The big news in the world wide web is the proposed purchase of Yahoo by Microsoft for a stunningly large amount of money. If you consider obtaining organic search engine rankings part of your marketing, the question is what this means to you.

XML Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to tell search engines about pages on their site that may be crawled by their robots.

It is no secret that Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most powerful, cost-effective, and results-yielding website promotion tool, but if your optimization service provider or the webmaster is cutting off the online campaign at SEO set-up only, then it is not meeting the campaign objective fully. SEO has to be followed with well planned on-going maintenance and off-page optimization strategies to continue to improve and/ or retain the top rankings. You could agree with the fact that competition webpages for your every target keyword/ key-phrase has increased multiple folds now. A well planned on-going SEO maintenance and off-page strategies will guarantee that you continue to reap the benefits of top rankings and thus get guaranteed qualified traffic and leads for a long time.

Are you looking for free directories to submit to? There are literally thousands of web directories available today. Almost every day a new web directory is being created and it is difficult to judge the quality and relevance of these websites. But you never know which website will be ranked high by the search engines when the next round of indexing happens.

If you target international markets then it’s important to know which search engines are used by European web surfers.

People with concerns about SEO and any changes in SEO processes have to focus primarily on the Google Algorithm. When you understand Google does at least 90% of the searches, in one way or another, it is apparent that that is where the beef is.

Google’s Universal Search - The Death of Article Marketing
I just read an article from SitePro News called “Search Engine Optimization For Universal Search - Back to Square One?” and have some comments to make.

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Do no-follow links count for search engine rankings?

Actually, the rel=nofollow attribute should prevent search engines from following special links. Some webmasters might have found out that nofollow links will help your search engine rankings though.

How it Works

This tool will give you a summary of your competitors backlinks.

Backlink Summary
Domain Name

Note* Results may vary if prefixed with www.

Are search engine spammers exploiting your sitemaps file?

A recent thread in a webmaster forum indicated that some search engine spammers might exploit the new XML sitemaps files. Has your sitemaps file been abused by spammers? Can using a sitemaps file harm your search engine rankings?