Welcome to this week's issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. It's been an exciting week in the search engine world, with the Microsoft-Yahoo dance reaching its final(?) phase. I'll talk more about that in a minute, but first, I want to remind you that we started running original articles this week on Dev Mechanic, one of SEO Chat's sister sites, that you won't find anywhere else. We've opted for quality over quantity. This week's article talks about money-making additions you can use to enhance your website -- and your income. Stop by Dev Mechanic and check it out; we think you'll like what you find.

You might also want to check out the article we're highlighting for you this week from eWeek. The State Senate of Maryland realized that tech companies can't be treated like cash cows when it comes to tax; they'll just go to some other state that doesn't milk their profits. Let's hope other legislatures learn that lesson. Want to know what happened? Read the article to find out.

We think you'll really appreciate the articles we published for you this week. On Wednesday we ran a book review of The Open Brand. We rarely run book reviews on SEO Chat, but this particular book is one we think will be relevant for quite a while. On Tuesday we published a hot-off-the-presses piece about Microsoft rejecting Yahoo and abandoning its attempts to purchase the venerable search engine. Is this truly the end of the game, or just another bargaining tactic? Finally, on Monday we covered Network Solution's sideline business. The oldest domain registrar now offers SEO services. They're not being entirely ethical about it though -- and we tell you all the problems with their so-called guarantee.

We're all about the traffic and subscribers when it comes to the SEO-related tutorials we're highlighting for you this week from Tutorialized. We show you how to increase your RSS readers, promote your site on a low budget, and tons and tons of ways to get traffic. Check out these and other tutorials on Tutorialized today.

Can you believe there is actually a book out called "Search Engine Optimization for Dummies"? There is; I confirmed it with Amazon. What's more, the third edition will be coming out in June. Is it worth purchasing? That's the topic of our Thread of the Week. The answer might surprise you. Stop by the thread and let our forum members know what you think!

Finally, our Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, covers text link advertising. You may never have encountered this aspect of it before, but if you run a popular blog, sooner or later you'll probably get some email with very tempting monetary offers. Should you accept? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out.

Thanks again for reading.

Until next time,
SEO Chat Staff

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Watch the video!

Written by Kelly Mooney and Nita Rollins, The Open Brand: When Push Comes to Pull in a Web-Made World takes a look at the evolution of Web 2.0 and its effect on marketing. It is a wake-up call to companies trying to manage their brands the old-fashioned way. Its message: change your attitude to meet the new reality or get left behind.
The book itself seems to target an audience short on time and attention spans. Small enough to fit in a pocket, it boasts about 200 pages, and that includes a glossary and an index. Nearly self-contained essays span every page or two, four at most -- just the right size to squeeze into a spare five or ten minutes. You can grasp each concept individually. The book as a whole comprises four parts of roughly equal length:

• The Future of Brands is Open
• The Rise of the iCitizen
• Inside the Open Brand
• Getting to Open

Though I haven't read Mooney's previous book (The Ten Demandments: Rules to Live by in the Age of the Demanding Consumer), I get the sense that this one is intended as a complement to that work. It can be appreciated on its own, however.

Read Book Review: The Open Brand

Microsoft Gives Up on Yahoo Takeover Bid
by Terri Wells
2008-05-06

In a move that caught many observers by surprise, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer walked away from his bid to purchase number two search engine Yahoo. The move ended three months of dramatic maneuvering on the part of both companies. Nevertheless, the rampant speculation continues.

Microsoft's original offer was $31 per share in a combination of cash and stock. That represented a premium of more than 60 percent on Yahoo's stock price. Yahoo, however, insisted the price was too low. Though the statement was clearly a negotiating tactic, it was also very clear that Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang did not want to see his company fall into the hands of the software giant, and he was willing to do just about anything - even strike up a deal with arch rival Google - to prevent that from happening.

It's been clear for a while that Microsoft was getting impatient with the whole process. While rumors say that the two companies have been in talks on and off for the past year, the pressure has escalated recently as Hitwise, comScore and other firms that measure the popularity of websites have shown Yahoo and Microsoft's search engine losing market share to Google. With Google increasing its lead, Microsoft must have felt pressure to do something, anything, to shake things up.

