Your Days Without Me :p

A Week without me would be: Mourn day, Tears day, Waste day, Thirst day, Fright day, Shatter day, Sux day, Seven days without me - Makes one Weak!

Dolphin deaths spark renewed opposition to RWS plans

What on earth is happening? Animals are dying!!! Research is one thing but capturing them to entertain humans is cruelty. How you like to caged up and forcefully be taken away from home? :(

Activists say keeping dolphins in captivity lowers their life expectancy. (File photo)

Animal welfare activists are up in arms over Resorts World Sentosa‘s (RWS) decision to proceed with its plan to keep dolphins in its oceanarium despite the death of two of the seven bottlenose dolphins in its possession.

According to The Straits Times, the move has drawn flak from animal welfare groups who are urging the integrated resort to reconsider its decision to keep dolphins in its upcoming Marine Life Park.

The two female dolphins — caught from the wild in the Solomon Islands — died from a melioidosis bacterial infection while being held in the Malaysian island of Langkawi two months ago. Melioidosis is a soil-borne disease, with infections occurring primarily during the rainy season.

The deaths have again sparked fresh opposition to RWS’ plans to house the animals as entertainers. Last May, RWS scrapped a controversial plan to exhibit whale sharks. It explained that it might not be able to care for the animals which can grow up to 15m long and weigh up to 15 tonnes.

Marine conservationist Paul Watson told Today newspaper the “incarceration of dolphins lowers life expectancy of the animals”.

“It’s a trade based on blood and misery and has no place in the 21st century,” said the founder and president of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA) executive director Deirdre Moss echoed his views.

”This is a tragedy. The animals were obviously under tremendous stress… If RWS could change its stand on whale sharks, why couldn’t they on dolphins?”

Mr Robin Goh, assistant director of communications at RWS, said the pair of dolphins were perfectly healthy prior to the infection. He added that other animals in holding have not shown any signs of infection.

As for the 18 dolphins being trained at Ocean Adventure Park in the Philippines for the Marine Life Park, RWS said they were in “good health”.

“We’re continuing with the development and establishment of the medical, behavioural, husbandry and training programmes that include the preventive medicine programme to ensure the well-being and health of the dolphins,” said Mr Goh.

The oceanarium — set to be the world’s largest aquarium – takes up a whopping 80,000 square metres, and was part of the resort’s proposal when Genting International won the bid to build the Sentosa integrated resort in 2006. It is scheduled to open next year.

“We’re committed to delivering the bid and the Marine Life Park that will not only boost tourism but research, conservation and education in marine mammals in this part of the region,” Mr Goh added.

However, Ms Moss reiterated: “It’s cruel to capture these animals from the wild with a view to entertain the public. We should promote tourism but not at the expense of these animals.”

Source: Fit to Post - Yahoo! Singapore's blog

When Art and Charity comes together

STRONG PLAY ETHIC" An exhibition and sale of photographs by Mark Teo

Hamstersaurus

Have you seen a Hamstersaurus before? XD

Buck-teeth dinosaur = Hamstersaurus! LOL! =P

Source:
Nikita

Top Management

A way to start out Monday morning specially in the office ROAR

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She reduced altitude and spotted a man below. She descended a bit more and shouted,
"Excuse me sir, can you help me? I promised a friend I
would meet him an hour ago but I don't know where I am."

The man below replied, "You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."
''You must be an engineer," said the lady balloonist.
"I am", replied the man. 'How did you know?'

''Well", answered the lady in the balloon,
"everything you told me is technically correct, but I've no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help to me at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip even more."

The engineer below responded,
"You must be in Top Management."
''I am", replied the lady balloonist,
"but, how did you know?''

"Well," said the Engineer,
"You don't know where you are, or where you're going. You made a promise, which you've no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you, to solve your problems."

