Here’s a simple & cheap way to have your press release (along with links to your product or site of course) show up in Google News’s results in about 10 minutes.

1. Just go to www.webwire.com & register their. (it’s free)

2. Click the Submit A Release button inside your account dashboard

3. Create your press release (Tips on writing a press release here)

4. Use their ‘webpost service’ (about 20 bucks) & your press release will show up in Google News & many other major online news sites within minutes.

Also be sure to do your keyword research & use your release not only for traffic & publicity but to build your backlinks too.

Technorati Tags: google news, google news traffic, Targeted Traffic

Google Buzz’s privacy settings are a disgrace. Not only do you start automatically following people who you email a lot but everyone can see who you’re following!

Fictional Scenario (Thank God!)

You’ve been mailing an ex-girlfriend something your current girlfriend didn’t know about and now due to Google Buzz’s sloppy privacy you automatically follow her publicly!

And now your current girlfriend can click a link in her buzz account to see everyone that your following. SHOCK HORROR fight ensues!

This is just a simple example of why Google’s privacy settings are just plain stupid & I’ve commented on Google’s view on privacy before which really annoyed me but this most recent foray into making everything and anything public really pissed me off.

So here’s a step by step guide on how to hide the people you are following & the people following you from preying eyes.

1. Log into Gmail

2. Click the buzz link to the left

3. Click your name just above where you would enter a status update

4. Click the Google Profile link

5. Click edit profile

6. Uncheck the box beside “Display the list of people I’m following and people following me”

7. Click “save changes” at the bottom of the page.

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,”

That is what Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt had to say in a CNBC interview with Maria Bartiromo with regards Google & your privacy. You can watch a video of the interview at Gawker

Personally I believe that this is one of the most stupid statements any human being can make, not mind the CEO of a company who knows more about people and their habits then the Government! Of course I’m sure Mr Schmidt has nothing he’d like to keep to himself.

Technorati Tags: eric schmidt, eric schmidt ceo, eric schmidt privacy, google, google privacy

There’s nothing better then free traffic & when that traffic
is highly targeted towards your product or service it’s
even better because you’re guaranteed to make some big bucks.

One of the best sources of free traffic is the Search Engines &
I just finished reading (for maybe the 5th time!) “SEO Made Easy” a free guide to Search Engine
Optimization & it’s something you should really read & implement. Here it is:

==>> Free Search Engine Optimization Guide

You should also check out the amazing Search Engine Optimization software, SEO Elite
created by Brad Callen, one of the most prolific SEO experts today.
==>> SEO Elite Software

And at the very least sign up for his free eCourse there. It
should come in as a hover ad while your on the site.

To Our Success,
Mark

P.S. Be sure to leave your SEO success’s, mistakes, tips, strategies & advice below.

‘Cheating’ the search engines
By Spencer Kelly
BBC Click

We have come to expect a lot from search engines.

Type in a phrase, and we not only expect it to find millions of relevant websites, but we also expect it to list the best or most important sites first.
Woe betide a search engine that requires me to click to page two of the results before I find the site I am looking for.

Generally they do a decent job but, up until very recently, if you were to search on the term “miserable failure”, top of the Google search results was the official George Bush page on the official White House site.

This is an example of how even the biggest search engines can be manipulated.

Essentially, the web is a collection of pages, all linking to each other.

If you are searching for something, search engines like Google, Ask, and Yahoo! will first find all the pages they think are relevant.

Then, crucially, they need to decide which order to display search results in. One of the most important factors in deciding how relevant particular sites are is to count how many other sites link to it.

The more references, or links there are to a site, the more important it is deemed to be.

Because lots of people quote and link the BBC website, for example, the BBC site is seen as relevant and a good hit. That is why the site ranks quite highly for many search terms.

An underground movement of bloggers exploited this fact, to create a “link bomb”. They encouraged thousands of their peers to include a link to the Bush homepage in their blogs, and label it “miserable failure”.

With all of these links, the main search engine algorithms were fooled into thinking this was a relevant result for that search term, and Bush was driven to the top of the rankings. Mr Bush had been link bombed.

At first, the search engines ignored it – it was not their job to censor search results, however controversial.

Nor did they censor other link bombs – googling “liar” would show Tony Blair’s homepage first.

Link bombs are usually self-defeating – as they become successful, other popular sites begin to discuss the bombs, and end up becoming more popular than the link bomb, driving it from number one.

Apostolos Gerasoulis, co-inventor of search technology for Ask.com said: “I don’t think this is the problem though. This is just fun.”

“Why we don’t remove it, or why the search engines don’t remove it, is because as long as we give relevant results for most of the queries that you type then we’re OK.

“The impact of this bombing, as it is called, is minimal, insignificant. It might be two or three examples,” he added.

Google decided to tweak its search algorithm to spot link bombs, and the miserable failure dropped away. On other search engines, such as Ask, it remains high.

The link bomb actually achieved what any business would love to have – the number one search result in their category.

The ideal place to be is in the centre of the search result, the so-called natural search result, online marketer Fadi Shuman, explained.

“You get 80% of the clicks from the natural results. That is where we all want to be. The way to achieve that is through search engine optimisation.”

