Dig into any self-labeled “SEO forum” and you’ll probably find some neatly organized categories along the lines of “Google,” “Yahoo,” and “MSN”. Checking the amount of activity in each will reveal the inclusion of Yahoo, and especially MSN, seems to be a mere “courtesy” on the part of the forum founders. Microsoft has been trying to change this for some time now, and the newly branded “Windows Live” is their latest attempt to do so. Will all those vacant MSN forums be lively any time soon? The short answer is “no,” read on to find out why.

Live.com is many things, including a search engine, customizable web portal, and the latest attempt by Microsoft to dig into Google’s market share in search. Its opening page is a simple one, in keeping with the “expectations” built by Google, providing several options and an invitation for you to personalize it as your own web portal.

Most of the features on the site are functional; while a few remain in the development stage and some are in between. Only Passport members can fully customize the basic Live page with RSS feeds and “gadgets”, much like Google’s portal page with Google Accounts. The basic, un-customized page offers a search bar with the options of Web, Images, News, Local and QnA.

The Web search performs much as other search engines, only it serves ads from MSN’s new ad network instead of Adwords. It does offer a “related search” section, something Google has yet to implement, but a standard feature of Ask.com for a while now.

The relevancy of the results, is, as always, a matter of debate. MSN’s Search performs ably in many regards, but one can’t help but wonder if the larger index Google provides means you’re missing something. Relevancy is undeniably important, though. It is one of the core reasons a searcher might actually make a switch, should his current engine of choice “let him down” too many times.

The Images search is an improvement on the Google and Yahoo technology, in that it offers dynamic thumbnail display in a “pageless” layout. Pass your cursor over a thumbnail and it will enlarge, with a brief description and the URL where the image can be found. The interface is intuitive and really feels innovative. The thumbnails can be dynamically resized, and the “scratchpad” can quickly create collections by drag-and-drop. The primary drawback to this very innovative feature is that it will respond slowly for those on dial-up and with weaker machines.

The News Search is a direct search function that lacks the “top stories” aggregator of Google News. Type in a word and you will get back a search list that is drawn from mainstream news outlets, which have stories that use your search term in the first sentence or two. The Local button will give you an interactive map of the area where hits for your search term are found. There’s little innovative here, but the presentation of the map is nice. It offers similar variations on the “route, aerial, and hybrid” graphical display popularized by Google Maps.

Windows Live Q&A allows you to post a question to the Windows Q&A universe and see who has an answer. This system is still in beta, so the technical specifics may change. Users post a question that is then open for 4 days to responses. At the end of the 4 day period, voting commences on the answers provided. This feature currently has no Google analog, though Yahoo has a similar service.

Additional Features- Betas
A variety of betas for Live services are available through ideas.live.com, the MS equivalent of Google Labs.

The Windows Live Mail is an in-house mail service that provides you with two gigabytes of storage and an updated version of what appears to be Outlook Express. It has some desktop features and keyboard hotkeys, new methods of sorting and categorizing, but nothing terribly radical. Windows Live Mail Desktop is a program that allows you to manage multiple e-mail accounts, including AOL, Gmail and others. It also manages newsgroups and RSS feeds.

Microsoft Live Office will be a web hosting service designed to provide you with a basic business website and domain name. Google Page Creator has tread this territory before, but was aimed at personal use, whereas Microsoft, with the “Office” brand, seems to be targeting businesses.

Windows Live Shopping and Windows Live Product Search are both as advertised: attempts to provide web-wide searches for products and shopping opportunities. The product search gives a dynamic display that can range from a simple text list to a thumbnail layout that borrows from the innovative image search layout. Searches can be refined by seller, brand, and most interestingly, “related term”, which provides a “tag cloud” of the kind popular with social bookmarking sites today.

Windows Live Academic, mentioned above, will provide search opportunities in “thousands of academic and research journals.” If their database has some heft to it, this will be a great addition to the search process. It remains to be seen if this academic resource will rival Google Scholar. Like Google Scholar, the results can be frustrating as many provide links only to abstracts or excerpts. Access to the full text of such results requires purchase or subscription to the journal in which they were originally published.

