About five months ago Google and Yahoo! announced an agreement that would allow Google to advertise on Yahoo!’s paid search result columns, and in turn allow Yahoo! to utilize Google’s AdSense program in the US and Canada. The deal was made in an attempt to strengthen Yahoo! as a corporation after Microsoft tried to take the company over.

Back in September news started leaking out that Google may throw out its deal with Yahoo!. The two companies combined currently handle 80% of internet searches all over the world. It’s understandable then why the US Justice Department was bringing up issues of possible antitrust violations.

Although the US Justice Department had already hired an antitrust litigator, Yahoo! was steadfast in calling the deal lawful, stating that “We have been informed that the Justice Department… is seeking advice from an outside consultant, but we should read nothing into that fact. We remain confident that the deal is lawful.”

Google may have seemed hopeful at first too. However, early this morning Google’s Senior VP and Chief Legal Officer, David Drummond announced that Google would not move forward on the deal.

“…after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners.” Stated Drummond in his blog.

Drummond also expressed his regret for having to pull out of the deal since the company felt that I would have been a win-win situation not only for Google and Yahoo!, but for publishers, advertisers and users as well.

Yahoo! had no comment on their Search Blog as of this posting. I’m sure there’s more to come though.

Popularity: 9%

For those who may not have heard that there was a plethora of publishers and authors attempting to sue Google.com for copyright infringement: Back in 2004 Google.com launched their book search program for which thousands of books from university libraries were scanned and made available on the World Wide Web for public consumption. The book search allowed users to search with a keyword, author name, title, etc, and Google would bring back relevant samples out of those books.

Sounds great, and it was. Unfortunately Google failed to get permission from the authors and publishers before scanning and posting their work. As a result, Google.com was sued (almost exactly three years ago to the day) in 2005 by the Author’s Guild, The Association of American Publishers and several other copyright holders for profiting from their work without properly compensating them for it.

Well on Tuesday, the two sides finally reached a settlement.

So what does this mean for Google, readers, publishers and authors? David Drummond, Google’s Chief Legal Officer stated in his Official Google Blog on Tuesday that

“This agreement is truly groundbreaking in three ways. First, it will give readers digital access to millions of in-copyright books; second, it will create a new market for authors and publishers to sell their works; and third, it will further the efforts of our library partners to preserve and maintain their collections while making books more accessible to students, readers and academic researchers.”

David Drummond, Google

Not only was Drummond pleased, but Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin expressed their excitement over the deal as well. All in all it was a very fair and beneficial ruling. Let’s do a more detailed breakdown of the settlement to see what Google, the copyright Holders and Readers can expect to happen next…

GOOGLE
The internet giant will be allowed to scan books that have a valid copyright which are also out of print. They can sell online access to individual books within digests and volumes, offer subscriptions to university databases. In the near future they should be allowed to let subscribers print the books that they search for and find on Google.com.

Google is also expected to fund and help to establish a new Book Rights Registry which will be managed by copyright holders. The purpose of this new registry is to “address the orphan works problem” by locating and representing copyright holders, make old and out of copy books more available to the public, and to distribute all royalties that Google pays out.

Of course there’s always the matter of money. Under the settlement Google will be paying out a total f $125 million as an upfront payment and an additional $34.5 million to fund the new registry.

Google Hands Over $125+ million in Settlement

PUBLISHERS AND AUTHORS
Obviously the new Book Rights Registry will be beneficial to all copyright holders since it allows them to be paid fairly for the use of their work. Aside from cashing in on 63% of Google’s book search profits, publishers and authors are getting about $45 million up front – or about sixty bucks per book.

Copyright holders will be able to have more control of how their work will be used. Google will be allowed to give non-subscribers a look at about 20% of the content in each out of print book. Subscribers will have full access to Google’s scanned out of print tomes. In order to offer the same access to in print books, Google will need permission from copyright holders.

