| LED Digest 2560: Live, Twitter, Rum & Faxes |
|
|
|
==================================================
The LED Digest Moderated Discussion List "Effective Online Advertising, Since 1997" Data > Information > Knowledge > Wisdom www.WillMaster.com/Master : the LED's Key Sponsor Master Series Software - Get Connected with Your WebSite www.SEOToolSet.com/training/ : the LED's Premier Sponsor Bruce Clay's Search Engine Optimization Training & Certification ================================================== List Moderator: Published by: Adam Audette LED Digest adam, led-digest.com http://www.led-digest.com .............................................. December 21, 2007 Issue no. 2560 .............................................. .....IN THIS DIGEST..... ====== NEW ====================== <Moderator Comment> ~ Live.com Weirdness, Spiced.Rum Goodness ==== CONTINUING ================= --== Fax Programs ==-- ~ Ron Coble "Let me tell you about a great little service that most people tend to believe is not for real..." --== International SEO ==-- ~ Michael Martinez "You can use one site to target both styles of English." --== Vital Business Tools ==-- ~ Paul Harris "here's a few tools I use regularly..." ========= NEW ===================================== <Moderator Comment> Greetings LEDer, Some quick takes for you today: 1) Live.com Puts Adwords in its Results Yup, as reported by Jon Page (http://www.jon-pape.com) over on the SEM 2.0 list (http://groups.google.com/group/SEM2) and elsewhere, certain searches were bringing up Adsense and Adwords listings in the Live.com results. Whoops! They put up an explanation / apology here today: http://blogs.msdn.com/webmaster/archive/2007/12/20/listing-google... saying the problem was robots.txt exclusion files that they ignore. Yeah, they ignore them... so long as other places on the web link to them. So in other words, if you've excluded a page or section of your site in robots.txt, and another site is linking to that page, they won't respect the robots.txt exclusion and instead will simply crawl (and index) that content. Here's the discussion with screenshot of the results page: http://groups.google.com/group/SEM2/browse_thread/thread... 2) Another MSN issue, this one with server logs. Apparently there's some broohaha over referrer strings in log files from live.com. Things like "payday" and "cash" were showing up as referral traffic in some logs. This is not actually referring data, it's just "quality control" lookup stuff live.com uses. To whit, from "msndude" - a MSN representative at Webmaster World (you just gotta love the professionalism of that username) - -------------------- "First, we appreciate the concerns and issues that have been raised and apologize for any incovenience this might have caused. "Second, we want to explain what this is all about. The traffic you are seeing is part of a quality check we run on selected pages. While we work on addressing your conerns, we would request that you do not actively block the IP addreses used by this quality check; blocking these IP addresses could prevent your site from being included in the Live Search index." Source: http://www.webmasterworld.com/msn_microsoft... -------------------- The full skinny can be found in this post: http://www.exposureonline.com/2007/09/Microsoft-is-lying-and-screwing-up... 3) Since Christmas is coming, then the New Year, our schedule here will be a little off-and-on. I think we should take a few days off since it's always slow this time of year anyway (and I need to focus on things that really matter - like trying to find a Wii for my... 2 year old daughter... yeah that's who it's for). I hope you have a great weekend and Christmas! One last thing - I've been using Twitter.com lately and it's a hoot. Or a chirp. Whatever - it's fun. Follow me and I'll follow you right back (don't worry if you don't know what that means - it's simple): http://twitter.com/audette One really last thing - try this drink (thanks to David at http://www.expotv.com for the recipe): cider spiced rum with cointreau. Mmmm... tasty. Best wishes, Adam ======== CONTINUING =============================== From: Ron Coble Subject: Fax > Do any of you know a system similar to Fax > Pal that would work with XP? Fax Pal > connects into my phone line, receives in a > fax and then alerts me on my computer > screen that I have a message. - Mary Findley, LED Digest 2559 - http://www.led-digest.com/content/view/1974/190/ Let me tell you about a great little service that most people tend to believe is not for real when they check it out. I give this service my unabashed and most outstanding recommendation possible but let me first tell you why. Our business has had a fax machine since 1989. This cost over $1,000 at the time but well worth it since prior to that we were paying a $1 a page for a local machine shop to receive our faxes that often numbered in double digits. Then we added our dedicated phone line which cost between $380 and $400 a year. As our business exposure became more worldwide the fax and dedicated line were integral to our business. During this time email came into being and the