Advanced Link Manager – Analyze your website’s link popularity, find link partners and valuable information about them.
Product Page: http://www.advancedlinkmanager.com

Rank Tracker SEO Tool – Rank Tracker is an all-in-one rankings monitoring SEO tool for webmasters and professional SEOs who need to monitor their site’s positions in more than 250 search engines.
Product Page: http://www.link-assistant.com/rank-tracker/

SERank – RAGE SERank will monitor search engine rankings for any number of keywords and display changes in a web site’s search engine rankings over any point of time.
Product Page: http://www.ragesw.com/products/search-engine-rank.html

Advanced Web Ranking – Advanced Web Ranking is a search engine ranking software that emulates a manual search through each search engine. It works exactly like if you were manually checking your keywords ranking position via a browser.
Product Page: http://www.advancedwebranking.com/

Link Assistant – A search engine optimization software program designed to automate the many tedious link building tasks us SEOs need to do on a daily basis. A complete, feature-rich, easy-to-use environment.
Product Page: http://www.link-assistant.com/

iWeb SEO Tool – Quickly and easily optimize your iWeb based website for search engines then publish directly to your iDisk or FTP server without ever leaving the application.
Product Page: http://www.ragesw.com/products/iweb-seo-tool.html

SEO Spyglass – SEO SpyGlass is an extremely powerful competition research tool that is amazingly easy to use. In three simple steps SEO SpyGlass will show you exactly how your competitors got top positions in search engines so you can learn how they do it, improve on it, and get your own site ahead of them, in 232 local and international search engines!
Product Page: http://www.link-assistant.com/seo-spyglass/

WordButler – A wordtracker competitor specifically designed for mac users.
Product Page: http://www.wordbutler.com/

For years now, the country has been competing with other countries like India in cornering outsourcing contracts. And the good news is that the country is competing well thanks to the many factors that help the Philippines maintain its comparative edge against other leading BPO providers like India. Here is a listing of the country’s strengths and in what sectors can the Philippines truly prove its mettle.

• · Low Infrastructure Costs. Here is one area where the country can show its edge. Office spaces and real estate properties in the country are minimal if you compare the prices to US real estate prices. Real estate prices in Metropolitan Manila are considered low if compared to other international markets. But if the prices in greater Manila still sting the budget, provincial locations are great choices as well. Real estate prices are significantly lower, like Subic, Cebu and Southern Luzon.
• · Government support is evident. One notable government move is to support 100,000 Filipinos thru scholarships. These scholarships will ensure that there will be a continuing pool for contact centers and BPO centers.
• · American-honed work culture. Since the country has been under American rule for many years, the workforce has assimilated some of the American culture, thus allowing the workforce to know and understand where their American customers are coming from.
• · The literate workforce. Companies that will look at the opportunities that can be provided by the Philippines will benefit from the Philippine’s high quality knowledge workers. The Philippines is the second largest English-speaking country and the country also boasts 94 percent literacy rate. Data suggests that more Philippine students are enrolled in the universities than in most European countries. This suggests the quality of education and the motivation of the students.

More importantly the, the Philippines and the country’s BPO providers is your ideal choice to handle your company’s outsourcing needs because of the ethics of the Filipino employees. Filipino employees can be the best workers as most of the Filipinos have Catholic upbringing. Their innate morals and ethics due to their beliefs manifests well in the workforces’ work functions. The Filipino workforce is known for being patient and accommodating thus making the Filipino workforce an excellent choice for your outsourcing needs.

In this newly rolled-out service by Yahoo!, users will get custom real time reports and graphs that help them slice and dice metrics like sales, page views, and sources of traffic and ultimately identify ways to amp up their visitor satisfaction.

For further info, check out Yahoo! web analytics

I have checked a number blogs earlier and found out that most of them don’t care of the permalinks issue. If you’ll notice, wordpress permalink by default shows a question mark and numbers in it, obviously not search engine friendly. You can customize this by going to Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks section of your wordpress powered blog. You’ll see five options there for your permalink:

• Default – http://www.kontrapelo.com/?p=123
• Day and name – http://www.kontrapelo.com/2008/09/12/sample-post/
• Month and name – http://www.kontrapelo.com/2008/09/sample-post/
• Numeric – http://www.kontrapelo.com/archives/123
• Custom Structure – you can create your own here

Of all the choices, I usually prefer making it custom that don’t include the postdate. Why? Well, here’s the idea:

url #1: kontrapelo.com/2008/09/12/wordpress-seo
url #2: kontrapelo.com/wordpress-seo

The first url above tells Google that “2008/09/12″ is more important than “wordpress-seo” as it is placed first. Placing the “date” first before your “name” structure pushes your keywords away. This is the best permalink structure for me but if you’re working a way to have your article featured in Google news which requires a 3-digit included in your url, it’s a no-no. If your wordpress blog already has 100 posts prior to targetting appearance in Google news, then something like “name/id” will do. If the blog is new, then work your way to have a 3-digit number in it. You can play around with the “year/month/date” placing it after the “name” structure.