Drummond notes in his blog that although the settlement only covers United States users and copyright holders, Google will do it’s best to respect everyone. International authors and publisher will be able to register themselves in the new Book Rights Registry so they can be paid fairly. International users will be able to search and view the full content of out of print texts, “but will not be able to preview or purchase access to books online unless these services are authorized by the rights-holder of a book.”

READERS
Under the agreement, readers will need to subscribe to services in order to view the full text of these books. They will also have greater access to more texts that they wouldn’t have other wise, which was Google’s and the copyright holders’ ultimate goal.

Thanks to a part of the agreement that allows Google and participating libraries to develop new technology and services, users and subscribers with disabilities will also have full access to these books.

For more information on the deal, you can go to Google’s press release.

Popularity: 14%

Well, SearchMonkey has been around for about a year now and there’s good news for developers and website managers/owners whose applications have been rejected by Yahoo! SearchMonkey. They may now qualify for acceptance. For those experimenting with new apps, Yahoo! has introduced their new SearchMonkey Experimental Applications Gallery. Developers can go onto Search Monkey and use the SearchMonkey Developer Tool in order to test out, post and even gain a little popularity for their Experimental Apps.

Nick Cox of Yahoo! Search states in the YSearchBlog that although guidelines for submission are pretty clear, they are willing to bend the rules a little for experimental apps that at least function as intended and don’t have any “major issues.”

Users who are looking for the newest beta applications can go to Yahoo! Search Gallery Beta and select the “Show Experimental Enhancements” link at the bottom. Right above that link it will tell users how many new experimental apps are available. From there you can play around, provide feedback directly to the developers, make feature requests and even get automatic updates on your favorites.

It’s pretty slim pickings right now, but if it’s anything like Google’s App Gallery, (and it kind of is) then I’m sure it will take off pretty quickly with the Yahoo!-lover crowd.

Popularity: 6%

Yahoo! is going to start making some their new website analytics tools available over the next few months. After it’s acquisition of IndexTools last May, Yahoo! has been working hard to develop and perfect their new service, simply named Yahoo! Web Analytics, which will provide feedback for e-biz owners, advertisement and marketing agencies, and online merchants. Complete with real time data, evaluation tools and even insights on how to adjust individual website designs to draw more traffic, this new service will help e-businesses convert more visits to sales and trim down marketing costs as well.

Yahoo! has once again proven why they are Google’s top competitor. For small businesses, Yahoo! will provide real time “enterprise level data” on their e-store including products and marketing. The Custom Microsite service provides tools to track and analyze how visitors spend their time on a merchant’s website and give owners a better idea of how to plan online branding and make their website more user friendly. The third part of Yahoo! Web Analytics, called “Yahoo! Open Strategy” (YOS) is for the developers. It was designed to provide API users with “analytics-enhanced reporting” in order to better understand user engagement and habits. These will be custom made reports and allows developers and e-biz manager follow the latest trends and visitor behaviors.

Yahoo! Web Analytics boasts ten specific services and benefits:

An Executive Dashboard which allows managers to customize the metrics, benchmarks and gauges in order to track progress, identify issues and set achievable goals. What I like about this feature is that every employee can have their own dashboard if you want them to. Personally I would stick with strictly management access, but the point is that you have a choice.

Custom Reporting Wizard allows managers to organize reports and include/exclude data according to what your business needs are.

Advanced Campaign Management measures CPC, CPM, CPA and ROI of each form of advertising. Because it’s real-time information, managers can adjust their budget, and organize reports as needed.

Real Time Segmentation analyzes each customer demographic and segment individually. This will permit managers to view how website visitors are responding to landing pages, campaigns, layouts and calls to action. It also enables managers to identify target groups of visitors so that they can better utilize their marketing budget.

The Live Cost Analysis compares search engine prices from Google, Yahoo! and MSN and integrates the data from revenue on your website, measures your paid search ROI and analyzes keyword effectiveness.

Managers can also analyze purchasing patterns, track product and product combination sales as well as preview their carts and suggest additional items they may be interested in with Yahoo!’s Merchandise Reporting feature. Reports can be created to track cancelled or changed orders and calculate your campaign’s profitability.

