SEO blog, Free SEO news, Webmasters Tips, Social media marketing

LG Optimus Pad LTE tablet 8.9 inch screen and ditch anaglyphic 3d

2012-01-18T08:15:00.000-08:00

LG has unveiled the Optimus Pad LTE, its first 4G-enabled tablet. The device will have an 8.9-inch screen and measures only 9.3mm thick.

At the Consumer Electronics Show last week, we began to wonder if LG had abandoned the tablet market. After all, it’s been more than six months since its first and last tablet, which was marketed through T-Mobile as the G-Slate last year, which is a lifetime in the fast-paced mobile industry. It looks like the company was merely waiting. LG today unveiled the Optimus Pad LTE, its first 4G LTE-enabled tablet.

Like the G-Slate (review), the new Optimus Pad will have an 8.9-inch screen, but this model will be a lot thinner and lighter at only 9.34mm thick and about 497 grams (1.09 lbs), which is slightly thicker than an iPhone 4S, and fairly light for a tablet, though the Galaxy Tab 8.9 (review) weighs slightly under a pound.

Under the hood, the Optimus Pad LTE runs Google’s Android 3.2 (Honeycomb) operating system, with no announced upgrade plan to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) yet. It also has a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm processor, 1280×768 pixel IPS LCD screen (wide angle viewing), 8MP rear camera, 2MP front camera, 32GB of internal storage, and a Micro SD card slot. Software for editing pictures and videos is also being included.

Though no US distribution has been announced, LG will have to target an LTE-capable wireless carrier, which means either AT&T or Verizon, though Sprint is rumored to be launching its own LTE network sometime before summer.

Nothing about the Optimus Pad LTE seems particularly standout, but most tablets seem to blend together lately. We’re excited that LG has dumped the silly anaglyphic 3D video recording mode that was on the G-Slate, which forced you to wear red and blue glasses to see your 3D videos–you know, like a movie in the 1950s.

Microsoft windows 8 release date

2012-01-16T12:44:00.000-08:00

"One of the things that I think is a good guideline though is we've always said that Windows releases come round about every three years and this year will be three years in October since we launched Windows 7. So I think that's a good guideline to consider."

Now, Microsoft has been hinting at this three-years-after-7 thing for a while. In fact, it used the same tactic to talk about a Windows 7 launch date, citing a three year gap from Vista. What's new is that instead of saying "Fall," or 12 months from BUILD, Microsoft is actually saying the word "October" out loud. Still, that's no guarantee of an October launch; there's plenty of leeway in this quote. The gap between Vista and Windows 7 wasn't exactly three years: Vista came out in January 30th. Also, there's a difference between the Release to Master date, Microsoft's volume licensing release to manufacturers, and the actual consumer availability, so even if "October" is true, it could be any one of those slots.

Microsoft has been disappointingly mum here at CES about any launch plans for Windows 8, only mentioning the upcoming "milestone" public beta release in February, so at least we have this hint now. In the middle of last year dates were as wide ranging as mid-2012 and back-to-school 2013, so at least we're honing in.

HTC Titan 2 16MP Camera | A smart phone windows phone with LTE

2012-01-15T12:34:00.000-08:00

We sit down and spend some time with HTC's new Titan II, coming soon to AT&T's LTE network with an impressive 16-megapixel camera.

Though there weren’t dozens of new Windows Phones shown at the Consumer Electronics Show this year, Microsoft may have had a more impressive showing than Android. Nokia finally debuted its first 4G LTE Windows Phone 7.5 device, the Lumia 900, and HTC quietly announced a sequel to its newly released 4.7-inch Titan phone. Oddly, the manufacturer didn’t have a presence on the show floor, but Microsoft let me play around with one during our Windows Phone meeting. My impressions are below.

A more stylish design

From a design perspective, the Titan II is quiet similar to its predecessor, but HTC has improved the look of the shell with a few lines and curves. The new design looks very similar to the HTC Sensation, an Android phone that hit shelves in the middle of last year, and a lot of HTC’s lineup since.

If you’ve held a Titan, then you know how the Titan II feels. Both phones have a huge 4.7-inch screen (about the same size as a Galaxy Nexus, though ever so slightly larger) and a camera that protrudes from the back just a bit. We’re not a huge fan of a stick-out camera, but I’ll address that in a bit. The Titan II is slightly thicker than the original, as you can see below. Much like the Galaxy Nexus, these phones are usable, but we wouldn’t want a device much bigger than this. Already, I have to stretch my thumb quite a ways to do anything on the upper or lower left side of the screen. If you hold phones in your left hand, reverse that problem.

4G LTE, finally

The Titan II isn’t dual-core, unfortunately. Windows Phones still haven’t breached that barrier, though we expect Microsoft to begin allowing more powerful processors in the coming months. But the Titan (along with the Lumia 900) does operate on AT&T’s 4G LTE network, which may is enough to tide us over for now. No Verizon release date has been announced, but it would be great love it if Verizon got on board the WP7 train a bit.

A 16-megapixel camera

I thought the 12-megapixel camera on some of the Fujitsu phones was impressive until I took a look at the Titan II. I didn’t get a chance to give the camera a proper test, but I did snap a few pictures and it appears to be at least on par with other recent HTC devices, which have had some of the best cameras on the market outside of the iPhone 4S. Like the Amaze 4G and myTouch 4G Slide on T-Mobile, the Titan II also comes with a wide-angle lens, a number of advanced filters, a “Burst Mode” for taking a bunch of pictures in a row, a panorama mode, and others. However, it still retains the same simple look and design that all Windows Phone camera apps have. Like all WP7 devices, the Titan II also has a full camera button, which can be activated without unlocking the phone—a useful feature. An upcoming Sony Xperia phone has mimicked this feature, but Windows Phones still seem to do it best.

A good phone

It may be too big for some, but with a fast 4G LTE connection and an impressive 16MP camera, the Titan II is looking like a great choice if you’re on AT&T. It will be even better if and when Microsoft updates Windows Phone to allow more flexibility in homescreen modification. With such a large screen, it would be nice to be able to fit more information on it than Windows Phone 7.5 currently allows. Still, it’s hard to complain, as it’s still a step up from Android and iOS in a number of ways. The HTC Titan II will be released on AT&T in the coming months for a price we expect to be between $200 and $300 with a two-year contract.

High-tech: what can we expect in 2012?

2012-01-13T07:06:00.000-08:00

New technology is a world of perpetual revolution. The year 2012 is no exception to the rule with building products that have marked 2011 as the "ultrabooks" or touch pads. But 2012 should also be the year of breakthrough innovations such as Apple TV, flexible displays or payment by mobile phone.

Apple launches new products

Steve Jobs's death in October 2011 did not dampen the ambitions of the group. On the contrary, as three new products could emerge in 2012. First, the iPhone 5. Expected in autumn 2011, the latest phones from the Apple brand was the subject of the wildest rumors. It is finally an iPhone 4S, a slightly improved version of the iPhone 4, which was released, causing the disappointment of fans of Apple. This year could be good. BGR believes that the iPhone 5 will be equipped with a new rubber shell and aluminum, with a four-inch screen, slightly larger than the present. Its launch could take place in autumn 2012. Then the iPad 3. In late December, Digitimes reported that the third generation of the touch pad from Apple would be presented Jan. 26 at the next Macworld and available in two versions. The first entry-level, is equipped with a camera of 5 megapixels, and the second, more upscale, a sensor 8 million pixels and a long battery life. " False , "says the site iGeneration that predicts an output in March-April, at the same time as its predecessors, and crippled the launch of two models. But the real innovation of the Apple TV would be 2012. With a screen manufactured by Sharp, connected to Internet and voice-activated, the iTV could emerge in the second half of 2012. The touch pads are spreading 2012 could well be the year of the touch pads and especially the end of the hegemony of one built by Apple. According to figures from PC World , the manufacturers of the iPad competitors have sold a total of one million tablets in 2011, while the firm at the apple has passed 11 million in the last quarter. But this quasi-monopoly may not last. Placing on the market November 14, 2011, the tablet of Fire Amazon Kindle has sold one million copies in just one week after its release. Products from Asus, Samsung and Motorola are also now equipped to provide shade to the iPad. Finland's Nokia should also develop its own in 2012 tablet running Windows 8, the new operating system from Microsoft, whose trial is expected in February. June was discussed. Especially on the side of Google as the main threat to Apple could come. In an interview with Italian daily Corriere della Sera in December 2011, the executive chairman of Google Eric Schmidt announced the launch of a high quality product to compete with the iPad. Already described as "iPad killer" (iPad killer), this new device could be marketed within the next six months. Facebook goes public " This will be the biggest financial event of the year in the world of high- tech , "warns Josh Bernoff, an analyst at Forrester Research, quoted by the daily Le Progres . Facebook has become the fantasy of traders. Mark Zuckerberg's baby continues its meteoric rise, despite the appearance of Google + end of June 2011. With a new design and with almost one billion users, the social network should do its IPO in 2012. Originally announced in the spring, it might eventually be delayed at the end of the year. The site hopes to raise $ 10 billion for a valuation estimated at over $ 100 billion. The manufacturers rely on "ultrabooks" These are laptops lighter for a few millimeters, more powerful but also more expensive (around 1 000), modeled on the Macbook Air from Apple. After Acer in October 2011 and HP in November, computer manufacturers have launched one after the other in trade ultrabooks. Giant Intel is also placed in the race for innovation and plans to release a series of machines. More than 50 ultrabooks must be presented at the International Consumer Electronics Show (from January 10 to 13), the largest trade show dedicated to high-tech world. Smartphones equip themselves with flexible screen in 2011, and Nokia Samsung announced the creation of study-screen smartphones flexible. If the Korean manufacturer is still in the imagination, Nokia has already shown a prototype. Malleable, so it is conducive to the addition of specific functions, but also stronger. However, the device presented by Nokia can not yet be described as smartphone is equipped with microphone and speaker, let alone a camera and GPS sensor. But the Finn seems to be on track.

