About Bing and Bing Webmaster Center

Bing is a development of Live and MSN search, which is now more stylish than it’s counterpart and organises search results in a better way. Bing is Microsoft’s avenue to get into the dominated search market and with the recently announcement of Apple iPhones containing the Bing search engine…they are on their way.

The webmaster center allows webmasters to add their websites to the index crawler. It also offers the ability to troubleshoot the site and organise how Bing views your site.

The site is split up into:

• Summary – Provides indexing and crawling information as well at your top 5 page scores.
• Profile- gives you the option to enter in your website’s sitemap to help Bing crawl and index your website.
• Crawl Issues – If for some reason you have a crawl issue, you can use the crawl issues tool to see where the problem might have occurred while crawling and indexing your website.
• Backlinks – Provides a list of URLs that link back to your site.
• Outbound Links – Provides you with a list of URLs leading to other websites on your site.
• Keywords – Use the keywords tool to evaluate how your website performs against search specific keywords or terms.
• Sitemaps – Allows you to provide your sitemap to Webmaster Center to help index your site (already included in the Profile tool)

How to Signup to Webmaster

Go to http://www.bing.com/webmaster and Sign-in with your Windows Live ID.

Ping your Sitemap

Without having to sign in you can also Ping your sitemap, using something like this:

• http://cn.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=[your sitemap web address]

Bing Website Submission

Also it’s worthwhile to mention how to submit your site to Bing. It’s a case of entering your url at:

• www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

Conclusion

I found the webmaster section easier to use and more friendly to the eye than compared to the complex nature of Google and Yahoo’s tools. It doesn’t seem like much at first, but when you click on your site’s link you’ll see more detailed features. I noticed the 404 search section wasn’t working as well as other search engine tools and there was less pages indexed. However, if it helps my site to get on Bing, I don’t mind at all!

Best Blogs Asia.

List of Free Backlink Sites

From the index list, remember to replace bestblogs.asia with your own site name! You can also submit your site to this list…very quick and simple although the list isn’t as big as the one below:

• http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.bestblogs.asia
• http://www.statbrain.com/www.bestblogs.asia
• http://whois.ws/whois-info/ip-address/bestblogs.asia/
• http://whoisx.co.uk/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.wikifox.de/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.builtwith.com/?bestblogs.asia
• http://whois.tools4noobs.com/info/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.aboutus.org/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.quantcast.com/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.cubestat.com/www.bestblogs.asia
• http://whois.tools4noobs.com/info/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.alexa.com/data/details/?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.siteadvisor.cn/sites/bestblogs.asia/summary/
• http://whois.domaintools.com/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.aboutdomain.org/backlinks/bestblogs.asia/
• http://www.whoisya.com/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.who.is/whois-com/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.robtex.com/dns/bestblogs.asia.html
• http://www.zimbio.com/search?q=bestblogs.asia&btnG=Search
• http://whois.ws/whois-info/ip-address/bestblogs.asia/
• http://www.wikifox.de/bestblogs.asia
• http://searchons.com/found-it.php?u=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.protect-x.com/info/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.feedest.com/feedHost.cfm/host/bestblogs.asia
• http://www.statsreview.com/bestblogs.asia
• http://siteanalytics.compete.com/bestblogs.asia/
• http://www.statbrain.com/bestblogs.asia/
• http://www.urladex.com/url/bestblogs.asia
• http://tool.alimama.com/ip/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/whois/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/alexa/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/chinarank/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/keyword/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/meta/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/gettext/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/get_header/bestblogs.asia/
• http://tool.alimama.com/code/bestblogs.asia/
• http://www.speedmap.cn/tool/?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://alexa.59bj.com/?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://alexa.soogla.cn/?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://ex66.com/zz/?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.pruke.cn/alexa/Index.asp?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://ex66.com/zz/Index.asp?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.360mf.cn/seo.asp?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.wonmay.cn/tools/?wd=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.54aa.com/sl/Index.asp?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.liequ.org/?url=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.myindexed.com/?domain=bestblogs.asia
• http://www.ymdg.net/tool/sl.asp?url=bestblogs.asia

Best Blogs Asia.

Impact of Zhifubao

Alibaba recently announced that its user number has reached 200 million. It now overtakes Paypal as world’s largest electronic payment gateway. It took Zhifubao 5 years to get the first 100 million users in the end of August 2008. The period shorted to 10 months to enlarge its user number from 100 million to 200 million.

Alipay oversees ￥450 million worth, or 2 million transactions every day. Currently, the number of merchants supporting Alipay has surpassed 460,000, not including those on Taobao and Alibaba. In terms of banking, Alipay has entered into strategic cooperation with domestic commercial banks such as the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, Agricultural Bank of China, China Construction Bank, China Merchants Bank and Pudong Development Bank, along with organizations such as China Post and VISA. Alipay partners with banks to provide an escrow service for payments, which reduces the settlement risks faced by Alipay’s customers in their e-commerce transactions.

