As Live.com is still live and users can currently opt to use either service, so far what we are seeing is the preview version of Bing. However as of today Microsoft will replace Live.com with Bing.

Bing has been live for only one day and there are already thousands of reviews of Microsoft’s newly improved search engine available on the net. Unfortunately people outside the US are seeing a local version of Bing without most of the new features. If you can’t wait to exploit and play around with Bing, select United States as your default region.

(found this tip on Techmeme)

These two videos perfectly describe and explain how Bing works, they are both being used as part of Microsoft multi-million marketing campaign to promote Bing’s services and capabilities.

Microsoft Bing Search – Product Tour of Bing.com

Microsoft Bing “Decision Engine” Launch

Have you tried Bing yet? If so we would like to hear your thoughts and opinions, so please leave them in our comments section.

Adrian had an idea to make an SEO plugin, this allowed him to track the traffic going through his own blog to enable him to analyse what was clicked, who clicked it, where and when they clicked from (using the IP address). All this information is valuable to many ‘Blog’ users to find a more advanced and scaled down statistics.

ClikStats is available for free download from wordpress.org or Adrian Callaghans Blog – www.adriancallaghan.co.uk clickstats

Popular sites and blogs are a common target though any site can be effected, its important to keep your software up to date and to keep an eye out for any strange symptoms on your website or statistics.

Common symptoms of a site being hacked include:

Your site runs out of bandwidth or is using a lot more than it normally does – this is normally a sign that the site is being used to host pirated videos or mp3’s

1. Your traffic from search engines like Google drops
2. Your domain name www.example.com “www.example.com” does
   not show up in search engines.
3. The site stops working – often this is because the hackers are
   incompetent as well as criminal and may have crashed the blog software
4. Pornographic or Viagra related terms start appearing in your
   search logs/ Google analytics

A quick way of checking if a wordpress blog has been hacked is to ‘view source’ option on your internet browser and if the site has been hacked you will see a large number of suspicious links which have been hidden

This is an clean example of the links hackers try to add to blogs – notice the way they try to hide the links by using

style=”display:none”

<u style=’display:none’><a

href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-888″>Samsung A300e Ringtones</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-24690″>V60i Ringtones Free</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-30165″>Motorola V120 Ringtones</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-21516″>Free Lg Mobile Ringtone</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-10348″>Free Reggaeton Ringtones</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-6339″>Hava Nagila Ringtone</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-9629″

>Monophonic

Ringtones For Motorola C115</a> <a

href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-4802″>Low Rider Ringtones</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-9818″>Cingular Nokia 3560 Ringtones</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-23917″>Mobile Phone Ringtone For Samsung E700</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-15154″>Free Amr Diab Ringtones</a> <a href=”http://rubishsite.com/Social/post.php?p=7-2230″>Free Inuyasha Ringtone</a>

You also need check the footer and header files of your blogs theme to see if anything has been added, as some sophisticated attackers stop the ‘view source’ method of detecting the addition of illicit links.

THUK Media can help sites recover from hacking attacks like this, and with the process of recovering from any penalties the search engines may have applied contact the us here

Online marketing does not simply entail building and launching a great looking search engine friendly website, nor does it mean placing a banner-ad on another website. Effective Online Marketing requires a comprehensive strategy that spans over time, constantly improving the website function and appearance to ensure the website is presented exceptionally well and easily navigated to deliver what the user wants, the search engine spiders can interpret and also focusing on the websites target market.

The Internet’s Domain-Name System (DNS) allows a user to refer to web sites and other resources using easy-to-remember domain names (such as “www.icann.org” or “www.thuk.co.uk” ) rather than the all-numeric IP addresses (such as “192.0.34.65″) assigned to each computer on the Internet.

Each websites ‘Domain Name’ is made up of a series of character strings (called “labels”) separated by dots. The first part of the domain name is “www.” meaning “world wide web”, the centre part is usually a description to make the site easy to remember, a company or organisations name and the end part is referred to as its “Top-Level Domain” (TLD), for example, .uk, .com or .org.

Domain names are the key for helping computers find websites and route e-mails. There are currently about 250 domain name suffixes, most of them for specific countries such as “.fr” for France, .co.uk for The United Kingdom. General-use names include “.com” and “.net.”

In 2000, two years after its designation by the U.S. government as the authority for overseeing Internet naming policies, ICANN approved seven new names, but only “.info” and “.biz” were truly for general use with the balance being restricted domains for example .coop for co-ops.

This means from early 2009  it will be possible  to  have  new top level domains  by using words such as .love, .hate or .city, or proper names.

At first these new top level domains will be limited to certain businesses and other major organisations such as city councils and large NGO’s and charities. Officials in Berlin are among those who have vociferously campaigned for the new rules, believing that selling .berlin web addresses would have a positive impact for tourism in the German capital.

However there are fears that relaxing the system in this way will  lead to more cyber squatting, where criminals register brand names to make money off their popularity, or even make it easier for criminals to pose as banks or other legitimate organisations – to steal credit card or bank details.

There are a lots of unanswered questions for example who has the greater right to .apple the computer company Apple Inc or the surviving Beatles Apple corps Ltd? All applications will need to be approved by ICANN itself, but buying the right to use one of these new names is not going to be cheap. These new domains are expected to cost in the region of £250,000 added to this will be the cost of bidding for, setting up and running the domain.

It certainly looks like there will be plenty of work for Intellectual Property Lawyers and for companies with the technical skills and experience in setting up and running a top level domains.

PHP uses a lot of its syntax from C, Java and Perl. But PHP has a lot of its own unique features, such as “loosely defined data types”, which are data types or variables that don’t need to be pre-defined of a particular type.

The goal of the PHP language is to allow Web developers to write dynamically generated pages quickly.