Ancient galaxy is more than 13 billion light years away

Ancient galaxy is more than 13 billion light years away
PARIS (AFP) - – European astronomers on Wednesday said a galaxy born in the childhood of the Universe lies at least 13 billion light years away, making it the remotest object ever observed.
Light from the galaxy UDFy-38135539 that reaches Earth today was emitted when the cosmos was only 600 million years old and mired in a primordial "fog" of hydrogen atoms, they said.
It has taken 13.1 billion years, travelling at 300,000 kilometres (186,000 miles) per second, for this smudge of infant light to arrive.
The study, appearing in the British journal Nature, used a giant European telescope in Chile's Atacama desert to measure the galaxy's so-called redshift.
The more distant a light source is, the longer its wavelength stretches. In other words, a light that appears to be receding from the observer shifts more towards the red part of the optical spectrum.
In this case, the galaxy's redshift was 8.6, making it the most distant object ever observed by spectroscopy.
The previous documented record, in 2009, was a redshift of 8.2 caused by a gamma-ray burst of a super-massive star. An object at a redshift of 10 was once reported but has never been confirmed.
"Measuring the redshift of the most distant galaxy so far is very exciting in itself, but the astrophysical implications of this detection are even more important," said Nicole Nesvadba of France's Institut d'Astrophysique Spatiale.
"This is the first time we know for sure that we are looking at one of the galaxies that cleared out the fog which had filled the very early Universe."
Under the "Big Bang" theory, the Universe originated in a superheated-flash around 13.7 billion years ago and started to expand.
After the cosmos had cooled a little, electrons and protons teamed up to form hydrogen, which for hundreds of millions of years filled the Universe.
During this epoch, known as the Universe's "Dark Ages," there were no stars. It was followed by a period known as reionisation, in which the first stars formed and their intense ultra-violet radiation managed to pierce the hydrogen fog.
Understanding reionisation would also help to explain the formation of the first galaxies. But the starlight needed for evidence has -- until now -- been absent because of the opaque mist that shrouded the Universe at this time.
One theory is that the light from the newly-discovered galaxy was able to penetrate the fog because it was helped by other, nearby galaxies.
"Without this additional help, the light from the galaxy, no matter how brilliant, would have been trapped in the surrounding hydrogen fog and we would not have been able to detect it," said astronomer Mark Swinbank of Durham University, northeast England.
UDFy-38135539 -- whose name comes from its location in the "Ultra Deep Field" zone of deep space -- was first spotted last year by the US orbital telescope Hubble.
The dim light intrigued astronomers poring over the reionisation enigma, said lead author Matt Lehnert of the Observatoire de Paris.
They begged the boss of the European Southern Observatory (ESO) to give them special time on the Very Large Telescope (VLT), which has a highly sensitive redshift-measuring spectroscope.
Sixteen hours of observation, using a very long exposure time, enabled a clearer image of the galaxy, but two months of analysis and testing were needed to confirm the data.
In terms of distance, the gap between Earth and the galaxy is likely to be far higher than 13 billion light years, ESO told AFP.
This is because the Universe has been expanding since the time when the light was first emitted. As a result, the light has had to travel longer in order to "catch up" with us.

Source: http://sg.news.yahoo.com/afp/20101021/tts-space-astronomy-galaxy-c1b2fc3.html

Million Dollars Questions

Q: Why are condoms transparent?
A: So that sperms can at least enjoy the scene even if their entry is Restricted!

Signboard outside a prostitute's house:
Married MEN not allowed. We serve the needy, not the greedy...

New AIDS awareness slogan:
Try different positions with the same woman instead of same position with different women.

Why is $ex like shaving?
Well, because no matter how well you do it today... tomorrow you'll have to do it again...

Q: What will happen if earth rotates 30 times faster?
A: Men will get their salary everyday and women will bleed to death.

Q: Why do 90% gals have left boob bigger than right?
A: Bcoz 90% boys are right handed.

Q: What is the difference between an UNDERWEAR & a STAGE CURTAIN?
A: When you pull down the STAGE CURTAIN, the show is over, but when you pull down the UNDERWEAR..... it's SHOWTIME!!!

Q: What is the similarity between a wife and a chewing gum?
A: Both are sweet in the beginning but become tasteless and shapeless later...

Advantages of having an affair with married women.
They give like hell.
They do not yell.
They do not tell.
They do not swell
And there's no wedding bell!

My dad told me that if Adam and Eve were Chinese, we would be still in Paradise .
Why? Because they would have eaten the snake instead of the bloody apple!

Talent VS Time

This is life LOL

why cops in africa wear security vests

why cops in africa wear security vests

Warum in Afrika die Polizei Warnwesten trägt... (Bild)

Financial Management

Country Of Origin . . . Malaysia

A beggar to another beggar: I had a grand dinner yesterday.

How? The other beggar asked.

First beggar: Someone gave me a Rm100 note yesterday. I went to the KL Tower Revolving Restaurant and ordered wine & dinner worth Rm 1,000, and enjoyed the dinner. When the bill came, I said, I had no money.
The manager called the policeman, and handed me over to him.

I gave the Rm 100 note to the police fellow, and he set me free.
Isn't that a wonderful example of financial management?!!!

Never Mess with a Women

Never mess with a Women. Whatever you give to them, they will have the way to use it accordingly :p

A Punjabi lawyer working in UK wrote to his wife in India ...