Since its launch in 2004, AliPay has become the most popular and extensively used online payment tool for all areas of e-commerce in China.

Join Alipay

You can join Alipay here, but watch out since it’s completely all in Chinese (no Alipay affiliate program yet):

• Join Alipay

Alipay FAQ

Do I need an Alipay account?
There’s no need to create an Alipay account. All you need is an Alibaba.com Membership. You can buy via Alipay with either a Visa or MasterCard that’s verified by your bank

How does Alipay secure your online transactions?
For Buyers: Pay securely with your credit card without exposing your details. We only release payment to the supplier after you confirm delivery of your order. When paying online, your details are protected by VeriSign SSL encryption (the highest level of protection commercially available).

For Suppliers: After the buyer has made payment, we will confirm that it is safe to ship the order. When the buyer confirms delivery, we release payment directly into your bank account.

Godaddy Using Alipay

Godaddy the huge web hosting company in the US has started to include Alipay in it’s checkout options. The meaning of adding it to their list of options is that they recognise the Chinese market and potential customers.

Conclusion

I can foresee Alipay growing and moving into Western territories. Perhaps eBay will buy them out or even Google, but one thing for sure is that they have grown massively over the past few years.

Best Blogs Asia.

Getting into Google Images

From my experience the process of getting images into Google takes a while, as the Google Imagebot works differently to the general spiderbot. To get into the images section, your site needs the following:

• Have relevant page content compared to the image – this means titles, keywords, alt text and h1>h6 tags
• Relevant text needs to be near to the image.
• Changing the filename to the relevant searchable keyword helps too.
• In Google Webmaster, turning on the “Enhanced Image Search in the Webmaster tools” is useful.

Another tip is to embed your image directly from your site into forum posts, even if you don’t link to your site’s page the image is linked instead so could help your image to spidered quicker.

Best Blogs Asia.

Website Valuation Tools Compared

There are thousands of value calculators on the internet, so I reviewed many and came up the best examples to use. I checked this site – bestblogs.asia. In my mind it’s worth about $10k – $20k since it makes revenue, is established over time and is a popular resource with many top 10 listings on Google.

Using Bestblogs.asia as the example, using:

• http://www.cubestat.com/ – $9,160.77
• http://www.statswebsites.com/ – $31,979.00
• http://www.valuemyweb.com/ – $24,366
• http://www.websiteprice.net/ – $14.775

Out of this selection, I think ValueMyWeb is the best as it breaks down what the positives are of the calculated site. If I was selling Bestblogs.asia, I may use $9000 as a minimum bid and $30,000 as the BIN bid.

Focusing on

To increase the value of a site, they seem to focus on:

• Backlinks
• Page Rank
• Impressions
• Impact in Social Media
• Alexa

Best Blogs Asia.

Current Blogging Model

Current blogging models usually consist of 3rd party adverts such as 125×125 graphic ads on the sidebar or using Adsense, with the hope that advertisers purchase them each month or people will click the links. The problem is with this model is that there are more effective ways to make more revenue.

We can’t compare blogs to television. Television networks make money from advertising or, for premium cable channels, from subscriptions. Advertising can work on some content web sites, but it usually works best when the reader is coming to the site to figure out a solution to a problem. If an ad presents a relevant solution to that problem, the ad can be effective.

Effective Blogging Model

The most effective model is to solve a problem or fulfil a want/need on your site. My suggestion would be to check exactly what the most popular pages are on your site, what people are searching for and cater your posts to their needs. By solving problems and helping others, you can make more revenue!

Direct Advert Sales

Selling to your potential audience seems to be the best way. If you know what your users want, then targeting specific products to them is like shooting fish in a barrel…know your customers and what they want.

Affiliate Marketing

By picking a product or service which is tailor-made for your audience, you’ll have more chance to make a sale. If there are consistent levels of sales on your site, you can contact the company/affiliate company and try to negotiate a higher payout.

Sponsorships

I was going to recommend the obvious “targeted sponsorships”, but depending on the amount of revenue – any site sponsorship would work. Best Blogs Asia has some site sponsors, some sponsors have focused on certain areas of the site like emails or the directory section – tailor made to their target audience too.

Best Blogs Asia.

Zhuaxia

Zhuaxia is listed as being the most popular online rss reader in mainland China, which accounts for over 30% of Chinese RSS users.

“在抓虾，我们希望能给你的，不仅是一份工作，更是一份事业。”

XianGuo

XianGuo looks more professional that other Chinese RSS feed readers and has a lot of functions which are better than others.

“鲜果网是一个在线的RSS阅读器，可以用来订阅新闻、博客以及各类网站信息，然后自动、及时地把这些网站的最新内容推送给你。”

YouDao

YouDao is a RSS reader from the Netease. Netease is the most biggest website in China and the third biggest portal website after Sina Corp and Sohu.

