I have a list of blogs that I read regularly. They are not all home work related: there are many SEO and general business blogs on my list.

One of my favorites of the recent time is OnStartUps, a business blog. There is some great information posted there. One of my favorites is the article ‘The Business Geek: Not An Oxymoron’.

In fact, all home workers are businessmen. We handle all kinds of tasks that ‘serious’ businessmen deal with. So, the article describes what a great business geek is, but most points are true for home workers:

1. Constant Learning
2. Uses Technology For Advantage
3. Balances Strategy and Execution
4. Professional Net Worker: (it is my favorite point – I am an introverted person – I wish I could improve myself) Technology geeks (if they’re really good) can often get away with being somewhat reclusive and introverted. Business geeks likely need to be much better at connecting with people, seeking out opportunities and doing something about them. In fact, they should enjoy this. Note: I’m not talking about the annoying types that approach people at social events and try to sell them stuff. I’m talking about the genuinely likeable types that are capable of having an intelligent conversation without expecting money to exchange hands.
5. Analytical and Inquisitive
6. Intellectually Honest

Summary: in my opinion all points are a must for a successful home worker. I do not think that the list will make you a successful and profitable businessman, but it is the starting point.
[tags]business, home work, home business[/tags]

eBay.com, auction giant, has acquired Skype, popular telephony service, last year. Now eBay announces the integration of Skype technology into the auctions.

Already this June the sellers will be able to make use of Skype technology: based eBay sellers can add a button ‘SkypeMe’ and their prospect buyers will contact them by voice or instant messenger. The new feature will be accessible for US based sellers and in 14 selected categories (I wonder how those categories were selected):

• Automotive GPS devices
• Camera and photo lenses and filters
• Wired networking routers
• Skype devices
• VoIP / Internet telephony
• Diamond solitaire rings
• Real estate
• Manufacturing and metalworking
• Beds
• NBA basketball cards
• Silver coins
• Lost in Space collectibles
• Radio control toys
• Cars and trucks

The new option should result in more sales for sellers and in better service for buyers – the communication process will be much easier, but it is hard to predict if the sellers will like and use this new feature. Also it is not clear how much eBay will charge for this option.

There is one important observation that the members communicating via Skype can easily arrange transactions and complete them outside eBay. Why to incur extra expenses on eBay fees?

Summary: eBay searches for the ways to justify enormous investment into Skype last year. The idea to integrate it with auction is obvious, but the time will show if it is successful and beneficial to all parties involved: eBay sellers, buyers and company itself.

[tags]ebay, skype, online auctions, home business, work from home, internet, business opportunity[/tags]

Top rankings – sweet dreams. Any site owner dreams to see his website on top of three search engines: Google, Yahoo! and MSN. The latter operate in the same way, but have a few differences that make any website owner dream unreal.

Aaron Wall, the author of the well known SEO manual, has just released a great article where he explores all top search engines (+ Ask) in detail. It is not a secret that Google provides most traffic to any established website (Googlejuice), but its competitors improve with every passing day. Added to that, if you are an owner of a new website you are likely to be ‘sandboxed’, so it would be wise to focus on top rankings in MSN and Yahoo! you will find a deep insight into every search engine. Here comes the short version of the article (quoted). Below you will find the link to the full version of this great piece of work.

The Short Version

Yahoo!

• been in the search game for many years.
• is better than MSN but nowhere near as good as Google at determining if a link is a natural citation or not.
• has a ton of internal content and a paid inclusion program. both of which give them incentive to bias search results toward commercial results
• things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in Yahoo!

MSN Search

• new to the search game
• is bad at determining if a link is natural or artificial in nature
• due to sucking at link analysis they place too much weight on the page content
• their poor relevancy algorithms cause a heavy bias toward commercial results
• likes bursty recent links
• new sites that are generally untrusted in other systems can rank quickly in MSN Search
• things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links still work great in MSN Search

Google

• has been in the search game a long time, and saw the web graph when it is much cleaner than the current web graph
• is much better than the other engines at determining if a link is a true editorial citation or an artificial link
• looks for natural link growth over time
• heavily biases search results toward informational resources
• trusts old sites way too much
• a page on a site or subdomain of a site with significant age or link related trust can rank much better than it should, even with no external citations
• they have aggressive duplicate content filters that filter out many pages with similar content
• if a page is obviously focused on a term they may filter the document out for that term. on page variation and link anchor text variation are important. a page with a single reference or a few references of a modifier will frequently outrank pages that are heavily focused on a search phrase containing that modifier
• crawl depth determined not only by link quantity, but also link quality. Excessive low quality links may make your site less likely to be crawled deep or even included in the index.
• things like cheesy off topic reciprocal links are generally ineffective in Google when you consider the associated opportunity cost

Ask

• looks at topical communities
• due to their heavy emphasis on topical communities they are slow to rank sites until they are heavily cited from within their topical community
• due to their limited market share they probably are not worth paying much attention to unless you are in a vertical where they have a strong brand that drives significant search traffic

The long version…

Summary: the article is no doubt a good and up-to-date manual for all website owners – what you should take into account targeting top rankings in this or that search engine. I think every individual will discover new facts and SEO tips about search engines.
[tags]search engines, google, msn, yahoo, guaranteed top rankings, seo, internet marketing, affiliate marketing[/tags]