Delta Partnership
Arizona ranked 6th in the nation for job growth during July.
Nevada continues to maintain the top ranked state in the nation for job growth with growth of 4.9%.
The second fastest growing state, Idaho, showed growth of 2.8%.
Michigan continued to rank 50th with a 1.24% loss of jobs.
The pace of growth in most states is beginning to gradually increase.
Blacklisted by Google: Is Your Company Next?
Working with the wrong SEO firms costing some big.
Thousand Oaks, CA (PRWEB) August 24, 2004 — Qualified shoppers and profitable returns have made search engine advertising and optimization the darlings of the online advertising world. But choosing to work with the wrong search engine optimization (SEO) firm can get your company banned from some search engines, including the industry’s giant, Google.
A new book, Search Engine Advertising, Buying Your Way to the Top to Increase Sales (New Riders Publishing 2004), sheds light on a few tactics that endanger web site owners of losing the rankings they currently have, or having their sites completely removed from the search engines’ databases. Companies that outsource their optimization campaigns are at risk of hiring firms that engage in search engine spam.
“While there are a number of great SEO firms available,” says author Catherine Seda, “there are some involved in practices that search engines don’t like. The problem isn’t that the SEO firms get banned. It’s their clients who pay the consequences.”
In a recent forum on WebProWorld, one user stated that her web site, as well as 10 others, has been banned by Google because of the alleged use of doorway pages created by an SEO firm. Doorway pages are loaded with keywords and often contain hidden links then placed within advertisers sites, and are discouraged by Google in its online Webmaster information.
According to Seda, another common spamming tactic of shady SEO firms is to post thousand of links to client web sites inside guestbooks or classified ads. Search engines, such as Google, place significant weight on the link popularity of a web site.
“There is a right way to boost your site’s link popularity,” says Seda. “Secure links from content-relevant site that have already achieved high rankings. Think quality, not quantity. And if you want to hire an SEO firm, ask how they get rankings for their clients.”
Catherine Seda is teaching a groundbreaking search engine seminar series in several U.S. cities this fall.
M&I Bank Announces Scholar Award Contest for High School Athletes
Monday August 30, 12:23 pm ET
Ten $500 Winners and the General Public Will Have the Opportunity to Vote for Their Favorite Student Athlete; Grand Prize Winner to Receive a $5,000 Award
PHOENIX, Aug. 30 /PRNewswire/ — It’s back-to-school time and for many high school seniors, that means the scholarship search has begun. M&I Bank, Arizona, and KTVK News Channel 3 have a way for Arizona high school senior student athletes to make their college dreams one step closer to reality with an innovative award contest, where the public gets to choose who receives the $5,000 grand prize award.
Starting August 28th, interested student athletes can pick up an entry packet at any participating M&I Bank. Completed packets and required materials can be submitted immediately to M&I Bank, Att: AZ098-4027, PO BOX 56969, Phoenix, AZ 85079-9953.
Contest materials can also be obtained by sending a self-addressed, postage-paid envelope to the above address. To be eligible, the student must meet these requirements:
Must be a legal resident of Arizona
18 years of age or younger
A senior in an Arizona high school
Have a GPA of at least 3.0 on a 4.0 scale
Participate in at least one season of a particular sport
“M&I Bank prides itself on a strong commitment to education, especially in our own community,” said M&I Bank Arizona Chairman and President Dennis Jones. “The M&I Bank Scholar Award for Student Athletes is our way of showing our support for those students who embody the values of M&I Bank and reward them for their exceptional dedication, both in the classroom and on the field.”
From entries received, a winner will be chosen each week for 10 weeks, and will receive $500 to be used toward continuing education expenses after high school. A panel of judges from M&I Bank will choose the ten finalists. All entries must be received by November 10, 2004 to be eligible.
“From my days as a coach, I know that athletics can play such an important role in a student’s college experience,” said Linda Vollstedt, former head women’s golf coach at Arizona State University. “It is wonderful when members of the corporate community like M&I Bank can support us in our efforts to make a college education more affordable.”
