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Hide your email address from spammers

I manage numerous web sites and domains and my email address is often exposed on the contact pages of the web sites I maintain and optimize. Not surprisingly, my email address has been scanned by any imaginable spammer which make sure my inbox is never empty.

The following is a simple piece of JavaScript code you could use on your own web page to help you achieve dual benefit:

  • Prevent spammers from scanning your email address
  • Enable your legitimate users to send you email messages by clicking on the active email link

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Web Site Optimization On A Shoe String Budget

Summary: Web site optimization should not be for the big guys (and girls) only! You can do user experience testing and organic search engine optimization with relatively modest budget. Not doing any of those, simply because you are afraid of their perceived complexity, is the sure way of losing in a competitive market place for both small and medium size business and non-profit organizations and associations.
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Yahoo Search is not Inktomi alone

Regardless of previous claims that submitting a site to Inktomi means submitting it to the new Yahoo Search, this turned out not to be completely true. Yahoo is not Inktomi, at least not Inktomi alone; rather it is a new technology mix of the search engine spiders and indexes of Inktomi, AllTheWeb, AltaVista, and Overture. Do you find this all confusing? Don’t panic, you are not alone 🙂

I contacted PositionTech, which is the Inktomi partner I have been working with to have sites listed with the Inktomi Search Submit program. I asked them if the Inktomi results are going to feed into the new Yahoo Search.
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Yahoo launches new search engine, drops Google as search provider

On February 18th, Yahoo launched its new search engine, Yahoo Search, and replaced Google as search engine results provider. This will have immediate impact on search engine rankings and traffic as the main search engines’ marketshare is anticipated to change dramatically:

A day earlier, Google officially announced that it had reached an important milestone with immediate access to more than 6 billion items, including 4.28 billion web pages, 880 million images, 845 million Usenet messages, and a growing collection of book-related information pages.
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Search engine marketing drove growth in online ad spending in 2003

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) find online advertising spending hit $7.2 billion for the entire year last year, representing a 20% increase in spending over 2002. Article
Online ad spending in Q4 2003 totaled $2.2 billion, rising 38% over Q4 2002. What’s more, last quarter marked the highest spending quarter yet in the industry.

According to eMarketer, search engine marketing (SEM) — which grew 123% in 2003 — is primarily to thank for the 20% in online ad spending growth last year. In its latest report, Search Engine Marketing, eMarketer estimates paid search ad spending totaled $2.07 billion last year, jumping from $927 million in 2002.


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Government web privacy and commercial search engines

In its standard meaning, search engine optimization focuses on making web sites rank highly with the main commercial search engines. The other side of it all is making sure content which is not supposed publicly available does not get indexed into the search engines’ massive databases.

WashingtonPost.com logo and home pageToday’s Washington Post has on its front page an article on the importance of knowing how to properly secure information from being scanned by commercial search engines like Google. This is the type of information you wish government web managers would know when approaching search engine optimization.

Visual explanation of how search engine spider web sites and a link to article on how to protect directories with sensitive information from visiting search engine robots

Knowing the flip side of things, i.e. knowing how NOT to show in the search engines, is as important as knowing how to rank highly with search engines — all based on the type of information you have on the web of course…

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Two-word searches lead

OneStat, the real-time web analytics service provider, announced the results of its annual report of the number of words in a search term used to drive traffic to web sites. As last year, this year two-word phrases are the winners with 32.58% of the total search traffic studied by OneStat. What is new is the advance of three-word phrases which brough 25.61% of the total traffic at this year’s survey, and passed the single-word searches as the second most popular search phrase.

Two keyword search phrases lead the web traffic - chart

The implications of this survey’s results are clear for web marketers – when optimizing a web site for search engine rankings, one cannot overlook the fact that most people willing to find quality results on the web are learning to use more complex search queries.

Following is a detailed comparison of the results from the 2004 and 2003 surveys…
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