doing timed bulletins vary the text and make them hours apart.
-Interact with people on myspace so you do not come off spammy.
-DO NOT email market but subtly talk to people and see if you can get them to advertise for you and promote you or your service for you.
-Purchase banner ads on myspace
-Purchase new sponsored links
-Remove spam comments from your profile
-Use a template and spice up your site with music and photos
-Make your profile seem like its a real person
-Make your profile seem like its a real person
-Make your profile seem like its a real person
-Make your profile seem like its a real person

NOTE: Somthing I think most social media marketers will agree on is that people need to trust your profile in order for you to be successful.

Todd Malicoat listed some great other resources for myspace marketing and I will repost them here.

• Myspace: Good for more than just hanging out
• Getting to know Myspace
• MySpace gold at MarketingVOX
• Myspace marketing
• My Social Marketing
• Much more on “myspace marketing”

I would like to add a few resources as well

• badder adder
  
• Whore Trains
• Myspace Layouts

Popularity: 10% [?]