Recently, SEO has been getting some bad rap. It may deserved or undeserved, but that really shouldn?t concern you if you stick within what is called ethical SEO. Experts would say that this is the best way to get search engines to notice you and give you lasting results.

So what is ethical SEO? The main point in ethical SEO is not to use any illegal means to advertise on your website. Neither does it cover the use of ?shady? methods to increase traffic. The major drawback to ethical SEO is that it does not give immediate results. It is a strategy that requires A LOT of patience and hard work. You have to develop and form your own strategy to suit specific needs and target your specific market. There is simply no shortcut to ethical SEO. On the other hand, with ethical SEO, you get lasting and real results. With impeccable content and excellent service, your hard work will pay off and you will gain the trust of your customers as you continue to rise in the page rankings. With ethical SEO, you get reliable results and permanent benefits. At the end of the day, that?s what really matters. You may get to your goal slowly but you?ll get there eventually, and when you do, you will be ready for the windfall.

We’ve been talking about RSS feeds and what it can do for your website. We know that incorporating RSS feeds into your site results in more frequent visits from search engine spiders and thus leads to faster indexing.

Have you realized however that by syndicating your RSS feeds successfully you can achieve the same results? How so?

If you have subscribers when a search engine spider crawls your subscriber’s site (assuming that your subscriber incorporated YOUR feed into his own website) the feeds will of course contain a link back to your website. Once the spider follows the link it will notice your website and so index your site as well. Now if you have a lot of subscribers the chances of being crawled through back links are much greater. In addition to this the spider will of course notice the plentiful back links, which will result not only in faster indexing but in a higher page rank.

To get noticed fast one thing you can do is to subscribe to your own feed using Google Reader, MyYahoo, and MyMsn accounts. Surely the three search engines will at least pay attention to their own services.

As you can see from our last post almost ALL of the criteria for getting a good page ranking in SEOmoz is related to links. Link love is indeed very important if you want to be able to get lots of traffic. This is true for all websites in the internet and especially true for blogs. The reasoning behind this is actually very simple.

We know the importance of the “word of mouth” most trends couldn’t have gotten as popular as they have without it. If you don’t believe me read Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” (it isn’t an SEO book but you’ll understand just how important the word of mouth is aside from being a really good read). In cyberspace links are equivalent to gossip and referrals. The more links you have the more people will become aware of your blog’s existence. Hence whether the links point to your full URL or domain or whether it comes from Yahoo, Wikipedia, or DMOZ the important thing is for you to have plenty of them in the right places.

So now that you know the difference between an HTML Site Map and a Google Sitemap you should also be able to realize just exactly how a sitemap will benefit you. Now undoubtedly you would want to a Google Sitemap file. To make one you need a sitemap generator.

There are many sitemap generators out there. To help you pick one to one here is a list of some of the good ones.

The “Official Google Sitemap Generator” – Ok so it isn’t really called that but this sitemap generator from Sourceforge is the one that Google endorses in its Sitemap file Help Section. So if Google endorses something you would do well to use it.

The next three sitemap generators can all make different types of sitemaps for you. They can generate an HTML sitemap, an XML sitemap file (Google Sitemap), a text sitemap (for yahoo submissions), or even an ROR sitemap (used for submissions to other search engines). Since they all offer free versions feel free to try any or all of them to get a feel of which will work best for you.

Sitemap Generator from XML-Sitemaps.com – free online sitemap generator capable of generating all the four sitemaps mentioned above

Sitemapdoc – very easy way of generating and editing an XML sitemap or an HTML sitemap

GSiteCrawler – free downloadable Google and Yahoo Sitemaps generator; works in Windows and Internet Explorer only; you can also make a ROR and HTML sitemap as well as get help setting up an RSS feed for your website using GSiteCrawler

Yahoo Mail‘s 41.4 percent share of all display ads was more that three times that of closest competitor MySpace‘s 16.1 percent, according to Nielsen/NetRatings AdRelevance data. MSN Hotmail was third, with 7.8 percent of display ads. Yahoo‘s share increased significantly from the previous month’s 32.9 percent and the 7.6 percent in August 2005.

Financial services companies accounted for 28.0 percent of online display ads in August, followed by retail goods and services with 18 percent and web media with 14 percent.

The total number of CPM display ads tracked by Nielsen (not pre-roll, partnerships and sponsorships) totaled 233.5 billion, up from 187.2 in July, 193.6 billion in June, and 197.7 billion in May.

Microsoft’s adCenter has sent out a limited number of invitations to advertisers for the pilot test of the program - ContentAds – which will initially place contextual ads on Microsoft properties such as MSN Money, MSN Real Estate and Windows Live sites, among others, reports MediaPost, citing a post on the JenSense blog. The pilot is expected to launch in the fall and will likely be extended to other publishers’ sites.

ContentAds will be capable of using demographic targeting, geo-targeting and incremental bidding tools, according to JenSense. The new offering would bring Microsoft’s adCenter platform in line with Google AdSense and Yahoo Publisher Network.

“From an advertiser perspective, we know that we’ll buy MSN contextual. The harder challenge will be for them (Microsoft) to get that inventory, particularly with Google locking up all the key partnerships,” Josh Stylman of Reprise Media is quoted as saying.