Free Y! IndexTools

IndexTools, a web analytics tools that claims to offer 80% of the functionality of omniture, was acquired by Yahoo in April.

Within few days after the acquisition, Yahoo announced that it will be giving away the tool for free. Well another few months flew by but there were still no sign of Free IndexTools.

Well, last week Yahoo announced that IndexTools is available for free but it is not freely available yet. At this time, all the new account activations will have to go through existing IndexTools partners. IndexTools is limiting new accounts to ensure they have proper infrastructure and capacity to handle new accounts.

In a letter to their partners, IndexTools wrote:

We here at IndexTools are now pleased to announce that the Add New Account function has been reactivated on your partner account, but with some limitations.

Please bear in mind that our current server capacity was based on our original projections according to where IndexTools expected to be in 2008 in regards to volume and revenue. The acquisition by Yahoo! rendered this forecast obsolete. Our number one responsibility is to ensure that our existing partners and clients are not negatively impacted by an oversubscription of accounts on the IndexTools system. These limitations will be reviewed in the coming months.
So, what are these limitations?

• You will be limited to three projects per client account"should you require more than three please contact your account manager


• We are limiting the monthly page volume to 20 million page views/month for the immediate future (this limit is per client account); data collection will occur up to that 20 million page view mark, but not beyond


• You will be able to add 5 accounts within a 30-day period ( based on former invoicing period)


• Note: all new accounts will be created as Enterprise accounts from this day forward"furthermore, as there are no longer fees there is no longer any need for trial accounts

Is It Worth Optimizing for MSN?

Whenever you need to find something on the Web, you “Google” it. Most of the Web surfers do this, and the percentage of those who “Yahoo” or “MSN” for information is considerably lower.

Google has imposed itself as the “top-notch” search engine on the market, leaving little room for others. Little, but enough, some would say. Among the search engines, Microsoft’s MSN comes third, after Google and Yahoo. So, how do you approach SEO nowadays? Where should your site rank better?

Ideally, optimization for the Web should satisfy all major search engines, but each and every one of them has its own likes and dislikes. Most of the SEO is done for Google, because what they advertise is quality, relevance and low spam content. Given that Google’s brand is so strong, is MSN search engine optimization worth the effort?

MSN vs. Google

Opinions vary. Everybody knows that it’s rather hard to get Google to rank your site high in the search results. Most of the SEO techniques used nowadays are meant to be relevant almost exclusively for Google. Every Webmaster is concerned with code structure, sitemaps, keyword density, anchor texts, links and so on. Google is rather hard to please, especially when it comes to newly created sites.

The much-feared “sandbox” is a side-product of Google, where the new pages end up until Google considers them mature enough to be ranked in the search results. It’s a drawback, and there’s not much anybody can do about it, because one of the things that are valued by Google is the age of a Web page.

What about MSN? In this case, things tend to be a little smoother. MSN seems to really like new pages, and it has no sandbox. It doesn’t use an “age filter” and classifies sites much faster. Therefore, it is highly probable that the amount of results that a Web user might get for a given search to be significantly higher than the one obtained from Google. Also, it appears that the search speed is higher with MSN than with Google. This may be because their index is considerably smaller than Google’s.

Reports show that Google is already a saturated search engine. Its users see so many websites that they don’t have the patience to spend much time on any given site, but still want to visit others as quickly as possible. On the other hand, it appears that MSN users are more likely to produce conversions (sales). This probability is 48% higher for MSN users than for any other Internet users.

This can be a factor that might influence the adoption of some MSN marketing strategies. The conversion ratio is paramount for any commercial website, and such indicators could most probably lead to actions meant to improve the MSN ranking for this type of sites.

MSN Optimization – How?

It is almost impossible to get it right from the start. Much of the SEO process is based on trial and error. There are no precise criteria for each search engine. Basically, what is good for one might be good (or better, or even worse) for the other. Experts say that, in order to get as much MSN traffic as possible, it’s enough to follow the basic guidelines with, of course, some adjustments that will differentiate your MSN marketing strategies from the ones you might use for Google ranking.

MSN is dedicated to satisfying the visitors. Therefore, MSN wants to make sure that they can offer web surfers a high probability of finding what they want on your site. A well-developed site, with many pages and homogenous content will rank much better than a smaller site with poorly organized content (supposing that these two sites apply the ranking factors in a similar manner).