Conclusions
Live.com’s primary innovative feature is the image search, and even that has issues with slower connections. So far, virtually everything else served up by Microsoft has been done by Google, or other search engines, before. Even if Microsoft was able to “do it better”, it will have a hard time convincing existing users to switch from Google, as there is little incentive to do so unless these services are done so much better. That is not currently the case. Microsoft merely offers an “alternative” with Windows Live, not an indispensable alternative.

By Eric Lester

You’ve heard the stories. Click fraud has run rampant on Google, Yahoo, and MSN. This is evidenced by the numerous law suits that have been filed.

One of the most notable cases occurred this year when Google settled their own click fraud case to the tune of 90 million dollars. In fact, Google and Yahoo have each settled a class action lawsuit filed by marketers.

Click Fraud - What It Is
So, what is click fraud and how does it occur? Wikipedia provides us with a definition:

“Click fraud occurs in pay per click online advertising when a person, automated script, or computer program imitates a legitimate user of a web browser clicking on an ad, for the purpose of generating an improper charge per click. Click fraud is the subject of some controversy and increasing litigation due to the advertising networks being a key beneficiary of the fraud whether they like it or not.”

However, I would like to simplify this definition. Click fraud is a crime, plain and simple. Cybercrime, however, is hard to track. Law enforcement has only just recently started focusing on the threat of click fraud.

Click fraud is now being targeted by some of the industry’s biggest names. This movement has both the American court and government system involved. Business Week recently announced that major brands including Expedia.com and mortgage broker LendingTree.com planned to go public with their disputes over click fraud in late September.

Who can blame them? When it’s your money that’s going out the door, you need to be asking questions. Unfortunately, Google and Yahoo haven’t come up with many answers.

They have certainly paid lip service, indicating that they have systems in place to deter it, but the click fraud numbers continue to rise.

The Threat to a Popular Advertising Model
The Interactive Advertising Bureau estimates that 20 to 35 percent of ad clicks are fraudulent. The multi-billion dollar search industry is under attack and the problem is not going away anytime soon.

Advertisers are being cheated and the search engines appear to be sitting on the sidelines, leaving much of the responsibility for detecting click fraud with advertisers, the majority of whom lack the tools and knowledge to detect it.

The high level of click fraud has undermined advertisers’ confidence and some have even pulled their entire ad campaigns. For small to medium-sized businesses click fraud effectively erodes ROI, impacting the bottom line and future marketing initiatives.

Click fraud is also the single biggest threat to companies like Google and Yahoo, whose digital empires are largely dependent on their advertising revenues. Google’s $6 billion-a-year advertising business is especially at risk. Despite the threat, or maybe because of it, Google is saying little about click fraud and the pay-per-click concept as a whole.

While Google maintains its silence, many advertisers and savvy online entrepreneurs wonder where pay-per-click is headed. Click fraud threatens to destroy the very business that Google thrives on. In fact, click fraud losses have surpassed the total loss attributed to credit card fraud in the U.S.

Do the current click fraud problems have the power to slow the growth of pay-per-click search advertising or even bring it to a screeching halt?

Well, that’s hard to say, but the industry as a whole is certainly being crippled by this problem. Pay-per-click may not be the future. Many advertisers are now starting to look at advertising options that offer an uncorrupted alternative. Flat-fee advertising, pay-per-percentage, and pay-per-action are all possibilities, but there is one alternative in particular that deserves attention.

This search engine advertising model was first put forward by ExactSeek.com and then promoted through the ISEDN (Independent Search Engine & Directory Network) which ExactSeek founded in June, 2005. The model promulgated by ExactSeek and the ISEDN does not eliminate click fraud but does eliminate the cost associated with it.

How the ISEDN Model Works
The ISEDN charges a flat fee for advertising, making click fraud a pointless endeavor for scam artists, “paid to read” rings and cutthroat competitors. Your competition could click on your ISEDN listings all day long and it wouldn’t cost you a single penny more than what you originally paid.

