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Gerard Baker voices something that has been nagging at me for some time:

The problem is that there’s a danger that the presidential contest between Mr Obama and Mr McCain will become not a debate but a silly battle of conflicting icons. You can be sure that, in the eyes of the rest of the world, and much of America, if Mr McCain wins it will be not because of his superior experience or the quality of his ideas, but because America is irredeemably racist.

Instead of being the welcome break with America’s recent past that he truly is, he will be painted as a continuation of it. Worse, that that, he will have won by vanquishing Hope and Peace. He will be for ever The Man Who Shot Bambi.

That will be truly tragic. If Obama loses to McCain, it won’t be because of race. These two men have a lot of debating to do before November, and who knows how it will all turn out. Both men appeal to the center. And at least for McCain, his vice-presidential pick will be enormously consequential for him. Frankly, this will be the first election in a long time where substance will be what really decides the election. It will be tragic should America pick McCain based on substance, and the world calls her racist as a result.

Read Gerard Baker.

Blogs about Yahoo! Shortcuts plugin is even muffling news about Movable Type OS. Is the plugin that good or is it a hype? To find out, I have activated a beta version of the plugin and thought I will give it a try. This post was one such test. To keep things simple, I decided to write about the plugin itself, what better way to check the magic out. Well, should I say I was disappointed, first the plugin made the whole process of editing a post slow, very slow to be accurate, the plugin itself reloads each time you save the post after a edit. Even more disappointing was the results, or rather the lack of it. Find out what the plugin had to say about this post. In short, this plugin couldn’t even find a shortcut for the word Yahoo!

Almost everyone has heard of the great Million Dollar Homepage created by Alex Tew last year which received a good amount of attention and was definitely a big hit. Well he has now released his next version of the Million Dollar Homepage which seems like it would most likely fail miserably (in my opinion) - Pixelotto.

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Technorati Tags: Alex Tew, Million Dollar Homepage

Have you been to the main MyTypes.com website or the our community blogs area? If not, you have to try it, it’s the best blogging community, and place to promote your blogs for your business. How can we say that? Simple, we have a Feed Aggregator, that pulls your blogs from any where you has RSS, it Tags them, categorizes them and promotes them across our network. It matches you with other users in our system based on interests and tags. Plus, if you place your photo on your profile, every time you log on, you show up #1 on our main site all across the network. And, all the content our community blogs get indexed immediately, so if you link from there, you will have good SEO Rankings. By the way, don’t spam, we delete Spammers without warnings, if we think you are spamming in anyway possible.

Enjoy the great blog that our previous blogging coach wrote, too bad she didnt’ follow her own advice and said stupid and negative things about our company. So do try to be positive, if you have to be negative and vent, don’t do it on your blog or a public forum! Are you getting a clue of what we are about to build, based on yesterdays blog? Community and Social clues for which field?

Blog Positive: Put Your Best Voice Forward

How many times have you heard the phrase “think positive!†or “focus on the positive!� A lot, right? Well, I’m going to say it again, because keeping a positive slant is especially important when it comes to blogging.

The vast majority of the people reading your blog don’t know you in real life - they don’t know what you’re like in person, they don’t know your likes and dislikes, and they don’t know if you’re having a bad day. Your blog is your introduction to them - it is the face you present to the world wide web.

It goes to follow that if you use excessively negative language and constantly complain on your blog, your readers will get an impression of you as a negative or unpleasant person. Of course, no one’s life is 100% sunshine and rainbows, but if you’re using your blog as any kind of business or promotional tool, I would suggest that you vent elsewhere.

This doesn’t mean you have to be just thrilled with everything, either - it is possible to state that you don’t like something without being vitriolic. For instance, say you want to review a book that covers topics in your niche, but you didn’t actually like the book for whatever reason. State your opinion, explain why you didn’t find the book helpful, tell your readers what you thought the author could have done better, and if you can, recommend some alternative books on the subject. Criticism is good if it is done constructively.

