Colorful striped bag at WMW Conference in New Orleans

To continue in the grand SEO tradition that Randfish started, of showing an easily identifiable piece of clothing or accessory, to help you determine who I am at the June WebmasterWorld conference in New Orleans, may I present to you [drum roll please], my handbag! Note the various colored stripes, as all attire I wear will mix and match with these colors. So please, if you spot my bag, do come over and introduce yourself to me. The first person to introduce themselves and mention this post will get a backlink from one of my sites. Now, if only I could convince Rand to part with those shoes.

Web CEO new version with scheduler

I have used Web CEO for a while and love many things about it, but the one drawback was the lack of a scheduler. That has all changed, now that they have released version 5.5. Now, I can schedule all my projects (sites) to run reports in the wee hours of the morning, so that my stats are ready and waiting for me when I wake up. This one added feature has turned a good SEO tool into my favorite SEO tool. They have added other features as well, and made significant improvements in many areas, but the ability to schedule the running of reports automatically puts this software at number one for me. Download the free version or get the upgrade if you already use it.

Google Web Accelerator – Potential Nightmare

As you are probably already aware, Google has released a beta product called Google Web Accelerator. The official description is:

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WMW Conference Sessions

WebmasterWorld has posted a list of sessions that will be presented at the June New Orleans conference. You can see the full list at www.webmasterworld.com/conference/sessions.htm, but the following are the ones I am most interested in. If you see any that you really really want me to check out, let me know and I will consider it. Of course, I will try to report as much interesting information as I receive from each session that I attend. No dates and times are posted yet for the sessions, so I may not be able to attend everything I am interested in, if there are scheduling conflicts.

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Take the RustySearch challenge

Rustybrick has created a tool called RustySearch that will attempt to test the relevancy of the four major search engines and in order for it to succeed, it needs your help! This test is a blind taste test, similar to the old Pepsi vs. Coke taste tests. In the soft drink tests, volunteers were given one cup of each soda and asked which tasted better, but the participants had no idea which brand they were drinking. In RustySearch, you will be scoring the relevancy of a search result without knowing which search engine has supplied the results. Please use search phrases that are not influenced by your own search terms, so that the test can be as objective as possible. Have fun, and help determine who really has the most relevant SERPs! Go to www.rustybrick.com/search-engine-challenge.php to take the test!

The birth of a search engine

The Seattle Times has an interesting article today that chronicles the two year process that MSN went through in launching its own search engine. It details the pain of learning how to crawl, index, and then weed out the junk from the billions of pages on the internet. It also includes a nice little chart that shows what happens when searching on MSN. And finally, it gives some perspective on what MSN envisions search will eventually evolve into. For a little light reading, check out http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002259705_search02.html

Using log info for anchor text variation

I have one site that does not seem to lend itself to many variations in search terms. Offhand, I can think of three or four variations of anchor text that would make sense to use when acquiring backlinks. Although this particular site is fairly new, it already ranks well in MSN (no big surprise there), so traffic is coming each day. Looking through the logfiles revealed that there were over 500 search phrases that were used to bring visitors to the site! Over 500! And all I could think of was three or four.

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