Below is a is list of URL’s to ping search engines with your XML sitemaps (For more info on Sitemaps see )

Ask.com: http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Google: http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Yahoo: http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=YahooDemo&url=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Live Search: http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://www.domain.com/sitemap.xml
Another Service (Just heard its good to use :S): http://api.moreover.com/ping?u=http://yourdomain.com/yoursitemap.xml

Hope this list helps someone

I have been building our new content management system, and I knew that our first site to be using it would need have a lot of pages 301 redirected as we are going to change the file structure and pages names (And the old site has has a lot of SEO done).  So I thought it would be a great ‘Admin Tool’ to be able to add the old and new pages into a table and if a 404 was served (One of the old pages) check against the pages in the database and 301 redirect the page to the new one.

So I made a simple table which held the OldURL & NewURL More...

I recently posted on cre8asite about BOTW moving in local search, one of the moderators posted the below stats - I thought I might need to refer to the later so I posted it here.

Compete - Directory Search Market Share by US Visitors for July 2008
Business.com:...5,829,592
DMOZ.org:.........1,324,690
Chiff.com:.............490,601
Joeant.com:..........302,678
BOTW...................292,889
Ezilon.com:...........115,185

Quantcast - Directory Search Market Share by US Visitors for July 2008
Business.com:.........6,083,709
Dir.yahoo.com:....... 3,132,742
DMOZ.org:...............2,096,178
Chiff.com:.................. 634,728
Joeant.com:................578,613
Directory.google.com..355,822
Ezilon.com:.................157,681
BOTW...........................61,100

I was going to write a big blog peice about this but just couldn't arsed so I posted it on cre8asite and did this very quick post but you should get the idea

When trying to promote your website on the net, you really need to start thinking outside the box in this day and age... So one out of the box ideas I had and which will probably cost you nothing or next to nothing or even a bag of sweets (If you have a kid or nephew who plays online), is to make use of the online gamers to promote your website.

In this example I'm talking about the Xbox 360 / Xbox Live

This is targeted towards people who have their website hosted for them, and do not have access to features in IIS.

I was faced with a challenge recently from a client that wanted to change their very well established domain name to a completely new one...But didn't want to upset their rankings!!??

The domain they were using is very well ranked, and that literally had 100's of pages that were ranking very well individually - So just a 301 re-direct on the root of the domain was out of the question.

I decided to write a little sub procedure that would check to see if people were accessing the page via the old domain name, and if so 301 re-direct to the page on the new domain. More...

Who's your target?
I think an important thing to get your head round before you start, is who / what you are optimising your pages for? (Getting orders, pushing your company brand etc...) I got this search splitting idea from a video I watched, and think it's a good easy way to look at things.

If you split the way people use search engines into 3 Kinds of searches:

Navigational:
People trying to get to a site or company they know

Informational:
Getting information on a specific subject / Researching

Transactional:
People wanting to purchase products... Might type specific things into SE's i.e. "Unlocked Nokia N73 New York" or variations of etc.. More...

So you're concerned with SEO, but have a really nice font / image you want to use for your headings... No problem.

I can't remember where I read / learnt this from, but I use it whenever I have a client insisting that I use the fancy looking heading that a graphic designer has used in a mock up design. Also the good thing about this is if a person is browsing with images off but CSS on the heading text will still show.

The main trick of this CSS is that it leaves the text on the page, and just places an image over the top. More...

Google wants to create quality search engine results just as badly as you want to acquire high search engine rankings. Fortunately for us, Google provides web masters with plenty of information... More...