If a user opens a site which has PHP coding, usually used for Dynamic content (text, images or any other sort of items), the server processes the PHP code and then sends the output (not the PHP code itself) to the
visitor’s browser.

So whilst the user will see a normal website which can be browsed, the server will see a lot of code and know
how to process it.

eMail Databases are considered a quick route to successful online marketing. There is no work involved in building the list. It can be bought in and setup in next to no time. So why not go out and buy a ready made list?

Experience

Here at TH UK we have been working with eMail Marketing for ten years now. In a relatively new market, that’s a lot of dog years! A common service requested of our eMail Marketing department is to buy in a list on behalf of our clients and build a campaign around it. However, things are not that simple and we advise our clients to think very carefully about their objectives and what they can expect from a ‘bought in list’.

Types of eMail data lists

There are different sorts of lists which you can buy and some of them are not worth the effort of setting up and sending, let alone the cost of buying the eMail database.

The best eMail lists are without doubt the ones that you develop and nurture in house. These are lists grown from people that have requested to be communicated with. However, it is commonplace at TH UK to be asked for a list that a client can send to, perhaps because they do not have the time to build their own database, or the inclination to.

Costs

eMail lists vary considerably in cost. We have known eMail lists exchange hands for £1,000 per thousand names. Whilst this is rare, it tends to be because the list is very niche, reactive and well looked after.

The next rung of the eMail list ladder, is the proven and responsive list generated by buying habits. These lists can be purchased around the £500 per thousand mark. Although these lists have proven buying trends, be wary of the fact that unless what you are selling is related to their area of interest, the recipients are still unlikely to interact in volume with your message.

On the cheap end of the scale, £100-£250 per thousand addresses, you will find the bargain bucket eMail lists. These could be generated by surveys, or offers, but in our experience, you are unlikely to achieve a return on your investment with them. These recipients are likely to have exchanged their email address for a personal gain, like a freebie, or document, even a competition entry.

In summary, be cautious about paying out for eMail lists, and consider whether or not it may be worth investing in developing your own list – wouldn’t that be a more valuable asset to your business?

TH UK are eMail Marketing Experts that can help you generate in house lists and maximise the potential of the list, Contact Us Now to find out how we can add benefit to your specific business.

However, it appears that the algorithm is serious a factor to consider when estimating the value of your website or blog. A good example is Website Value Calculator http://www.websitevaluecalculator.com. To estimate that value, the script  uses data from the most popular and recognized statistic systems available on the Internet – Alexa Traffic Ranking and Google Page Rank and the amount of links to the blog/website. For example, Google.com…

• Alexa Traffic Ranking: 2,
• Google Page Rank: 10,
• Average of 57,950,000 backlinks from major search engines.

The script calculates indicators of potential profits, all sites have a potential of earning money, Google.com can earn approximately $5,825.895 per link per month from selling text link advertisements and approximately $9,135,000/Month through creative product placements, by placing relevant affiliate links on the site, could earn approximately $32,366.07 per month. Based on the fact Google.com is worth $1,561,822,935… Nice…

How much is your website worth? To improve that value, please feel free to contact our SEO team.

The Footy Boots website is actually a blog, developed by TH UK.

It gives an unbiased perspective on the football boot industry, providing information on the latest football boot releases, and offering advice on which football boots consumers should buy, dependant on their individual needs.

Since its inception in April 2006, it has developed into the leading independent voice on football boots, amongst consumers, football boot brands, and related football companies.

Footy Boots recently launched the first International Football Boot Awards, gaining sponsorship with a leading mens fashion and lifestyle magazine, and receiving significant media coverage. The success of the Footy Boots blog allowed the bloggers to attract some of the World’s leading footballers to present the Football Boot Award trophies, including England internationals Wayne Rooney and Micah Richards.

Footy Boots has a unique demographic audience of active footballers, with a high spend on football equipment, typically owning more than three pairs of football boots per season. Footy Boots attracts over a quarter of a million visitors a month and is continuing to grow at a rapid rate.

Click here to visit Footy Boots

So what are the secrets of the Footy Boots blog success?

The Footy Boots blog is updated on a daily basis with fresh, informative, accurate, and often exclusive content. It is written in a way that appeals to visitors and search engines alike. As an extremely flexible and easy to manage blog, even those bloggers with no prior knowledge of blogging find it extremely user friendly.

Search engines particularly like promoting blogs because they offer a large amount of content that is updated and added to on a regular basis. By providing fresh news stories with hundreds of highly relevant keywords, Footy Boots has become a magnet to internet search engines, promoting the blog to an vast number of potential customers.

By using related words and phrases in its daily articles, Footy Boots has greatly enhanced its website ranking amongst the leading search engines. The Footy Boots blog is currently ranked number one on ‘google’ for the search term ‘football boots’. In addition, following the release of the new Nike football boot, the ‘Mercurial Vapor 4’, Footy Boots ran a number of articles focusing on the new boot, littering the articles with related keywords and links. The words used in the blog articles were picked up by search engines worldwide, leading to Footy Boots being the highest ranked website under the ‘google’ search terms ‘Mercurial Vapor 4’.

How can a TH UK blog help my business?

TH UK will build you a flexible, powerful and easy to use business blog. It will become your most powerful marketing weapon, enhancing your website’s ranking and substantially raising your profile for a minimal cost. You can promote your business online by informing your customers of any changes, new products, latest offers and much more. This, in turn, will lead to direct sales. Captivate your audience with compelling content and you’ll receive a growing list of market leads.

Contact TH UK now to find out how your business can benefit from a blog.

Come and talk to us about our full range online marketing services. including; Website Design and Development, Search Engine Optimisation, Email Marketing, Blogs, SMS and Fax Campaigns.

Hope to See you there