Do your MSN search results show your DMOZ descriptions?

DMOZ requires you to write lame descriptions of your web site.  Usually to get approved by DMOZ you have to rewrite your description and take out some of the promotional text and make it very boring.  You can’t use too many keywords in your description or the DMOZ editor might rewrite your description or not include your site.

BUT did you know that MSN search uses your site’s DMOZ description when they list your site in search results?

So, how do you change this? 

According to the MSN Search weblog you can use these tags in your HTML to tell MSN Search NOT to use your DMOZ description.  Instead they’d use your meta-description.  This won’t help your search results, but it will help the way your site looks when it shows up in the search results.

What we did was introduce a new option at the page level  – a robots meta tag – that tells the MSN search bot not to use the DMOZ site snippet.  This is something that only can be done at Web page level, by a webmaster, and is not done as part of the robot.txt file. So in your Web page you’d put:

<meta content=”NOODP” name=”ROBOTS”>

or
<meta content=”NOODP” name=”msnbot”>

In theory the first of these applies to all crawlers and the second just to us. As far as we know right now, we are the only search engine  to support this  tag, so the two are the same for the moment. But when others follow suit, you could use the second tag to get only MSN to ignore ODP content for your page.

A word of caution: Putting either tag in your pages will not make your search results descriptions change immediately – they will change once our crawler has re-crawled the page. Usually that takes about 1 day -4 weeks for us to re-crawl you (ok, that sounds odd, but we hope you know what we mean). 

 - Ben Fitts

Popularity: 10% [?]

I frequently promote my online businesses by submitting press releases through the press release service PRWeb.  I was really surprised to find out that PRWeb is now offering podcast interviews for your press releases!

 The way it works is you pay $200 for an enhanced press release.  This gives you the normal press release, the search engine exposure, the ability to attach images to your press release, and NOW it also includes your own private podcast interview which PRWeb will help promote for you.

It is a really cool new service.  Once you pay $200 you have enhanced features available for your press release.  You click on the enhanced features button and you can schedule your podcast interview.  They give you some times to choose from and you submit your request for interview.  They then give you a number to call at your appointed time.  You call in and you’ve got an interviewer and an engineer on the phone who walk you through the process.  It was really friendly and easy to do.  The whole process took about 15 minutes.  They asked me a few leading questions about my business and specifically about my “newsworthy” item.  Then you’re done!  They take your recording and edit it for you.  Then they submit it to the podcast directories and attach it to your press release.

If you don’t know how to podcast $200 is a pretty good deal to get someone to do a professional podcast interview of you.  Plus you own the podcast so you can republish the MP3 file in as many locations as you want.

Check out my mothers day press release and look at the links in the right hand navigation to see my podcasts. 

- Ben Fitts

Popularity: 9% [?]

Are you looking for a last minute Mothers Day idea? Let your mom know how much you appreciate her.

Boston, MA (PRWEB) May 8, 2006 — Mother’s day is only a few days away, have you remembered to send your mother a gift yet?

RememberMothersDay.com is excited to offer you the ability to send your mom a free mothers day card without having to deal with the hassels of driving to the store, buying a stamp, stuffing an envelope, and rushing off the post office.

“We know everyone is busy and you just don’t have time to get to the store and get a card,” said Benjamin Fitts founder of RememberMothersDay.com. “We don’t want any moms to be forgotten. The least we could do is offer a free greeting cards to people who don’t have time to get to the store to purchase a traditional card.”

RememberMothersDay.com uses an online system that prints real greeting cards, stuffs them in a real envelope, and puts them in the mail with a real stamp on it. They take all the pain out of going to a store and finding the right card. Best of all you can send your mom or grandma a card for free. They even offer a service for a small fee where they can put a gift card from major department stores inside the greeting card for you!

To send your free greeting card for Mothers Day visit http://www.RememberMothersDay.com. Contact Benjamin Fitts for further information or to request a free sample account of our innovative greeting card system.

RememberMothersDay.com:
Is a free service provided by Benjamin Fitts and other independent distributors of Send Out Cards, LLC. Their goal is to create senders of greeting cards and bring smiles to the faces of millions of people around the country.

Our first interview for our Mothers Day card giveaway.

Popularity: 11% [?]