Starting September 24th through November 19th, a winner will be announced each Friday between 10-11 p.m. during The News Show on KTVK. Each of the ten finalists will be featured on azfamily.com from November 22-29, where visitors will have a chance to vote for their favorite. The Grand Prize winner of $5,000 will be announced on Friday, December 3, 2004.
M&I Bank is an affiliate of Marshall & Ilsley Corporation (NYSE: MI - News), a diversified financial services corporation headquartered in Milwaukee, Wis., with $37.1 billion in assets. Founded in 1847, M&I Marshall & Ilsley Bank has the largest banking presence in Wisconsin with 197 offices throughout the state. In addition, M&I has 31 locations throughout Arizona; 11 offices in metropolitan Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minn.; and, locations in Duluth, Minn.; Las Vegas, Nev.; and, Naples and Bonita Springs, Fla. M&I’s Southwest Bank affiliate has six offices in the St. Louis area and one office in Belleville, Ill. Metavante Corporation, Marshall & Ilsley Corporation’s wholly owned technology subsidiary, provides virtually all of the technology an organization needs to offer financial services. M&I also provides trust and investment management, equipment leasing, mortgage banking, asset-based lending, financial planning, investments, and insurance services from offices throughout the country and on the Internet ( http://www.mibank.com or http://www.micorp.com ). M&I’s customer-based approach, internal growth, and strategic acquisitions have made M&I a nationally recognized leader in the financial services industry.
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Source: M&I Bank
Search Engines Like Google Make Memorable Web Addresses for Products and Services More Important Than Ever
A common belief that search engines like Google make specific web addresses relatively unimportant is wrong, states psychologist Susan D. Griffith, Ph.D., who studies effective use of the Internet. In fact, memorable Internet names are more important for advertising than ever before.
(PRWEB) August 25, 2004 — All businesses need targeted, memorable web addresses this century, but most businesses don’t have them, maintains a psychologist who studies effective use of the Internet. “All businesses today are online businesses, whether sales take place via the Internet or not. All businesses today need web addresses just as much as they need telephone numbers, and good, memorable web addresses are more important than ever.”
A common belief is that search engines like Google make specific web addresses, that is, Internet domain names, relatively unimportant. “That is not true,” asserts psychologist Susan D. Griffith, Ph.D. “As in other areas of branding, names are everything, and memorable names on the Internet are more important than ever before.”
Telephone numbers are generally not retained in memory, unless they are associated with words–a telephone directory is necessary to list the telephone numbers of most places consumers might want to call. “A wonderful feature of the Internet is that web addresses are accesible by letters and words. There is no need for an Internet directory, that is, a search engine, when we can remember the name of the place we want to visit on the Internet,” Griffith remarks.
Search engines are effective in sending motivated traffic for a first-time visit. But Griffith finds that search engines beget fickleness. “Google seems so fast that many of us do not remember to keep or search our web browser ‘favorites’ or ‘history’. The search engine itself becomes our friend, our department store, our brand, rather than brand being the individual product or service and its web address.”
That’s okay with Google, who needs you to forget where you went before so you will have to come back to Google and search again. After all, as America is well aware of late, Google makes a lot of money including paid listings on its search results pages.
In fact, Griffith believes one reason search engines have become so important in Internet sales is that many businesses are overlooking the power of the memorable web address both in branding and in attracting web page visitors–and in bringing them back.
However, since she “began talking publicly in recent months about memorable web addresses and better use of web pages, I do see some positive change in television advertising with respect to use of appropriate Internet domain names. But there is a lot of room for improvement, ironically especially for big business.”
Griffith is director of OneBigRoach.com and GrowPuppy.com, groups providing consultation about appropriate web addresses and web pages for business. Her paper Branding and Effective Use of Web Addresses and Web Pages: So This Century, So This Century.com, is featured this month in the online journal PsychologyOfTheInternet.com. That paper outlines principles for effective Internet use by advertisers.
