In the next 24 hours or less, Microsoft’s slick new search engine BING will take over the no. 2 spot for search engine which is being occupied by Yahoo.

Bing + Yahoo = Bingo!

If the “rumors” are true, Microsoft and Yahoo are expected to announce the search pact, the deal that will create a big impact not only for the two companies but for the online ads business as well.

This is perhaps one of the reason why Microsoft is not capitalizing on their company name as behind the Bing product in all their television advertisements in the United States.

Bing, starting tomorrow will be Yahoo’s default search engine. A new landscape for webmasters, including bloggers, will take place. From now on bloggers should develop battle plans that will fit both into Google and Bing, modifying their existing SEO and PPC efforts.

What do you think about this deal of two giants? Will it be a threat to Google’s kingdom?

Make money with Squidoo

Are you using FREE Squidoo.com to MAKE MONEY on the internet?

If  NOT, then you’re missing a lot of FREE BIG opportunities!

What are these opportunities?

1. BIG Traffic (Links!)
2. Real Money

BIG Traffic, and I mean real traffic.

Why Do You Need to create a Squidoo lenses (pages)? Reason: Traffic, traffic, traffic by way of backlinking. Currently, Squidoo.com is at PageRank 6. What does this mean?

It simply means that if you have a lens (page) in Squidoo, you can create links going back to your blog! Remember that a higher PageRank page or domain can boost your blog’s ranking, if you are linking FROM the source with higher rank.

If you’re PR is lower than 6, then all the more reasons you have to create a Squidoo lens.

Real Money?

Yes, that’s right. You can make money inside Squidoo website.

Ways to Make Money on Squidoo.

1. Direct Commission

Sell items on your lens. Squidoo will provide the modules such as Cafepress, Amazon, and eBay. The commission you earned will be shared in 3 ways: 5% goes to Charity Fund, 45% to Squidoo ( they have expenses too, like running servers etc.) and the remaining 50% goes to you, the lensmaster.

2. Google Ads and Other Ads Revenue
This means that you will get share for Google Ads and other ads contracted by Squidoo to run on your lens(es). The money earned from this Ads will be put on a big pool. Half of the content of this pool will be distributed among the lensmaster (yes, that’s you!). Higher ranking lenses will be rewarded with larger chunk.

There is no limit to the number of lenses (pages) you can create. Don’t forget to create backlink from your lenses. And, don’t worry if you don’t have an  Adsense account because AdSense code is generated automatically by Squidoo.

Payouts are monthly via PayPal only. If you don’t want to hassle yourself in getting a Paypal account (and getting your money), your account will automatically start off earmarked to charity until you decided to get your cash using Paypal.

Minimum Payouts.

If you’d like to cash sooner, set it at $1!. Very ridiculously isn’t? The default settings is automatically set at $10, so make sure to change your cash payout threshold.

Is Squidoo FREE?

Absolutely YES!  You will never have to pay Squidoo. Building lenses is FREE!

Making a Squidoo lens is easy but making a good Squidoo lens, well, that’s another story.  There’s a lot of resources from Squidoo website that you can use but I HIGHLY Recommended a FREE Squidoo Guide written by a lensmater named PotPieGirl!

Free Squidoo Guide

This FREE “How To Squidoo” guide is 50+ pages of step by step instruction from the very beginning ( setting up a new Squidoo account) all the way to lens creation steps to get your first lens live and online!

Remember that by making a popular and interesting Squidoo lens, you will be increasing your likeliness of making a nice amount of money!

Avoid some of the more common Squidoo pitfalls by reading the FREE Squidoo Guide.

Did I mention not to forget to create backlinks going to your main blog? That’s actually the main benefit you can get from Squidoo -aside from the revenue. Once you get how Squidoo works, it’s not that hard to generate traffic.

* Note: This is a repost entry. My current host provider encountered multiple harddisk failures and the backup was restored but it does not have the latest data.

Oh boy, I was busy for the past three days and time flies so fast. It was only 3 days ago when I wrote my last post and now, weekend is almost here. A friend of mine is launching a business next week so she asked for my hand to helped her in preparing some business materials.

Anyway, today I will give you the 2nd part of our topic “SEO Here, SEO There, SEO Everywhere“. Remember the WordPress SEO Secrets that I mentioned on my previous post? Well, it’s timing because I received some additional secrets from WordPress SEO author Michael Martine that he wants to share to us.