Why Web metrics are important

2011-05-25T07:14:00.000-07:00

The power of the Web is astounding. As an extension of other sources, or perhaps as the only source, the informational, operational, and marketing aspects of Web media are potent. Having a Web presence is not sufficient, though. e-businesses must exploit the latest technology and evolve more quickly than their conventional competitors and customers or risk getting left behind. Recognizing that Web site behavior has a direct effect on business success and customer loyalty, companies are now required to better understand their users so that their sites are responsive, easy to navigate, and present what the users are interested in purchasing. However, many e-businesses have little or no idea what customers and potential customers are doing on their Web sites. Web sites that are slow to respond and contain hard-to-find items will drive away customers. To justify Web site changes, though, using the right quantitative and qualitative information is essential in optimizing a site, which means there is a growing need for new tools that analyze Web site effectiveness -- that form of analysis is known as Web analytics.
Consider this scenario: If a Web site is promoting a sale through advertisement that is valid for only one day, the Web site owner might want to know if the campaign was successful. One indicator would be whether the campaign generated additional site traffic. The following Web metrics chart can help illustrate whether or not the campaign was successful in generating increased Web traffic on the day of the promotion.
Web analytics is the monitoring and reporting of Web site usage so that there is a better understanding of the interactions between Web visitor actions and what the Web site offers, as well as leveraging that insight to optimize the site for increased customer loyalty and business benefits. Web analytics can assist with the following tasks:
planning Web infrastructure capacity to handle future growth;
understanding qualities of new and repeat visitors;
targeting offers and campaigns to categories of visitors;
determining appropriate investment in online advertising campaigns versus other channels;
identifying which e-business partners to work with based on generated referral traffic and realized profits;
decreasing investments in, or altering the navigation to, Web pages that get little traffic;
and much more.
The diagram below illustrates how Web analytics can be used in an organization:

Send us your article

2011-04-22T12:14:00.000-07:00

We are now accepting articles, news, press release and product reviews. If you would like to send an article, news, HOW TO, Guide to us for publication, just simply Email US with your article along with a title for the article. You may also include your name or the author of the article’s name if you wish to have it published along with your article. If you would like to remain anonymous, then don’t include any name with your article. Please make sure your articles contain proper spelling and punctuation, as we will publish them as is. Try to keep your articles clean and semi-positive in nature (no complaining, inappropriate language, etc.) so that all people can enjoy your articles.
We will then publish your article on our site as soon as possible.

General rulse for article:

1) Articles must be at least 450 words (500-1000 is preferred, but at least 450 words)
2) Articles must be your own work and not copied in part or whole from any other site
3) Articles must be something that is not currently on any other site (ex. something that you write yourself that you haven’t already written for another Pokemon site, etc.
4) Articles must be informative. Something interesting to readers
5) Article should have a title (if not, I will add one)
6) Article should not repeat the same word many times (example: don’t say “Pokemon” 50 times in the article. try to change the wording a bit so it isn’t so repetitive.
7) Article should contain proper spelling and punctuation.

Press Release

We also accept press release and product review, that is paid. We will submit your press release to two websites Diolt, WoW Range & one blog. Also your press release will be bookmarked by us. Press release price just $50. Email us your press release or product review with your name, website, if you have image/photo/video..

We'r waiting for good news from you.

Email us

How important web directory for seo?

2011-04-17T11:25:00.000-07:00

Everyone who has a website and especially online business owners knows just how important search engine optimization is; more to the point, they know how important having your website appear as high as possible in search engine results for relevant keywords is to the success of their business.

Out of the many techniques which constitute SEO, building backlinks has emerged as one of the most effective ways to give websites a higher ranking in the search engines. While a slow organic growth of inbound links will eventually cause upward motion in rankings, it is often necessary to give things a push in the right direction by listing sites on a quality web directory.

When you submit a site to one of these directories, you gain the advantage of having a high value inbound link from a website which receives a lot of traffic of its own. This is helpful for a few reasons which we’ll cover here in brief.

First, an inbound link from a popular website is considered to be more valuable by Google and other search engines. Basically, the more popular the website that the link originates from, the reasoning goes, the more popular the website it points to must be. For this reason, a backlink from a web directory can be far more effective in boosting your visibility than one from a less popular site in your own industry or a reciprocal (two-way) link exchange with another website.

Secondly, if you choose popular directories to submit a site to, you’re also providing potential visitors another chance to find your website. While they’re not as popular of a vehicle for finding web content as the search engines themselves, you may be surprised by how many hits you receive from these directories. Every little bit really does help when it comes to SEO.

Link popularity really does matter to the search engines – and of course, webmasters should certainly carry out their own link building campaigns as well as using web directory submissions to drive traffic and move their sites up the search engine page rankings.

Like SEO itself, link building is an ongoing effort and especially early on after establishing your website, you’ll have to put in some work in order to get the ball rolling. Once your site has achieved a certain level of popularity and traffic, inbound links will continue to grow on their own, though it never hurts to have more links to your site, especially from popular sites in your own industry.

One note of caution though: it really does matter which web directory you choose. Don’t submit a site you own to low-quality “link farm” sites which feature no content other than pages and pages of links; this used to get results for webmasters, but the search engines have long since been fine tuned to spot this and links from these sites will now either produce no benefit or in some cases, even cause your page rank to drop! Used judiciously, a listing on a high quality web directory can help get your site moving in the right direction – just be sure to choose wisely.

WOWRANGE.COM

2011-03-13T01:46:00.000-08:00

WOWRANGE.COM is a search engine friendly, premium web directory manually edited by humans, listing quality web sites organized by topics & featuring helpful directory resources. Feel free to submit your website today.

Link:
http://www.wowrange.com

Domain names for sale

2011-02-23T10:02:00.000-08:00

We have two domain names . Www.worthfashion.com & Fashiondir.co.uk. If some one interested to buy please contact us.

Keyword Submitting - Targeted Keywords Will Do It

2011-02-08T10:32:00.000-08:00

For article marketing there are basically two steps, find a keyword, submit after writing the article. Finding the keywords is the real challenge. You want to focus on keywords that have a decent number of monthly searches but not too much competition.

Hint, stay away from the keywords that have hundreds of thousands of monthly searches. These keywords will be guaranteed to have high competition ( if they don't it means that the niche they are in isn't a profitable niche and you wouldn't want to be in that niche anyway).

You'll notice that I glazed over the whole writing of the article. Why? Because, as long as you are writing your article around a certain keyword phrase, make sure that the spelling and grammar are acceptable and offer some valuable information, the writing will pretty much take care of itself. Having a keyword phrase that you are writing your article around is like having a blue print, it's pretty easy to follow.

If you don't want to write, hire someone to do it for you. Make sure that you don't overpay, though. Most of the time a well written, 500 word article shouldn't cost you more than $5 -$10. If your article is on a highly technical subject where your writer has to do a lot of research it will cost more, but for fairly general articles that is a good rule of thumb.

Keyword research really is the first step to having a money making article. If you don't target the right keywords your article either won't get a very good ranking in the search engines or it won't have enough searches monthly to make it profitable. Either way, it's not good.

There is kind of an art to finding the right balance between a decent number of monthly searches and not a lot of competition. Generally I advise people to shoot for at least 1,500 searches a month and competition of less than 20,000. These numbers aren't written in stone and it can vary from one niche to another. Find the parameters that work best for your niche, but when you're just starting out, these guidelines are a good place to start.

OK, now that you've got your keywords picked out and your article written, it's time to submit it. Many people get freaked out at this point. They feel like they'll get a lot of rejection letters and that their article won't get published. Actually, if you write a well written, informative article and you follow all the terms of service requirements, your article will get published.

There are probably hundreds of online article directories where you can submit your original article to for publication. One of the most highly regarded is EzineArticles.com. This directory is almost always at the top of everyone's list when it comes to quality article directories. For article marketing, the strength of the article directory is very important since you'll basically be riding on that reputation.

So, even though someone will have to actually write an article, there are still two basic steps to online article marketing, finding a good keyword, submit to your writer or you write the article. Do it right and you'll be amazed at the results you can get.

Business on DIOLT.com

2011-01-11T05:05:00.000-08:00

Are you spending a hefty amount every month just to get referral traffic for your website? Thinking about getting the website promoted on the search engines through directory submissions or already paying it. You can now get it for free.

Submit your business with Diolt Business Directory www.diolt.com. is one of the fastest growing business directory. The website is also one of the fastest business directory in world wide web. By just listing your business in diolt pages, you can get huge exposure to potential customers for your business.

There are four plans like (Business Link, Featured, Regular & Free Listing). Business Link is just $100 cheapest plan for home & sub pages for one year. Featured link with 3 deep links just $40 life time listing, Non reciprocal regular link only $15 life time and also Free with reciprocal listing available.

Your business will start showing up on the search engines. After that your business will start showing up or every keyword searched by the user if your business is relevant to the searched keyword. For example, you own a restaurant in Surrey and the user is looking for the best restaurants in surrey, your website will show up. By putting an attractive tag line in the title, you can target the potential users can target them from sales pitch. It will allow you to reach very specific subsets of individuals based on their search preferences and interests. By just listing the website onto the Diolt business directory, the website will gain a lot of referral traffic.

DIOLT.com is one of the fastest growing website getting visibility on the search engines. So submit your business today!!!

Measuring Website Traffic

2010-10-13T23:05:00.000-07:00

Measuring and Qualifying Website Traffic

Every webmaster's goal is to increase traffic to his or her website, i.e. increase the number of visits everyday. Therefore, it is essential to have indicators that, on the one hand, facilitate the measurement of how website traffic is evolving (which is called both "audience monitoring" and "website metering") and, on the other hand, identify the audience in order to provide content that is closer to what the website's visitors want.