Dear Sunita Darling,

I can't send you my salary this month because the global market crisis has affected my Company's performance, so I am sending 100 kisses. You are my sweetheart, please adjust.

Your loving husband,
Tuna Singh


His wife replied...

TINKU KE PAPPA ,

Thanks for the 100 kisses. Below is the list of expenses I paid with the Kisses...:

1. The Milk man agreed on 2 kisses for one month's milk.

2. The electricity man, Kooldip Singh, agreed not to disconnect only after 7 kisses.

3. Your landlord Kapal Singh comes every day to take 2 or 3 kisses instead of the monthly rent.

4. Supermarket owner Jaswant Singh did not accept kisses only, so I gave him other items, I hope you understand..

5. Miscellaneous expenses 40 kisses.

Please don't worry about me, I still have a balance of 35 kisses and I hope I can survive the month using this balance...
Shall I plan the same for the next month?

Your Sweet Heart,
Kichi

Two priests go on vacation

Two priests decided to go to Hawaii on vacation.








They were determined to make this a real vacation by not wearing anything that would identify them as clergy. As soon as the plane landed they headed for a store and bought some really outrageous shorts, shirts, sandals, sunglasses, etc.



The next morning they went to the beach dressed in their 'to! urist' garb. They were sitting on beach chairs, enjoying a drink, the sunshine and the scenery when a 'drop dead gorgeous' blonde in a topless bikini came walking straight towards them.. They couldn't help but stare.





As the blonde passed them she smiled and said 'Good Morning, Father ~ Good Morning, Father,' nodding and addressing each of them individually, then she passed on by. They were both stunned. How in the world did she know they were priests? So the next day, they went back to the store and bought even more outrageous outfits.





These were so loud you could hear them before you even saw them! Once again, in their new attire, they settled down in their chairs to enjoy the sunshine. After a little while, the same gorgeous blonde, wearing a different colored topless bikini, taking her sweet time, came walking toward them. Again she nodded at each of them, said





'Good morning, Father ~ Good morning, Father,'and started to walk away. One of the priests couldn't stand it any longer and said, 'Just a minute, young lady.' 'Yes, Father?' 'We are priests and proud of it, but I have to know, how in the world do you kn! ow we are priests, dressed as we are?' She replied,





'Father, it's me, Sister Kathleen.




A smile - is a sign of joy.

A hug - is a sign of love.

A laugh - is a sign of happiness.


And a friend like me??

Hell...that's just a sign of good taste!!

4 different sons...

Previously I shared a post on Christian jokes. Now I want to share you something interesting. Sometimes what people thought things should be ashamed of can be other's pride and another way round.

Four friends, who hadn't seen each other in 30 years, reunited at a party. After several drinks, one of the men had to use the rest room. Those who remained talked about their kids.

The first guy said, 'My son is my pride and joy. He started working at a successful company at the bottom of the barrel. He studied Economics and Business Administration and soon began to climb the corporate ladder and now he's the president of the company. He became so rich that he gave his best friend a top of the line Mercedes for his birthday.'

The second guy said, 'Darn, that's terrific! My son is also my pride and joy. He started working for a big airline, then went to flight school to become a pilot. Eventually he became a partner in the company, where he owns the majority of its assets He's so rich that he gave his best friend a brand new jet for his birthday.'

The third man said: 'Well, that's terrific! My son studied in the best universities and became an engineer. Then he started his own construction company and is now a multimillionaire. He also gave away something very nice and expensive to his best friend for his birthday: A 30,000 square foot mansion.'

The three friends congratulated each other just as the fourth returned from the restroom and asked: 'What are all the congratulations for?'

One of the three said: 'We were talking about the pride we feel for the successes of our sons. ... What about your son?'

The fourth man replied: 'My son is gay and makes a living dancing as a stripper at a nightclub.'

The three friends said: 'What a shame... what a disappointment.'

The fourth man replied: 'No, I'm not ashamed. He's my son and I love him. And he hasn't done too bad either. His birthday was two weeks ago, and he received a beautiful 30,000 square foot mansion, a brand new jet and a top of the line Mercedes from his three boyfriends.'

The Daily Feed Issue #12: Ideas for creating link bait

I'll be away until Sunday. Since I'm free at the airport, I'll advance post up some interesting sharing. Will be up whole week :D Hope it helps you in gaining the traffic you always wanted ;)

Welcome to Issue #12 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page.

This week I'm continuing my focus on SEO and how to get quality links to your blog or website to boost your ranking in the search engines. On Monday I chatted about the 5 rules of linking, yesterday we covered the basics of link bait - what it is and I gave you a few examples of successful link bait.