Memorable web addresses free Internet surfers of some of their visits to a search engine. “Consumers go directly to web pages they they have been well-invited to visit. Today a business can announce, on television and in print advertising, a web address consumers can remember and can associate with the product or service–like Broadzilla.com for broadband and Mewsick.com for new-age music and like LowCarbBeers.com and LowCarbGroceryList.com for, well, the obvious.”
Dr. Griffith suggests that advertisers visit websites, like GrowPuppy.com, who list targeted, memorable domain names; “you can buy for a reasonable price domain names pre-selected for your product or service, or you can use those domain name lists as inspiration for your own web address designs.”
“Ebay, Google and Amazon–they are great–as names for services that work for us and as names that we remember. They are web addresses and brand names in one. We remember them. We do not have to use a search engine to find Google. When we do use a search engine to search for search engines, we find competitive search engines that also interest us and may distract us. But we don’t use a search engine to find Google, because we remember its name, its domain name and web address. And Google retains us as a regular customer, not distracted by the other search engines found in a Google search.”
Griffith compares the online customer’s experience with that of the mall shopper. At the mall we often need to leave a shop before buying. When we return, if we cannot remember the name of the shop and how to get there, we search for it. We have lots of branding signs to help us and relatively few shoe shops and all look different to us, so we may find the shop we want. If all the shops look the same and all the names of the shops sound the same, we look again, this time not for the shop, but for the shoes we found before. And we may buy our shoes at a different shop.
“On the Internet the situation is the same–except that the shops are many, many more in number and all are invisible, appearing before us only when we arrive at them,” says Dr. Griffith. So when we look again for the shoes we want, we may end up buying our shoes at a different online store. That is, “unless we remember that the store we liked was called, for example, HipShod.com. We remember the name and immediately know how to get to that online store. We remember the name because we noticed it on the web page and because we found it memorable.”
When satisfied consumers find products and services they like, they try to go back to the same web address when they are ready to buy. But a second search by even those prior customers can lead to a different web page from the one they wanted, because they can’t remember the web address where they shopped before.
“To be sure, without knowing or remembering the name of online stores or brands, consumers can find a web site offering the product or service they are searching for. But for an individual store or brand to attract its own customers, and keep them, that store or brand must use one or more memorable domain names.”
“Do not let the only portal to your web pages be a search engine,” Dr. Griffith suggests. A really good web address guarantees the return of a larger percentage of satisfied customers, as well as those new customers they refer. And, “as Internet viruses are seen to affect search engines, we find a new reason not to depend on already inefficient and costly search engines for all your web page visitors.”
“Use a targeted, memorable web address to encourage your customers to go directly to your web page, and to remember where they visited so they can easily return. You will be reinforcing your brand each time a consumer makes a mental note of your web address–so this century, SoThisCentury.com!”
Communists For Kerry
Communists for KERRY
This Sunday, August 29 th, 2004, hordes of neo-imperialistic running dogs will descend on the freedom-starved city of New York for the so-called “GOP Convention.”
Communists For Kerry have come up with a plan, to counter this reactionary cabal with a glorious uprising of the unwashed masses. We shall open the gates and bridges of New York to hundreds of thousands of unkempt workers, peasants, and toiling intelligentsia from many towns and villages across our great American motherland.
Search 101 - Understanding Meta Search Engines
Web Search
Search 101 - Understanding Meta Search Engines
Part 1: What are Meta Search Engines?
More of this Feature
• Part 1: Meta-Search Engines
• Part 2: Why Meta-Search Engine
• Part 3: Some Meta-Search Engines
Most searchers are familiar with the idea of search engines and directories. meta-search engines, on the other hand, are often misunderstood and under utilized when the need arises for a little bit of power searching. The majority of Internet users don’t understand what a meta-search engine is, how it works, or why they would even want to use one.
The idea behind a meta search engine is that an Internet user should be able to visit one site, conduct a search, and view the results from multiple search engines on a single results page. Meta-search engines do not create or maintain their own index of Web sites, they simply pass your search query on to other search engines and aggregate the results together for your convienence.
Astronomy Column for September - September Skies
September Skies
Silver Star with combat V - Fake claims not uncommon - More John Kerry Controversy
Silver Star with combat V