Generally there are thought to be two types of studies:

Site-Centric Measurement
User-Centric Measurement, performed mostly with a panel of users
Measuring and defining a website's traffic are two methods for measuring a website's effectiveness in order to permanently improve its quality.

How to Measure a Website's Traffic

There are three solutions for measuring a website's traffic:

Exploiting the web server's logs (log files) by using a specific tool. This involves choosing a tool capable of analysing web server log files and creating a control panel containing the website's main traffic indicators
Developing an ad-hoc statistics system. It is possible on a website to store visitor information each time a visitor loads a page in order to use that information at a later date. For websites with high traffic flow, this type of mechanism can cause the processor to become heavily loaded and the disk space to be more full, especially if the collected data are stored in a database management system
Using a "traffic measurement" service. This system consists of inserting a "marker or "tag" on each page so that the traffic measuring service can collect the data on a server. The advantage of this type of service is that it conserves material resources because all of the processing is done on a remote server. What is more, the company offering this service is responsible for upgrading the indicators and control panels so as to be constantly in sync with the evolution of Internet access technology and web browsers. However, the statistics gathered this way will not necessarily be exhaustive because:
some users stop loading pages before the tag code is downloaded
intermediate proxy servers are likely to impede the page from loading
security infrastructures and firewalls in particular can block information from being uploaded

Terminology

The terminology of website statistics and traffic indicators is relatively complex and often varies from one tool to another. But when they are used in comparative and marketing research, traffic indicators only make sense when the terms being used correspond to a common comparative base ("you don't compare cabbage and carrots"). It is particularly important to master the definition of each one of the indicators.

Thus, the goal here is to make sense of the different terms used in the area of traffic measurement. Most of the indicators defined below stem from projects carried out by the French organization CESP (Centre d'étude des supports de la publicité, or the Advertising Medium Research Centre).

Hits

One webpage may be made up of a certain number of files (particularly image files), style sheets, JavaScript files, etc. Thus, a "hit" is a file loaded by a browser. If a webpage containing three images is loaded, that equals four hits.

Page View

A "page view" is when a page is completely loaded after the user performs an action (e.g. a click) on the page.

The "page view" concept is vague because it depends highly on each website's architecture. Thus, a page containing frames runs the risk of not being counted in the same way that a simple webpage is.

Session

A session is the period of time that corresponds to the uninterrupted browsing of a website. Any period of inactivity of over 30 minutes is considered an interruption.

Visit

A visit is defined as browsing a website during a session, no matter how many pages are browsed.

A visit is qualified by a period of time (day, week, month). Thus, there are daily, weekly and monthly visits. The number of visits indicates the number of workstations that access a website over a given period of time.

Visitor/Unique Visitor

A "visiteur" is an individual. Thus, the "number of visitors" is the number of individual who went to a website over a given period of time.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) Guide

2010-08-30T00:34:00.000-07:00

With all the time, effort and money that goes into getting top SEO rankings and building a stream of consistent organic traffic, great care must be taken when developing and launching a new website that replaces an existing one.
It can take months or even years to get top SEO rankings but you can lose these rankings in a matter of hours. With this in mind, here are a set of guidelines to help maintain your website’s SEO value and minimise any negative impact on your rankings.

Maintaining URLs and Linking Structure

If your website has been online for a while then you have likely built some value for your current website through internal and inbound links. Before you develop your new website it’s important to keep in mind that any changes to the URL of any existing pages will diminish the value of those pages. With this in mind, and wherever possible, you should maintain the same URLs and linking structure in your new website.

If your website has a large number of pages indexed by Google or if internal pages on your current website are already ranking you should use the same URL structure for those pages so that all previous links do not need to be redirected. If your current website uses a search-engine-friendly link structure it would be best for SEO purposes if that structure was carried across to your new website.

Redirecting Old URLs

Now of course it would be ideal for your website’s SEO if you could keep the same URLs but in some cases you might not be able to. For example, there may be some pages on the old website that no longer exist when the new site is launched, such as old products or categories.

In these cases, even though an old link may no longer exist in the new website you can still maintain much of the SEO value by setting up a 301 redirect from the old URL to a similar or corresponding URL on the new site. If there is no corresponding page on the new site then you can simply setup the redirect to go to your homepage.

A 301 redirect tells search engines that a page has been permanently moved to a new location. Once this is picked up, whenever someone tries to access the old URL it will automatically redirect them to the new URL. 301 redirects can be setup using an htaccess file on Linux servers or through the backend of a Windows server.

Google Analytics

Commonly overlooked by many developers during the commotion of launching a new website is transferring your Google Analytics code to the new website before launching. Doing this ensures that there is no lost analytics data when the new website is launched, allowing you to see how the new website is performing right away. You can also create an annotation within Google Analytics for the date the new site launched. This comes in handy when you are comparing website performance before and after the launch.

Conversion Tracking

A new website can also mean that there will be new actions available on your website, or at least changes to the existing ones. Perhaps you have a new enquiry form or maybe a new ecommerce section to sell products.

If you have new conversion targets available when the new site launches, be sure to add new Goals in Google Analytics, or any other tracking software you use, using the ‘thank you’ page URLs. If you have a new URL for the same type of conversion you should update the Goal tracking URL when the new site is launched.

Additionally, if you have any advertising campaigns running, such as Google AdWords, you will need to install the conversion tracking code on the new ‘thank you’ pages as well.

Title Tags & Meta Tags

If you optimised your old site for SEO then you likely updated the title tags and meta tags of your website. When launching a new website, you may need to re-optimise the new site in the same way using your target SEO keywords.

Whatever the case may be you should always review the new website before launching to make sure it is optimised for search engines. If your home page or any internal pages from the old site are already ranking and you want to keep those rankings then you should also make sure that the new website maintains similar title tags and meta tags for each page.

And be sure to optimise the title tags and meta description tags for any new pages that have been created, to help them rank better.

Home Page Link

A common mistake made on many websites is having multiple versions of the homepage; for example, a website could be displayed as example.com, www.example.com, example.com/index.html, etc. It is SEO best practice to ensure the home page is accessible through a single URL (eg www.example.com) and then ensuring that any pages linking to the home page use this URL in the link. This includes the navigation menu, the logo, the footer links and so on.

Additionally, once the preferred format is selected (with or without the ‘www’ in the URL) a 301 redirect should be setup to redirect the other format to the preferred version. For example, if you prefer to have your website display as www.example.com then you should setup a redirect to ensure the non-www version of the site redirects to the www version of the site.

Footer Links

Internal linking is essential in SEO to allow search engines to easily find the various sections of your website. Furthermore, the anchor text in links is used by search engines to help determine the topic of a web page. Footer links on a website are one of the best methods to assist search engines to find content on your website, to index internal pages, and to identify the content of the internal pages. When launching a new website, be sure to use footer links that have a purpose and use anchor text that corresponds to the keywords for which you want the pages of your website to rank.

Submit a New Sitemap to Google

After the new website is finalised and launched, you should create a new XML sitemap and submit it to Google for faster indexing of the new site. A great software tool that automatically generates an XML sitemap is XML-sitemaps.com.

Once the sitemap file for the new website is generated, upload it to the root folder of your website and submit the file in the Sitemaps section of Google Webmaster Tools.

Monitor Google Webmaster Tools

With all the planning that can go into launching a new website, there can still be instances of technical issues or a drop in rankings. The Diagnostics section of Google Webmaster Tools offers a range of options to identify and repair these issues.

Over the first few weeks after launching your new website you should check this section of Webmaster Tools to see if Google has picked up any errors. In particular, there are two sections to monitor closely:

1. Crawl errors

– This section provides a list of pages that Google was unable to access, the details of the error, and in some cases the source of the error. This tool can also be of great use in identifying any pages from the old website that no longer exist and were missed during the above step. Whatever the reason, if any URLs are listed in this section you should either resolve the issue with the specific page or setup a 301 redirect to a similar page.

2. HTML suggestions

– This tool identifies errors in the titles and meta tag content of your website, such as missing or duplicate title tags. Any pages listed in this section should be optimised for search engines as suggested above.

Flickr Will Now Post to Your Facebook Feed

2010-06-11T06:39:00.001-07:00

Yahoo has been integrating Facebook into its properties more deeply, and Flickr is no exception. The company announced that it is launching a new and improved way to share Flickr photos on Facebook.

Users can simply connect their Flickr and Facebook accounts, and Flickr will automatically send updates to your Facebook feed every time a new photo (or video) is uploaded).

As always, you have control over who sees your Flickr images," says Flickr's Denise Leung. "Once you enable Facebook sharing, updates are only automatically sent to your Facebook feed when you upload them as public (or when you set a photo to public)."

"We're using the Yahoo! Updates platform to power this integration," adds Leung. "Yahoo! Updates lets you share and view activity across multiple social networks, including on Yahoo!. Your Flickr updates are private on Yahoo! Updates by default and you can easily manage your settings there."

Web Directories for Search engine optimisation (SEO)

2010-05-31T02:39:00.000-07:00

If you are looking for ways to promote your website, than web directory like (http://www.diolt.com) should definitely be considered a big part of your promotional plan. Web directories provide web visitors with a one- stop destination on the web to find the information they are looking for. Further, in using web directories, you can increase the visibility of your website and derive myriad benefits offered by web directories.

Let's take a look at the benefits that webmasters derive from web directories:

Some webmasters might wonder why they should bother to submit to web directories when 80% of all website traffic comes from search engines. The answer is simple when you consider the following: what about the other 20%? When you are attempting to maximize the traffic that comes to your website, every little bit of promotion helps and web directories can help you gain a big chuck of that 20% of web traffic you have been missing out on.