Scenario Analysis actually allows mangers to track visitor paths, behavior, and task completions allowing managers to redefine processes for the future as well as how those would have worked well in the past. This goes hand in had with the Advanced Path Analysis feature which allows managers to view popular user paths as a branched map.

Yahoo! Web Analytics allows managers to view and compare multiple reports side by side with their Comparative Reporting feature. Managers can bookmark reports and analyze their history to improve future processes and campaigns.

Marketing Workflow Management allows internet marketing managers to monitor the website and manage reports. This feature allows you to see how random and planned events (such as power failures, website changes or holidays) can affect website traffic. It will also send out an email alert to bring any changes to the manager’s attention. Colleagues can communicate, share notes and reports on their dashboard as well.

Popularity: 23%

When iPhones first came out the demographic was mainly affluent professionals ages 20-35. But with iPhones being increasingly accessible to the middle class and teens, more and more people are hooking themselves up with one. This is significant for e-biz owners because according to M:Metrics, more people use the iPhone to surf the net than any other mobile browser in the USA. The New York Times also reported that 58.6% of iPhone owners used their device to access and use a search engine. There are also over 350,000 iPhone in service in Europe (2007) making it #2 on the top most used mobile browsers. In the USA, people actually perform 5000% more Google searches on their iPhone than any other internet capable phone users combined.

But that’s not all. I don’t know about the rest of the world, but here in the USA teenagers have astronomical amounts of buying power. Not only do they hold their own part time jobs, but they also have tremendous influence over their parent’s purchases. According to the US National Center for Education (2008), there are approximately 15 million high school students and 8% of them (or 1.2 million) own an iPhone. In spring of 2008 about 9% of teens who did not already own an iPhone wanted to buy one. In six months that number jumped to 22%. Out of all the students who planned on purchasing a new phone in the next six months, 33% of them specifically said they wanted an iPhone.

Anyone in the marketing field knows that technology such as smart phones and the internet have become important parts of teenage life. They are incredibly dependent on these as an intricate part of their lives in school as a learning tool, socially outside of school and for recreational browsing. Granted they aren’t the only customers that businesses should cater to, but they are the immediate future of internet browsing and purchasing. Their habits are the future habits of America.

So the question remains: Do you have an iPhone friendly website?

With phones being so much more than just phones, it’s important that websites and bloggers ensure they are iPhone compatible. By either making your current website iPhone compatible or setting up an additional iPhone compatible website, you are making yourself more accessible to customers. Not only that, but your original site will collect more quality links for it.

There are two problems that iPhone users face when using their mobile browser. The first is a download speed that is slightly slower than their desktop counterparts. The second is the small screen resolution of only 320×480. Website managers need to develop a site that loads quickly and doesn’t force users to scroll through the page as much. They can do this by reducing (or eliminating) any unnecessarily large pictures, Flash or “heavy” content from the new/updated website. Also, many websites are optimizing, coding and configuring themselves to work with iPhones accelerometer so that different content can be displayed by holding the iPhone different ways.

It’s also a good idea to start developing some relevant iPhone apps. Applications for the iPod are relatively inexpensive and they are a huge market right now. In economically hard times, the iPhone apps can be considered a small, affordable luxury and provide the user with news, games, weather, music or whatever. Creating your own application not only helps to drive traffic to your website, but can make you a little extra on the side as well.

There are websites that can help you build apps and configure your website for use on the iPhone as well as other smart phone brands. However, you may at some point reach a point of difficulty that a professional becomes necessary. Whatever you decide keep in mind that the iPhones have been and will most likely to remain the most popular mobile browser in the world. But after the iPod phenomenon, did we really expect anything less from them?

Popularity: 18%

Cyber criminals certainly leave no stone unturned. They have now started to use our own traffic impetus against us by monitoring Google Trend during peak sear hours. What are the looking for? Webroot issued an advisory recently stating that hackers are gathering the top news stories, videos and searches from Google Trends and posting on their own faux blogs. The Director of Threat Research at Webroot, Paul Piccard stated:

“These highly relevant news stories and videos are being posted to the hackers’ fake blogs to increase the site’s Google search rankings.”

