WebDesignsBlog.com

• On-page factors and off-page factors
• A single factor is more important than all other factors
• Don’t think that you already know t

Regarding on-page factors, the content of your web pages is important, the position of your keywords in your web page elements is important, the keyword density matters and much more.

When it comes to off-page factors, the number of the links that point to your website is very important. It’s also important that the the links to your website contain your keywords and that the links are from related websites.

All of these factors are important. However, there is another factor that is even more important than the other ones. That single factor will determine whether your search engine optimization activities will be successful or not. Full article.

The software maker is announcing Office Live Workspace, a free online tool for viewing, sharing and storing–but not editing–Office documents online. (Its existing Office Live efforts will be rebranded as Office Live Small Business.) It’s not quite ready–starting Monday customers will be able to put in their name to be part of a beta testing program expected to begin later this year.

Still, the effort is a recognition that competition is heating up in the productivity arena, an area that large rivals had basically ceded to Microsoft a few years ago. In addition to Google’s effort, which as of earlier this month also includes presentation software, IBM announced its free Lotus Symphony productivity software, which prompted 100,000 downloads in its first week of availability.

Adobe, meanwhile, on Monday is expected to announce it has acquired Virtual Ubiquity, a start-up that has built a Web-based word processor, called Buzzword, using Adobe’s Flash and AIR technologies. Adobe is also introducing a service, code-named Share, that allows people to share and store documents via the Web. Full Article.

Microsoft had high expectations for customer adoption of Vista, and claimed the launch would be one of the most successful in Windows history. Unfortunately for the company, those predictions so far haven’t panned out, and in July, Microsoft lowered its projections for customer adoption of Vista. The company had said the split between XP and Vista sales in its fiscal year ending June 30, 2008, would be 15 percent to 85 percent; now the company is saying the split will be 22 percent XP and 78 percent Vista.

According to some, that may even be optimistic. Paul Ghysels, a custom system builder who owns the Neighborhood Computer Store in Moraga, California, said that Microsoft has “really blown Vista.” He said he’s not surprised Microsoft extended the availability of XP for OEMs. “I figured Microsoft would have to come up with something because Vista is so unprepared for the market right now,” Ghysels said. Full article.

We’ve rolled out some changes to our index with fresh web data and updates to our crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the last few days. We expect the update will be completed very soon. Throughout this process you may see some changes in ranking as well as some shuffling of the pages in the index.

This is the first update after the launch of Dynamic URL Rewriting in Site Explorer. We’ve had millions of URLs rewritten based on your submissions and your sites should have seen smarter crawling from Yahoo! Slurp as a result. You will see further benefits in how your site is represented in the index from this update. Your input improves relevance and coverage for users in search results, particularly in relation to your site. Full article.

DMOZ is made up of thousands of passionate, volunteer category enthusiasts and experts from all over the world who donate their time to arrange their respective portion of the web. Thanks to their work, DMOZ is a starting place for browsing and searching the web. DMOZ data is also used by thousands of search engines and web portals to help people quickly and easily find information on the web.

To paraphrase Mark Twain, the rumors of DMOZ’s death have been greatly exaggerated.

The editor community is very much alive and thriving. Thousands of new sites are added and updated every week, and we continue to receive hundreds of editor applications and suggested sites every day. Full Article.

What is the Conversion Optimizer?

The Conversion Optimizer (beta) is an AdWords feature that manages your advertising costs around specific conversion goals.

Suppose you know how much you’re willing to pay for a conversion, and you know that your ads get better conversion rates on certain days of the week. Normally, you’d spend time monitoring and adjusting your cost-per-click (CPC) bids in order to get more conversions for a lower cost.

With the Conversion Optimizer, this process is automated. You still pay per click, but instead of setting CPC bids, you simply specify a maximum cost-per-acquisition (CPA) bid for each ad group. The Conversion Optimizer manages your CPC bids for you, making adjustments and showing your ads only when you’re likely to get conversions.

To determine when to show your ads, the Conversion Optimizer predicts a conversion rate for your ads every time they’re eligible to appear. This prediction is based on various factors. For example, here are some of the factors that affect the conversion rate on Kim’s custom shirt website:

The search query. Kim’s conversion rate is higher when users search for custom shirts than when they search for shirts.
The location of the user. Her conversion rate is highest when her ad shows in New York.
The conversion history of particular sites. When her ad shows on certain types of content sites in the Google Network, Kim is more likely to get conversions. Full Article.

Not tonight, Honey. I’m online.
Sound familiar? A survey of about 1,000 Americans showed that the Internet has become such an essential part of their every-day lives that 28% said they spend less time socializing with friends because of it. And 20% said they spend less time having sex because they’re too busy online, according to a study by advertising agency JWT.

“It’s clear that there’s been a huge cumulative shift in what we do and what we pay attention to, thanks to new technologies,” said Bob Jeffrey, chairman and CEO of JWT, in a written statement. “Increasingly, you will see the emergence of truly passionate ‘digitivity denizens,’ or people who thrive in a technology-enabled universe. They see their cell phones as extensions of themselves, their online and offline lives are co-mingled, and they would choose a Wi-Fi connection over television any day. Trending younger, these are people who don’t distinguish between old and new media — in fact, new media is not thought of as new, it’s just media.” Full article.

The program applies only to Windows Vista Business and Ultimate versions, and it is up to PC makers to decide how, if at all, they want to make XP available. Fujitsu has been among the most aggressive, starting last month to include an XP disc in the box with its laptops and tablets.

“That’s going to help out small- and medium-size businesses,” Fujitsu marketing manager Brandon Farris told CNET News.com.

Hewlett-Packard also started a program in August for many of its business models. “For business desktops, workstations and select business notebooks and tablet PCs, customers can configure their systems to include the XP Pro restore disc for little or no charge,” HP spokeswoman Tiffany Smith said in an e-mail. She said it was too soon to gauge how high customer interest has been. “Since we’ve only been offering (it) for about a month, we don’t really have anything to share on demand.” Full article.

At stake is the future of how we interact with software: by logging online to free applications provided by groups such as Google, or by buying costly boxed software from behemoths such as Microsoft.

For the past year or so, Google has been quietly promoting its online range of free software, including the Gmail email service and its Docs and Spreadsheets programs for creating Office-style documents.

But its executives have denied they’re trying to take serious business away from the omnipotent Microsoft Office: just providing a handy little service for consumers, they have said. Full article.

The big problem with third-party auditors is that they continue to count “fictitious clicks,” clicks that Google doesn’t count as clicks at all, in click fraud estimates. Here’s one major example: Users click on a Google ad on Google.com or an Adsense site.

 When they land on the advertiser’s site, they click on products, hitting the “back” button to go back to the landing page. Many browsers reload the landing page each time. We don’t count those as clicks, but third-party auditors actually register each click on the “back” button as another click on an ad, which grossly overestimates the number of ad clicks.  Full article.