Today I'm going to give you a few ideas and strategies to get high quality sites to link to you. A reminder: Link bait is a web page that is specifically designed to get other websites to link to it.

Why does link bait work?

One of the reasons link bait is so powerful is because it's viral. If you come up with a truly killer headline and web page, people will scramble to tweet about it and post it on their blog. Social media users will rush to post it on their favorite social media site so that they can get the karma, points or votes that come with posting a popular link. Other's will see your link posted and repost again and again.

Just to illustrate: If every time someone posts your link, two other people see it and re-post it, the cycle will look as follows: 1 person posts it. 2 people see it and re-post. 4 people see the 2 links posted and repost. Then 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512... So after just 9 cycles of re-posting you have 1+2+4+8+16+32+64+128+256+512 which equals 1023 people linking to your site.

I'm going to spend a lot more time on The Daily Feed discussing virality, viral co-efficients, viral loops and viral growth. But for now just take my word for it that viral growth is very powerful and very good provided it is growth in a desirable target market.

The other reason link bait is so powerful is because of the high quality links it provides. A single link from a major news outlet like CNN or BBC or a single link from a major government or university website is worth pure gold. If you're able to consistently get very high quality links like this every month or 3, you're pretty much guaranteed page 1 for several categories in your sector.

So how the heck do you write a page that everyone loves and wants to tell their friends about? Here are a few ideas:

• Write or do something funny. Matt Inman, a designer from Seattle is a genius at funny linkbait. Check out this take on Twighlight. Linked to from The Huffington Post and many other high profile sites.
• Write an article praising a blogger. See Jason Calcanis post on link baiting him.
• Build a useful web tool or application
• Make a valuable resource. Lists are always popular. Write a how-to guide or a well researched historical article.
• Interview someone famous
• Be the first in doing something on the Internet
• Expose a scam, a scammer or rant about bad service or a bad product
• Disagree with an authority. I mentioned BoingBoing taking on Wired yesterday - great example.
• Be controversial.
• Get a scoop on a story in your niche
• Make a tool that others put on their sites and link to you.
• Write an outrageous theory and back it up with logic. A recent computer science paper got over 700 votes on the popular geek website Hacker News and many other sites including Digg.com and Reddit.com. Turns out the publication may be incorrect, but it received a huge amount of publicity.

Tomorrow we'll chat about the most important part of creating link bait: Writing a killer headline.

Regards,

Mark Maunder.

Feedjit Founder & CEO

The Daily Feed Issue #11: How to get high quality links

I'll be away until Sunday. Since I'm free at the airport, I'll advance post up some interesting sharing. Will be up whole week :D Hope it helps you in gaining the traffic you always wanted ;)

Welcome to Issue #11 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page.

Yesterday I covered the 5 rules of linking. Today I'm going to give you a few tips on how to get links to your blog or website from high quality sites to give your search engine traffic a serious kick in the tail.

Last week I promised you something really special in this morning's edition. My team and I have come up with something we've never done before.

Feedjit is used by over 500,000 site owners because we show who is visiting your blog or website in real-time. Feedjit Pro lets you watch visitors click through your site, see live events like new cities and countries visiting, get email alerts about traffic spikes, see live graphs and much more.

We're offering Feedjit Pro at an unbelievable 60% discount for a 1 year membership. We've never given a 60% discount on any of our products before and we don't offer yearly memberships to the general public.

Because this is an unusually large discount we need to limit signups. The good news is that it includes a free 10 day trial!

Click here to get 60% off Feedjit Pro now with a free 10 day trial.

(Hurry. Yesterday we passed 20,000 subscribers who are also reading this email.)

Once you click the link above simply follow the instructions on the page and you're all set. Please don't post this link or tweet it - it's only available for Daily Feed subscribers and it will be disabled once we remove the offer.

Now lets chat about getting high quality links!

In case you're a new subscriber, at the beginning of last week I introduced my basic SEO philosophy: "Create new, unique and useful web pages, host them on a user-friendly website that Google can understand and make sure the right people know about them."

Link bait is the "make sure the right people know about your pages" part of this philosophy.

Link bait is an essential strategy for any blog or website. I tend to quote Matt Cutts a lot, but there's a reason: He's on the search quality team at Google and they're the guys who decide what the definition of web spam is. Here is Matt on the subject of Link bait. Clearly Google wants high quality websites to let them know where the other high quality websites are on the web. So link bait is good for Google and good for us.

So what is link bait? Link bait is any page on a blog or website that is designed specifically to get others to link to that page or the website in general. The goal is to get high quality "backlinks" - which are other websites that link to your site.