“有道的发起者是一群执着于搜索技术的年轻人，我们发现中文网络中的搜索还远未达到理想，所以希望通过我们现在和将来的努力，把设想中的服务一点点变成现实，分享给大家使用，让你更快一秒找到想要的好东西。”

QQ reader

QQ Reader from Tencent QQ is the most popular free instant messaging computer program in China and the world’s third most popular IM service.

“您可以用您的QQ号和密码直接登录QQ邮箱。”

Other Chinese Feed Readers

• Potu
• Feed Lite
• Panghulu
• Aobo

Chinese Ping Services

You may also add the following Chinese sites to your ping list:

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://www.xianguo.com/xmlrpc/ping.php
http://www.zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php
http://blog.youdao.com/ping/RPC2

Best Blogs Asia.

About Feedburner

FeedBurner is a web feed management provider launched in 2004. FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters, and other web-based content publishers. Services provided to publishers include traffic analysis and Adsense advertising.

Feed Benefits

• You will use your single Google account to log in to your feeds instead of having a separate one for Feedburner.com
• You will be able to use Adsense for Feeds
• You will have better email subscription capabilities

Moving the Feed

Log into your Adsense account, go to “Adsense for Feeds” under “Manage Ads” and select “Move FeedBurner feeds to your Google Account”, then follow the instructions.

Your feed will now be http://feedproxy.google.com/feedname, update your META date and/or site settings.

Now you need to login into feedburner.google.com to access your feed rather than feedburner.com.

Best Blogs Asia.

Htaccess Guide

Enable Directory Browsing

Options +Indexes
## block a few types of files from showing
IndexIgnore *.wmv *.mp3 *.avi

Disable Directory Browsing

Options All -Indexes

Customize Error Messages

ErrorDocument 403 /forbidden.html
ErrorDocument 404 /notfound.html
ErrorDocument 500 /servererror.html

Get SSI working with HTML/SHTML

AddType text/html .html
AddType text/html .shtml
AddHandler server-parsed .html
AddHandler server-parsed .shtml
# AddHandler server-parsed .htm

Redirect Visitors to New Page/Directory

Redirect oldpage.html http://www.domainname.com/newpage.html

Block Hot Linking/Bandwidth hogging

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?mydomain.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ - [F]
RewriteRule \.(gif|jpg)$ http://www.mydomain.com/image.gif [R,L]

Avoid the 500 Error

# Avoid 500 error by passing charset AddDefaultCharset utf-8

Best Blogs Asia.

Using a Robots File Effectively

Generally we want as much as exposure as possible to our sites, but there some content that you don’t want indexed and listed on search engines. This is where a robots.txt can be used effectively.

Definitions

User-agent: this parameter defines, for which bots the next parameters will be valid. * is a wildcard which means all bots or Googlebot for Google.
Disallow: defines which folders or files will be excluded. None means nothing will be excluded, / means everything will be excluded or /folder name/ or /filename can be used to specify the values to excluded.
Allow: this parameter works just the opposite of Disallow. You can mention which content will be allowed to be crawled here. * is a wildcard.
Request-rate: defines pages/seconds to be crawled ratio. Example, 1/20 would be 1 page in every 20 second.
Crawl-delay: defines howmany seconds to wait after each succesful crawling.
Visit-time: you can define between which hours you want your pages to be crawled.
Sitemap: this is the parameter where you can show where your sitemap file is (You must use the complete URL address for the file).

Example

This the robots.txt I use on my site:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cms/feed/
Disallow: */feed/*
Disallow: /feed
Disallow: /cms/wp-content/
Disallow: /cms/wp-plugins/
Disallow: */wp-content/*
Disallow: /cms/wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /cms/index.php
Sitemap: http://www.bestblogs.asia/sitemap.xml

Best Blogs Asia.

General Guidelines

Your favicon should reflect your site and be relevant to your users. Don’t forget not only will they see your favicon in the browser window on all pages, but in saved bookmarks too. I recommend the following:

• Icon size must be 16×16 pixels.
• Don’t make it too complex.
• Make sure the icon and icon colour reflects your site
• If designing using a paint package, create the icon at 64×64 pixels, then when downsizing to 16×16 there won’t be any blur.
• Convert the image to .ico format and upload into your root directory.

HTML Code

The following code needs to be implemented in between the < head >… code:

< link rel="shortcut icon" href="/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" / > 

Favicon Generators

The follow is a list of useful .ico generators/convertors:

• Favicon Generator
• FavIcon Generator
• FavIcon from Pics
• Favicon.ico Maker

Screenshot of Nice Favicons

Best Blogs Asia.

Validation Tools

• W3C Markup Validation – this tool will validate your HTML or XHTML markup.
• W3C CSS Validation – this service will validate your CSS.
• Feed Validation – this tool will validate all versions of RSS feeds as well as Atom feeds.
• Browsershots – this tool will show your site in different browsers.

Best Blogs Asia.