Webroot went on to state that “These fraudulent blogs contain several video links about the news story for which the users were originally searching. Once a user clicks on one of the video links, they are prompted to download a video codec that downloads a rogue antispyware program designed to goad the user into purchasing an illegitimate program that may put their personal information and data at even greater risk.”

The motivation behind all this is not surprising. There’s a lot of money to be made and according to Dancho Danchev, an independent security consultant and cyber threat analyst, ten or more malware blogs can start to appear in the top ten result pages in less than an hour. “Upon clicking the link, the user is exposed to the typical ActiveX Object Error message that is attempting to trick them into installing TrojanDownloader:Win32/Zlob.AMV with 10 out of 36 AV scanners currently detecting it (27.78%).” stated Danchev.

Granted, black hat is nothing new. What is unique is the fact that by using this ongoing research technique cyber criminals actually have a better chance of increasing their traffic and getting users to purchase their malware-ridden products.

How can you protect yourself? Webroot gives these five tips:

1. Always have a current version of antispyware, antivirus and firewall product;

2. Never download free product or purchase them from unknown Web sites and vendors, or peer
to peer networks;

3. Download videos and other multimedia files only from known and trusted Web sites or blogs;

4. Make sure the computer is up-to-date by always installing the latest Microsoft or Apple
security updates; and,

5. Use a credit card that has sufficient fraud protection when shopping and never use a debit
card online.

Popularity: 25%

Making social networks personal

You are a part of one or have seen heaps of buzz about them. Social networks are here to stay and are only going to get bigger.

From an advertiser’s perspective it’s pretty hard to grab someone’s attention and keep them focused on your adverts. So many times have I seen companies pour millions of dollars down the drain on social network advertising, in the hope that people will buy their products or services?

So why doesn’t advertising work on social networks?

All the online marketing gurus say it’s about building brand awareness, and it is to some extent. But if you have been in the business long enough, you’ll know that measuring brand effectiveness can be very expensive and time consuming. There are a lot of companies out there that provide these services such as Nielson Buzz Metrics, but be warned – only if you’re willing to spend the big bucks.
Don’t get me wrong, BRAND is important, but like any sales or marketing person will say “Show me the money!”

So how can we leverage off social networks and actually take some ROI?

I have a theory and as cliché as it might sound, it’s about getting personal and understanding the “4 core elements” of personality groups and targeting them based on their characteristics.

If you are a marketer or not, most companies target their databases into areas that are functional, beneficial and emotionally appealing – which is mostly known as the value proposition. But before that is concluded they break their databases down into segments which are usually based on primary and secondary research.

Online segmentation is however measured differently as other elements come into play such as time spent, bounce rates, etc. This can be very difficult to do and is also extremely time consuming.
But what if there were another way to segment and target a core set of consumers online based on your value proposition? I believe you can – through social networks.

I strongly believe that the future of online targeting will be based on a person’s characteristics.

Here are some advantages:

• Personalised communication strategies for campaigns
• Greater understanding of behavioural patterns
• Making each experience relevant, personal and engaging

Now here comes the cliché part, based on astrology (I know, for all you men out here banging your heads against the wall, there is some logic behind this) you can “assume” all people share common characteristics based on their element sign.

These are broken down into 4 elements:

• Fire = Leo, Aries & Sagittarius
Are known to be; irresponsible, impatient, boastful, positive, extraverted, active, creative, ingenious, dynamic, highly energetic, outspoken, fiery temper, passionate, emotionally intense

• Water = Scorpio, Cancer, Pisces
Are known to be; deeply intuitive, imaginative, emotional, reserved, not gregarious, exceedingly passionate, self pity, sensitive, pessimistic, overly vague, secretive

• Earth = Capricorn, Virgo, Taurus
As known to be; stable, practical, realistic, cautious, hard-working, dependable, highly materialistic, inhibited, introverted, down to earth, calm

• Air = Gemini, Libra, Aquarius
Are known to be; free spirited, philosophical, intellectual, open minded, idealistic, adventurous, restless, unpredictable, interactive, extraverted, emotionally aloof, opinionated

Even if you don’t believe in astrology – it’s about finding the right set of ‘people characteristics’ for your product or service. Understanding the personality that wants or needs your products or services is important and knowing how to leverage on that.