Creating a good, easy-to-navigate site map will not only help the search engine’s spiders crawl your site, but it will also add to its value for the visitors.

Microsoft’s search engine has a great response to an increased keyword density (as opposed to Google, which is quite quick at identifying and penalizing sites that, according to its algorithm, are clearly spamming – and sometimes it is not far from the truth).

This orientation towards quantity rather than quality makes MSN more spam oriented. But the criteria for your site remain, basically, the same.

Therefore, the more back-links you have, the better. Bear in mind though that the quality of the links is a plus, as well as their relevance to the optimization aiming website. This will help spiders to completely index the website, thus leading to an improved visibility among search results.

The logical approach is to focus on building high-quality links towards the site and its content, which will eventually help you rank well in other search engines too. MSN will give credit to the new content and to the inbound links quite quickly.

You should not forget about clean code. It is a major factor for site indexing, and even MSN, which is not as demanding as Google, will rank poorly sites with badly written code.

The are among the most important code elements which you can rely on if you want to improve your MSN traffic. They occupy a top position in the algorithm used by MSN. Consider it your exhibition room. When somebody is looking at the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), the first thing they see is the title of your page. In order to encourage a web user to click on it, it has to be as descriptive and as “appealing” as possible. But don’t exaggerate; about 80 characters should be more than enough.

One of MSN’s drawbacks is represented by its robots, used for page indexing, so keep them in mind. They have difficulties in indexing pages that contain frames, pictures, flash elements, Java script or dynamic URLs. If your site uses image or script based navigation, it is advisable to use text links as well, both within the content and at the bottom of the page. Text links are easier to follow and, more importantly, they give you the opportunity to link to your home page thanks to the anchor texts.

So…Should We?

To make a long story short, MSN is more permissive than Google. Adopt the right tactics, and you can be riding the MSN wave in no time (as compared to Google, where you have to wait in the sandbox for a painfully large – for your business, mostly – amount of time). But there is the risk of dropping from that high position in the MSN ranking as quickly as you got there. This is because your MSN SEO techniques can be overthrown by those newly arrived sites that MSN likes so much to welcome. Such an inconvenience can be quite easily avoided by keeping the content constantly fresh.

There can’t be a “Yes” or “No” answer to the question above. Yet, there could be a “Why not?” MSN does what Google avoids, and likes what Google frowns upon or regards with suspicion. And then there’s also Microsoft’s potential marketing power that they can bring to the search engine business. So, the value of MSN should not be underestimated. Of course, it is a rather feeble match for Google now, but this situation can change dramatically overnight. Similar situations have been seen before, and Microsoft has the financial power to make enough changes and adjustments relatively quickly so as to turn the tables in MSN’s favor.

Bottom line, if you have already optimized your site for Google, it can’t hurt to do some MSN optimization as well.

What is PPC (Pay Per Click) and What It Costs

Search keyword marketing is paid for on the basis of how many people click on your ad, so it's called pay per click.

There are other advertising methods as well: CPL (or cost per lead), where you pay for each "lead" or potential customer you get from the ad, see InfoHub.com for travel site that does this well; and CPA (cost per action), with the action taken by the customer being defined variously as filling out a form or signing up for something. There is also revenue sharing, where the site carrying the ads gets a cut of any purchases made as a result of the ads.

An interesting variant on cost per click is cost per call, a service offered by Yahoo! and AOL that is particularly interesting for very local businesses. In this case, you list not your Web link, but your phone number, and Yahoo! and AOL track the calls you receive through that ad. Obviously, it's also handy for businesses that don't have a Web site at all. How cool is that?

OK, so you pay a cost per click — but what is the cost per click?

Well, that depends on what you're willing to pay, in competition with others. In this market, you are buying the right to have your ad displayed on the search results page generated when somebody has typed a particular keyword or search term into the search engine. Somebody searches on the phrase "life insurance" and, since you sell life insurance, you want your ad to pop up there. So you bid on the term "life insurance" and what you pay depends on what everybody else is bidding.

The minimum bid on Google is 10 cents. On Yahoo! it's 5 cents, but you'll only pay that amount for obscure terms that nobody else wants. Other terms are more expensive — sometimes breathtakingly more expensive: "Delaware incorporation services," for example, costs about $8 per click. The term "merchant accounts" is running about $6 per click at the time of this writing. Certain legal terms and medical terms, linked with diseases that are subjects of class-action lawsuits, can cost as much as $30 per click.

