Today, we received a Valentine's Day card from Google! With a $100 AdWords Coupon and a QR Code!

It seemed to have been sent to Canadian AdSense Publishers judging from the generic salutation on the envelope and a quick search on Twitter. Google has decided to show some love with this little card which includes a CAD$100 AdWords coupon code which will depreciate into a CAD$75 one the 5th of March to finally expire on March 31st 2010. To get started, the card and the QR Code leads us to www.google.ca/ads/abondance ("abondance" for abundance in English) read more »

When promoting your website, you may lose yourself in the details, such as advanced search engine optimization techniques or detailed statistics. In such case, you need a high-level strategy for your website promotion if you have not created one yet. read more »

In response to the new threats in the search industry from Facebook's real-time search, Twitter Search and Bing, Google has unveiled a secret project they worked on for some time: A next-generation search engine.

For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google's web search. It's the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions. The new infrastructure sits "under the hood" of Google's search engine, which means that most users won't notice a difference in search results. But web developers and power searchers might notice a few differences, so we're opening up a web developer preview to collect feedback.

Although some sites such as Mashable claim to test several aspects of this Google 2.0 (if we can call it this way) but only received criticism for over-analysis. As Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer at Google mentioned on his blog, the main focus is the back-end code: read more »

Previously, we showed you how-to submit your sitemap to Bing without giving you much detail about the full range of features from Bing Webmaster Center Tools. This web application from Bing (Microsoft) was designed to address important questions from webmasters, such as whether your website has been indexed or blocked by Bing or if there are website crawling issues.

In other words, Bing Webmaster Center Tools gives a look to make sure that your website is working well with Bing's MSNBot (The Bing web crawler, a program that scans websites and indexes their content, such as text, documents, images, and links, for searching). read more »

TechCrunch has a preliminary report that Facebook has acquired FriendFeed:

Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we’ve learned. We’re gathering details now. At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but it’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few of features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates.

This is a very strategic move for Facebook since it will complement their current set of features and take a step towards the "real-time web". Facebook just issued the following press release: read more »

If you are looking to submit your URL because you just launched a new site, you might have a bit more work to do today than in the past. Search engines have evolved and even collaborated on some standards to facilitate their job of indexing the web.

You now have to do more than to submit a single URL and have the crawler do the rest (you can do that but it does not guarantee your important pages will be found.  There are five places where you need to submit your Sitemap (no time and know how to ping? jump to the summary):

1. Google - The top search engine with roughly 65% market share
2. Bing - From Microsoft, formerly MSN and Live, will soon own 25% of the search market share
3. Yahoo! - Still an important player while it is being replaced by Bing
4. Ask.com - With 2.5% market share, still an important search engine
5. Moreover - a premier provider of real-time news and business information on the Web (serves many Fortune 500 companies)

We assume you have already created your sitemap using your content management system or a Sitemap generator and that you are ready to send it out to lead the web crawlers to your page. read more »

I do it too, and I am sure many of you reading this are starting to realize the problem (as highlighted by DailyBlogTips). If you know someone that wastes hours of his or her time checking stats instead of being productive, send them to this page.

Now, you must tell yourself, it just takes 2 seconds to check that number, it does not hurt right? Wrong! There are two main problems with checking your stats all the time:

1. It interrupts whatever you are working on right now
2. It wastes time, and that time cumulates quickly

Let's try some calculations, let's say you check your stats 10 times a day and it takes 5 min every time (could be a conservative estimate for some of you), and that you are up for work 8 hours a day. You are effectively wasting about 10% of day looking at stats numbers. read more »

Previously, we have seen how you can removed unwanted pages from Google, now we will hit the main topic of this website (promotion) and show you six essential SEO Techniques that will put you in good terms with search engines and get listed!  Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a gray area for webmasters since there are many conflicting information and unproven methods. Thankfully, there are a set of SEO Techniques that do not fall in this gray zone since they have repeatedly been proven to create significant improvements to your search engine visibility. read more »

One of my friends never got accepted to Google AdSense.  This prompted me to write an up-to-date List of AdSense Alternatives, here we are limiting ourselves to Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising Networks since Cost Per Mile ones often have higher requirements.

These alternatives to Google AdSense are being listed from a publisher's perspective. Advertisers will always have an option to display advertising on several ad networks as opposed to publishers with limited ad space.

Why another List?

There may be many lists available but many are outdated or try too hard by giving anecdotal evidence as review. There are a wide array of industries and niches and judging the performance of an ad network based on a single view would be flawed. Therefore, we made a list based on popularity as we can logically assume that the more an ad network is being visited, the more advertisers they have and the higher the payout can be due to the increased competition. read more »

As some may have seen (or are coming) from our post on SitePoint Forums, we are asking you for your feedback on netParticles!

So, please open up and post your uncensored thoughts! But if you are speechless, here are a few questions we have categorized by website dimensions.

Do not limit yourself to these questions, they are only ideas to get you started. Also, be sure to visit several types of pages such as the front page, the archives, the about page and the sitemap. read more »