Because at the end of the day, they will be your distribution channel when it comes to word of mouth or recommending your product or service to other people online and offline.

So having the right personality representing your brand will be just as important as the way you communicate across all channels.

Popularity: 28%

SEO is one of the most important online marketing trends available right now. Almost everyone knows that you need good quality text, keywords and links combined with lots of popularity and a good reputation to make it big. But it’s also important to take a holistic view of your online business pages. Your website is a valuable SEO tool in itself. By building (or remodeling,) your website so that it’s more easily accessible to spiders, you can boost your search engine score astronomically. It’s also important to have the “SEO-friendly website” conversation with your website design company and/or SEO firm if you have one to make sure that they on the same page as you. So with out further ado, here are some things that you should keep in mind when building or redesigning your website:

1. Content, Keywords and Links. As always ensure that your content, keywords and links are unique, of good quality and relevant to your business. Your back links should also be relevant so be sure to look out for and reject illogical links. Use absolute links which are less likely to have issues, but also allow you to get more backlink love if your content gets scraped. Remember that when it comes to keywords there is such thing as “too many” so don’t overdo it.

2. Make your links and keywords easily accessible to spiders. Drop down menus make the website user friendly, but they aren’t spider friendly. Somewhere on the page you should be placing good old-fashioned text links so spiders can find them. Also, be aware that SPIDERS CAN NOT CRAWL IMAGES OR FLASH. Be sure to label everything with text and include text descriptions so that spiders can find it more easily. Use minimal AJAX and Flash, and you shouldn’t be using frames at all.

3. Viral Videos and Pics. Enable the “Enhanced Image Search” option and list a video sitemap in your Google Webmaster Central account. Also, get your videos played on viral sites like YouTube, AOL, MSN, Yahoo, Metacafe and MySpace. All these places are crawled by Google. When posting captions and descriptions for pics and videos use words like “image” “pics” or “video” since many searches for pictures or videos include obvious words like that.

<img

4. Unique Title Tags. Make sure that each title tag on your website is different and has a keyword in it. Don’t put your company name in there unless you are so big and popular that people ask for you by name. In other words, unless you’re Wal-Mart, Gucci, or Vera Wang, you should put your name somewhere else on the page… like at the end.

5. Interior linkage. When linking pages within your website, don’t simply hyperlink the words “click here”. Use keywords instead. So if you’re selling diamonds then hyperlink the phrase “Buy Wholesale Diamonds” or “Wholesale Diamond Information”. Also, if you have “index” associated with your home page (ie: DelawareDiamonds.com/index.html) then be sure to arrange it so you’re not splitting your links. You don’t need index.html, default.php or any of those. Your URL should just be your URL with a plain-Jane dotcom (net, org, edu or whatever) ending. When linking internally though, spiders and search engines don’t pay attention to your URL file extension.

6. Location, Location, Location. If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, be aware of local search keywords. Don’t be afraid to put your location (i.e. Florida, New York, Presque Island,) into your keyword phrases. “Delaware Diamonds,” “New York Fashion” or even just “Presque Island Store” instead of “our store” helps people find you better. This is especially important if you count on your customers finding you online, and buying your products/services in-store.

7. Make sure to buy up any similar URLs to yours and have them redirect to your website. This is not the same thing as creating doorways, gates or mirror sites. What this does mean is that if your original URL is http://www.happybusiness.com then you could buy up http://happybusiness.com, happybusiness.net, happybusiness.org, and have them all automatically and instantly redirect to your original site. This typically works well for website URLs which are commonly misspelled by searchers. A good example is Barnes and Noble: you can enter www.barnesandnoble.com into your address bar and you’ll automatically be redirected to www.bn.com. Just a note though before you go buying up URLs; Don’t buy up links that haven’t been updated or used in over a month. The best way to tell is to do a Google search for “cache” plus whatever website your looking for. i.e.: “cache:www.whateverwebsite.com”

8. Sticky Forwarding. If you’re completely renovating your website and changing domain names then be sure to use “sticky forwarding.” This will allow users to get redirected from your old site to your new one and help them transition through the change better.

