Here's hoping you had a fun and romantic Valentine's Day! Believe it or not, we had all of you fondly in our thoughts as we put together this newsletter. (It must have been the chocolate). So without further ado, let's dive right into our belated Valentine for you.

We'll start with the article we're highlighting for you this week from eWeek. If you're a reseller, you'll definitely want to check it out, because it covers the 12 top executives who've done the most for the channel in the past year. Michael Dell is one of them; if you want to know who the others are, and why they received this honor, you'll have to check it out yourself.

Of course we have some great articles for you this week, mostly focusing on the news. On Wednesday we kept it educational, though, with an item on how to optimize your press releases. Those bad boys aren't just pieces of paper; put them online and they suddenly become mini-websites. We covered the big news of the week on Tuesday; Yahoo rejected Microsoft's bid to purchase the company. We understand Yahoo's desire to stay out of Microsoft's clutches; meanwhile, we take a balanced look at what the future holds for this potential merger (you don't think Microsoft is just giving up, do you?). On Monday we took a look at Google's charity initiatives and how its hybrid structure allows it to do things that a more traditional charitable foundation would not be legally permitted to do.

Once again we're highlighting a potpourri of SEO-related tutorials for you this week on Tutorialized. Do you want to know how to choose the best hosting? Do you need a refresher on some basic ways to promote your site? Would you like to know six ways to attract more traffic? We have you covered.

Our Thread of the Week deals with backlinks. It's called the Web for a reason; sites are connected to each other with links, like the intersecting points and threads in a spider web. But not everyone seems to feel that way; many site owners are stingy about giving out backlinks. What do you do then? Several forum members came up with some ideas for our original poster. Be sure to stop by the thread and share your experiences!

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, takes a look at the idea that you need to have lots of pages on your website to do well in the SERPs. That's something of a myth, though an understandable one. What should you really be striving for? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

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Create dynamic Firefox user interfaces
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Explore Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded
Ubuntu is a great server and desktop distribution for the GNU/Linux operating system, but did you know that it's also ideal for handheld and mobile embedded devices? Ubuntu's latest release, Gutsy Gibbon, now includes support for the embedded and mobile spaces with the Ubuntu Mobile and Embedded (UME) project. Get to know the UME project, and find out how to get started.
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All White Papers.

SEO Index

Optimizing Your Press Releases

Yahoo Rejects Microsoft Bid

Google Finds New Way to Give

    SEO on Tutorialized

 SEO Thread of The Week

 SEO Chat News Spotlight

Introducing Tech News by Developer Shed. News you can't use.

It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's news you can't use, and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions:

Who let the dogs out? Who? Who? Who? Is being dumb the new smart? Hot or Not website sells for $20 mil... you tell me. Why would you spend $6 Million Dollars on a home theatre when you're just going to trash it after seeing the ending to I am Legend anyway? Does Japan really plan to shoot giant lasers full of energy back to Earth to power their cities? Godzilla not impressed. What do Britney Spears and Inspector Gadget have in common? Aside from being complete idiots and bad parents I mean. Watch the video!

Optimizing Your Press Releases
by Terri Wells -- 2008-02-13

If you look at a press release through the lens of an SEO, what you see is not a piece a paper; it’s potentially a mini web site. From this perspective, the humble press release takes on a whole new life. In this article, I’ll discuss a number of ideas that will give your press releases much more impact.

Before I get to these tips, however, maybe you’re not convinced that you need to optimize your press releases in the first place. If you aren’t, here are some points to consider, with a nod to Rob Garner, writing for Media Post’s Search Insider:

If you use an online news wire such as PRWeb, PRNewswire or BusinessWire to help you distribute your press releases, you may already know that many reporters go directly to them (or receive feeds from them) for content. They’ve turned into “press release search engines," and as with any search engine, content indexed by them may need to be optimized if you want it to be found by your target audience.

Read Optimizing Your Press Releases

Yahoo Rejects Microsoft Bid
by Terri Wells -- 2008-02-12

Just one week after Microsoft made its surprising $44.6 billion cash and stock bid to purchase Yahoo, the venerable search engine rejected the bid. As if to add insult to injury, Yahoo’s board of directors agreed unanimously. Someone get me some popcorn; the fight is just beginning.

It’s true that Microsoft has been working on some kind of deal with Yahoo for the past 18 months now, so it shouldn’t seem like a shock. It’s also true that, before Microsoft’s offer, Yahoo’s stock had been dropping in price; at the original price of $31 per share, Microsoft was offering Yahoo stockholders a 62 percent premium over the recent closing price on the search engine’s stock. Yahoo has taken a beating for the last eight quarters; if the replacement of Terry Semel as CEO with co-founder Jerry Yang will save the company, we didn’t see any signs of it before Microsoft made its bid, at least in the price of Yahoo’s shares.

But that was then, and this is now. Thanks to the stock market’s reaction to Microsoft’s bid, the software giant’s stock has lost 13 percent, while Yahoo’s stock has shot way up, to as high as $29 per share. All of a sudden, Microsoft’s bid doesn’t look so good anymore. Once again adding insult to injury, the dip in price of Microsoft’s stock reduces the company’s value by about $42 billion – or approximately the price that Microsoft wants to tender for Yahoo.

