You read it hear first (or at least this version of the merger) that Carol Bartz and Steve Ballmer, two of the sexiest people in search today had come together to birth a new search engine (or at least Yahoo will now use Bing for search).

What will this new partnership bring? How will it roll out. All we can do is hope that this new baby will be pretty (unlike the potential below):

Official Site News – Microsoft, Yahoo! Change Search Landscape

We are all familiar with keyword research tools like – WordTracker, Keyword Discovery, Wordz, Wordpot and so on, but what if you want to know what people are searching on right now? Well many search engines big and small let you peek into what people are typing into their search engines in real-time making for some really interesting insights. Below is a list of engines and their respective offerings:

Google – Google Hot Trends
EntireWeb – SpeedySpy
AOL Search – AOL Hot Searches
InfoTiger – InfoTiger Voyeur
Search.com – Search.com Top Searches
MetaCrawler – MetaCrawler Popular Searches
Search Hippo – Search Hippo Last 15 Queries
Ask – Ask Interesting Queries (Top Searches)
DogPile – Dogpile SearchSpy

While some may call this a voyeuristic activity, others can use the ‘research’ excuse – either way it is a lot of fun…:-)

WhoLinksToMe.com (beta) is a great new service that offers some interesting and unique webmaster research tools. Here is the explanation from the site:

This first level launch provides free services to bloggers and businesses interested in learning about the strengths and weaknesses of their websites’ linking structure. Unlike current link analysis services, WhoLinksToMe.com reports cover a significantly broader online footprint in near real time, using technology far superior and more secure than previously offered. The services are web-based which removes the risks often associated with such an enormous continuous search, including banned IPs and immense lag time.

Check it out today at – WhoLinksToMe.com

MazeCore / Analyze is using a common script, but somehow it appears much cleaner than most installs (maybe because the others have so many ads and this one does not) to create one of my favorite free online SEO dashboards. In this adaptation they are calling it their ‘RankMeter’ (good name).

In addition, they have created a nice keyword ranking tool that can track a single term against a URL in Yahoo, Google and Bing. While it is limited, it is a nice addition.

Check it out today at – MazeCore / Analyze

SearchMe, one of my favorite search engines and a real contender is throwing in the towel on Saturday (July 25th, 2009). Apparently their venture capital backers did not find the same value in it that many others did.

What will be interesting to see is what they are going to do with what was created (at 45+ million dollars)? Will another engine buy the technology or interface? Will a smaller (or larger) search engine buy the URL and redirect the traffic (hello InfoSpace and Ask – here is your opportunity)? Who knows, but after Saturday we should find out as the engine is actually slated to go dark.

All I can say is, what a waste. They had a real opportunity and it is all being thrown away.

Check it out one last time before it is gone – SearchMe

Just got done working on phase one of my new search engine and PPC ad network (ad network not complete yet). Please welcome – iCrawl.us Global Search Engine.

I would love your feedback and input. Please fee free to drop me a comment within this post. otherwise please enjoy!

Thanks in advance….:-)

What I like about the new MSN Search or Bing team is there open attitude to the SEO/SEM community. The tools and information they are provising are going a long way to endearing them to this community and I hope they keep it up.

Search across their community forum I found a great post on SEO 101 for Bing and thought I would share the highlights with you here and provide a link to the post for additional information. So below are the best practicies for Bing SEO. Good luck!

Title Tag

The key message with the title tag is still the same. The page title is a critical element for helping the search engine bot identify the contents of your page.

When creating the title text, keep the following in mind:

* The closer the word is to the start, the more heavily weighted it is as a keyword. This is true for the bot as well as the reader.
* Keep the title text between 5 and 65 characters in length
* For greatest efficiency and consistency, write titles using this syntax: keyword phrase, category, website title (or brand)
* Make the title text unique on every page
* Don’t use any of the following special characters in title text: ‘”<>{}–()

Meta Description Tag

While search engines reserve the right to use a variety of inputs for filling out site description snippets in their SERPs, webmasters who provide unique, concise, compelling, and keyword-laden descriptions in their meta tags description attribute help guide the development of their websites SERP captions.

When creating the description text, remember the following:

* Create unique descriptions for each page, using keywords specific to that page
* Keep the description text between 25 and 150 characters in length
* Do not copy title tag text content as a description; this is a wasted opportunity to develop more keywords and adds no value
* Make the description text unique on every page

Meta Keyword Tag

The meta tags keyword attribute is not the page rank panacea it once was back in the prehistoric days of Internet search. It was abused far too much and lost most of its cachet. But theres no need to ignore the tag. Take advantage of all legitimate opportunities to score keyword credit, even when the payoff is relatively low.