proliferation of computer technology began to place less emphasis on faxing and our expensive machine, dedicated line and fax paper became nothing more than a prolific Nigerian spam fax central receiving station. About 4 years ago I did a good bit of research in trying to find an alternative and MaxEmail came to the rescue. Here is their non-affiliate link: http://maxemail.com I will not try to explain their various service plans but suffice it to say I dropped my annual cost from between $400 and $500 a year to just under $30.00 a "year" (Yes, that is thirty). To this day I still do not know how they can provide you with a dedicated phone number that can be used for voice mail, fax or both for this amount, but I am very happy that they do. I "still" have a dedicated phone line for this amount of money and I get my faxes delivered direct to me via email in either a PDF or TIFF format which allows me to easily review, print out or delete. You can get a dedicated fax/phone line just about anywhere in the USA for a few bucks more (I think $60 a year) and you can use their service to send faxes. If having a fax number nearby is not a requirement, you get one in MaxEmails location which is Chicago. I have recommended their services to many friends and business associates and they too have found huge savings like I have and also could not believe it until they used it. Last, in regards to faxing from your PC. Although MaxEmail has an outstanding outgoing service, my long distance service still makes it less expensive to fax from my own line. I purchased a faxing software a few years ago that has served me well and only has a one time cost of $29.99 - Snappy Fax is the name and here is their web site: http://snappyfax.com I know there are many alternatives out there, but the SnappyFax and MaxEmail both get my "best in their field" recommendations. Ron Coble Coble International - International Marketing Services http://www.ImportExportHelp.com ========= Begin Sponsor Message ========= Does your website dance? Or does it stumble? The Possibilites Ezine. Every week - An in-depth article to grow your web site. Stay in touch- Subscribe to Possibilities Ezine http://willmaster.com/possibilitiesLED ========== End Sponsor Message ========== -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Michael Martinez Subject: International SEO > It's difficult to see how I could address > this problem, though, without setting up > two separate sites - one written entirely > in UK English and one in US English. - Nicole Bishop, LED Digest 2559 Your site is not really optimised/optimized for anything in particular now. Optimizing for country or region is really no different from optimising for keyword markets. You can use one site to target both styles of English. In fact, many other sites do just that. Managing your search visibility is very similar to managing your market visibility. You create your "elevator pitch", you show it to people whom you feel may be interested, and you build on the interest that comes your way. Two very different explanatory pages on your site should help with search indexing. One page would be more appropriate for UK English and the other would be more appropriate for US English. But don't count on directory listings to help the search engines figure out which page works best for which market. Use your internal link anchor text and place acceptable announcements on appropriate regional sites that deep-link to the correct explanatory pages. In this kind of Web site promotion, it is best to sectionalize your site rather than promote the root URL of the domain. The sections can share a lot of content between them (through jointly linked pages). A more difficult, less efficient approach would simply be to engage in two separate link-building campaigns, one from US-based sites with appropriate anchor text and one from non-US-based sites with appropriate anchor text. You can promote a single URL into multiple regional search markets -- that has been done successfully -- but you need a LOT of visibility to do it successfully. You would probably see better performance from good linking partnerships than from search in the short term. Michael Martinez http://www.michael-martinez.com/ -------- new post - new topic -------- From: Paul Harris Subject: Vital Business Tools > What we want: > > 1. Excellent, critically important business > tools that can be used by anyone who owns a > website... > > 2. The tool must make a marked difference > to profitability. > > 3. Web tools, yes - but also complementary > business tools - e.g. CRM for follow-up, > one of the most critical business > activities. - Michael Linehan, LED Digest 2559 Hi there, here's a few tools I use regularly: www.snagit.com - Screen Grabs & more www.nattyware.com - Colour Picker and its free! www.iconico.com Screen Callipers - An invaluable tool for screen layout www.stevemiller.net/puretext/ removes formatting when you copy / paste - Free Regards, Paul Harris www.designaweb.biz (c) Copyright 1995-2007 Orange Wheel, LLC. All Rights Reserved. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to LEDers everywhere! |