“What if I’m just having an awful day, you may ask?†First of all, remember that you don’t have to post every single day, but if it’s been a few days and you really want to put something new up, try writing about someone else.

First of all, try reading other blogs in your niche or related news wires - chances are someone wrote about something interesting. Do a links post (where you post multiple links with a sentence or two to place them in context so your readers know that they are clicking on) to point out the good things.

Last but not least, you can look to YouTube (there’s always something entertaining on YouTube) or check out popular tags on the social bookmarking sites (hint: see if any of your keywords are tags on those sites - it can be an interesting way to see what other people in your niche are writing as well as checking out what readers valued enough to bookmark). If you’re ever at a loss for positive blogging words, find something positive to say about someone else.

We know that few links from highly regarded web sites are worth more than a hundred links from disreputable link farms and other questionable sites that provide no real SEO consulting service to their sightseers. The quality of the homeward bound links to your site is critical and after all, link popularity is not very egalitarian and not all web sites created equal, more than ever in search engine’s eyes. You have almost certainly heard of other Search engine marketing firm or submission tools and services that submit your website to thousands or more search engines, how efficient is that when Google, Yahoo and MSN holds 35%, 31% and 29% respectively of the market.

Clearpath Technology knows the difference between vacuous link farms and rightful, up-and-coming sites and our campaign directors always have current advice on which link-patterns pursuit were meaningful and which ones are not according to business. Using SEO consulting firm’s services you can track search engines positions, back-links, Page-Rank of any web pages and compare your site by way of competitors sites.

As Clearpath Technology, a SEO consulting firm’s services extends to emphasize the overall quality of your Website, as we will recommend our best practices, which will help improve your conversion rate, turn more prospects into customers and retain more clients. Such as, we may advise that you improve your site’s loading time if it is slow as speed is a very critical issue for e-commerce, visitors simply do not wait for pages to load.

Clearpath Technology as a high-quality SEO consulting firm does much more than optimizing a homepage, it is an entire ranking and conversion rate process to association towards the target market. That is it with SEO consulting firm’s information for each site/page will be providing disjointedly. In addition to SEO consulting firm, we offer SEO Tools.

While having dinner with a colleague the other day, we were discussing the particulars of effective link building campaigns. Not necessarily social media or blog strategies, but raw, traditional link building: finding prospects, evaluating websites and soliciting link requests. This post is about the factors website owners should be aggregating when researching and evaluating possible link opportunities and what sort of existing, tangible benchmarks you can set in your prospecting strategy.

I look at traditional link building the same way I may look at working in a “boiler room” or telemarketing office. You need to gather as many opportunities as possible with the expectation that many of your link requests and link strategies will go unopened or unreplied. The key is in gathering opportunities and understanding - holistically and through available data, what link opportunities are the most important and what ones you need to turnover quickly (to avoid ineffective time management).

On-page factors related to link building
First, define some of the characteristics associated with the actual location and creation of the link. These questions can/should be answered with a simple “Yes” or “No”.

• Where will the link be placed?
  • Within the main body of text? (preferred)
  • Within a standard navigational element?
• Will there be an opportunity to get specific keywords directly in the link text? (preferred)
• Will there be an opportunity to get specific keywords in a supporting description or around the actual link? (nice to have)
• Will the link be text based? (preferred)
• Is the link 302 redirected, nofollowed or some form of JavaScript? (which makes it less valuable or not valuable at all)

These factors can be compiled, by column, in a spreadsheet and then evaluated with simple “Yes”/”No” answers.

Factors you can get real data for
Now that you have an understanding of how your link may be placed and formatted, here are some specific (and available) website variables that you can aggregate, for purposes of assigning a numerical value of website “quality” or “importance”.

• Domain age
• Inbound links to the site according to Yahoo
• Google PageRank
• Alexa Rank
• Compete Rank
• del.icio.us bookmarks
• If it’s a blog:
  • Bloglines subscribers
  • Google Reader subscribers
  • Technorati Authority

Tip: Almost all of these factors can be aggregated using the SEO for Firefox extension from SEO Book.com.