A great example of link bait is BoingBoing's recent blog entry refuting Wired Magazine's articleclaiming the web is dead. How successful was it? Less than a week after hitting the publish button Google has indexed 235 new inbound links to that BoingBoing URL alone. Many of the links are very high quality and include GigaOm and Wired themselves. Bingo!!

A few of things that made BoingBoing's linkbait successful are:

• The headline: "Is the Web really dead?" The headline is the most critical part of link-bait. More below.
• It's informational - BoingBoing actually did some research to put this article together and they present useful data.
• It's current. Wired's article is on this month's cover of the dead-tree version of their magazine. It's being talked about all over the web and offline including on NPR (national public radio which is very popular in the USA)
• It's emotional and taps into something controversial.

BoingBoing is already a successful blog but the reality is that anyone could have done this research, turned Wired's story against them and gotten a flood of traffic.

Some of the blog entries I've posted on my personal blog have either intentionally or inadvertently become link-bait. (sorry, no links as I'd rather not promote my personal site here):

• A blog entry titled "If your bank doesn’t like your startup’s blog, they may freeze your funds". I broke this story about a friend's business who was being discriminated against by their bank. It ended up on the Financial Times, ValleyWag, GigaOm and many other A-list blogs and newspaper sites with back-links.
• A blog entry complaining about a large company's unresponsive sales team. It was picked up on a very popular social media website and got over 10,000 uniques in 24 hours with lots of new inbound links. A day later a senior manage from Dell called me to repair the relationship.
• A blog entry on how to launch a startup in 10.5 hours. This actually was the start of Feedjit. Also was very popular on several social media sites, got a ton of new links and is still my most popular blog entry to this day. As a footnote: The blog entry is of course a bit of hyperbole. No one creates a business in 10.5 hours. But it makes for a great headline! :-)
• "Think you work hard? Think again". I created this headline and blog entry to help promote a friend's business and it worked. Over 8,000 uniques in a day to this page alone. It's still my 4th most popular page on the site. The slightly controversial or challenging headline is what made it work.

Tomorrow I'll give you strategies to help you create link-bait that will get you the high quality links you need to boost your search ranking.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

The Daily Feed Issue #10: The rules of linking

I'll be away until Sunday. Since I'm free at the airport, I'll advance post up some interesting sharing. Will be up whole week :D Hope it helps you in gaining the traffic you always wanted ;)

Welcome to Issue #10 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page.

Just a quick note on our book due this week titled "The little black book of free online marketing. From launch to your first 5,000 visitors per day and beyond". After a long weekend of work we've made the call to delay it an additional week. We're going to be adding more material including a bonus section and we also want to allow more time for editing.

I did promise you something special this week, so Tuesday (tomorrow) morning's edition will have a surprise and you're going to have to wait until then to find out what it is.

This week I'm covering the last and most powerful part of the SEO philosophy I introduced you to last week. My SEO philosophy in case you are one of the 3049 new subscribers we've gotten since Friday's issue went out is:

"Create new, unique and useful web pages, host them on a user-friendly website that Google can understand and make sure the right people know about them."

Today I'm covering "make sure the right people know about them". Having valuable content that is new, unique, useful, user-friendly and that a search engine can understand is great. But there are millions of websites out there that have all these basic ingredients. So how does Google, Yahoo, Bing and friends determine which websites should rank higher than others, assuming all on-site factors are equal? By using a kind of reputation system.

Each search engine has it's own algorithm for figuring out your reputation. I'm going to focus on Google exclusively because 80% to 90% of your search engine traffic will come from Google.

In the beginning - meaning 1996 when Google launched as "Backrub" at Stanford, Larry And Sergey used an algorithm called Pagerank to rank web pages. Previously search engines had relied mostly on the text on individual websites to figure out which site would rank higher. Larry and Sergey introduced a reputation system that was a huge breakthrough. It gave search engines a way to take two pages that both look useful and determine which page people on the web like more or find more useful.

Pagerank is a simple reputation system. It starts off by giving everyone a score of (lets say) one. Then it starts walking through the link structure of the web (or the link graph as it's called in geek speak) calculating who is linking to whom. It figures out your score by looking at who is linking to you and who links to them.

An exhaustive explanation of pagerank is more than you want to read. So I'm going to give you a few simple rules to follow to get Google to like you:

Rule #1: Never get someone with a low quality or spammy site to link to you. Ever.

This will hurt your ranking in Google and it's tough to recover once you've been flagged as a spam site or part of a "bad neighborhood".

Rule #2: All links are good provided they are from good quality websites.