Quite a range! Although none of the major search engines publish averages, the sense of the industry seems to be that typical keyword buyers are paying between a dime and a couple of bucks per click.

Fortunately, you have a lot of control over what you pay. When you bid on keywords, you get a lot of information from Google and Yahoo! about what others are bidding, so you're not bidding blind. You can see which keywords are popular with searchers and which are popular with buyers, and plan accordingly. And of course you can tinker with your keyword purchases to find the best blend of price, response, and final results.

Advertising your tourism business on Yahoo!

For tourism businesses with a limited online-advertising budget (i.e. most of us!), Yahoo!'s featured directory listings are a great way to reach out to millions of potential customers. Having your company's Web site featured in a directory listing is actually very easy.

First, you'll need to get your site listed in the appropriate Yahoo! directory. Type your company name in to the Yahoo! search box. If your site doesn't appear in the search results, you will need to submit it for consideration. Unfortunately, this process can take a long time. Currently it's taking 2 to 3 months...

Your other option is to use Yahoo!'s Express Service, which provides expedited listing. There is a US$299 annual fee for this service, and there's no guarantee that your site will actually be listed — only that it will be reviewed within seven days. However, if you don't want to wait a long time to be added to Yahoo!'s directory, this may be a great choice.

Once your site has been listed in a directory at Yahoo!, upgrading to featured status is easy. You will need to pay a monthly fee, which is determined by the directory where your site is located. This fee can vary from $5 to $300 per month. All you need to do is provide a credit card and your monthly fee will be automatically deducted along the way.

Featured listings appear before the rest of the businesses in a directory, which means that you won't have to worry about having your company buried far into the listings. This is also a benefit for business owners who are having difficulty optimising their site for Yahoo!'s search engine.

So, what does featured status actually do for your resort's site? It provides targeted advertising, and targeted advertising means the right people will see your listing: people already looking for a vacation or diving in your destination. Once your resort or op is featured in a directory, your listing will be one of the first results when customers perform a search in your area.

With more small businesses jumping on the Internet every day, it's getting harder and harder for companies to retain their current customers and attract new customers. With literally thousands of choices for online shopping, it can be almost impossible to entice customers to visit your site first.

Having a featured listing removes much of this concern, since most users will click on the first match they find. If your site is at the top of the list, there's a much better chance your listing will be clicked on, as opposed to if your listing does not appear until page 20 of a user's search.

For SME tourism businesses worried about advertising costs, Yahoo!'s fixed monthly fee is certainly a benefit. Knowing how much your advertising will cost each month makes it a lot easier to stay within your budget while still reaching out to millions of new potential customers.

Another way to guarantee appearing on Yahoo! is by buying keywords through Overture, a subsidiary of Yahoo. With Overture's pay-per-click products, you purchase keywords related to your business. Then, when Web surfers search for those keywords, your listing will appear in Yahoo!'s Sponsor Results box. Overture's distribution network also includes many of the Web's other top search engines and portal sites, including MSN, Altavista, and CNN.com.

With Yahoo! still the number 2 search engine spot behind Google (albeit a long way behind), your resort should see a dramatic increase of traffic once your site is listed in one of Yahoo!'s directories, and much more should you choose to have your site featured.

Staying on top in Internet business is never easy, but Yahoo! has made it possible for small tourism companies out here in the islands to effectively compete for potential customers, and at a controllable and budget-able cost.

How to get your site reincluded if banned...

All the major search engines have procedures whereby a webmaster who has determined that his site has been censored, has somehow determined which was the offending feature, removed the offending feature, and is suitably repentant, can apply for reinstatement:

Google: You can go to: https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/reinclusion?hl=en

You will have to sign up for Google's Webmaster's Tools Service first, which if you have been reading any of my blog, then you would have .

Google only solicits reinclusion requests from sites that admit and stipulate that they violated Google's guidelines or inherited a domain name that they suspect violated Google's guidelines.

"By submitting this form, I acknowledge that: I believe this site has violated Google's quality guidelines in the past. This site no longer violates Google's quality guidelines. I have read and agree to abide by Google's quality guidelines."

You can include a note pleading your case, explaining all the corrective actions you have taken, and promising on your genuine Batman ring never to do it again. Google might eventually reinstate your site. There are persistent reports that Google has “punishment periods” that vary depending on the “offense”. If your site has been banned for editorial or competitive reasons you are out of luck.