$3-$4 provides you with an entire month’s worth of advertising across a network of 235+ search engines and web directories. If you choose to buy in volume, you can even expect some significant discounts.

Let’s face it, pay-per-click advertising is expensive. There are a number of companies who spend $5,000 to $10,000 per month on paid search marketing. Competition is fierce with many keywords costing $5 per click or more.

The problem is then compounded when you consider that 20 to 35 percent of those advertising dollars are wasted on fraudulent clicks. Just imagine. If you are paying $1,000 dollars per month to advertise on Google, $200 - $350 of those dollars are wasted on click fraud.

If you want to lower your click fraud costs, you need to buy click fraud monitoring software, which is quite pricey. Unfortunately, few click fraud monitoring companies target small to medium sized businesses.

The ISEDN offers an affordable alternative that charges a one-time, flat fee. The initial cost is the only cost.

Within this unique advertising model, the sale of any keyword or phrase is limited to 30 advertisers. Regardless of whether a keyword term is sold 5 or 30 times, ads rotate within the SERPs and throughout the ISEDN. The rotation ensures that every ad appears in the top 10 search results. In the worst case scenario, a listing would appear on the first page of results approximately once out of every 3 searches.

Of course, you can’t expect the same exposure provided by Google or Overture. Google alone receives millions of searches per day. However, if you are looking for a consistent return on your investment without wasting a penny on click fraud, then the ISEDN provides an affordable and lucrative solution.

Not to mention, the ISEDN is growing every day. An average of 3- 5 search engines are added every week. As the network continues to grow, your ad automatically receives more exposure.

This program gives advertisers the benefit of advertising with smaller search engines on a massive scale without the fear of click fraud and without the hassle of managing multiple advertising accounts. For more information on the ISEDN, visit ExactSeek.com or ISEDN.org.

Summing It Up
The rules in search engine advertising are shifting and the winners are adapting.

As for Google, Yahoo, and MSN, you can definitely expect to see some changes being made with their paid search programs in the near future. Cybercrime is still a crime and law enforcers are finally starting to take these problems seriously.

The pay-per-click model is inherently flawed and must be altered to survive. Google and the other major search engines know that their business will be crippled if they do not adapt. The challenge for them is how to adapt and still maintain those multi-billion dollar bottom lines.

Fortunately, there are individuals, groups, companies and organizations more interested in finding and providing solutions to the problem of click fraud than in propping up a flawed concept. Those leading the fight against click-fraud, like the ISEDN, may never see 10 figure bottom lines like Yahoo or Google, but the revenue they do make won’t be based on fraudulent clicks and at your expense.

By Kim Roach

At present, a vast majority of webmasters are designing for IE (Internet Explorer) 6, which is not as W3C standards compliant as is FireFox, Netscape, Safari and Opera.
In my article - “The importance of sound website design & search spiders to Internet Marketers,” I mentioned the importance of a designer being cognizant of the fact that web browser standards are not yet fully harmonized - a web page that looks great in Internet Explorer (6) might look hideous in a Mozilla based browser like FireFox or Netscape.

I also noted that with the explosion of devices with which to serve Internet applications, compliance with W3C standards has become critical.

When the final release for IE 7 for Windows XP, Server 2003 & Vista is launched, hopefully before the end of 2006, the tables will be turned, so to speak.

Internet Explorer 7 will be more standards compliant and your HTML code will be subject to much more rigorous interpretation than is the case with IE 6, consequently some web pages that look fine in IE 6 might not look the same IE 7.

In IE 7 Microsoft has made a solemn effort to fix the browsers acquiescence to W3C standards and CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) compatibility. CSS interpretation as recommended by W3C has been improved tremendously giving designers and developers more leverage in functionality for cross-browser design.

Microsoft asserts that they are taking W3C compatibility issues seriously.

Concisely what this means is that IE 7 will tend to interpret your web page code more scrupulously than before.

Therefore, if you have been designing your pages and have not bothered to check how they render in W3C Standards Compliant browsers like FireFox, you may be in for a rude shock when IE 7 finally rolls out.