The site that links to you doesn't have to get a huge amount of traffic or even have a super high pagerank. Just make sure they have good quality content that isn't spammy and that the people who link to them are good quality sites too.

Rule #3: Focus on getting links from sites that are related to yours.

About 70% or more of the sites that link to you should be related to your content. If a high quality site wants to link to you and they're unrelated, say yes! But focus your link building on sites that are related to yours. That will ensure that you rank highly for the correct keywords and that you'll get the kinds of visitors you want.

Rule #4: Only link to high quality sites no matter how badly someone begs or pleads that you link to them.

Linking to a spam or low quality site will hurt your ranking.

Rule #5: Link text is very important.

Link text is the text that appears as (usually blue) underlined text that surfers click on. With images that are linked, the link text is the text contained in the "ALT" attribute of the image. If someone links to you and the link text is "holiday accommodation website" then Google will assume that you should rank a little higher for anything related to holiday accommodation. When you ask a website for a link, be very specific about what link text they use. Some bloggers and site owners will want to put their own text in the link, but try to influence them into having link text that is targeted and will attract the kinds of Google users that you want.

One last note: If someone links to you, make sure they're not including a nofollow attribute. That will cause the link to not pass any pagerank to your site. You can learn more about nofollow on this wikipedia entry.

Tomorrow I'm going to chat about a few strategies to get sites to link to you. Have a spectacular Monday!

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO.

The Daily Feed Issue #9: Building websites that Google (and friends) can understand

I'll be away until Sunday. Since I'm free at the airport, I'll advance post up some interesting sharing. Will be up whole week :D Hope it helps you in gaining the traffic you always wanted ;)

Welcome to Issue #9 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page.

On Tuesday next week we have a big surprise for the blogging community. A week and a half from now is the official launch of our ebook titled "The little black book of free online marketing. From launch to your first 5,000 visitors per day and beyond". Next Tuesday we're doing a verylimited pre-sale of the book at a discount - available exclusively to members of this list. Tuesday's pre-sale is limited to 100 members and we'll send out the details on Tuesday morning so keep a close eye on your inbox.

The book contains over 30 years of combined experience in online marketing. It's written by my co-founder and I and is designed to ramp up your blog or website traffic to 5,000 visitors per day and help you keep growing. If you're just starting out or you've plateaued at a few hundred uniques a day, we have carefully constructed a set of solid rocket boosters to put your site traffic into orbit. Our current business is the massively popular Feedjit and our previous projects have been featured in Time Magazine and the NY Times. We've included a bonus section which I'll tell you more about in Monday's edition of The Daily Feed.

Now, back to our regularly scheduled programming:

We're continuing our focus on getting and keeping search engine traffic. This week we've introduced a broad philosophy to get and keep traffic from the search engines:

"Create new, unique and useful web pages, host them on a user-friendly website that Google can understand and make sure the right people know about them."

We've covered creating new, unique, useful and user-friendly web pages. Today we're going to chat about creating pages and websites that Google can understand.

Does your domain name matter?

Years ago Google would index search keywords in your domain name. These days your choice of domain name has little effect on your ranking in the search results unless the name contains an obscene word or was used by a black hat (bad) SEO before you and has been black-listed.

The most important factors when choosing a domain name are:

• It must be easy to remember
• It doesn't have to be short. HuffingtonPost is the most popular blog in the world.
• It should have words that are related to what it does. e.g. RescueTime.com sells time management software. MediaPiston.com is a copywriting service.
• It must be easy to spell
• It must be easy to pronounce
• It should not contain dashes - when someone remembers your domain, they won't remember if it included dashes or not.
• It should be a dot-com. .org'ers argue with me if you like, but dot-com's are still the most memorable domains.

I would also avoid domains that incorporate a top level domain into the spelling. For example: "del.icio.us". It worked as a marketing gimmick for Delicious back when they launched, but even they chose to buy delicious.com and replace their original fancy spelling with a plain vanilla dot-com domain.

What about URL structure?

Your URL's should contain words that describe each page on your site separated by dashes. This is not a good URL:

http://example.com/?p=2343

This is a good URL:

http://example.com/how-to-bake-a-cake.html

Search engines index the words in your URL and give them slightly greater emphasis than the text that appears in your page content. You must use dashes instead of underscores. Google treats words separated by underscores as one big word. Here is Google's Matt Cutts explaining why you should use dashes in your URL's. Notice the URL of the page I linked to. It's well formed with dashes separating the words. Matt uses a forward slash at the end of his blog entry URL's. You can also use a .html extension - either works just as well.