When creating keyword text, remember the following:

* Choose words that may be secondary keyword terms (save the primary keywords for use in the title and meta description tags), and even include a few, commonly seen typographical errors of primary keywords, just for good measure
* Limit your keyword and key phrase text, separated by commas, to no more than 874 characters
* Don’t repeat a keyword more than 4 times among the keywords and phrases in the list

Read more – Head’s up on head tag optimization (SEM 101)

Redz, or previously called RedZee is one of the biggest rip-off scams on the Web. They may have changed their name and domain to try and avoid all the negative listings after any search for RedZee – EVERY listing after their own on a Google search is something negative – time for a new engine name and URL don’t you think and that is exactly what they did….:-)

So, now when you search for ‘redz’ on the major search engines, Redz shows up between 2nd and 4th position, but there are no negative listings on the first page! Wow, good job Redz (or RedZee).

What I find funny is this, they are so sloppy on running their company that they left old versions of their search engine live. For instance, if you type in RedZee.net you get to see the original search engine. If you type in RedZee.org, you will find show old press release from 2005 called, ‘New Metasearch Engine With a New Vision’. Not sure what they meant, unless the vision was a clever scheme to rip people off.

Now let me tell you a quick story about someone I know who bought into their lies and bought a listing from them. Well, after analyzing their traffic in Google Analytics it was quite interesting that a site that receives around 200 unique visits a day from search engines can suddenly spike to 600 unique visits a day with 400 of these visits coming from Redz. Let’s give Redz the benefit of the doubt and assume that they could provide 400 unique visits a day (sometimes much more in bursts) I analyzed a bit deeper any amazingly enough 100%, not 98% or 99%, but 100% of the traffic bounced. So, with no explanation from Redz my friend has dropped them, but they still try to harass them into using their service with lightly veiled threats about what will happen to their website once they quit the service.

So, just for reference, Redz really does not have that much actual traffic and no they have no arrangements with any of the major search engines, but they do have a piece of software that once installed can overlay their ads on top of Google, Yahoo, Bing or Ask results giving you the appearance of clicking on a Google, Yahoo, Bing or Ask ads. This is basically spyware labeled as something else (some spyware software can catch and remove this malicious and intrusive code) as to not alarm you and/or allow you to have any idea of what it is actually doing. In addition, all the traffic my friend saw was actually ‘bot’ traffic, meaning it was not actual humans, but programs specifically designed to call upon and then click on ads that generate traffic for RedZee to allow it to continue selling it’s program to unsuspecting individuals month after month.

What I hope to achieve with this post is a better awareness of what Redz actually is all about and to provide the potential for this information to rank within the top 10 listings in major search engines when someone actually searches on the term ‘redz’.

Redz is just like RedZee you cannot hide behind a new domain and name and apparently you cannot teach an old zebra new tricks.

McAffee SiteAdvisor Information on RedZee and Redz Websites

I urge you to post any dealing you have had with RedZee and/or Redz in the comments of this post.

Updates and additional resource links (10.22.10)

Amazingly enough, RedZee/Redz have been running their scams for over 5 years now!

I would like to thank everyone who continues to keep others aware of this ongoing scam by posting their personal experiences with this worthless company. My only hope is that we can help more people before they also get scammed as it appears Redz will not stop be stopping anytime soon. Below are some additional links and information, but please read the comments before you go and add your own if you feel so inclined.

PRLog – RedZee Traffic Fake, Lots of Complaints and Reviews

Ripoff Report – RedZee Search Results

Agents Online – RedZee – scam – Realtors Marketing Tips, Talk, Webmasters Forum

SEO Fail Blog – RedZ Fail

Squidoo – Open Letter to the President of RedZee

The Kona Impact Blog – RedZee Pay-Per-Click Scam Alert

800 Notes – Directory of Unknown Callers – RedZee (813) 769-2423

Feydakin.com – Bad SEO – RedZee / Web Wise Media Scam

T-Shirt Forums – RedZ – New Inexpensive Search Marketing Opportunity

Able 2 Know – Anyone use RedZ search engine?