Did you know that a key factor in the ranking algorithm of search engines is link popularity? By using web directories you will be creating more links that point directly to your site and the higher your ranking becomes in various search engines across the Internet. Further, everyone knows that a higher search engine ranking is equivalent to easier accessibility and easier accessibility equals more traffic for your website.

The first way to increase your link popularity is to include keywords in your hyperlinks. When you submit to web directories, the links you submit should not only lead to your site, but also should possess themed keywords within the links. The themed keywords will not only make your site easier to find, it will also increase the rating of your links in various search engines—again getting more, free web traffic for you.

Links that are created within web directories are votes for a site and they use your keywords within your hyperlinks to associate your link with certain key phrases. As such, the keywords you select are extremely important because they determine how often your links will be pulled up whenever a key phrase is associated with your created links. Therefore, It is a good idea to research the most popular keywords associated with your website theme before submitting your website to various web directories: the most popular keywords can make all of the difference in the world.

If you are submitting to various web directories, there are a few things that you need to consider. First, for a directory to be valuable, the pages you submit your listings to must, at minimum, be listed in various search engines. For instance, if you submit your links to a web directory that doesn't appear in any search engines, chances are web visitors will not only have difficulty finding your website, but they will also have extreme difficulty finding the web directory you have listed your site in. In such cases, the listing in the web directory is a fruitless endeavor. Conversely, if you list your web site in several popular web directories and you utilize keywords in your hyperlink and short website description, you greatly increase the visibility and accessibility of your website.

The second consideration you must keep in mind when submitting to web directories is that when you are submitting your hyperlinks, you will derive the most benefit from submitting to directory pages that have a comparable theme to your website. For instance, if you have a website that is based on credit cards you will find that you get more web traffic from a web directory page that focuses on credit cards. Thus, when searching for web directories, look for web directories with topics that parallel the central focus of your website.

Here's a quick tip for you that can help you derive the most benefit from listing your hyperlink in web directories: watch out for Google Adwords as these are a good indicator of how Google at least categorizes the page. In other words, if you mirror your hyperlinks and descriptions to appear much like those seen in Google ads, you will more than likely increase your search engine ranking as well as your listing in various web directories.

In order to be successfully listed in any web directory, you will need to conform to the terms and conditions of the directory. Typically, web directories list a series of specific listing regulations that you must adhere to and it would pay for you to adhere to them. In addition, to improve the chances of your listing being accepted you should try to avoid promotional language and you should choose a category that is as close to your website theme as possible.

Webmasters have much to look forward to in terms of web directory posting. In fact, the next generations of web directories are now appearing that allows business card type pages. Not only do webmasters get the opportunity to post a short description of there website, but now they are afforded the opportunity to display their logo and contact information as well. Such offerings prove to be particularly appealing because eye catching logos and easy contact information will make a Webmaster's website that much more appealing.

Some webmasters might wonder why they should bother to submit to web directories when 80% of all website traffic comes from search engines. The answer is simple when you consider the following: what about the other 20%? When you are attempting to maximize the traffic that comes to your website, every little bit of promotion helps and web directories can help you gain a big chuck of that 20% of web traffic you have been missing out on.

Did you know that a key factor in the ranking algorithm of search engines is link popularity? By using web directories you will be creating more links that point directly to your site and the higher your ranking becomes in various search engines across the Internet. Further, everyone knows that a higher search engine ranking is equivalent to easier accessibility and easier accessibility equals more traffic for your website.

The first way to increase your link popularity is to include keywords in your hyperlinks. When you submit to web directories, the links you submit should not only lead to your site, but also should possess themed keywords within the links. The themed keywords will not only make your site easier to find, it will also increase the rating of your links in various search engines—again getting more, free web traffic for you.

Links that are created within web directories are votes for a site and they use your keywords within your hyperlinks to associate your link with certain key phrases. As such, the keywords you select are extremely important because they determine how often your links will be pulled up whenever a key phrase is associated with your created links. Therefore, It is a good idea to research the most popular keywords associated with your website theme before submitting your website to various web directories: the most popular keywords can make all of the difference in the world.

If you are submitting to various web directories, there are a few things that you need to consider. First, for a directory to be valuable, the pages you submit your listings to must, at minimum, be listed in various search engines. For instance, if you submit your links to a web directory that doesn't appear in any search engines, chances are web visitors will not only have difficulty finding your website, but they will also have extreme difficulty finding the web directory you have listed your site in. In such cases, the listing in the web directory is a fruitless endeavor. Conversely, if you list your web site in several popular web directories and you utilize keywords in your hyperlink and short website description, you greatly increase the visibility and accessibility of your website.

The second consideration you must keep in mind when submitting to web directories is that when you are submitting your hyperlinks, you will derive the most benefit from submitting to directory pages that have a comparable theme to your website. For instance, if you have a website that is based on credit cards you will find that you get more web traffic from a web directory page that focuses on credit cards. Thus, when searching for web directories, look for web directories with topics that parallel the central focus of your website.

Here's a quick tip for you that can help you derive the most benefit from listing your hyperlink in web directories: watch out for Google Adwords as these are a good indicator of how Google at least categorizes the page. In other words, if you mirror your hyperlinks and descriptions to appear much like those seen in Google ads, you will more than likely increase your search engine ranking as well as your listing in various web directories.

In order to be successfully listed in any web directory, you will need to conform to the terms and conditions of the directory. Typically, web directories list a series of specific listing regulations that you must adhere to and it would pay for you to adhere to them. In addition, to improve the chances of your listing being accepted you should try to avoid promotional language and you should choose a category that is as close to your website theme as possible.

Webmasters have much to look forward to in terms of web directory posting. In fact, the next generations of web directories are now appearing that allows business card type pages. Not only do webmasters get the opportunity to post a short description of there website, but now they are afforded the opportunity to display their logo and contact information as well. Such offerings prove to be particularly appealing because eye catching logos and easy contact information will make a Webmaster's website that much more appealing.

In the end, web directories are a valuable part of your web promotional program and should not be overlooked in terms of their value. Along with the use of search engines, and article databases, a Webmaster will be pleasantly surprised at the free advertising available on the Internet. Finally, the increase in web traffic that webmasters will reap is truly astonishing indeed.

On & Off Page Optimisation

2010-05-24T09:48:00.000-07:00

Onpage optimization is essential for producing effective web pages for offpage optimization efforts.
On-Page SEO Checklist

Always start with keyword selection, research and testing

Meta Description tag

ALT tags

H1 tags

URL structure

Internal linking strategy

Content

Keyword density

Site maps, both XML and user facing

Usability and accessibility

Track target keywords

Expect results in 6-12 months

Avoid common on-page SEO mistakes such as:

Duplicate content

URL variants of the same pages

Off-site images and content on-site

Duplicate title tags

Do not use on-page SEO spamming tactics such as:

Hidden text

Hidden links

Keyword repetition

Doorway pages

Mirror pages

Cloaking

Off-Page Optimisation (SEO)

Defined: Off-page optimisation (off-page SEO) is what can be done off the pages of a website to maximise its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the on-page content and keywords in off-page direct-links.

Off-Page SEO Checklist

Always start with keyword research, testing and selection

Use Keywords in link anchor text

Obtain links from high ranking publisher sites

One-way inbound links (not link exchange or reciprocal links)

Different keywords in your link-ads from the same site

Gradual link building technology (no growth spikes)

Use relevant keywords near your inbound link (contextual relevance)

Deep linking (from multiple pages to multiple pages)

Target a large list of keywords (5-500+)

Link from sites with a variety of LinkRanks

Track active all keywords and refine strategy as required

Discontinue campaigns if ranking does not improve

Expect results in 1-2 months (Bing) 1-9 months (Google, Yahoo)

Avoid common off-page SEO mistakes:

Duplicate keywords in link avderts

Site-wide links causing link growth spikes

Using on-page SEOs to do the work of specialist off-page SEO's

Placing random links without keywords near your link adverts

Do not use off-page SEO spamming tactics such as:

Link farms (sites with 100+ outbound links per page)

Using irrelevant keywords in your link-ads

Garbage links

Link churning

Hidden inbound links

Mobile and Location Fueling the Design of Future Search

2010-05-14T11:52:00.000-07:00

There's no question that location is playing an increasingly great role in how people obtain and share information. We recently looked at where location fits into the SEO equation.

Google has its own location-sharing service Google Latitude that has been somewhat overshadowed lately by services like FourSquare, Gowalla, and of course Twitter and Facebook, but Google recently said Latitude has 3 million active users, and this year it's grown 30% per month each month so far. Features in Google's newly redesigned SERPs also show potential for integration of location information. Google has also invested in a location-based gaming platform in SCVNGR, that would theoretically rival Foursquare.

The rise of social media, location sharing, and mobile apps continues to pave the way for what might be considered a revolution in search. People have a lot more access points in general these days.

As the description for the O'Reilly book Search Patterns says, "Search is among the most disruptive innovations of our time. It influences what we buy and where we go. It shapes how we learn and what we believe."

WebProNews spoke with co-author Peter Morville at SXSW a while back about design patterns in search:

People are not only continuing to find more ways to search, but developers are rapidly creating more ways to deliver information that people find appealing. That's where these search design patterns fit in.

"At the surface level, you could think of the search interface as being just the box. Very kind of plain vanilla," Morville tells WebProNews. "But the fact is that there's so much we can do with search and discovery from the interfaces to the ways that we just think about the broader system that really includes not just the interface, but the search engine, and the people, the content, the meta data, and even the creators of that content...trying to kind of include them in how we think about this broad...what I think of as a complex, adaptive system called search."

Morville says the future of search has basically been the same for decades: artificial intelligence with "a dash" of information visualization. But there are many possible futures of search, and we're seeing interesting new things come about all the time. Mobile is fueling innovation in a way that perhaps hasn't been seen before.