Basic Education in SEO according to Michael Martine (WordPress SEO Secrets)

For SEO point of view, the parts of the blog the matters most are: Titles, post slug names, headings, and text content. Let’s discuss each one.

• Titles: Keywords (search terms) in titles are very important to search engines. Titles appear at the top of a browser window or in a browser window tab. The problem with blogs is that your headline automatically becomes the title unless you have a plugin that allows them to differ.

• Post slug names: The post slug is the virtual file name of a blog post. This is very important to search engines. It becomes part of the permalink for a blog post. You need to set up what are known as “pretty permalinks” in WordPress, and you need to edit the slug for SEO reasons. You want to use important keywords in the slug, just you do for the title.

• Headings: In your WordPress blog, you can use various heading levels when writing posts to break up the content into sections. Search engines pay attention to keywords in headings. Many people don’t know how to see the controls for headings in WordPress. You have to click on the “Kitchen Sink” button on your WordPress toolbar (barring special buttons added by certain WordPress plugins, it should the last button on toolbar above the write box). Once the second row of toolbar buttons is revealed, use the “Format” drop-down to set headings.

• Text content: Of course the content of the post must be relevant to a searcher’s needs. Use the same words in the post the searcher would use in a search (keywords). Use them as frequently as you can while still sounding natural (read it out loud to test). Think of it this way: if your searcher has a question, you want your post to be the answer.

If you want to more on how to make your wordpress blog visible to Google and other search, I suggest you check WorPress SEO Secrets. It will explain how to do all of this step by step in words, audio, and video.

If you  have questions on what I posted here, just write it on the comment area and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Update! Update!: WordPress Secrets SEO will be taken out of the market in 2 days. Saturday, the 17th is the last day.

On my previous topic about SEO, I’ve told you 2 of my secret techniques that I’m using. These secrets are tested and proven already.

I also wrote in that article that I divided the topic into two so you won’t get bored, but due to some pressing matters that I wanted to tell you, I’ll continue our topic about SEO secrets tomorrow.

Today, I wanted to quickly inform you about something incredible that one of my blogging idol, Michael Martine, launched recently. His new baby, WordPress SE0 Secrets – The web’s best step by step guide to blog SEO is now opened.  You may now download and grab your copy directly from Michael Martine website.

Michael Martine,  is one of the few industry leaders in the business blogging sphere. His methods are simply remarkable. He knows how to increase traffic and gives you insights on how to improve your blog. One thing more, he always reply back to your comments on his blog specially if you have questions.  Actually, I’ve learned from him the tips on “how not to launch your blog”.

I guess Michael and I have the same simple definition of what is SEO all about. If you can’t remember my definition, kindly read my previous post. Just kidding! SEO=BE Visible, and this is exactly how Michael described  SEO in his site. Not only simply being visible, but be on the first result page of the search engine!

If you want to improve your search engine rankings, get more taffic and make more money then I highly recommend Michael’s Martine WordPress SEO. It’s the most complete package that you can get.

“WordPress SEO Secrets is densely packed with tons of useful info—no fluff, no sales hype, and no ridiculous multiple puff pages about the author!

“I’m sick of information products that are light on the information and only try to upsell you on the next product. As far as I’m concerned, there is no better “salesman” than value and results. You know why the ebook for WordPress SEO Secrets is less than 40 pages? Because it’s not full of B.S.!” - Special Note from Michael.

And by the way, Michael also provided a whole audio from one of those included  with WordPress SEO Secrets. You could learn a lot from this audio.

So, if you are blogging on WordPress and want a boost in search traffic (make money) then I recommend you grab WordPress SEO Secrets today.”

SEO, SEO, SEO. I’m pretty sure that if you have been blogging for at least a couple of months now, you’ve seen these words posted in almost all blogging resource sites and some “make money online” blogs as well.

What is an SEO all about? How important it is for your site? Does it have affect at all in your online business?

For the technical minded people and computer-savvy, I guess you can easily understand what is an SEO and how it works.

For most of the bloggers out there like WAHMs(working-at-home-moms) who doesn’t know even the meaning of SEO, today, I will define SEO in a very simple way and will tell you some little secrets that even a new blogger running a mom/pop business can follow.

The Meaning of SEO

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a web site from search engines via “natural” (“organic” or “algorithmic”) search results. Usually, the earlier a site is presented in the search results, or the higher it “ranks,” the more searchers will visit that site.

Here’s what BlogDeManila definition of SEO:

Search engine optimization (SEO) = make your site or blog the most visible to the search engine, the more visible you are, the more visitors you can get.