Info Barrel – Redz Search Engine

The Consumerist – Redzee Won’t Stop Trying To Scam Charlie’s Boss

Webmaster World Forum – RedZ Won’t Be Around Long

Les Jones Blog – Beware of Redzee.com

Squidoo Lens – RedZee Search Engine – The Top3 Scam

The Search Engine Guide – Seeing Red – Search Engine RedZee Reviewed

SEOMoz – Investigating the RedZee Search Engine

Real Estate Webmasters – Redzee

Cre8asiteForum – What’s a RedZee

Website Chat Software – Detecting click fraud with…Live chat software!?

Site Reference – RedZee Complaints Pile Up – Read This Before Using Redzee!

Stepforth – Seeing Red – Search Engine RedZee™ Reviewed

Web Pro World Forum – Share Your RedZee Experience or Information

Professional Web Services – Advertising Scam “Search Engine Data Merging”

Complaints Board – Web Wise Media SCAM, HOAX, RIP OFF

Lunar Pages Forum – RedZee and eventure

Active Rain – RedZee.com

Every once in awhile you find something really new and cool. Well this is one of the those SEO/SEM tools and it is free. Here is the description from the website:

Welcome to the beta version of Orchid Box’s new specialist Page Rank tool.

Our tool is more than the usual suspects that tell you the page rank alone – instead the Crawler tool will crawl up to 60 pages within your site to look at its accessibility for search engines as well as tell you each one’s page rank, its powerful learning algorithm ensuring prioritises the most important pages first.

Here’s what the tool will tell you:
– HTTP status codes – broken links and redirects are highlighted by our tool alongside the normal page codes
– Metadata diagnosis – we can show you if your titles and descriptions are all in order
– Inbound/Outbound links – see where your links are headed to and how many inbound (within your domain) and outbound (outside the domain) links you have
– Size and loading times – page sizes are a vital factor in loading times for sites – we’ll give you both
– Page Rank – the magic number for Google, we’ll give you every page’s individual Page Rank so you can optimise your page rank flow

This tool is absolutely incredible and very unique in its abilities.

Check it out today at – OrchidBox Page Rank Tool

1. Twitter Timer – Need to remember something? Send timer a direct message, and it will tweet you back.
2. Twitter Mobile - A simplistic Twitter web interface orginally created for mobile phone users but also works well on desktop pc’s and laptops.
3. Tweet Volume – calculates and compares the volume of mentions in Twitter of words and phrases.
4. Twitter Counter – calculates and compares the followers of any Twitter accounts you select, for the last week, last month or last 3 months.
5. Twitterholic – cool tool that allows you to check the top twitters per city/region/country.
6. Tweet Deck – a desktop app that helps you organize your twitter account and makes communicating through twitter much easier.
7. Twhirl – a desktop app that has similar functionalities to Tweet Deck.
8. Destroy Twitter – another desktop app that has similar functionalities to Tweet Deck and Twhirl.
9. Twitpic – lets you share pictures on Twitter.
10. Mr. Tweet – finds relevant followers for you, great way of expanding your Twitter Follower Network.
11. Twellow – the Twitter yellow pages.
12. Twitbin – firefox extension that allows you to keep up with all of your Twitter conversations right from your browser sidebar.
13. Tweetr – allows PC & Mac users to upload and share files and photos.
14. Qwitter – useful app that e-mails you everytime someone stops following you on Twitter.
15. Twitpay – allows you to send and receive money through Twitter by making use of paypal.
16. WP to Twitter – a wordpress plugin that updates your status in Twitter everytime you post on your blog.
17. Twitter for WordPress – a wordpress plugin that displays your latest tweets on your blog.
18. Tweet Later – check out the free version, it has a really cool feature, it automatically unfollows someone that unfollows you.
19. SnapTweet – allows you to post your Flickr pictures to Twitter
20. LinkBunch – Need to share more than one link in a tweet? LinkBunch puts together all the links and provides you one link that you can share on Twitter. As you might have understood, this can be used not just with Twitter, but also with emails, IMs, SMS, etc.
21. Secret Tweet – allows you to Tweet anonymously.
22. TweetCube – allows you to post files on Twitter. The following are supported .zip, .rar, .pdf, .jpg, .png, .gif, .mp3 and .txt.
23. Twitteroo – another popular desktop client for Twitter.
24. Twittercal – allows you to post events from your Google (Google) calendar to your Twitter accounts.
25. Twessenger – updates Live Messenger status to reflect latest tweet.

Enjoy….:-)