In addition, I’ve read an article before (can’t remember where) saying Matt Cutts mentioned in WordCamp 2007 in San Francisco that the best permalink structure you can use is just the post title with hyphens.

Well, to make it simple, the whole idea here is to take a domain like http://kontrapelo.com and redirect it to http://www.kontrapelo.com consolidating all incoming links to a single domain, wether they use “www” or not.

Here’s a simple mod_rewrite rule you can add to .htaccess to accomplish this, put it above any other rewrite rules that you are using, you may want the other rules to apply to the www. domain after the initial redirect.

note: replace the sample domain with your own domain.
RewriteEngine on

#Redirect http://kontrapelo.com to http://www.kontrapelo.com
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^kontrapelo.com
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.kontrapelo.com/$1 [r=301,L]

I wonder where Microsoft will be placed after this sale, if you don’t know yet, Digg has a 3-year ad arrangement
with them.

Digg has been popular for its voting concept that fascinated Google.

“The court’s erroneous ruling is a set-back to privacy rights and will allow Viacom to see what you are watching on YouTube,” Google senior litigation counsel Catherine Lacavera said.

“We urge Viacom to back off this overbroad request and Google to take all steps necessary to challenge this order and protect the rights of its users.”

Viacom recently issued a statement saying it is only out to bolster its case against Google and not to expose or pursue viewers of copyrighted videos.

“Any information that we or our outside advisors obtain will be used exclusively for the purpose of proving our case against YouTube and Google,” Viacom said.

“It will be handled subject to a court protective order and in a highly confidential manner.”

WHAT IS THIS FOR US?
It’s simple. Viacom will have access to informations about every Youtube video that me and you have ever watched. They will know what username you are using. It’s a breach of privacy!!

Every participant will surely do everything they can just to grab the $5000 top prize, though black hat is not allowed, there’s surely one or two that will use it, either for the benefit of their sites or for pulling down other’s site and it makes me wonder what if that happens to me or any other participants? Well, it’s part of the game and makes it more exciting…

Honestly, I am not applying too much work for this busby seo challenge entry of mine as I’m a bit busy working for several clients the past few days, the only thing I’ve applied is just a few bookmarks and applying links from my other sites. Hopefully, I’ll have more time to work on this as I am also hoping to grab the top spot, not much for the prize but for the honor!

Here’s the list of prizes for the Busby SEO Challenge:
First Prize: $5000
Second Prize: $2000
Third Prize: $500

The prize at stake is high so this will be a competitive one.

RULES

* Start date is 1st June 2008, 12:00midday, Perth, Western Australia at which point the phrase will be posted on the Busby website.
* End date of 31st August 2008, 12:00 midday, Perth, Western Australia.
* Only ethical SEO techniques may be engaged and the judges reserve the right to review the techniques engaged by the winner to ensure they comply.
* No pornography, no discrimination and no illegal behaviour is permitted.
* The competition is only open to domain and sub domain names that do not include the key phrase in any form
* Only registered entrants are eligible to compete and win the prize. Busby will maintain a list of entrants which can be view on the Entrants List page.
* Registration is free, open to anyone of any age, gender, race and domicile and can only be made through Registration Process.
* All entrants pages must have a visible link back to www.busbywebsolutions.com with the following text (including the hyperlink) in Arial 10 font:

* Only one prize per person.
* Employees, franchisees and licensees of Busby (and each of their family members) are eligible to enter but are not eligible to win any prizes.

Goodluck to everyone who’s joining.

If you’re about to promote your video, find existing videos in youtube similar to your niche which already has tons of views or those uploaded by users who are really getting good traffic via their uploaded videos, then copy their tags to the video you’re uploading.

The logic is that whenever their video is watched, your video will appear in their related videos in the sidebar which will give you lot more possible views.