The original deal between the two was set to expire on December 19th. This allowed AOL to shop around for possible new partners to power their search.

One was Microsoft, who were especially interested in providing AOL with their Bing search services.  Since announcing Bing, Microsoft has managed to make a dent in Google’s share of the search market this includes their partnership with Yahoo.

It is going to be interesting to see how the search landscape plays out over the next few months.  Google is still the king of the hill and although Microsoft is giving a valiant effort, will it ever be enough to dethrone the search king?

A: TRUE – That is if it’s  done properly. Writing articles is a great way to deliver more link love to your website. However, there are right and wrong ways to do this. The wrong way is to write an article and pack it with too many keywords or the same one too many times. Keyword stuffing can hurt you more than help you. Another wrong way is to submit that same article, which was written incorrectly to a lot of article based websites. This results in the article being difficult to read and understand from a human perspective. Also, the search engines can tell that you are trying to get ranked for a keyword stuffed article that is all over the place.

The proper way to utilize this strategy is to focus on a primary keyword and phrase. Then when writing the article place it just 5 times – once in the title, once in the opening sentence, once in the first paragraph, once in  the last paragraph and once in the closing sentence. You’re going to  also want to add the keyword to the resource box. Only twice in the article will I place a direct link on the target keyword to my target URL.

When your article is ready for distribution you want to use a quality service, or internal resources that can produce as many variations of your article as possible without compromising quality or readability.

This now means that combined, Yahoo! and Bing now own close to 30% of the search market. Even though this is still less than half of Google’s 65% share, it is still a significant piece of the market.

Everything with Yahoo! search still looks and feels the same, but Bing’s search results will be what show up. The new Bing powered Yahoo! search is currently only in English and only operating in the U.S. and Canada, with plans to include other languages in the months and weeks to come.

Microsoft is also working on transferring over Yahoo! search advertisers to Microsoft’s adCenter platform. This is still under development, but Microsoft predicts this will be completed later this fall.

1. Go to your Facebook account’s “Privacy Settings.”
2. Click “Customize settings” in the “Sharing on Facebook” section.
3. Under “Things I share” click the option box next to “Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in.”

You now have switched off the self check in for Places, but your Facebook friends still can. By turning off this feature you won’t have to worry about check-in requests.

1. Go to your Facebook account’s “Privacy Settings.”
2. Click “Customize settings” in the “Sharing on Facebook” section.
3. Under “Things others share,” locate the option “Friends can check me into Places.”
4. Select “Disable” from the list of options. You have now disabled this feature.

A: FALSE – You will be able to maintain your ranking if you have been trained in SEO. You would need the SEO company you hired to educate you and your team on how they achieved your competitive ranking. If you aren’t fluent with SEO chances are you will lose your ranking. Why? A lot reasons come to mind, but consider this metaphor: You start a specific weight loss and exercise program. Your days are now filled with activity, sweat and tears. Your meals have changed and are now healthier. You get the proper amount of rest, water and vitamins every day. This process continue and the results progress in a positive direction each month. At 9 months you have almost reached your goal and the target is near. Then you decide to stop exercising every day. After a week you start eating at Mc Donalds once a day. You start to change your positive ways and the results you achieved are now going in a negative direction.

While this example may be a little extreme, you get the point. Once achieving a target ranking you now have to maintain that position. While the efforts may not be that extreme as it took to get you there, regular maintenance and new work is necessary. Competitive analysis is now a must. If you bump a top competitor out of #1 they are going to notice and will most likely retaliate. New competitors may come up as well. You need to be able to maintain a competitive advantage when it comes to your SEO campaign.

So no, I would not flat out fire that SEO company. I would discuss your options on how to maintain that ranking and become more proactive and reactive to changes. You may be able to take on some responsibilities and save some money.

However, there are a few things you are going need to know about Facebook Places before you decide to use the feature.