9. Check Yourself. Google up some server header checkers (you can actually do a search for “Check Server Header”) to get a tool that will check your redirected websites. You should be popping up with a report that says: ‘301 moved permanently” or “200 OK” if they are set up and used the right way. If not, either fix them or get someone to do it for you.

10. Guilt By Association. Make sure to run occasional blacklist checks if you are running on a shared server to make sure that you’re not sharing space with any banned or notoriously shady websites. This could actually affect your ratings with search engines. It also helps to make sure that your domain ownership information is visible by search engines.

11. Sponsorship. Philanthropy is actually rewarded by most search engines. Find non-profit organizations on the web, see if they are looking for sponsors and reap the benefits of those back links.

12. RSS Optimization. It is what it sounds like. You need to be optimizing your RSS feed the same way you would any of your web pages.

13. Beneficial Blogging. Your title tag and blog title are two different things so make sure you’re optimizing both separately. Use a “call to action” style of blogging where you provoke people to respond or react to what you’re blogging about. Also see if you can get someone of influence to post something special on you blog. Build up to it ahead of time: i.e. “Coffee Guru, Joe Schmoe will be posting with us on October 10th!” You can also ask the person of influence to post comments and opinions on blogs that you’ve written.

14. Social Networking is SEO. You can’t do SEO nowadays without incorporating social networking into the mix. Websites like Digg, Facebook, Twitter and Del.icio.us have become SEO essentials. Also, adding components like blogs, podcasts, social content, reviews, sharing apps, user ratings and comments help to boost your website’s “viral appeal.” It does take extra time and effort to do this right and not spam every blog you come across so make sure that you or whoever you hire knows what they’re doing so your website doesn’t get penalized.

15. Quality not Quantity. I know I talk a lot about page rank, but it’s actually not so important that you’re #1. There are plenty of websites that outrank the #1 spotters in hits, quality, sales and time spent on the site simply because the lesser-ranked website has better and more relevant content. Another important thing to do is keep adding to or refreshing the content that you have to legitimize your website to search engines. You should be adding new content or changing content about 3-5 times a week to keep spiders happy.

Popularity: 28%

Web directories are not search engines. They are categorized lists of websites and function much like an online version of the yellow pages. Web directories are also not considered to be link farms which makes it a beneficial place to put your website address and work your way up in the search engines. In fact you’ve probably come accross Google , Yahoo!, Mozilla and MSN which all have their own directory listing sites. There are many others too if you are willing to search for them.

How you get listed in a directory is completely up how much you want to pay and where you go. Some websites will offer free submission or will list you at no cost if you are willing to add their link to your page. Be wary of free directories though since depending on how legitimate they are, you could end up getting penalized for link farming. More importantly though, you should consider paid submission sites because they practically never have a no-follow application which means your website will do better in search engine rank/ratings.

You have to be careful when submitting your website for consideration to a directory. Submissions are usually evaluated by real-live humans who are looking for spammers, black hatters and bogus or scammy websites. In order to let them know you’re legit, be sure to submit your website to the right category. If the directory doesn’t have a category that you really fit into, then suggest one and explain why you think you should be put there.

Hitting the web and doing some research on the directories that you want to submit to is the best way to ensure acceptance. Create a list of directories that you would like to be placed on and start looking into them. Some things you’re going to need to know are:

Mimic the Manager/Editor’s Preferred Style. Writing a very precise description that imitates the directory editor’s style will make it easier for him/her to accept you quickly and with few, if any alterations to what you’ve written. You can find this out by searching for businesses with similar keywords that have already been accepted. Look at their descriptions, keywords and categories and submit your keywords, description and category suggestion based on what you’ve found.