Google people, looking down on lowly webmasters from their lofty positions as industry leaders and employees of a $100 billion company, tend to be unusually condescending. Google treats webmasters like children with “punishment” and “penalization”:

“Tommy, you’ve been bad. Go to your room.”

“Why Mommy? Why?”

“I’m not going to tell you why. I’m the parent and you’re the child. I don’t have to tell you why.”

“How long do I have to stay in my room Mommy?”

“I’m not going to tell you that either. I’ll let you out when I feel like letting you out.”

Yahoo: You can request a “re-review” at: http://add.yahoo.com/fast/help/us/ysearch/cgi_rereview

In Yahoo parlance, the “original” review was the one they did when they decided to ban your site. Your message should include all the changes you made in order to be in compliance with Yahoo guidelines.

MSN Search: You can go to: http://support.msn.com/eform.aspx?productKey=search&page=support_home_options_form_byemail&ct=eformts and fill out an MSN Search problem report form “Search, Problem, Finding a Web Site” stating that your site has been deleted.

You will get an immediate web reply with a ticket number promising a support person will be in touch. Soon, you will get an email from a support person directing you to help pages, guidelines, etc. You reply to this email with your plea, including that you have indeed confirmed that your site has been intentionally de-listed by MSN Search. You will then eventually get a reply that the support person has forwarded your plea to the MSN Search Product Specialist Team. Eventually, your site might be reinstated.

A very curious note: The reply email from Microsoft Support contains a number of features usually associated with email spam and therefore was tagged as spam by our Spamassassin anti-spam software. The items flagged by the filter included: "HTML obfuscation", "Envelope sender in postmaster.rfc-ignorant.org ", "Message-Id has pattern used in spam", and "Reply-To is empty". Be careful or you might miss the reply message.

Alternately, you can try to follow this note on MSN's site: "We may remove a website from the index if the website was reported as spam. If you suspect that your website was incorrectly identified as spam, please send an e-mail message to webspam@microsoft.com."

Microsoft is a huge company and MSN is a large division but MSN Search is a relatively small group. Although MSN has an extensive, responsive, and well managed support department, it is our impression that the “team” responsible for MSN Search is still very new, relatively small, and feeling its way. Despite all the hype by Microsoft that they are going to “bury” Google, Microsoft does not appear to be expending all that much effort on search. Just about everything about MSN Search is pretty primitive when compared to Google and Yahoo Search. Once your request has been sent to the “MSN Search Product Specialist Team” you may be in for a very long wait before you get any response. The “reinclusion” department at MSN Search may well be essentially non-existent.

Handling reinclusion requests at search engines is not a priority and reinstatement can reportedly take months or even years. Search engines often do not advise sites if they are going to be reinstated so site owners spend a lot of time waiting and wondering.

How to know if your site is banned from SE's

You can find out if a search engine has singled out your site for exclusion by doing a search for “site:www.domainname.com” in any of the them. The SE will report the number of your pages it has indexed. If it says zero or one, your site has been censored. If your site has been de-listed, “link:www.domainname.com” may also report zero even though other search engines report that you have incoming links

Yahoo! Search is using a second link-only banning method in which the site's pages are not indexed by the search engine but links to the site that have been found on other sites are still included and can theoretically be found in a search. The pages have not been indexed so text on the pages cannot be found in a search. The pages are not cached. No descriptive text is provided in the unlikely event that such a listing is included in a search result, so a user is unlikely to be able to determine what the site is about. The title text provided in the search results is the "link text" provided by the site linking to you. These "supplemental results" are essentially useless for search users and are apparently included so Yahoo Search can claim to have a larger index than its competitors. If the site: search reports many pages, check to see if the listings consist entirely of "link-only" entries. Your site is banned if the search engine is not indexing your text. The link-only entries result from indexing other people's sites. Link-only banning adds insult to injury. Yahoo Search is claiming your pages as included in their index while actually refusing to index them!

Another test method is to search for some unique phrase that appears only on your pages. Some webmasters include a phrase such as “Vmxzwh S34pp” on their pages for this purpose. This search will avoid listing “link-only” entries and will also disclose some of the other sites (not banned by the search engine) that have stolen your content, if any.

The “ultimate misfortune” is to find that your site has been banned but that many sites that have stolen your content have not been banned by the same search engine!