Read Microsoft Gives Up on Yahoo Takeover Bid

Network Solutions: Unethical SEO
by Terri Wells
2008-05-05

Network Solutions displays a real talent for tripping itself up with unethical behavior. Sometimes it gets caught and called on the conduct quickly, as happened when it engaged in domain name tasting. Other times, though, it can continue for months before enough people catch on to make a real stink.

Ordinarily, we'd publish a story about Network Solutions on our Web Hosters web site. As a domain name seller and registry, the company goes back to the early days of the web, before the US government bowed to the pressure to allow competition in domain name registration. This move drove down the price of domain names from $35 per year per name to as little as $6 or less.

You can read about one of the ways that Network Solutions unethically tried to gain greater control of the market here. Basically, every time you visited NetSol's web site and performed a domain name search using its Whois tool, the company bought the domain name itself if it wasn't already owned. If you didn't buy the domain name immediately, you would come back later to discover that Network Solutions was the owner of record. You could only buy the domain from NetSol - and the company's prices for domain names were and are significantly higher than many other registrars' prices. NetSol gave the dubious justification that it was trying to protect its customers from domain tasters - but the fact that it was doing so by domain tasting itself escaped no one.

Read Network Solutions: Unethical SEO

Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other
tech related tutorials.

How to Promote Your Site
SEO is about promoting your site to the world.
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65 Ways to Get Traffic
A tutorial on 65 ways to get more traffic to your website.
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6 Ways To Gain Traffic
6 ways to gain traffic to your site-part without any spam.
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Top 15 Link Building Tips for New Webpages
How to build links to your site.
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Promoting On a Low Budget
Learn how to promote your site on a low budget!
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How to Increase RSS Feed Burn Subscriptions
Technique to increase RSS readers.
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How can this SEO Newsletter be better?

What do you like or dislike about this issue?
Is there a topic you want to learn more about?
What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement,
so please email us. Email us.

We don't usually run book reviews; this week was a notable exception. The reason we avoid them can be seen from the comments in the Thread of the Week. Be sure to stop by the thread and share your knowledge.

SEO For Dummies is it worth buying?

I'm completely new to the world of SEO and want to do everything myself to save money.

Should I use "SEO for Dummies" as a rough guide to what I want to do?

cheers.

The web is very dynamic in nature, when publishing a book, it could potentially be "outdated" in a day or two.

You would be better off reading here and many other places for the most current news about SEO. This is the way that many of us have "learned" the biz.

Buy ten different SEO books and read ALL of them. Go to all of the web tutorials on SEO and read all of them.

Now you have a base to begin your experiments and asking good questions.

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

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Text Link Ads: Don't Yield to Temptation

After you've maintained a blog for a while and built up a following with regular, quality content, you're going to receive some tempting and flattering emails. You might even be receiving them already. Someone will like your site's content and traffic so much that they want to put text link ads on your site and they're willing to pay you good money for them.

These kinds of ads are placed within paragraphs on a page. The paragraphs contain permanent links to web sites permanent as in for the life of the web site. Usually the person approaching you is the middleman between the advertisers and the content producers (bloggers), and may be willing to offer you a lot of money per page. How much money? Darren Rowse of ProBlogger reported receiving an offer of $400 per page to add the paragraph and the seller was even willing to let him write his own content for it!

But Rowse wasn't tempted and you shouldn't be either. Why? It's more than likely, first of all, that the paragraph won't fit with the rest of your content. After looking at some examples the text link seller showed him, Rowse noted that They stuck out like a sore thumb to anyone looking at them.

Second, $400 per paragraph per page isn't as much as it sounds like. At four to five links per paragraph, it's a one-off payment of $80 to $100 per link. That's very cheap for a permanent link on a trusted page.

But the biggest reason to turn down a deal like this is that it can harm the quality of your content and annoy your visitors. If you compromise your readers' experience, they'll start going elsewhere. Also, don't forget that search engine spiders visit your site as well and having a paragraph of non-relevant content on some of your pages can hurt your SEO. Add in the likelihood of some of those purchased links leading to spammy sites, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Is your bank balance really that much more precious than your reputation? Think of all the work you put in to building it up, how quickly you can lose it, and how hard it would be to gain it back before you answer. Also, think about this: Google penalizes blog sites that feature text link ads. Add it all up, and you'll decide to tell text link sellers the same thing one of Rowse's readers did: My content is not for sale.