Cross linking is key

Every page of content on your site should cross link to other content. If you have a blog, throw in a link to older blog posts you've written at every opportunity. Don't go too wild - just 1 to 3 links are fine. I tend to get peeved at sites that cross link too much, so only link to content that is actually relevant to what you're writing about. As the amount of content on your site grows, you'll have more fuel to cross-link to.

Cross-linking is important because not only does it help search engines find your content, but it helps them figure out which content is the most important. Google does this by calculating internal page rank for each page on your site. It figures out which pages you're linking to most often and emphasizes those pages in the results. The result is that important pages like your home page are ranked higher than content deeper in your site.

That's all for todays edition. Have a great weekend and I'll see you again next week when we'll dive into my favorite part of SEO: Link development, link bait and letting the right people know about your site.

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

The Daily Feed Issue #8: "Useful" and "user-friendly" websites

I'll be away until Sunday. Since I'm free at the airport, I'll advance post up some interesting sharing. Will be up whole week :D Hope it helps you in gaining the traffic you always wanted ;)

Welcome to Issue #8 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page.

This week we're focusing on getting and keeping search engine traffic. Earlier this week I introduced a general philosophy for SEO:

"Create new, unique and useful web pages, host them on a user-friendly website that Google can understand and make sure the right people know about them."

We've been breaking down this philosophy as a broad approach to SEO and discussing each of the colored words above. As the weeks progress we'll dive deeper into each of the elements in this approach. Rest assured that you're building a solid foundation in SEO and that the principles I outline in the coming weeks are the same principles that the busiest and most successful websites in the world use to get and keep search engine traffic.

So far we've introduced the importance and the meaning of creating 'new' and 'unique' content. Today we're going to cover 'useful' and 'user-friendly' as it relates to search engine traffic.

"useful"

When I write these newsletters I try to pack in facts you can use. If I just have a bunch of fluff every day just so I can send you one useful piece of data every second week, you're probably going to get your advice somewhere else right? Google feels the same way about the web pages it sends visitors to. The page should answer the question the web surfer asked Google as effectively as possible. If another page is more useful and Google is doing their job right, they should send the surfer there instead.

If you have a website on quilting and Google sends you someone wanting to know how to do a rag edge stitch (don't ask me how I know about this) you'd better tell them how to stitch rag edge with as much useful information as possible. If you don't the visitor isn't going to be very happy with you or with Google's ability to find stuff. They'll leave your site and they'll go and use Bing. [No offense Bingers!]

"user-friendly"

Ever arrived on a site and a box appears in the middle of your browser obscuring the content? Or how about those sites where the ad blocks the entire site until you click close, at which point it opens a popup window. Doesn't that just make you want to climb into the screen and...

Once again, lets think like a Google employee. We want the websites we send searchers to:

• To be Fast! Remember last week's focus on speed? This is massively important when it comes to user-friendliness and user satisfaction. I hope you took notes.
• To be Easy to navigate. Menu's should be clear and easy to access and understand.
• To contain the same content that the search engine indexed. Sites that show search engine crawlers one thing and then visitors another get banned from Google. This technique is called cloaking and it's very bad.
• To have content that is easy to read and not obscured by a bunch of ads.

Earlier this week I was again reminded of the importance of speed. Our site load time dropped by about a second thanks to high traffic across our servers. The conversion rate (number of people who buy things) dropped by a few percentage points as a few people who were used to our pages loading in a tenth of a second didn't want to wait around for a mere extra second.

Making your site fast and user-friendly is an ongoing project. The good news is that every improvement you make yields measurable results that increase user loyalty and revenue.

Tomorrow I'm going to start chatting about building a website that Google (and other search engines) can understand. It's is a big subject and it will probably overflow into next week when we'll finish with the other really big subject of SEO: letting the right people know about your site ( also called link development).

Regards,

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

The Daily Feed Issue #7: New and unique

I'll be away until Sunday. Since I'm free at the airport, I'll advance post up some interesting sharing. Will be up whole week :D Hope it helps you in gaining the traffic you always wanted ;)

Welcome to Issue #7 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page.

Yesterday I told you the secret of getting and keeping search engine traffic. In case you're new, the secret is:

"Create new, unique and useful web pages, host them on a user-friendly website that Google can understand and make sure the right people know about them."

Feel different? You should. You're now a member of a select club who knows how to get search engine traffic. Lets break down two of the underlined sections in this sentence:

"new"

Everything else being equal, new content will rank higher than older content in search engine results. Of course everything isn't equal. But this is an important factor because you are competing against a lot of other useful and unique web pages out there, so if you can be newer, why not!

