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Here are the latest news headlines and articles from Pandia Search World. Go to www.pandia.com/searchworld for the online version of this news service.

Online SEO training becomes truly global

People looking to learn more about search engine optimization go for online training.

Kalena Jordan of Search Engine College informs us that the college now has students in 30 different countries.

The courses include search engine optimization, pay per click marketing, web site copy-writing, web site usability, keyword research and link building.

Kalena argues that the main reason for the increasing number of students is the fact that search engine optimizer has become a cutting edge type of job.

We noticed this at the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in New York. A few years ago such conferences would be dominated by young male geeks in T-shirts, many of them amateurs in the best sense of the word. Now there were a large number of well trained young women i business suits. Even advertising companies have started to talk about SEO.

There is no reason to be surprised, really. Company managements are slowly being taken over by people who grew up with the Internet. Furthermore, more and more of their business is taking place online. A well optimized site will bring in much more than a site rotting in the dark cellars of “supplemental results”.

However, such courses shouldn’t be limited to those who plan to become a professional search engine marketers. Anyone trying to market or design a site can benefit from such competences.

Today we have updated our survey of online search engine optimization and marketing courses, presenting several of the companies and organisations providing such services.

Note that all of these are English language services. At a later time we would like to take a look at online training in other languages.

Disclosure: Pandia is a Search Engine College affiliate.

Fast Search & Transfer in trouble

The Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten/business site E24 reports that Fast Search & Transfer is loosing out on the stock exchange.

The stocks of the Norwegian search company have lost two thirds of their value in one and a half year.

The explanation is simple: The revenue is not in harmony with the company’s expenses. Too many customers are not paying enough for what they get.

“Have the engineers been given too much leeway and spent too much time on the fun stuff?” Aftenposten asks.

CEO John Markus Lervik admits that the company has been too much technology- and sales-driven.

Yahoo! launches Traffic Quality Center for advertisers

Yahoo! launches a separate website with news, tools and resources for combating click-fraud.

The Yahoo! Search Marketing Blog reports that Yahoo! has launched a Traffic Quality Center for users of their pay-per-click advertising (Yahoo! Search Marketing).

The Traffic Center is clearly a response to the many complaints both Yahoo! and Google get regarding click fraud.

Click fraud is caused by persons, automated scripts, or computer programs that click on an ad without being interested in what the ad is about. Such activities may be instigated by sites that publicize the ads (who are paid by the click) or by competitors of the advertiser (who want to see the company bleed).

At the new site you may:

Yahoo! is now working with a four step system to stop click-fraud:

Why frames and search engine optimization don’t mix

Whatever you do, do not use framesets when designing a web site! In essence you are reducing the number of linkable pages to one. We use a music shopping site as an example, and take a look at iTunes while we are at it.

It sounded like a good idea at the time. With a frameset you can put up more than one web page in the same browser window at the same time.

You can, for instance, put your navigation in a frame on the left hand side of the screen, and let the rest be filled with content. Clicking on a link in the navigation part of the window will open the corresponding page in the content part. And the navigation will always be there, regardless how much the reader scrolls in the content frame.

So what is the problem, search engine optimization wise?

The search engines will find the framed pages

Well, it used to be that the search engines would index the frameset HTML file only (i.e. the file that decides how the web browser window is to be divided and what files to include in the different frames), and not the pages that were to be included in the different frames.

Hence webmasters used a NOFRAMES tag in the frameset document to tell the search engines what the file was about. This is no longer a major problem as most search engines are able to identify and find the files linked to in the frameset document.

You cannot link to individual pages

No, the problem is that a site of this kind have only one — I repeat 1 — URL that can be bookmarked, and that is the web address of the frameset file itself.

So if you have online CD store with individual pages for each artist and for each album, it is impossible for surfers to bookmark those pages in their browser, and what’s even more important: It is impossible for outsiders to link to those pages.

Are there free online encyclopedias that can compete with the Wikipedia?

A review of the Wikipedia and competing free online encyclopedias.
Man and woman carrying books

It seems everybody uses the Wikipedia these days, as it gives surfers a short-cut to relevant and concise information on nearly any topic.

The large number of sites that link to the Wikipedia have given its article a strong standing in regular search engine results, as well, bringing in even more visitors.

The question we ask is: Are there any serious free alternatives to the Wikipedia out there?

We have tested the content of several free online encyclopedias by doing a search for three topics we know quite a bit about: the renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno, our home country Norway and the search engine Google.

The Wikipedia has now close to 8 million articles in 253 languages, 1.91 million of which are in the English edition.

It is written collaboratively by volunteers around the world and the vast majority of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the Internet. This has led to a lot of debate and criticism.

All in all, however, most of the articles are informative and useful, and the collective nature of the adventure normally helps readers and writers identify and correct the most serious inaccuracies.

The article on Giordano Bruno is long and substantial and captures the Hermetic side of his philosophy.

Search engine marketing feature articles from Pandia

An overview over Pandia’s guides to search engine marketing and optimization.

Pandia celebrates its 9th anniversary this year. During these years we have published a large number of articles with hands on practical advice for people learning the art of search engine optimization and marketing.

Obviously, some of these articles are out of date, but we have now gathered links to the most up to date and relevant ones on one page, giving new readers a free library of search engine marketing tips.

Among the topics covered are:

Pandia Weekend Wrap-up Week 32/2007

This week’s search engine news headlines plus a few words on the “diggs” of search engine marketing.

We have spent some time over at Sphinn this week, testing out this new forum for search engine related discussions and link sharing. Danny Sullivan’s new forum is different from the one in initiated over at Search Engine Watch, in that it is more digg-like. You suggest and vote for articles, the ones with most votes hopefully being the most newsworthy.

As a discussion forum I think it works very well. Danny has attracted a lot of SEO-savvy experts that are able to find new and original angles to search engine related questions.

it does not always work equally well as a search engine news discovery site. It is not that the “sphinners” fail to put up the most important links, they do. The problem is that they tend to drown in links to more generic “practical advice” kind of articles, which are great for beginners, but do not provide food for those who have been around for a while.

That being said, we have identified quite a few interesting stories through Sphinn, and some have found their way into this weeks edition of the Pandia Weekend Wrap-up.

By the way, Sphinn is not the only Digg-like search engine forum around. BUMPzee started out as a SEO/affiliate forum, but has now expanded into a wide range of topics.

SEO Voter continues to be a search engine optimization and web development forum only.

And now, this week’s headlines:

Search In The Year 2010
Gord Hotchkiss suggests a search engine building dream team (SE Land Aug 10 2007)

Google to Webmasters: Reciprocal Linking will get you BANNED!
Does this apply to blogrolls and trackbacks as well Search Engine Optimization 2.0 asks (Aug 9 2007)

Interview with Google's Sep Kamvar, Lead Software Engineer for Personalization
On the use of Web History and more. Google wants to compute PageRank for every single person. (Read Write Aug 9 2007)

Is Google Shortening The Description Meta Tag It Shows?
Google may be planning to shortening their snippet text limit from about 150 characters to 95 characters. (Unofficial SEO Aug 11 2007)