Face-to-Face Meeting Between Microsoft and Yahoo!

According to a report on the All Things Digital Website, preliminary discussion between Yahoo! and Microsoft about a search partnership, now have taken place.

The report said that Talks have included a face to face meeting between Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer. All Things Digital Website stressed that the talks are centered on what sort of advertising and search partnership might be possible.

Steve Ballmer has been saying for months he would be open to a search deal, while Carol Bartz is not so excited for such an agreement, in her far more limited comments on the subject.
In Past few months, Microsoft's position has strengthened somewhat, with Redmond having hired a number of Yahoo's top search individuals, including Qi Lu. Few business deals have also been grabbed by the company aimed at boosting its query share and begun testing of its next-generation search product, code-named Kumo.

But the software maker also needs the share boost that Yahoo could give it. Microsoft is preparing to back Kumo's launch with a big ad push and would benefit from spreading those costs over more than its current single-digit share of the market.

Yahoo, meanwhile, has held more than double Microsoft's share, but could be headed for a decline after losing several toolbar deals to Microsoft and Google. A report on Thursday said the lost deals could cost the company as much as three percentage points of share, or 15 percent of its search volume.

16 useful and important Firefox extensions for SEOs, Developers and Other Users.

Here I have listed 16 useful and important Firefox extensions for SEOs, Developers and Other Users.

Long time I haven’t post anything about external sites in my blog.

Finally, after a long time of every day work shit, I managed to write something, today I’ve come up with some tools and tips which are very useful for SEOs, web designers and developers, like most website designers, developers and SEO experts, I use a vast range of tools and widgets to get the job done, few of them are desktop applications and few are web applications, few are paid and few are absolutely free and some are partially free. Below are few of my favorite add-on

HTML Validator – HTML Validator checks pages from within the Firefox web browser and validates web pages to the W3C standards with a simple green check in the corner of the page if the page validates, a red check if it doesn’t, and a yellow exclamation point if there are warnings. It also gives an enhanced view of source code that allows you to see where errors are within the code.

FireFTP – It is free, secure, cross-platform FTP client that provides easy and spontaneous access to FTP servers. It removes a piece of software for those of you who use a separate program for FTP.

Professor X – Professor X lets you analyze header information without seeing source code. The page “slides” down and Professor X shows you the contents of the page's head element, including Meta, Script and Style content.

NikkelWHOIS – NikkelWhois lets you view the WHOIS information for any page by just clicking the button on the top-right of the browser. It is WHOIS lookup that adds a small WHOIS button next to your URL go button.

IE Tab – IE Tab embeds Internet Explorer in a Mozilla/Firefox tab. This is derived from the famous extension IE View, so if you are sick of substituting between IE and Firefox when testing out a web page you’re developing, With IE Tab you can view Internet Explorer in a Firefox Tab!

FireBug – IT is an advanced debugger console that lets you monitor your JavaScript, CSS, HTML and Ajax.

Codetech – It is a web page editor that has the feel of Dreamweaver. Its an amazing extension for anyone doing web design that doesn’t want to fork out a few hundred dollars for Dreamweaver.

Server Switcher – easily switch between sites on your development and live servers by clicking the switch server icon.

SEO for Firefox – pulls useful market research data right into Google's and Yahoo!'s search results, including Google PR, Age, links, Alexa rank, WHOIS, and more. It also adds a few helpful links to the top of the search pages, including Google Trends, Google Traffic Estimator, and the Overture View Bid tool.

Yet Another Window Resizer – allows you to resize browser window to default screen resolutions.

AdSense Preview – preview the Google AdSense ads that would appear on that page. This is incredibly useful if you are considering putting AdSense on a page and don’t want to go through the hassle of signing up for an account and putting the ads up just to see what type of ads will show.

Screen grab – takes a screenshot of the webpage and saves it as an image file. This saves a ton of time compared to the method I used to use – take a screenshot and open Adobe Photoshop to crop the image.

Server Spy – indicates what brand of HTTP server (Apache, IIS, etc.) runs on the visited site on the lower-right side of the browser.

ColorZilla: Choosing color is always a key point when developing any websites, its an color picker with which you can get a color reading from any point in your browser, quickly adjust this color and paste it into another program. ColorZilla is a very useful add-on for Firefox and a must for web designers. You can pick color code for any point in the browser window, it lets you zoom the page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the page. The built-in palette browser allows choosing colors from pre-defined color sets and saving the most used colors in custom palettes.

RoboForm: RoboForm is the top-rated password manager and web form filler that completely automates password entering and form filling. This tool is very useful for Link Builders.

Copy as HTML Link: Copy as HTML instead of a normal hyper link. Makes posting links in your blog slightly easier. Not the best extension, but it should be mentioned on the list.

Comments invited........

Google Sites Now Open to Everyone

Few months back Google had launched Google Sites as a part of Google Apps for organizations/companies/firms that wanted to use their own services on their own domains, which has been made more easy for everyone and now any one can set up a website to share every kind of information, be it company intranets, community groups, team projects, clubs. Google says You name it, You got it! It is very easy. The upside is that all this is in one place. People can now host their own website at http://sites.google.com/[mywebsite] and add as many pages people like and all this is for free

How to manage personal finance online

amazing stuff... really cool!Now I've full control over my credit card bills, phone bills, expenses and everything is just for free...

read more | digg story

15 Hard Core SEO Tips

1. Revamp your Website once or twice a year.


2. Add at least 10 - 12 content pages to your website fortnightly.


3. Go without using keywords in your titles


4. Abstain from using keywords in your URLs.


5. Modify the titles on your least successful pages two times a year.
   
6. Try to find few Search Engine Optimization forums that accept website assessment requests and write at least 20 - 25 reviews in each forum before you ever ask a question.


7. Try to create your own SEO book by accumulating your preferred SEO forums and blog posts, articles, and technical tips in a .Doc or .PDF file that you review once a month.


8. Optimize your best performing page for the exact mirror of your targeted key phrase expression (turn an WXYZ page into a ZYXW page).


9. Write 10 blocks of ad copy of not more than 20 - 30 words each, every week and post them on the Web where they won’t offend anyone.


10. Write a full page announcement about your website every fortnight and post it on the web where it won’t offend anyone.


11. Create a 1-page listing of 25 unidentified Websites you wish you had created. Post that page on your site.


12. Create a forum signature that does not support your site and put it into every profile you have created.


13. Design and promote (to no. 1) a 5-10 page Web site about a society project or charitable movement. Now repeat the process without changing or building more links for your first website.


14. Find a niche directory you have never heard of before which you feel is honestly listing only one of its kind and useful sites. Promote that niche directory through back links and comments on your own sites until you see development in its Compete, Quant cast, and Alexa metrics.


15. Define a metric that uses from three to five factors OTHER THAN Alexa, Google PageRank, Compete Rankings, Quantcast Rankings, and back link counts. Use this metric to track 5-10 websites you don’t control for six months.

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Yahoo! Search Index Update Rolling Out

Sharad Verma of Yahoo Search has announced on their Yahoo! Search Blog: We are updating crawling, indexing and ranking algos, which will be completed very soon, and SEMs/SEOs may report slight ranking changes and page shuffling in the index. People can visit Site Explorer Suggestion Board, to share thoughts with other users.

Now, its time to check your rankings on Yahoo! If you haven’t done it yet

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