As a broad strategy this means that you need to create a constant stream of new content on your site. Write a new page every week for your wine website covering a new variety of grape. Write a new blog entry each day if you're a blogger. If you're out of ideas on what to write on, revisit older blog entries and write an updated version on the same subject.

Pretend you're Google: A friend asks you to recommend a good article on Merlot grapes. You find two of them and they're very similar so you recommend the newer one. Google does the same thing.

"unique"

Pages on your blog or website must be unique. This is glaringly obvious, but certain brain dead SEO's still copy other people's web pages on their own website and pretend they own them. Google is very good at recognizing duplicate content and if you do this you will incur the dreaded duplicate content penalty! Google will penalize you and you will drop out of the top search results. Don't do it.

Be careful of even grabbing a few paragraphs of someone else's content unless you add a lot of value to it with your own content that surrounds it.

Pretend you're Google: Would you want to send a web surfer to a bad copy of a web page or to the original?

That's all on SEO for today. Interesting blog battle I ran across today: Wired Magainze's Chris Anderson and Michael Wolff published a piece in Wired titled "The Web is Dead. Long live the Internet". BoingBoing called them on it with some interesting data of their own - and rightly so. I'm going to cover link building later this week or early next, but I bring this up because it's a classic time-tested strategy of building links to your blog or website. Wired publishes a controversial article and gets a ton of inbound links from irritated readers telling them they're full of it. And BoingBoing goes right ahead and plays the good guy calling them on it and gets a ton of inbound links and social media exposure too. Awesome! Both websites win and we're given some interesting opinion pieces to read. Learn from these guys!

Errata: Yesterday I mentioned Matt Cutts as an "employee" but didn't clarify that he works for Google and is part of their Search Quality group.

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO

The Daily Feed Issue #6: The secret of SEO, revealed!

I'll be away until Sunday. Since I'm free at the airport, I'll advance post up some interesting sharing. Will be up whole week :D Hope it helps you in gaining the traffic you always wanted ;)

Welcome to Issue #6 of The Daily Feed. If this email was forwarded to you by a friend, you can subscribe on this page.

We're continuing SEO week today with a new approach to thinking about SEO and getting visitors from search engines. Yesterday we chatted about how many visitors you can expect, the level of difficulty and how long it takes. We also covered avoiding snake oil salesmen, that this isn't brain surgery and that you can do it too!

In this issue I'm going to introduce a philosophy that you can use to get Google and other search engines to send a constant stream of targeted visitors to your blog or website.

Google wants to send you visitors and they need your help to do it. They are in the business of helping web surfers find answers to their questions. If your page has the answers and Google isn't sending people to it, they're not doing their job!

You can take one of two approaches to SEO: You can view SEO as tricking search engines into sending you traffic, or you can try to help search engines do their job better.

If you choose to trick or control what they do, you're going to have to gain a deep understanding of the algorithms they use, keep up to date on how they change - and you're going to be up against some of the smartest computer scientists in the world. If you're crazy enough to take this approach I've included links to Google's original PageRank algorithm and the Hilltop algorithm's paper to get you started. You should also be warned that if you're discovered you'll be black-listed and will have to start over on a new website.

For the rest of you sane folks, I'm going to give you a broad strategy that will get you search engine traffic and help you keep it.

Here is the secret to getting a constant stream of visitors to your site from Google or any other search engine:

"Create new, unique and useful web pages, host them on a user-friendly website that Google can understand and make sure the right people know about them."

I'm going to break this sentence down into parts and we're going to focus on each of these parts for the rest of the week. Here it is again, with each important part color coded and underlined:

"Create new, unique and useful web pages, host them on a user-friendly website that Google can understand and make sure the right people know about them."

If you stop reading now and never read another issue of The Daily Feed and you follow the above sentence exactly, you will succeed at SEO. If you don't succeed, come and ask me why and I'll explain to you which of the underlined items in the above sentence you neglected to do.

Think my 151 character SEO philosophy is too simple? It contains every major element that the best SEO's in the world use. I've used this approach myself, seen it used to great effect by successful friends. Even employees like Matt Cutts recommend this approach. [In fact part of that sentence is taken from something Matt once said.]

Tomorrow we'll dive into some of the specifics in the philosophy I've outlined above. This issue of TDF is brought to you by Feedjit Advanced and Feedjit Pro, the world's most popular real-time analytics tool. Send your feedback and suggestions for future issues to support@feedjit.com.

By the way I'd like to thank everyone who has emailed us with thank you notes, comments and suggestions. I've been terribly remiss in not replying to you yet, but you should know that we read every one of your emails and they mean the world to us. Thanks very much and keep the suggestions coming.

Mark Maunder

Feedjit Founder & CEO