Original source

Google now helps You Expand Your Twitter Network

2010-04-15T00:18:00.000-07:00

Google has launched a new Labs project called Google Follow Finder. It's designed to help you expand your Twitter network.

To use Google Follow Finder, you can enter your Twitter account name and see a list of people Google thinks you might be interested in following (our own Twellow has a helpful suggestion feature too). Google's tool will also let you enter other people's Twitter names and get suggestions based on that.

"If you see someone you want to follow, just click 'Follow on Twitter,' log in, and they’ll be added to your following list in Twitter," explains Associate Product Manager Aaron Wise. "This integration is based on Twitter’s new @anywhere frameworks, which make it easy for any site to add Twitter functionality. We’re using the frameworks to provide dynamic information about Twitter accounts and one-click following."

It's quite interesting that Google is this into getting you to expand your Twitter network, when you might think they would be more interested in getting you to use Buzz. But since your Twitter network can be integrated into your Buzz account, it's probably just as well, for the sake of Buzz use.

This is the second Twitter-related announcement to come from Google today - the first being the replay feature in Google's real-time search, which archives tweets and lets you browse them on a timeline.

Make Twitter More Useful by thousands ways

2010-04-15T00:13:00.000-07:00

Twitter announced today at its Chirp Developer Conference that it has 100,000 registered apps.

Since its inception, one of the biggest knocks against Twitter has been that it's been hard to figure out what to use it for. As time has gone by, this has become much more clear to a great many people, but you can rest assured, there are still plenty out there who have a hard time justifying its use. Others, particularly in the business world feel like they need to be using it, but still have a hard time finding ways in which it can be most effective and beneficial to their specific needs.

There are at least 10,000 Ways to Use Twitter.

OneForty is a directory of Twitter apps, that's been around since last year, when we first discussed it with founder Laura Fitton. Last month at SXSW in Austin, we dropped by Fitton's party (which featured some fantastic beer, I must say) and talked with her about the site, and the vast array of Twitter tools that are constantly being developed.

At the time, Fitton said OneForty was up to about 2,500 Twitter apps, and that they've found "evidence" of 7,500 apps more. So that's about 10,000 apps out there providing ways to use Twitter, if this is accurate. There's got to be some useful ones (might I suggest our own Twellow - the Yellow Pages for Twitter). Currently, the site claims, "2,624 Twitter tools that make Twitter more useful for your business, career or life."

The directory has 23 main app categories from Advertising, Analytics, Blogging Tools, Business, Email, and Search, to Mobile, Shopping, Productivity, News, Networking, and Monitoring (there are plenty of other more fun ones as well, like Games, Music, and Multimedia).

Any business evaluating their social media strategy, and Twitter strategy in particular, would probably do well to take some time and do some Twitter app exploration. It's entirely possible that there are apps out there that will have a profound impact on how your business interacts with Twitter, and could potentially have a significant impact on your online strategy as a whole. OneForty is not the only Twitter directory out there, but it's certainly a good place to start exploring.

Google Hands Out Its First 1337 Cash Prize For A Chrome Bug

2010-03-19T23:10:00.001-07:00

Back in January, Google announced that it would follow Mozilla’s lead and start offering cash bounties for bugs found in the code of Chromium (the open-source browser behind Chrome), or Chrome by the community. Google both matches Mozilla’s $500 and ups the bounty all the way up to $1,337 (yes, 1337) for “particularly severe or particularly clever” bugs. This week, they rewarded the first of those.

As noted on the Chrome Release blog, Google made four cash payments on Wednesday. There were two $500 prizes (both for memory errors), one $1,000 prize (for a cross-orgin bypass), and the first-ever $1,337 prize. The lucky receipient of that was a man named Sergey Glazunov, who located a bug that Google is calling, “High Integer overflows in WebKit JavaScript objects.”

This crowd-sourced bug hunting seems like a great idea, especially for a browser moving through development as quickly as Chrome. Chrome has only existed for a year and a half and already they’re testing version 5.0. Stable builds of both the Mac and Linux version of the browser are likely to launch at some point over the next few months.

Brand promotion on facebook & twitter

2010-03-17T21:26:00.000-07:00

People who are Facebook fans and Twitter followers of a brand are more likely to buy the brand's product or recommend it to a friend, according to a new study by Chadwick Martin Bailey and iModerate Research Technologies.

The study of 1,500 consumers found that 60 percent of Facebook fans and 79 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to recommend those brands since becoming a fan or follower.

More than half (51%) of Facebook fans and 67 percent of Twitter followers are more likely to buy the brands they follow or are a fan of.

"While social media is not the silver bullet that some pundits claim it to be, it is an extremely important and relatively low cost touch point that has a direct impact on sales and positive word of mouth," said Josh Mendelsohn a vice president at Chadwick Martin Bailey.

"Companies not actively engaging are missing a huge opportunity and are saying something to consumers - intentionally or unintentionally- about how willing they are to engage on consumers' terms."

The study also found that people view brands not engaging in social media as out of touch.

When asked the question "What does it say about a brand if they are not involved with sites like Facebook or Twitter?" they said the following:

* "It's EXPECTED that a company have some digital face - whether it's on FB or Twitter I don't know - but they need a strong electronic presence or you doubt their relevance in today's marketplace." Female 50-54

* "Either they are not interested in the demographic that frequents Facebook and Twitter or they are unaware of the opportunity to get more exposure in a more interactive method." Male 35-39

* "It shows they are not really with it or in tune with the new ways to communicate with customers." Female 18-24.

* "If they're not on Facebook or Twitter, then they aren't in touch with the "electronic" people." Female 55-59

Google's Blogger Users Can Now Customize Their Designs

2010-03-12T20:48:00.000-08:00

Google has launched the Blogger Template Designer, a way to customize the look and feel of your Blogger blog.

"Over the past few years we've worked to scale Blogger and ensure that it is capable of handling hundreds of millions of pageviews per day," Google says. "But we also believe that blogging is about self expression and that an important part of expression is creating a custom design that expresses your unique voice. So last year we started working on a tool that would allow everyone to easily customize their blog’s look and feel, and today we’re proud to introduce the Blogger Template Designer."

Features of the template designer include:

- 15 new templates (with more on the way)
- Custom blog layouts with one, two and three columns
- Hundreds of background images courtesy of iStockphoto
- Customizable colors, fonts, and more.
"While alternative offerings force users to choose among a limited set of rigid template designs, Blogger provides an intuitive yet powerful interface so anyone to customize their blog's design & layout - putting the user in complete control," the company says.

It's interesting that this kind of customization has not been available from Blogger until 2010, as Blogger itself is over a decade old, and has been Google-owned since 2003.

The Blogger Template Designer is available through Blogger in Draft, Blogger's testing ground/sandbox site.

Google search result with star feature

2010-03-03T21:13:00.000-08:00

Google today introduced yet another way it is personalizing search results (we talked about social search with the company at SMX). Now Google is letting users "star" search results that they like, just like the star feature in other Google products like Gmail, Reader, and Google News.

This almost seems like an obvious move for SERPs now that it is there, but it has not been present until now. Essentially, when you star results you like, you will get them at the top of your results the next time you search a query relevant to them.

"With stars, you can simply click the star marker on any search result or map and the next time you perform a search, that item will appear in a special list right at the top of your results when relevant," the company explains. "That means if you star the official websites for your favorite football teams, you might see those results right at the top of your next search for [nfl]."

"The great thing about stars is that you don't have to keep track of them," the company continues. "You don't even have to remember whether or not you starred something. Simply perform a search and you'll rediscover your starred items right when you need them. Stars sync with your Google Bookmarks and the Google Toolbar, so you can always see your list of starred items in one place and easily organize them. Even beyond the results page, while browsing the web you can quickly click the star icon in Toolbar to create a bookmark, and those pages will start showing up in the new stars feature."

Interestingly, the feature replaces Google's existing SearchWiki feature, which apparently didn't catch on too much. According to Google, people don't much care for rearranging the order of search results. I can't say I blame them. The annotation feature that came along with that is pretty much what you get from Google's other product - SideWiki, anyway, and Google suggests using that if you want to leave a comment on a particular result.

Google may be call pagerank something else

2010-03-03T21:08:00.000-08:00

Google quietly got rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa had said, "We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."

A lot of people wondered why Google would keep PageRank in the Google Toolbar, where it still sits to this day. Search enthusiast Barry Schwartz of Rusty Brick speculated that Google would not want to remove it because PageRank is "too much of their branding." After some words from Google's Director of Research, Peter Norvig today, however, I'm not so sure that's the case.

Note: Watch Norvig's keynote address here (or view our liveblog of the event), and our exclusive interviw with him here:

Norvig said at SMX today that PageRank is still one thing that is "overhyped," and that Google never felt that it was such a big factor. They have always looked at all available data, combining every available signal and tiring to figure out the best way to combine them.

Norvig also said that it may be time for some re-branding with regard to PageRank. There may be a different term in the pipeline. "There's a technical formula that's PageRank, which is the way of judging the links between pages, and that's just one component of how we rank the pages and you get your final search results. There's all these other things that come in, but they don't have a catchy name. So some people apply PageRank to mean all the components that give you the final ranking, and that's where we get confused. So probably we need some other term for that...We'll get some marketing guys on it."

I don't know how seriously the company is considering this, as Norvig seems to simply be speaking off the cuff, but given the company's repeated emphasis on a lack of emphasis on PageRank, it would not be surprising to see them change the name. However, the problem with that could be, that these same PR-obsessed webmasters would just become obsessed with the re-branded term.

Google Makes Facebook Pages a Higher Priority for Businesses

2010-03-01T22:54:00.001-08:00

Google announced via Twitter this week, that public status updates from Facebook are now included in the search engine's real-time search feature. That means the largest social network in the world is getting play in Google's real-time search alongside Twitter, MySpace, and others, and these real-time results are often featured prominently on the first page of search results for the hottest queries.

