No real problems there….

2. www.brizsoft.com/mp3split/
Title: MP3 Splitter – software to split mp3 files

Fair enough….

3. www.codevisions.de/mp3splitter
Title: Codevisions/404 – hjhappel.de

Brilliant search result.

I have started to use Yahoo Search.

A Wikipedia article states that Page Rank is a factor, but since Googles algorithms are a quietly kept secret it is hard to tell how often they tweak it and what they decide is more important for the SERP.

We spend so much time on optimization for Google, it seems that we just hope that Yahoo and Live optimization results just follow suit. Tomorrow I’m going to look at Yahoo, a change is as good as a holiday.

Even though Page Rank is meant to denote the relevance or importance of content in the eyes of Google, it apparently isn’t important enough to be considered in organic search results.

Loan Peak Tram, Big Sky Resort, MT

We headed up to Big Sky, Montana on Friday afternoon from Denver. Unless you plan to stop somewhere overnight I suggest leaving very early in the morning from Denver to make it to anywhere in Montana by a decent hour. We arrived at about 5am Saturday morning at the Huntley Lodge and after a very quick check in (thank you!) we were up to our room to grab a couple of hours sleep.

Breakfast was a full buffet deal and since the lodge is slope side we spent most of the time with apple raspberry pancakes stuffed in our mouths trying to chew while gaping up at the peak above us. It is massive and impressive, while the lower slopes of the mountain can easily cater for kids and beginners.

While we all vowed to have an easy day after only 4 hours of sleep we were out on the mountain by about 11am and making our way to the top. We had arrived for one of the best dumps of the year and throughout the day the snow kept coming down. We took advantage of the conditions and by 4pm I dragged myself off the slope, very happy to have driven 11 hours to get to this mountain. We were looking forward to the next day after a full night’s sleep and what was shaping up to be over a foot of new snow overnight. Now we just had to wax our boards (apologies to the housekeeping staff).

Up and back at the buffet for breakfast we noticed that the forecast had been slightly off. There was about a foot and a half of new snow and it was still coming down. Shoveling down the Chef’s special of some sort of scrambled eggs concoction we didn’t spend any time gaping and were out on the mountain by 9:30am.

Deep, deep powder

Our crew were all fitted out in purples, pinks, greens, neons and whatever other colour you can think of and it seemed that Big Sky wasn’t quite used to the Colorado flair but considering the conditions it was better to stand out than to blend in with a tree.

We spent the morning on the lower half of the southern side of the mountain, trying to get used to riding in the amount of powder underneath us. Trips were made to the workbenches to set back bindings and moans of “powder board” could be heard, but we found that if we just pointed our boards and didn’t care about the consequences the ride on top of the powder was brilliant. Even if you did bury your nose and buried yourself you still came out smiling.

After the disappointing season in Colorado the time taken to travel to Big Sky had just been made worth while.

We met up with a local after lunch and headed back up to the peak, hoping to get to ride to the top on the Lone Peak tram. Unfortunately we left it too late in the day to get through the lift line before the tram closed so we had to content ourselves with the Lone Peak Triple and black diamond runs, Gun Mount and Dead Top at the base of the Pinnacles and running all the way back down the the base of the Swift Current Quad.

Before we knew it, it was nearly 4pm and the lifts started to close. We had barely touch any of the terrain at the resort and only money, jobs and other inconsequential things kept us from staying the rest of the week just to explore the mountain a little bit more. Next year.

go for the sauerkraut, mustard and onions

Tip:

If you’re out on the mountain until last lift (and at Big Sky this is pretty much a given) then head to Yeti Dogs before 4:30 for one of the best hot dogs you’ll find on a ski hill at a decent ski resort price.

Add to that, Google is experimenting with users being able to rank the search results.

Just one month ago NCH Software’s Prism Video Converter ranked 2nd on Google USA’s search results when searching on “AVI converter”, now it ranks close to 40th with Xillisoft one rank behind. I almost boosted Xillisoft’s rank out of sheer frustration with Google’s change in rankings.

The question on my mind is how much of an influence is the experiment of user rankings going to have on real results. Who’s to say a company won’t outsource ranking work for a couple of dollars an hour, and in turn affect legitimate search results?

Is Google just playing with all the SEO experts out there?

Well was it search or content or both? It stands to reason that your content display advertising will generate a higher percentage of new visits over search keywords. Why? Because there are no organic results for your potential visitors to choose from, over a display ad.

So I decided to delve into our traffic and extract search from content, new from returning and figure out how many people really do reach us as new visitors from our paid search advertising. The figure closed a few mouths.

New Traffic from Search accounted for only 9% of Paid (Google) traffic.

When I looked at the keywords traffic that made up this 9% – it came from keywords where we simply didn’t organically rank.

The more worrying figure was that Returning Visits on Search accounted for 14% of Paid (Google) traffic. Why would someone who has been to our site before need to use an ad medium to reach us again?

This can be partly explained by the 100+ applications we develop in various different categories, from video onverters to transcription players.

Tomorrow: Find out what they searched for the first time around and is it 180% different to the second time they searched and clicked on an ad? How do we cross sell completely different categories?