Read Yahoo Rejects Microsoft Bid

Google Finds New Way to Give
by Terri Wells -- 2008-02-11

Google recently announced that Google .org, a hybrid philanthropy organization, will be working on five initiatives to address some of the world's most urgent problems. The news gained attention not only for the problems the organization chose to address, but the way in which they're being addressed.

To give you the context of the most recent news, let's go back in time to 2004, when Google held its IPO. At that time, company founders Larry Page and Sergy Brin told prospective shareholders that they were committed to contributing one percent of Google's equity and profits to making the world a better place. That commitment, in late 2005, turned into Google .org. It was backed by the equivalent of three million shares of Google stock, which has continued to climb in value.

Interestingly, Google .org is not actually a charitable institution. It is a for-profit organization. It pays taxes. It does have a non-profit arm, Google Foundation. The fact that it is a hybrid organization gives it a certain flexibility that it wouldn't have as an ordinary charitable institution. For example, there is nothing to prevent it from funding start-up companies.

Read Google Finds New Way to Give

Tutorialized has a dedicated SEO section for Search Optimization, Website Marketing, and many other SEO/SEM related tutorials.

How to choose the best hosting?
10 things you should know before buying web hosting.
Read the tutorial.

Bad Publicity is better than No Publicity
Getting a readers attention can be a tough task try this approach.
Read the tutorial.

SEO Website Tips Website Analysis
4 minute Ecommerce and SEO Video tutorial covering site reviews and reports.
Read the tutorial.

Website Promotion Basics
Web site promotion is the most important step in making your business succeed online.
Read the tutorial.

6 ways to gain traffic to your site- part 1
6 ways to gain traffic to your site without using spam.
Read the tutorial.

Quality backlinks in my area, impossible!

Hi all,

I am French and I live in Quebec, Canada. (My English is not perfect).

I built my wife a website and optimized it for SEO. Being new to this two years ago, I did follow your precious advice since the beginning and I did very well. She is ranking at the top for many keywords. I am very satisfied.

Now I don't panic anymore with rankings and pagerank. There are so many related links I can build in order to bring good quality traffic and convert this traffic to clients. This has been my main objective since a year.

The website being in French, I have no problem building links from France country websites but this is not my goal. I want local traffic because we are selling music services in Quebec. The problem is, where I live, people do not give backlinks. Most of those quality websites do not have a single link and when asking, they always say the same. They don't link to other websites. My website is top quality by the way, clear, classy and useful, customers always congratulate us for our website.

We are building our social network in the real life too. Even those that partnered with us during an event (caterer, hotels, DJ, photographers, and others) are saying that they don't link to other websites.

There seems to be a lack of the Internet comprehension where I live or not open mind, I don't know, but they are missing the point. They want their client to find a dead end when they are coming to their website or they don't want to commit themselves for any reason.

I think there is no point really to post this message. But I want to simply share my experience and see if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.

Thanks for taking the time,

Bob

Record a music podcast and link it to your site, regularly update it and seed it on lots of music/podcast sites including iTunes.

This might work for you...

Thanks for the suggestion. I had a similar idea. We are about to record many samples of music and we will offer them to some webmasters as background music for their websites in exchange for a link. This is hard work, but probably worth the effort.

Ok well you're looking for backlinks. Your backlinks don't have to be local, who cares if they're local or not. Backlinks are good, and the more you get the better. If you're looking for local searches have your backlinks have your anchor text with your local keywords such as "quebec music blah blah" whatever, but your backlinks dont have to come from local sources.

Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts.
Read the full thread.

Do More Pages Always Mean Better Rankings?

It's commonly said that a web site with more pages will do better on the search engine results pages than one with fewer pages. Does this mean that you try to stretch things out on your web site so that you have more pages? One poster to our SEO Chat forums, for example, noted that he has a Frequently Asked Questions page that he could fit completely on one page. Should he stretch it so that every answer has its own page? "My soon to be competitors seem to be creating pages at every opportunity," he noted, wondering if he should follow suit.

That very much depends on the nature of the FAQ. Are the answers short and easy to give? Are some of them complicated? This matters quite a bit. When it comes to your position in the SERPs, it's not so much about the number of pages as the quality and quantity of your content. You should have at least 250 to 500 words of real content on every page of your site.

If you're the only one writing for your web site, or you have only a few people writing for your site, then you see the obvious problem. More pages with real content means more work for you or whoever is going to be writing that content. A good position in the SERPs does not come for free.

So how should our poster handle his FAQ? If it all fits nicely on one page, he should probably put it all on one page. It'll be less annoying to his visitors, too. If some of the questions have lengthy answers, there is another option, which Google uses for some of its FAQs. Give a short answer to the question in about three or four sentences. Include a link to a page that gives more information about the subject. Then make that page, writing as much content as you believe you need to thoroughly cover the topic.

This approach keeps the advantage from the visitor's point of view of having all of the questions and answers on one page. But it also lets them delve deeper when they want to. From the site owner's and webmaster's point of view, it doesn't create too much work because it doesn't create too many new pages to write and maintain. But it also allows them to cover a topic in more detail when they find it's necessary to do so, thus giving the site a boost from increasing its relevant content.

Read the thread for this article.

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