Apparently only updates from Facebook PAGES are indexed, and according to Danny Sullivan, that includes links, status updates, photos, videos shared by page owners (not comments made by the fans). Any Facebook update (from regular user profiles) can be shared publicly, so I wonder why these aren't being pulled. Results from Twitter and other places aren't only from branded sources.

This seems to indicate that brands should be getting a good amount of play for Facebook appearances in Google's real-time search results, and possibly in the real-time search results in general (due to Facebook's huge user-base). Right now, Facebook isn't dominating the results, but that is bound to change with it being the largest (by far) social network on the web.

A lot of brands who don't have Facebook pages in place are likely going to consider this a new reason to create one. Here are some tips for making a good one and promoting it.

This should also lead to Facebook Pages getting more fans, due to the increased exposure. Beware, however, that running a promotion on your Facebook Page may cost you ten thousand dollars, because Facebook's policy guidelines indicate that you must get written approval from a Facebook account rep. In order to get one of those, you must spend that much in advertising, according to Eric Eldon of Inside Facebook.

Now Google's real-time search results include (as listed by Sullivan) Facebook, MySpace, Twiter, Google Buzz, FriendFeed, Jaiku, Identi.ca, TwitArmy, Google News links, Google Blog Search links, new web pages, and freshly updated pages. At this point, Google generally only shows the real-time results for newsy/trending topics.

Note: At the Online Marketing Summit out in San Diego, WebProNews talked about a different kind of real-time search that involves local businesses, with RateItAll president Lawrence Coburn. It's not local search as you would traditionally think of it, but it involves location, which one might consider a new kind of query.

By Chris

Google Upgrades Ad-Serving Product for Publishers

2010-02-22T22:36:00.001-08:00

Google has just announced a new DoubleClick for Publishers, a service it refers to as "the next generation of ad serving technology for publishers."

"For the past few years, we've been investing in a suite of solutions — AdSense, ad-serving technology and the DoubleClick Ad Exchange — to help online publishers make the most money possible from their content, whether they sell advertising directly through their own sales force, through an ad network such as AdSense, or a combination of both," says Vice President of Product Management Neal Mohan. "For major online publishers — including social networks and online communities, entertainment sites, e-commerce sites and news sites — managing, delivering and measuring the performance of ads on their websites can be a hugely complicated process. A publisher's ability to manage this process can have a significant impact on how much money they make from their online content."

The new release includes a new interface, redesigned to save users time and reduce errors, and more detailed reporting/forecasting data. Google says it has "sophisticated algorithms" that automatically improve ad performance and delivery.

DoubleClick for Publishers also comes with a new public API that publishers can use to build and integrate their own apps with the service. They can also integrate third-party apps created for the service into their own.

Doubleclick for Publishers comes in two different versions - one for large publishers, and one for small businesses. The latter is a simpler, free version.

All Google Ad Manager publisher accounts will soon be automatically upgraded to DFP Small Business.

LinkedIn Can Be One of Your Most Valuable Traffic Sources

2010-02-18T21:59:00.000-08:00

LinkedIn is often discussed as a powerful social networking tool, particularly for business professionals, employers, and jobseekers. What is not discussed as frequently is the site's ability to simply drive traffic to your site. We talked to entrepreneur Lewis Howes (who claims that LinkedIn is one of the top traffic sources to his blogs) about how powerful LinkedIn can be for driving traffic.

We asked Howes why he thinks people don't generally associate LinkedIn with driving traffic like they would with other social networks like Facebook or Twitter. "Their perception of LinkedIn is of a resume, or a way to get a job, but they don't see all of the powerful tools within LinkedIn that allow you to drive traffic back to your site," he tells WebProNews.

LinkedIn has announced that it is now being integrated into Microsoft Outlook, in one of the numerous convergences of social media and email that are increasingly taking place.

"Anytime you can increase the size of your network on LinkedIn, it will give you the opportunity to distribute your content to more people, therefore driving more traffic back to your site," says Howes. "The Outlook integration is a way to connect more with your current LinkedIn contacts, and also help you grow you network as well."

In some ways, LinkedIn traffic may even be more valuable than traffic from other social networks and sites. This is simply due to the generally professional nature of LinkedIn itself.

"You need to take into consideration that LinkedIn has the highest average household income per user over any other social networking site (even NYTimes.com and BusinessWeek.com readers)," Howes tells us. "That being said, these are business decision makers you are targeting with your traffic from LinkedIn. The network is for real, and it will only continue to grow in time as there are currently 60 million professionals."

Now consider that LinkedIn could be one of your top traffic sources if you put enough effort into cultivating it as such. On a scale of 1-10, Howes says he'd rank it as a 7 or 8 on importance level for using it. "For me it is always one of the top 5 referring sites that drives traffic to my blogs," he says.

Howes went through ten steps in a post at ProBlogger.net. While the post is geared at driving traffic to your blog, you may find the advice helpful for other types of sites. In summary (he goes into much more detail about each of these in the post), the ten steps are:

1. Complete your profile.
2. Increase you connections.
3. Customize your website links.
4. Answer questions.
5. Update your status.
6. Join niche groups.
7. Post comments in groups.
8. Add RSS feeds to groups.
9. Create a group.

10. Add the blog application to your profile.
Now that LinkedIn can be integrated into Microsoft Outlook, I would suggest looking at getting that set up as well (steps here), if you want to get serious about including LinkedIn in your traffic strategy.

Of course there are plenty of other ways to use LinkedIn as a tool to increase the success of your business. As Howes lists, you can sell products, find new clients/employees, generate leads, receive funding, obtain sponsorships, sell tickets to events, as get press coverage to name a few.

By Chris Crum

Diolt Web Directory Perfect Place For Webmasters

2010-02-10T03:18:00.000-08:00

Web directories are a valuable tool for promoting a website. Especially for websites that rely on search engines to gain visitors to the website. Links from web directories help increase a website’s rankings within search engine results. When promoting a web site, gaining backlinks from other websites is an important first step.

One should use a combination of techniques to gain backlinks. Popular approaches are articles sites, forum signatures and web directories.

Web directory Diolt.com provides the perfect place for a webmaster to advertise their website. Users that visit Diolt directory do so, in order to find websites on a particular category or topic. Therefore if you promote your website in the correct category then you can drive the type of users you’re looking for to your website. Diolt is an ideal SEO frienldy directory to submit your site to if you’re trying to attract customers. Users can usually search by category and location making it very making it very easy for your customers to find you.

Diolt usually allows webmasters store more relevant business information than a standard web directory. Each listing usually includes the Company Name, Address, Phone, Fax Website, Company Overview, Email Contact. Its important is that you're choosing a quality web directory to submit your link. It often occurs that when you subscribe to the free web directories you might not hear back about your submission for weeks, but at Diolt's free submission is guaranteed if website comes on all criteria.

http://www.diolt.com

The Buzz: Yahoo or Google?

2010-02-10T02:52:00.000-08:00

Today Google officially announced their latest product, Google Buzz, during a live press event. If you’re not familiar with Google Buzz, it’s a way to share updates, photos, videos, and more. (You can read an extensive writeup of Google Buzz here).

Wait a minute; doesn't the name Buzz sound familiar? Well, there’s a good reason for that. Let me re-introduce you to Yahoo! Buzz.

For those of you who don’t know what Yahoo! Buzz is, or for those of you who forgot it even existed, it’s a Digg-esque social bookmarking service that launched back in 2008.

The first thing that came to this writers mind was, “how can two rivals in the search industry each have a product with the same name?” Granted, they’re two separate services, but both reside in the social media realm.

Another thing that should be noted is the Yahoo! Buzz logo features a trademark. We’re not trying to stir up any legal discussions… but it does seem kind of odd that Google would choose a name that a rival company has trademarked.

With all the lawyers that Google employs, one would have to think that this matter has already been sorted out. Right?

UPDATE: Looks like Yahoo! finally caught wind of Google Buzz, they recently tweeted the following...

Blog Comments For Link Building or Reputation?

2010-01-26T06:07:00.000-08:00

You’ve seen them... those spammy blog comments touting the benefits of herbal Viagra or acai for weight loss. To ensure that hyperlinks would have no SEO value when people left these types of spam comments on certain blogs, HTML NoFollow tags were created by Google in 2005. Any blog comment containing a link that contains the NoFollow attribute does not get any credit when search engine rankings are decided. Many websites and blogs are now using the NoFollow attribute by default to prevent spam comments from being made although sometimes human moderators are still used.

DoFollow blogs do NOT use the NoFollow tag. When people comment on DoFollow blogs and leave a link, that link has SEO value. As such, webmasters and spammers seek out DoFollow blogs so they can leave hyperlinks with anchor text containing their target keywords. It’s easy to find DoFollow blogs by doing a Google search. There are also many tools out there that help you find DoFollow blogs and generate hundreds of generic comments to leave on them. Moreover, services exist that post hundreds of comments with links on DoFollow blogs. Many webmasters and marketers jump on DoFollow blog commenting as an opportunity for link-building because it is cost-effective and easy. However, are the long-term results worthwhile?

The Link-Building Power of DoFollow Blog Comments

When you comment on hundreds of relevant DoFollow blogs, there are certainly SEO benefits. However, it seems that so many webmasters and marketers are desperate for links and forget to take a look at the big picture. The immediate search engine ranking benefits of dropping comments on DoFollow blogs are nice but the long-term benefits of leaving thoughtful comments and connecting with bloggers is far more beneficial as a link-building tactic in the long run.