We would expect that spiders would stop visiting a censored site. They do visit much less frequently. However, they usually continue to access some pages and to check /robots.txt apparently to monitor that the site still exists. Yahoo’s robot “Slurp” checks /robots.txt up to several hundred times per day. One reason for doing this might be to determine if a domain name is sold to another owner by detecting a substantial "down" period.

Building Quality Links Outside of Link Exchanges

There are more ways to generate links to your pages than just exchanging them. Create quality links by doing the following:

1. Get your site listed on large directories like Open Directory Project (DMOZ) and Yahoo! Directory. Google uses Open Directory Project listings in these directories to formulate its own directory and listings in either or both directories can help boost your "importance" or PageRank on Google.

Listings in the Open Directory Project are free. Just be sensible, honest and careful into which categories you try and get listed. Don;t choose the first one that looks 'likely'...

You will have to pay to be considered for inclusion to Yahoo! It's a whopping US$299 just to be considered with absolutely no guarantee of listing. Given the Yahoo's search results are currently provided by Google, I don't believe it's necessary. If you still want to proceed, click here for tips on getting listed on Yahoo.

You cannot request a listing in Google's Directory. You need to submit your site for free submission at the Open Directory Project.

2. Write a press release about your website. Submit it to online newswires like PRWeb or Click2NewSites.com. You can also submit to newspapers that run their stories on their websites. Click here for tips on writing a press release.

3. Join associations related to your business or field of specialty. Many of these associations will link to their members.

4. Have your articles with your byline published on other websites. Submit your articles to sites that host free content. Consult our list of free content sites to get started.

5. Get links from other big, "important sites". Do you have an eBay About Me Page, a Ryze Page or even a Yahoo Groups page? Did you know these have link popularity? It makes business sense to link to these pages and then have them link back to you.

6. Link the various pages of your website together. Your most important links should be on all your pages for easy navigation and to increase your link popularity. You should also link to relevant information on your other pages when appropriate.

7. Create a few websites with similar themes and create a few links between them. For example, if you sell children's books on one site, you can also make a site on children's literacy and so forth. One is your sales site and the other is purely informational, but be careful of cross-linking to heavily...as this can be penalized by search engines.

8. Purchase ads on various directories that have a relevant theme to yours. If you are a wedding planner, get your site listed in Wedding-related directories.

9. Create an informative and useful site. If your website is good, people will WANT to link to you. You won't need to ask them.

10. Offer testimonials for products and services related to the tourism industry. Many websites will give links in return for testimonials. For example, if you are a dive operator, provide testimonials for various dive equipment and software.

11. If someone asks you for an interview for their website or to contribute to an article, do it. They should (and you should insist they do) give you links back to your site in return.

Keywords Strategy : The Keyword Auction

Most advertising is charged according to rate cards, based on the audience that sees the ads.

Print magazines and newspapers charge from $5 to $100 (USD) per thousand subscribers depending on the readership — general consumer pubs are at the bottom end while specialty pubs that appeal to wealthy and select audiences such as business owners, gourmet food enthusiasts, or Porsche buyers get to charge more.

Radio and television charge a lot less per thousand, but reach a much broader audience — national television programs in the U.S. can cost a dollar or less per thousand viewers — which can add up to a large dollar amount, but your "reach" or the size of the audience seeing your message can be greater than in any other medium: A hugely popular U.S. TV program can attract 20 million viewers at once.

Web sites are like a mirror of the rest of the publishing world: There are specialized sites, such as AllBusiness.com, which are able to charge a high advertising rate per thousand pageviews, while broader sites like the main page of Yahoo!, which charges a lot less for a less targeted but much larger audience.

A lot of negotiation goes on in ad contracts, but they start from a fixed pricing sheet. This has a disadvantage for search engine results pages, which can't be managed the same way as relatively fixed editorial site pages. Google originally tried charging a flat rate for ads on its results pages — they got way too many advertisers trying to get onto certain highly desirable pages, and nobody on millions of other pages.

Then some genius came up with the ad auction that is now the norm in search keyword marketing. Instead of picking from a fixed price list, you bid in competition with everyone else and pay based on demand for that keyword and its value to you.

So some people are paying a nickel a click on a keyword that's not in much demand, while others are willing to pay fifty bucks a click. So almost every keyword has a price — and a value. It's a great way to sell as much of your inventory as possible at the best price. Clever!