• You are going to need a smartphone, specifically an iPhone. There are plans for Android and Blackberry versions of Facebook Places to be developed.
• If you don’t have a smarthphone you will need to use the Facebook touch mobile site and have a browser that supports both HTML 5 and Geolocation.
• Users will have to live in the U.S. Facebook has not announced any international launch dates yet.

Places and Other Geolocation Services

Facebook is allowing certain data to be available for all developers to access parts of Places. This will allow applications to pull information about people, locations and groups all right from Facebook Places.

As of right now, there are only a few applications that are pulling information from Places. To start, Gowalla, Foursqaure, Booyah and Yelp will be integrated with Facebook Places.

Places for Businesses and Developers

Businesses can use Places to give Facebook their location. Anyone can add a business on Places, but it will be up to the business to claim their place. Once your location is claimed, it will then turn into a Facebook page. However, Places can only be claimed by official representatives of that business. They will need to present some sort of documentation to verify their place.

Developers will be able to use one of Places API in their applications. Facebook will be launching a read API, which will collect data on checkins from indentified users, their friends and public data about Places. Facebook has also developed a Write and Search API (both currently in beta) that will allow third party applications to publish checkins and have access to Places data.

Are There Privacy Issues?

Mr. Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, claims Places isn’t about sharing your location with the world, but more about finding places and then sharing them with your friends. Okay, so what does that mean?

Well, like everything you do on Facebook, your checkins will show up on your profile, in the activity stream and news feed. Also, it should be known that your friends can check you in without your consent.

Facebook has addressed these in their privacy settings, but like the rest of Facebook’s features you will have to opt-out or customize them to your liking. With all this information being shared by default it will probably be a good idea to adjust your privacy settings before you make a commitment to Places.

Even in its infancy Facebook Places is already setting the bar high for location based services. What are your thoughts on Facebook Places? How will users and businesses react to this new feature? Please feel free to leave a comment expressing your opinion.

A: FALSE. Paid links work. NOTE – That is a loaded answer and buying links comes with serious risks. Paying for links is the practice of buying a text link, or a link on an image that points back to a target website for the sole purpose of increasing your backlink profile. This helps to increase your rankings in search engines for that selected keyword or phrase. The more links you have, on an on-going basis the better. However, you need to consider these important factors:

• Research is very, very important. You want to make sure that your links come from relevant sites. If you are selling insurance then a link from a high PR weight loss blog is useless.
• If a site looks like it is selling links then stay clear. You could be penalized.
• Mix it up a little, use links on blogrolls, partner pages, friends, etc.
• Be careful to not use the same anchor text all the time for a prolonged period.
• Do not ingest too many links at once. If you get 1,000 links to your insurance site in 10 days you’d better make sure that you were featured on CNN and the NY Times. Otherwise you are creating a footprint and throwing up red flags for the Google SPAM Team to act on.
• We call it “link-humping”, or the practice of looking for links. Keep in mind it is hard work. There are a few notable services out there that can provide you a platform to research and purchase links on a monthly, yearly, etc basis. Do research and make sure that the sites you buy links on with these services are where you want to be, and monitor to make sure you do not get a negative effect.
• Don’t just buy from where your competitors buy. Do research, “hump” and find your own list of quality sites.
• Don’t be afraid to contact webmasters, site owners or managers directly and ask for a link, or offer to purchase or “donate” for a link placement. You’d be amazed.
• You can sponsor, donate or be charitable to organizations out there. I am sure they can also show thanks with a link or a logo on their site.
• Finally, monitor your success. Are the links working for the cost? Consider hard $ costs and your time as well. They need to give you a boost or they are junk. Not all links are good forever.

We have our own techniques over here at TM, but I can’t just give them away. Okay, I’m not that stingy, I’ll share with you a thing or two about link building.

Here are several things you should know about links for SEO:

Utilize Different Link Types

• Diversity is imperative when it comes to links – you want different people and different sites linking back to you.
• If every single one of your links are all from relevant sites in your industry it could cause the search engines to think your link building was unnatural.
• A quality backlink portfolio will include articles, press releases, directories, and blogs. Remember, the mix of link types together is going to help your link building efforts.