When you give it some thought, leaving comments on DoFollow blogs may not require you to invest any money but it certainly demands your time. And because your time is essentially money, it’s a good idea to use it wisely and get the highest return for your investment. Rather than just looking at commenting on blogs as an easy way to build links, you ought to use it to your full potential. First off, you must get rid of the narrow mindset that you can only comment on DoFollow blogs. Comment on both DoFollow and NoFollow blogs. Focus on finding blogs that are relevant and popular in your niche rather than worrying about whether they are DoFollow or NoFollow.

The ultimate goal in blog commenting should be to attract direct links to your site from popular bloggers because of your knowledge and reputation. This will have far more power because it will drive droves of targeted traffic to your website.

In essence, commenting on hundreds of DoFollow blogs may offer immediate SEO benefits but when you consider how time-consuming it can be, it may be more worthwhile for you to actually read blogs in your niche and leave thoughtful contributions in the comment section. Ideally your comments would offer helpful information to the blogger and his or her readers.

So there you have it. Consider commenting on blogs whether they are DoFollow or NoFollow with the aim of attracting direct links and reputation. In the long run this tactic will provide you with far more benefits, SEO and otherwise.

SEO Anchor Text : Using anchor text links to improve your sites and contents SEO performance

2010-01-26T02:45:00.000-08:00

Higher search results are better, right? Whether you answered yes or no, there is no doubt that a first page search ranking can do wonders for your business. This is the very reason Google is so profitable. People are willing to pay high fees per click for a premium, first page spot. But what if you didn't have to pay? If there is one overlooked, easy to implement technique that can get you there, whether in Google or other search engines, it is anchor text.

What is SEO anchor text?

Anchor text is simply the visible name for a link. It is also represents a powerful SEO (search engine optimization) tactic. As an example, "SEO Company" might lead to www.diolt.com . "SEO Company" would be the anchor text in this case. From a practical standpoint, when creating anchor text for a link, it would look at follows in the html view of any text, wysiwyg or html editor.

Between the quotes is where you would put the web address. Between > and is where you would put the description of your link, in this case SEO Company.

The power of SEO anchor text links

Despite the fact that anchor text is often overlooked, anchor text can have a dramatic impact on rank. In fact, by many experts it is cited as the number two influencer amongst all SEO (insert link) techniques. Why? Google and many other search engines view links as a vote of popularity. And in essence, anchor text is viewed as a vote for a site related to a specific term.

As an example, most of Dell's inbound links (links from other sites), contain the word computer, “Dell Computers” would be typical anchor text. So while their home page does not contain the word computer often, Dell ranks highly for the search term computer thanks to their inbound links.

And some search engines, including Google, take it a step further. They examine the rest of the page on which the link is contained, asking “Does this page have anything to do with the vote?”. The search engine is seeing if you are qualified to vote. Do you know anything about the vote you cast? If you create a link for “Dell Computers” does the page contain any information about computers? In essence, the search engine basically wants to verify that you know something about the subject on which you are voting. The linking page should have the phrase in the anchor text, in part or in whole, repeated a few times. It must be relevant to the text in the link.

$1 Dollar Link

2010-01-21T09:54:00.000-08:00

3 Days offer

We have just opened an exclusive offer called "3 Days". Yeah it means that Regular Link from the $10 Dollars it is just now $1 Dollar listing at Diolt PR# 4 Web Directory. What are you waiting for just submit today your website in just $1 Dollar until this offer finish.

http://www.Diolt.com

Is MSN Optimization different?

2010-01-20T08:48:00.000-08:00

SEO experts often forget that there are three major search engines. While there is no doubt that Google is the number one with the most searches and Yahoo! manages to get about a quarter of the market, MSN has not retired yet. It holds about 10-15 percent of the searches (according to some sources even less – about 5%) but it has a loyal audience that can't be reached through the other two major search engines, so if you plan a professional SEO campaign, you can't afford to skip MSN. In a sense getting high rankings in MSN is similar to getting high rankings for less popular keywords – because competition is not that tough you might be able to get enough visitors from MSN only in comparison to the case when you have optimized for a more popular search engine.

Although optimizing for MSN is different from optimizing for Google and Yahoo!, there are still common rules that will help you to rank high in any search engine. As a rule, if you rank well in Google, chances are that you will rank well in Yahoo! (if you are interested in the tips and tricks for optimizing for Yahoo!, you want to have a look at the Optimizing for Yahoo! Article) and MSN as well. The opposite is not true, however. If you rank well in MSN, there is no guarantee that you'll do the same in Google. So, when you optimize for MSN, keep an eye on your Google ranking as well. It's no good to top MSN and be nowhere in Google (the opposite is more acceptable, if you need to make the choice).

But why is this so? The answer is simple - the MSN algorithm is different and that is why, even if the same pages were indexed, the search results will vary.

The MSN Algorithm

As already mentioned, it is the different MSN algorithm that leads to such drastic results in ranking. Otherwise, MSN, like all search engines, first spiders the pages on the Web, then indexes them in its database and after that applies the algorithm to generate the pages with the search results. So, the first step in optimizing for MSN is the same as for the other search engines – to have a spiderable site. (Have a look at Search Engine Spider Simulator to see how spiders see your site). If your site is not spiderable, then you don't have even a hypothetical chance to top the search results.

There is quite a lot of speculation about the MSN algorithm. Looking at the search results MSN delivers, it is obvious that its search algorithm is not as sophisticated as Google's, or even Yahoo!'s and many SEO experts agree that the MSN search algorithm is years behind its competitors. So, what can you do in this case? Optimize as you did for Google a couple of years ago? You are not far from the truth, though actually is is not that simple.

One of the most important differences is that MSN still relies heavily on metatags, as explained below. None of the other major search engines uses metatags that heavily anymore. It is obvious that metatags give SEO experts a great opportunity for manipulating search results. Maybe metatags are the main reason for the inaccurate search results that MSN often produces.

The second most important difference between MSN and the other major search engines is their approach to keywords. Well, for MSN keywords are very, very important, too, but unlike Google, for MSN onpage factors are dominating, while offpage factors (like backlinks for example), are still of minor importance. Well, it is a safe bet that the importance of backlinks will be changed in the future but for now they are not a primary factor for high rankings.

Keywords, Keywords, Keywords

It is hardly surprising that keywords are the most important item for MSN. What is surprising is that MSN relies too much on them. It is very easy to fool MSN – just artificially inflate your keyword density, put a couple of keywords in file names (and even better – in domain names) and around the top of the page and you are almost done for MSN. But if you do the above-mentioned black hat practices, your joy of topping MSN will not last long because, unless you provide separate pages that are optimized for Google, your stuffed pages might pretty well get you banned from Google. If you decide to have separate pages for Google and MSN, first, it it hardly worth the trouble, and second, the risk of duplicate content penalty can't be ignored.

So, what is the catch? The catch is that if you try to polish your site for MSN and stuff it with keywords, this might get you into trouble with Google, which certainly is worse than not ranking well in MSN. But if you optimize wisely, it is more likely than not that you will rank decently in Google and perform well in Yahoo! and MSN as well.

Metatags

Having meaningful metatags never hurts but with MSN this is even more important because its algorithm still uses them as a primary factor in calculating search results. Having well-written (not stuffed) metatags will help you with MSN and some other minor search engines, while at the same time well-written metatags will not get you banned from Google.

The Description metatag is very important:

MSNBot reads its content and based on that (in addition to keywords found on page) judges how to classify your site. So if you leave this tag empty (i.e. CONTENT=””), you have missed a vital chance to be noticed by MSN. There is no evidence that MSN uses the other metatags in its algorithm that is why leaving the Description metatag empty is even more unforgivable.

How Google Rates Links from Facebook and Twitter

2010-01-17T21:38:00.000-08:00

The first Matt Cutts Answers Questions About Google video of the year has been posted, and in it Matt addresses links from Twitter and Facebook, after talking about his shaved head again. Specifically, the submitted question he answers is:

Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?

Essentially, Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It's just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).

While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can't crawl it, and it can't assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can't fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank, Matt says. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.

"At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we'd treat links from Wordpress or .edus or.govs or anything like that," says Cutts. "It's not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it's not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank."

There you have it. Matt's response probably doesn't come as much of a surprise to most of you, but it's always nice to hear information like this straight from Google.

By Chris Crum

Donate to UNICEF's Haiti Earthquake Children's Appeal

2010-01-17T02:50:00.000-08:00

A devastating earthquake measuring 7.0 on the Richter scale has struck Haiti causing an unfolding humanitarian crisis. Children have been killed and injured — many are in desperate need of clean water, shelter and medical help. Early reports indicate a large number of casualties and widespread damage.

The situation for Haiti was already difficult before the earthquake hit the island. Haiti is the one of the poorest countries in the world and is struggling to recover from years of violence, insecurity and massive natural disasters. More than half of the country's 9.6 million inhabitants are under 21 years of age.

All children have rights — these are most at risk of being denied in emergencies. UNICEF is working to ensure that the rights of children affected in Haiti are not forgotten.

A gift of £30 could provide 3 families with basic water kits, protecting more children’s right to be healthy.

Click here to Donate

Benefits of Using a Web Directory

2010-01-16T09:51:00.000-08:00

A web directory provides the perfect place for a webmaster to advertise their website. Users that visit a web directory do so, in order to find websites on a particular category or topic. Therefore if you promote your website in the correct category then you can drive the type of users you’re looking for to your website.

A business directory provides the ideal directory to submit your site to if you’re trying to attract customers. Users can usually search these directories by category and location making it very making it very easy for your customers to find you. A business directory usually allows webmasters store more relevant business information than a standard web directory. Each listing usually includes the Company Name, Address, Phone, Fax Website, Company Overview, Directions and Email Contact.