It’s very simple isn’t?

More visitors will bring you more traffic! And the more traffic you have, the more “money” you can make!

You’re next question is “How to make my blog/site more visible?”. Am I correct?

SEO Secrets Revealed!

Alright then, here are the simple and very practical tips on how to make your site more visible to the eyes of the search engines.

1. Think about what people are going to search for.

Make sure the content of your site is using the correct keywords that people will use in searching. Search engines are using program (spiders) to arrange (indexing) all the websites and blogs all over the world using the “keyword” query. This keyword is basically the word people will use to look for the information using the search engine.

Tip: Write for the reader not the engine!

2. Use “How To” in your Title.

It’s no secret that “how to” contents are some of the most sought after. This is the reason why ehow.com and wikihow.com together with answer.yahoo.com are one of the top most result when people search for a particular topic.

Tip: “How Tos” with  list and benefits are hot!

Take for example the title “How To Plant Malunggay”. People living in our country doesn’t know the scientific word of “Malunggay” which is Moringa oleifera and, I’m absolutely sure that 99% will use the word “How to plant Malunggay” than ” How to Plant Moringa oleifera”.

See the optimization I did with one of my niche blog site using the SEO secret 1 and 2 that I’ve just mentioned here.

TheFarm@PinoyBusiness was one of my first niche site where I applied SEO.  I already abandoned that site but do you know that it’s still earning? See my post about Inactive Blogs But Actively Earning.

Going back to our topic, you don’t have to take my word about the result that I’ve shown you . You may search the title that I used using Google, Yahoo, Ask or any search engine that you prefer (as long as the result is in English ) . I bet you that it will land if not on the top list, it will surely be on the first few pages of your result page.

I don’t want you to get bored with this topic so I’ll divide this topic into two. There are still 3-4 SEO secrets that I want to share.

Take note that these are not  just tips that I copied from another site. I am personally using these “secrets” which I’ve studied for more than a year now. I got bored studying the technical stuffs that’s why I’m presenting the topic here using very simple, and understandable words that I can think of.

In short, I’m telling you what are the SEO techniques that really works, and easy to implement without being too much techie.

Watch out for my next article as I reveal more of the real and true secrets of SEO!

Yes! These alternatives are free just like Google Analytics. I will not say they are better but are really good. Some have features that are more “advanced” than what GA (Google Analytics) can offer.

If you are comfortable with GA, then don’t feel forced to change. These are free, so if you don’t get along with them you’re not really lost any cents but just your time checking them out.

By the way, do you know what is a web analytics? You don’t know?..really? Oh well – in a simple term, web analytics are just like your membership card in a supermarket or department store. A good example is the membership card of PriceMart, Inc., a warehouse retailer based in California but operates outside the USA. The card when swipes on the sales counter or POS of the supermarket keeps track of what you buy, your demography, purchasing power and other data that will help these store to sell more.

Web Analytics sample

Web analytics are services to let website owners know more about their visitors.

List of Free Alternatives:

Piwik LogoPiwik Logo

1. PIWIK – an open source web analytics  software which aims to be an alternative to GA. Still on beta version but is already gaining a lot of reviews. It surfaced first as PHPMyVisites from France and almost all attention so far has been from outside USA.

Based on their website at http://piwik.org/.  Piwik is different from the competition because:

1. The features are built inside plugins: you can add new features and remove the ones you don’t need. If you are a developer, you can easily build your own plugins!
2. You own your data. Piwik being installed on your server, the data is stored in your own database and you can get all the statistics using open APIs (publishing the data in many formats: xml, json, php, csv)
3. (NOW AVAILABLE!!!) the user interface is fully customizable, you can drag and drop the widgets you want to display, create the reports you want.

2. myRT – a free web analytics, site statistics and conversion tracking.  It stated on their website that it is the first FREE  & REAL-TIME Web Analytics service.

myRT Logo

• No cost – completely free of charge.
• No Ads – they don’t require that you display sponsor’s ads on your site. The myRT interface itself is also ad free.
• Simple installation – just like any web analytics, installing myRT is a snap. After you signup you’ll receive a welcome email that contains their  javascript tracking code. Copy and paste the code into your webpages (usually the footer) and immediately you’ll start seeing and tracking your users.

I will add more  to this list in the near future because I want to do some test with them first. If you  are using some web analytics, just post your comments and tell us what attracts you in using it.