Optimisation is produced by making the website as visible to search engines as possible and having other sites linking to it.

However search engine optimisation also has a darker side.

Blacklisted

In February 2006, BMW Germany got into hot water over its website.

The problem was that the site was laden with keywords which customers could not see, but which search engines could.

They were there specifically to boost the rankings. Google has rules to guard against so-called black hat methods – specifically, “don’t present different content to search engines than you do to your users”.

Once discovered, Google blacklisted the site and dropped it from their search results altogether until BMW redesigned the site.

Jason Duke, search engine optimiser, said: “We try and persuade people to link to us, whether that be via content, whether that be via methods of creating controversy in the marketplace.”

It is an ongoing battle of sorts, between the search engines and the optimisers who would love to work the system to their clients’ advantage. Although both sides prefer to call it an uneasy truce.

Mr Gerasoulis added: “If they build the right page, it’s OK, if they build a great page, it’s OK. But the problem comes when they really try to cheat you.”

I found this very interesting article on Google I wanted to share with you. Please leave any comments you have below at the end of the article.

Microsoft first – then Google wants world domination

John Naughton
Sunday February 25, 2007
The Observer

Psst … want a $64 trillion question? Well, here it is: what is Google up to? I don’t mean what is it doing in public; I mean what is the company really up to?

The simple-minded answer is that it’s going after Microsoft. After all, this week Google announced that it was bundling its ‘data in the cloud’ applications (email, instant messaging, calendar, word processing, spreadsheets) in a commercial package called ‘Google Apps Premier Edition’, which will sell for $50 per annum and comes with 10GB of storage per user, application programming interfaces to enable data migration, technical support and a guarantee of 99.9 per cent availability. It’s basically an online Office suite and is targeted at small businesses, schools, universities, clubs and social groups.

Google executives went to great pains to pooh-pooh the idea that they were targeting Microsoft Office. ‘We are not in this to get Microsoft,’ said Dave Girouard, general manager of Google’s business software division. ‘We are in this to offer more compelling choices for consumers and businesses.’ Quite so.

And it may well be that for some organisations, the prospect of being able effectively to outsource their office IT operations for $50 per employee per year may be attractive – especially when they realise that to get the Google services they don’t need to pay for Windows licences either: all they need is Firefox running on Linux – both free programmes.

Recently, a Merrill Lynch analyst estimated that Microsoft Office cost companies $60 to $120 annually per user, assuming the software is used over a two- to three-year cycle.

And that doesn’t include the cost of the operating system or of the level of technical support needed to run a Microsoft-based network. It’s been reported that Google already has more than 100,000 small businesses using Google Apps and that ‘hundreds’ of universities have allegedly signed up for the education version of the package.

On the other hand, Office has more than 450 million users worldwide, and we know from experience that the pace of transition from one computing paradigm to another can be glacial.

So I can’t see many people in Microsoft’s Seattle HQ getting too worked up about the latest Google move, however many waves it causes in media circles.

As it happens, I suspect that Google’s canny onslaught on Microsoft is just a diversionary sideshow. Something much bigger is afoot. It’s about bandwidth, infrastructure and – ultimately – effective control of the net.

Here are two clues. First, Google is currentlya very profitable company. It has money to burn, and it’s been burning it in some interesting ways. Chief among them is the purchase of colossal amounts of network bandwidth – the fibre-optic cabling that forms the backbone of the net.

PBS columnist Robert Cringely reports a recent conversation in which a bandwidth broker – someone who buys and sells bandwidth on fibre-optic networks around the world – told him that Google now controlled more network fibre than any other organisation on the planet.

Second, Google has been building large numbers of data centres – ’server farms’ with tens of thousands of computers in each – and locating them all over the US and elsewhere in the world.

The company is very secretive about this for reasons of security, which is fair enough. But people have begun to notice that some of these distributed data centres are situated near electrical power-generation plants.

So we have two curious facts: Google has acquired fabulous amounts of bandwidth capacity, for which it has no obvious use; and it’s putting local data centres all over the place. Why would it be doing this? What’s the factor that links these two observations?

The answer is simple: video. You may have noticed in the last six months how YouTube has transformed computers into a natural platform for watching video. And this is just the beginning. We’re moving towards a world in which a significant amount of television programming will be delivered via the internet.

Indeed, you could say that we’re almost there already: it’s been estimated, for example, that half of all internet traffic is now generated by BitTorrent, a file-sharing application that is being used mainly to transfer video files (many of them illicit) over the network.

But BitTorrent is a minority sport. Most people have never heard of it. What will happen, however, when getting hold of video via the net becomes a mainstream activity?

The answer is that the network, in its current form, won’t be able to cope. And that’s before high-definition television – which is even more of a bandwidth hog – becomes commonplace.

The obvious solution to the problem would be to have an infrastructure that consisted of tens of thousands of localised data centres (which could cache video content), linked by high-speed fibre-optic channels.

Any company which had built such an infrastructure could effectively dictate its own terms, because only it could deliver what consumers had learned to crave. Such a company would, in effect, control the world.

If that comes about, we will have been well and truly Googled.

Learn how to promote your business using YouTube. Click here…