If you have not been incorporating W3C Web standards in your design strategy you may need to re-design for IE 7.

How should you go about it?

Design for “strict” browsers like FireFox first. Not only is FireFox a more standards-compliant browser but it is also the primary competitor to Internet Explorer. A contender backed by Google’s marketing machine — and therefore, is not likely do “a Netscape” on designers.

Prior and up to IE 4.x, Netscape was the leading browser in the market with almost 80% of the market, but in a bid to force the issue culminating with proprietary goofs by AOL to whom Netscape sold out, they screwed up big time with versions 4 up to 6. A bitter war of attrition with Microsoft in the late nineties did not help either.

Microsoft grabbed the opportunity and gobbled the Browser market overnight.

With version 7+ Netscape has been revived. How well it will compete with IE and FireFox remains to be seen.

I will be the first to admit that most the web pages I have built in the last several years are not always standards compliant… and so are ninety five percent of other web pages — as I stated in my previous article, “if strict W3C standards were to be enforced in browsers, most websites would go out of business.”

To design for FireFox a designer needs to combine Valid CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) for “look and feel” and W3C compliant HTML for web page structure.

The combination of these two design strategies is powerful in that it elicits tremendous flexibility, ease of maintenance and opens up extensive possibilities in website design. The benefits are rewarding, and every webmaster should attempt to utilize this two pronged scheme in their design routine.

Making changes to and/or styling a site designed with CSS is much easier and more elegant than messing around with a traditional table-based design.

CSS may look intimidating to a first-timer but once you familiarize yourself with the basics you can progressively harness the power of CSS to your full benefit. In addition, most web page design tools such as Dreamweaver or FrontPage have built-in modules with which you can automatically generate CSS code, which you can then view in a plain text editor for study purposes.

To aid you in your CSS endeavor you need the following developer tools: Web Developer Extension for FireFox and the Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar. Great time-saving tools for creating, understanding, and troubleshooting Web pages.

As a matter of fact, by installing some of the 1,500+ available FireFox extensions you can eliminate the need for quite a chunk of standalone desktop applications.

After designing your Web page remember to use a MarkUp Validation Service to check whether your Web page conforms to W3C recommendations. If there are errors, the validator will notify you of them and suggest corrections.

Also, remember that when designing using W3C standards guidelines a lot of code(tags) that were very valid in the “Pre-Standards” era have completely depreciated and will be ignored completely by browsers. If you ignore these errors during validation, your web pages might not render correctly.

In many instances, you may never be able to achieve 100% HTML or XHTML validation. In such cases you may want put the following DOCTYPE declaration in your document — at the top of your web page before the tag:

< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">

A “Document Type Definition” or DTD supplies Web browsers with information about which (X)HTML specification your web page is built upon, which instructs the Browser how to render the page for viewing.

In the example captioned above a standards compliant browser will interpret your web page as an HTML 4.01 document, and because it is marked as “Transitional,” it will display it in “quirks mode,” meaning that the browser will forgo the strict standards mode, and display your page like it would be displayed in older “non-strict” browsers, while still supporting any tags developed after IE 4, Netscape 4 and others.

On the contrary, the following DOCTYPE declaration tells the standards compliant browsers that your web page should be displayed in strict compliance with the DOCTYPE declaration.

< !DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN">

A complete list of recommended DTDs can be found at the W3C Website.

If you leave the DOCTYPE out, the browsers automatically switch to “quirks mode,” therefore, it is important to include the DOCTYPE declaration on every web page that you build in order for it to be rendered correctly.

If your Web pages render well in FireFox at present you probably will not encounter any major problems in IE 7 other than minor adjustments here and there. However, I think a realistic designer should at least make a meaningful attempt to follow W3C guidelines for it is the correct way forward.

Do it now so that you will be ready for the future…re-designs and total overhauls are a time consuming and painful process. A process, which becomes much easier if your initial design incorporated structurally clean and modular (X)HTML with CSS compliance.

By James Opiko