As our site grows every day we want to share some information with you on the way we are operating the project. We call this section «Business Blog» as it is similar to doing a log book where data is recorded in a chronological order. «Blogging» is gaining popularity with more and more people picking up the habit of publishing their experiences and thoughts on the Internet. Our Blog covers various topics — from TOEFL, TOEIC, MBA, GMAT, ESL/EFL test preperation to cultural traditions and current political events.
There will also be some Internet marketing terminology and if you have any questions regarding the information simply let us know.

The Business Blog is written by Torsten Daerr and edited by Alan Townend.

2003 — December 12
A number of language schools are interested in integrating our tests into their teaching services. They have come across our website and checked out the conditions for the test download and found them very reasonable. Now we have to come up with a new licence policy because the current prices for downloading and using the tests offline are for single copies only. If a larger organization such as a language school or even an organization of language schools such as www.assest-schools.de want to use the tests the conditions clearly have to be different, too. Also, there as another isuesse to looked into, it's the «Common European Framework of Reference for Languages» which has been developed in order create a unified standard for language proficiency levels within the EU and we'll give you more details about how it corresponds with English language certificates issued by LCCI, ETS or the university of Cambridge soon…

2003 — December 11
Last Thursday there was an article on BBC.co.uk entitled «Google changes anger web businesses». It describes how Google altered their search algorithm in late November — a major change known as the Florida Update. Google is constantly refining their indexing and ranking system in order to increase search term relevancy. Therefore they regularly update their data bases by doing the «Google Dance» as the frequent reshuffle is called among SEO people. When it comes to our key words the results have been fairly stable ever since we submitted our URL. As of now we rank between position 1 and 3 when you type in «english test» or «english tests». Interestingly enough, the top position is held by englishlearner.com — A site that hasn't added any new materials to site for months if not for years. Yet, it was launched in March 1998 when not much competition was around and now almost 1000 sites link to englishlearner.com
It might take a while for people to find new English language training resources on the web…

2003 — December 09
We have added a download section to our website offering a variety of reasonably priced information and education products. Of course we understand that our users will only make purchases on our website if they can clearly identify the benefits they can receive. Another important factor is the convenience of the entire process. At this point you first select the product (either Babylon Pro, the english-test.net English tests for offline use or an e-book). Then you check the price and send the appropriate amount to us via PayPal. As soon as we receive your payment we will send you an URL and login information to your product via email. In a couple of days we will implement a PayPal button into the download page to make the purchase even easier. We will also add new products from time to time.

2003 — December 05
Slowly it's becoming an obsession: Working with Google on the other side. What do you think I mean? Well, Google is like a magnet, a medium that attracts people with similar thoughts from all parts of the world. When I started the Netlog August 15, 2003 I had no idea that Google's spiders would index and analyze every single word combination on it. But this seems to be exactly what's happening because every day our site gets hits by people using fairly unusual search strings such as «russian vocabulary list pdf» or «High Fidelity teaching +Hornby EFL». Yes, of course I have read lots about SEO — Search Engine Optimization and most of my findings you'll find in the handbook I'm putting together for download. The gist, though of all SEO activities is this: Design your webpages not for search engines, spiders, robots, crawlers, Google, MSN and AltaVista but for human beings. It's really as simple as that. You see, web based search has in the past decade developed from zero to a highly sophisticated system by the name of Google and this is just the start. We don't know if Google will be around in a couple of years. Chances are it won't. Web based information search though will be part of our lives and search string relevance is a key issue here…