Same Thing for Anchor Text

• Use multiple keywords within your anchor text to make sure your link building efforts look more natural.
• Use variations of your keyword phrases. If you are having a sale try using something like, “End of Summer Sale” in place of your more routinely used keywords.
• These links will help your entire campaign by making your efforts appear more natural and passing link juice to your site.

Have Links Relevant to Your Audience

• It’s important to have relevant links to your site, but MORE important that these links are relevant to your site’s audience.
• If the links appear relevant to the users on your site, then the search engines will recognize the purpose of the link.
• Having a mix of links from relevant industry sites and other strong friendly sites is an effective approach.

Deep Linking Inside Your Site

• When you are focusing on specific keywords for link building, it will be beneficial to link to the most relevant related page within your site.
• If you are linking to a subpage it is important for that page to be optimized for the keywords you are focusing on.
• This will also help you rank for the specific pages you want to on the search engine result pages (SERPs).
• Content is still important to help your link building efforts. By deep linking into each page of your site all of your content will be indexed by the search engines.

With Links, Age Isn’t Just a Number

• Recently Google began to put more value on the age of a link in order to battle spammers. Google needs to crawl a link a few times before it can determine its credibility, so give your new links 3-6 months to fully index.
• Link age says a lot about your link building campaign and can determine how effective your backlink portfolio is for your site.
• As you acquire new links their value will grow with their age, which will then increase more value to your site as a whole.

These link building strategies can often go forgotten when you are developing an SEO campaign focusing on links. Most of the time link builders are focusing on finding that one link; they forget that diversity is what is important. Don’t get me wrong it’s great to have high quality links, but it will help your efforts if your link building campaign looks organic and natural. Plus, if you are building your brand’s online presence doesn’t it make sense to have your links in more than one spot?

I understand it is easy to get overwhelmed and confused when it comes to finding link building techniques that work. It’s ok, we are here to help, feel free to contact us for help with your link building, SEO or anything else internet marketing related – we do it all.

A: A location-based game (or location-enabled game) is one in which the game play somehow evolves and progresses via a player’s location and there actions. Thus, location-based games almost always support some kind of localization technology. For example, the use of satellite positioning technology like GPS. Also, there are the popular location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla. “Urban gaming” or “Street Games” are typically multi-player location-based games played out on city streets and built up urban environments.

Can they be beneficial for your company to use? Yes, you just need the proper budget and planning. They can create a “digital buzz” in a specific area, which can socially expand your brand name and recognition. The key component would be for users to gain knowledge of your company and product that would direct them to experience your brand. Then you would be able to track conversion from the campaign in to potential leads or sales.

How many times have you listened to someone’s story about “…I had that idea about (insert awesome popular website company) and if I would have executed it, I would be a billionaire!”

What delusional and pathetic logic they have. Having a great idea for a new website or start-up has absolutely nothing to do with creating a company. Doing something matters, not what you think, say or plan. Do you think your idea for your company or new start-up is that valuable? Then go and try to sell it, let’s see what you get for it. Until you actually start making something, your brilliant idea is just that, an idea. The problem with ideas is that everyone has one.

Stanley Kubrick, a famous filmmaker, gave advice to aspiring filmmakers that was simple and to the point. “Get a camera and start shooting something, anything you want.” See, Kubrick knew that when you are new at something, you need to start creating. The most important step is to just “start.” You will make mistakes; you’re suppose to. It is how you learn from them that will determine how you progress towards reaching the status of “successful.”

Remember ideas are plentiful and cheap. Your original idea is negligible. How you execute is the real story teller.

If you have an idea for an internet start-up, maybe a clash of three different ideas with a twist – call us. Schedule some time to come in and discuss. We can set you on the right path, show you what needs to be accomplished, and show you how you can make revenue from your idea. Heck, we may even want to be your partner Mr./Mrs. “I have the new Ebay.”