Equal, but Different. Ensure that although you descriptive style resembles that of the other businesses, your description still accurately reflects your unique business services. In other words if your company provides five specialized services or has a unique target market, then be sure to include that information.

The Long and Short of it. The criteria for business descriptions can be vary greatly from web directory to web directory. It’s useful to have several descriptions ready of different lengths. Have one that’s 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, and 200 words long. You should certainly include 1-5 keywords (one for every 10 - 20 words perhaps) but don’t stuff them in or make them too obvious since that will get you rejected. Keywords are allowed by web directories, but they certainly aren’t going to accept sketchy submissions.

Industry vs General Directories. When submitting to a web directory, keep in mind the type of directory it’s marketing itself as. Always be sure that your content belongs in the category you selected, your information is unique and your keywords aren’t crammed in there like a pack of sardines. You also want to place your keywords correctly so that search engines can pick them up easily. Only choose keywords that your company uses in the name or title of your website. Anything else may look suspicious and the directory manager will remove them.

Additional Things to Keep in Mind:
Always submit your homepage first. You can submit more specific web pages later, but it’s good form to start with the basics. Chances are that your individual web pages will be accepted if your main web site was.

Keep in mind that directories rank websites by keyword popularity within each category. I can’t reiterate enough that if you don’t typically use a keyword for your website in the title or business name, then don’t use it in your description. It will only get you rejected for looking like a spammer.

If you do get rejected you can resubmit your website after about four weeks, but don’t resubmit more than three times. After that contact the directory manager and find out what you can do to get in there. Sometimes it’s your keywords, submission lengths or maybe it’s your website. Getting into directories can help boost your rankings and they don’t have as stringent rules as search engines. If you aren’t successfully complying with them then you certainly aren’t going to rank well in search engines either. It would be beneficial for your website to find out what you can do differently and accommodate their standards.

Popularity: 28%

Over the past year or two I’ve been hearing quite a bit about Gray Hat SEO. There seems to be a few ideas out there on what Gray Hat is and how it is achieved. This in itself makes it a “gray area” thus possibly earning its name no matter what the actual definition. Either way, the tactic is always questionable and borders on Black Hat, if not crosses the line completely. It’s a highly debatable issue, but here are the major veins of reasoning in regard to what Gray Hat SEO is and why it’s used.

1. New SEO tactics that wouldn’t necessarily be considered White Hat because still they involve manipulating content, keywords, codes, web pages and/or URLs to increase SE score and rank. On the other hand, they haven’t been deemed Black Hat by search engines yet. (Emphasis on yet.)

2. Another form of Gray Hat tactics are those that have been deemed Black Hat techniques, but are subdued to a point that search engines won’t pick up on it. An example might be keyword stuffing just under a concentration that a crawler would notice. However, there will usually be a high enough keyword density that a reader would be able to pick up on it.

3. Many people believe that Gray Hat SEO is Black Hat techniques which managers use in ethical ways, thus justifying the behavior. The reasoning is that Black Hat is typically used to spread spam, viruses, malware or promote scam-products or services. Legitimate businesses who are trying to increase their page rank feel that using some Black Hat tactics are okay because they aren’t spreading spam or causing harm to others. These “lesser offenses” won’t get them banned, but could get them penalized.

4. A fourth theory is that because search engines basically give score/rank on two things: Good search engine results, and lots of visitors. Gray Hat uses mild black hat methods to achieve white hat results in search engines in order to get visitors, but ensures that those surfers are getting the relevant and quality information they were looking for. This sort of goes along with all three of the examples above.

Gray Hat SEO tactics generally take longer to discover than Black Hat because the intent isn’t necessarily malicious. However even though you may take two steps forward by using Gray Hat, eventually search engines will have you taking three steps back. It takes longer, but White Hat has an advantage over other methods because the results are long term and ultimately bring in more traffic (and cash) over time. So really, it’s not an ethics issue. For true SEO marketing professionals, it’s just plain common sense.

Popularity: 28%