msdanielle – just another ego blog site

First off, there are two great contests that are ending soon. Gary Lee is giving away an 8GB iPhone for free, and I wanted to let all you bloggers know you still have time to enter the contest. Just follow the rules and make sure to let him know you’ve entered. The contest should be closing later this month, but he’ll be making the official end-date announcement on his blog.

Enkay is also holding a contest that will end this coming week. You may remember Enkay was the winner of my Zune giveaway contest last month. He decided to keep the Zune, and have his own MP3 player contest which looks like it’s been going well for him. You can enter his contest here. Best of luck to you guys if you enter either contest…or both!

David over at TechZi had the opportunity to guest blog at ShoeMoney last week and was flamed by a bunch of haters — a lot of people who assume every ShoeMoney subscriber knows everything there is to know about link cloaking and affiliate redirects. Personally, I appreciated the article because it’s food for thought, but normally comments are reserved for fleshing out questions and details regarding technical articles. I could find only a couple useful comments which made me mad because I don’t know everything about link cloaking! Sigh… I for one am glad David is standing his ground, regardless of whether or not it’s an A+ article — which I’m still unsure of since there were so many useless comments that strayed off topic. Point is, he got a guest post on ShoeMoney. If anyone wants to leave constructive comments regarding the topic at hand, go to David’s post here to leave your thoughts. I’ll be reading the comments for useful feedback on link cloaking!

Another David — this one, the Bespeckled SEO — questions what the heck is going on with Google’s Page Rank update this time around. I have to say, I was wondering the same thing as him a few days ago. Seems that some sites have been updated, some back links have been updated, but some sites that were predicted to change haven’t seen any movement in ranking. He’d written a few articles regarding the start of the roll-out and also the meaning of page rank that led up to his most recent post, all of which I recommend you check out. I’m still stumped, crossing my fingers I’ll someday be a PR5…but who knows if it’ll happen.

The Clickz Network published an article appealing to e-commerce site owners: Creating an Effective Home Page. I find it extremely useful for helping people who run an online store or business analyze a few core questions about their audience. Do you know what your customers are looking for, and can they find these features quickly on your home page? Even if you don’t own an online business, and you run a blog or other non-retail site, think about the questions posed and see if they apply to your site. It’s a great article for anyone who wants to improve their home page performance and keep more users on the site longer by providing them what they’re looking for only one click away.

Last but definitely not least, I ran across this article by Vinny Lingham, SEM specialist in South Africa, sarcastically instructing corporations on how to ban all social networking sites from employee use. It’s a…well, social commentary on social networking. I agree with what he says, that these social networking sites are merely social networking tools until a corporation decides to use them and turn them into a corporate tool. And don’t forget to check out the Facebook parody at the end of the article which pokes fun at Facebook-obsessed stalkers. It’s a scary thought, and probably holds some truth…but it’s still a funny parody!

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