Somewhat subjective site specific factors
Even though you have the numerical data on a website, there can be arguments made on the value associated with each variable, so I still feel it’s valuable to review websites and web pages to make some personal judgments on value as well. The subjectivity arises in the fact that aggregating link opportunities and making assessments will require some form of taxonomy or definition system, and no two systems (or opinions) will be exactly the same.

• Type of website
  I usually try to categorize the overall site in some form of classification system, be it a blog, portal, directory, news syndication etc etc. The difficulty in this type of system is that there are many sites that fall in multiple classifications (a website with a blog and forum and directory etc etc).

  Here are some things you can easily identify, outside of a general classification system:

  • Is the site in the same industry or topically related?
  • Does the site have multiple contact points (blog authors, general submissions, PR submissions etc)
  • Are submissions to the site free, paid, review only?
• Objective of the web page
  It’s worthwhile to make a judgment on the actual web page your targeting for a link. This includes what the objective of the page is (assuming it’s an existing page) or what the objective may be, if your submission/request would generate new content.
• Quality of website
  This is the most subjective of all criteria for evaluation, but it’s necessary because there are so many factors that can sway data one way or another that may not be immediately realized. Perhaps it’s a situation where the site is new, redesigned or recently acquired. Perhaps you already know (through log reports etc) that your users tend to come from that link opportunity (in the form of referrals), so there is some existing relationship already in place.

  You could create a point scale and assign values based on all of the other criteria collected, which may be valuable for those that really love numbers. I don’t get that deep into the analysis though (simple notes on quality or importance are what I would recommend for most).

• Additional criteria to document
  Above all else, you need someplace to send your link opportunity, preferably a name and direct contact information. The degree to which you may want to find specific people and details can be determined by the collective review of the others factors listed. In some cases, a general submission may be the only way (and best way) to go. In others, you’ll want to invest the time and energy to meet particular parties and establish a relationship that goes beyond a simple link request.

Tying it all together
It seems unlikely that most people will go to this extent when it comes to aggregating and collecting link opportunity data, but if you have a method for obtaining data in large volumes, this may be an effective way to organize and prioritize the submission/communication schedule for actually contacting websites.

I’ve created a proposed link opportunity template for this work and you can download the spreadsheet and add/modify as desired. But more importantly, does this type of link evaluation/analysis work for you? What pieces of information do you find valuable in your link building efforts and what information presented here seems less valuable than other factors? I would love to hear your thoughts and opinions.

Given the tense situation in Serbia right now, I wish some ad agencies would get their maps right: since June 3, 2006, Montenegro is a fully recognized independent country, even for Mercedes drivers.

Found on the frontpage of Der Standard print, Februar 24, 2008.

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You may have noticed (and hopefully used!) Eurekster’s Swicki widget on the right column sidebar of this blog (under the heaading labeled “Buzz Cloud”). A couple more examples of swickis can be found on my personal blog and on my daughter’s blog.

Yahoo just announced that they lowered the minimum payment for their publisher network to $50 USD and you can get your money quickly using your paypal account. This is just another “scream” to attract more publishers since their advertiser network is growing quite well as most big advertisers go around the google-yahoo-msn network for more profitable return of investment on their ad campaigns.

We noticed that Yahoo is trying to attract more advertisers and publishers as we received a phone call from their search marketing department describing us all the yahoo sponsored search options as well as the content network. Yahoo is trying to grow and survive the Google giant especially nowadays where Google Maps and Local listings are prefer ed than Yahoo’s.

From advertiser point of view Yahoo increased their potential, and again from Publisher point of view the acceptance of paypal payments will increase the interest between publishers and will allow small website owners to join their network.

Lets see what’s going to happen.

I’ve been enjoying some great StumbleUpon traffic for the last few days to most of my sites. When I checked my referral logs, I noticed that the referrals were coming from StumbleUpon Referral Page. It was meant to be a source for webmasters receiving traffic from StumbleUpon to get even more traffic via paid traffic.

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Technorati Tags: StumbleUpon