Apart from the obvious benefit that a web directory provides in attracting potential customers, web directory submission has become an essential component of search engine optimisation (SEO). At a very basic level Google calculates a Pagerank for each website based on the number of inbound links a site receives. This is where a web directory can be of benefit. A web directory allows webmasters to get an inbound link to their site that will potentially add to the overall Pagerank of their homepage. The more directories a site is submitted to, the more inbound links it receives and therefore the higher the Pagerank. If a site hasn’t been indexed by a search engine yet then adding a site to a web directory can be a good way of getting your site noticed. Web directories are regularly crawled so it’s more likely to be picked up by a search engine quickly.

A deep link directory is a web directory that points to a specific page rather than the homepage. The real benefit that a deep link directory provides is that it allows users to get exactly what they want from your site in a single click. This makes your site more efficient and stress free. The deep link directory also provides some additional SEO benefits that improve the rankings of internal pages.

Its important that you chose a quality web directory to submit your link to otherwise you will waste your time. It often occurs that when you subscribe to the free web directories you might not hear back about your submission for weeks, if at all. Webmasters may be better off paying for their links in good quality web directories that are managed well. The internal pages of these web directories are likely to have a higher PR and more traffic which will benefit your site.

Submit your website to High quality web directory

125 Social Bookmarking Sites

2010-01-14T01:47:00.000-08:00

The positive effects of social bookmarking for publishers of news sites, blogs and other web sites is outstanding. Social bookmarking can introduce the sites that you own or you like to others with relevant tastes, can drive traffic to your site, and valuable backlinks.

Some social bookmark sites like Propeller.com pass on link juice, while some use the NoFollow attribute. But do not let the use of NoFollow fool you, the search engines are looking beyond the incoming links from social bookmarking sites to gauge their value to their search indexes. The external metadata compiled via user generated descriptions, tags, titles and categorization is incredibly valued by the search engines, as in the same philosophy as anchored backlinks, descriptive content about a web site defined by the users of that site who are not associated with the marketing or coding of that site, can be extremely powerful in gauging the importance and relevance of the content and tags which are used on that site.

Bookmarks show how a site is perceived, and when these sites allow voting, they also show the engines or whatever classification system which monitors voting, how people feel about the quality of the site. Furthermore, social bookmarking can introduce a site to the search engines, as in some cases, people may find and bookmark a site or a site’s internal pages before a search engine can find those pages via another form of inbound link.

Monitoring social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Ma.gnolia can help search engines in multiple ways by:

Indexing Sites Faster : Humans bookmark sites launched by their friends or colleagues before a search engine bot can find them.
Deeper Indexing : Many pages bookmarked are deep into sites and sometimes not as easily linked to by others, found via bad or nonexistent site navigation or linked to from external pages.
Measuring Quality : Essentially if more users bookmark a page, the more quality and relevance that site has. A site with multiple bookmarks across multiple bookmarking services by multiple users is much more of an authority than a site with only several bookmarks by the same user.
External Meta Data : Users who bookmark sites tag them with keywords and descriptions which add an honest and unbiased definition which is created by the public and not the owner of the site.
Co Citation : Social bookmarking sites tend to categorize sites and pages based upon the tags used by humans to describe the site; therefore search algortihms can classify these sites with their peers.
Number of Votes : Similar to the number of bookmarks, the more votes a page receives on Digg or Reddit, the more useful that information usually is. If the same page receives multiple votes across multiple social news voting sites, the higher quality the site.
Categorization : Like Co Citation, categorization can help define the subject of a site, therefore better helping the engine address searcher intent.
To help share the wealth of social bookmarking, I’ve put together a list of 125 social bookmarking sites, some of which are very popular and others which are newer or somewhat unheard of. But besides targeting the major social bookmarking and tagging sites which are listed above, you will find some diamonds in the rough which are niche oriented or treated well by Google and other search engines. I’ve found that one such surprise is Searchles which is regarded as an authority by multiple search engines and bookmarks within Searchles sometimes show up quite high in some branded organic results.

1. Backflip : Backflip is a free service currently being run by volunteers. Backflip was started in 1999 by Netscape veterans Tim Hickman and Chris Misner. As a research tool, Backflip is clearly of value to the education community, and that community (or at least certain segments) has certainly embraced Backflip. A Google search of sites that contain the term “Backflip.com” results in numerous education-related links, including Teacher Tools.

2. barksbookmarks : BARKS=BookmARKS is a website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control.

3. BibSonomy :BibSonomy is run by the Knowledge Data Engineering Group of the University of Kassel, Germany. Its specifically designed for researchers, in sharing bookmarks and bibliographies.

4. Blinklist :A social bookmarking site launched by Mindvalley. According to their site, they launch several web businesses a year and are focused in 3 areas. – Technology, media and Marketing. BlinkList does have a user friendly interface indicating that its being run well and efficiently. They also quote “fully profitable” on their site. Furthermore, you can label and comment about any web page on the Internet.

5. Blipoo :Meet Blipoo, a social bookmarking site for “cool” people sharing “cool” stories. It claims to help bloggers drive more traffic to their blog because they allow self promotion..

6. BlogBookMark : Designed specifically for Blog hunters, BlogBookmark.com claims to have the hottest news, gossip, and blog chatter from around the web. I highly sugggest that mainstream bloggers bookmark their entires here.

7. BlueDot : This basic social networking service allows users to save and share bookmarks.

8. blurpalicious : Get Blurped! Not too different from other social bookmarks, but I love the tagline.

9. Bmaccess : Social bookmarking with thumbs :)
10. Bookkit : BookKit.com is an absolutely free web service designed to facilitate bookmark (favorites) management needs.

11. BookMarkAll : Bookmarkall is an online bookmark community where users can create, organize and share their favorite web links online and access them anywhere.

12. Bookmark-manager : Organizer for bookmarks, calendar, diary and knowledge.

13. bookmarktracker : Free online storage, management, synchronizing and RSS sharing of your bookmarks.

14. Bookmax : You can store your bookmarks and links to your favorite sites online and access them from wherever you are : basic Social Bookmarking.

15. Buddymarks : The online personal, group and social bookmarks manager.

16. Bukmark : Bukmark is a social bookmarking website.

17. Chipmark :Another basic social bookmarking site.

18. Citeulike : A free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading.

19. Claimid : Manage your online identity. Although this is not a normal social bookmarking site, users can bookmark sites which reference their identity and build backlinks in this fashion.

20. Clipclip : Clipclip allows you to save images and text, with a “bookmarklet”.

21. Cloudytags : A unique word analyzer connects to your page, gets all the words and suggest you the real tags your site is showing to the world.

22. Complore : Derived from com-(with,together) and explore-(search, research). As the name suggests, complore is a vision to connect people from diverse backgrounds.

23. Connectedy : Lets you establish a personal link directory online. As you surf the web, you collect links, categorize them in a way that makes sense to you.

24. Connotea : Social bookmarking (for researchers).

25. Contentpop : It has the latest Web 2.0 features such as social bookmarking, blogging & RSS. It also uses the word POP in the title which means it must be good.

26. coRank : coRank is a site where you can share whatever you find interesting on the web with people who value your opinion

27. Crowdfound : CrowdFound is essentially a social bookmarking website, but with a different vision in mind.

28. de.lirio.us : Store, share and tag your favourite links. Open source clone of del.icio.us with private bookmarking, tagging, blogging, and notes.

29. del.icio.us : THE social bookmarking site : It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links and to categorize those sites with keywords. Not to mention that if enough people save your site in a bookmark, it will make their popular page and send a lot of traffic. Delicious is owned by Yahoo and is a MUST for your social media and bookmarking strategy.

30. Diigo : Social bookmarking on steroids.

31. Digg : The social news site that changed the Internet, Digg is a high power authority and a listing in Digg for a site, even if it only has a couple of votes, will rank highly on Google and other search engines for certain terms. If your site is shared and voted upon on Digg, and makes the Digg homepage, you’ll get a lot of traffic and attention from other bloggers who read Digg.

32. Dropjack : DropJack.com is a social content website and owned by the ExactSeek company.

33. Easybm : Allows users to bookmark their frequently visited sites on their private page, allowing 1-click access to their favorite web sites.

34. Enroll : Social bookmarking system based in India.

35. ez4u : Social Bookmarking – Ez4u to Bookmark : “Ez4u to Organize Ez4u to Share with Others Ez4u to Remember”.

36. Favoor : Favoor is your personalized new start page. Collect your favorite internet addresses.

37. Folkd : Folkd is a social web-service about pages, news, audios, videos and blogs.

38. Freelink : Freelink.org provides free pages of links that you can access anywhere at anytime.

39. Freezilla : FreeZilla claims to be the first Web 2.0 freebies and promotions social networking site.

40. Fungow : Fungow was designed to help better organize and keep track of your bookmarks.

41. Furl : Like Delicious, LookSmart’s Furl.net is one of the first social bookmarking sites and considered an authority by the major search engines. Listing your sites in Furl will lead to traffic from organic rankings and its popular page drives traffic.

42. Gather : Gather is a place to contribute articles and content, blog, tag and connect with people who share your passions. (Plus you can link out from the articles in this authority site).

43. Getboo : GetBoo.com is yet another free online bookmarking service which allows you to store, edit and retrieve your bookmarks from anywhere online.

44. Google : Allows users to save and create bookmarks in their Google toolbar that can be accessed anywhere online. Google is getting more social by the day, so take advantage of their Google Bookamrks and citations, because one day they probably will have some kind of influence on external meta data considered by the Google ranking

45. Hanzoweb : Hanzoweb – Bookmark, tag & share knowledge online

46. Hyperlinkomatic : Hyperlinkomatic – bookmark list manager.

47. i89.us : i89.us offers a free service which allows you to save your favorite website/links at one location that can be accessed from anywhere.

48. Icio : Danish Bookmarking engine.

49. Ikeepbookmarks : Popup feature allows you to add links while surfing the web

50. Iloggo : Simple web based bookmarking tool that you can use for attractively displaying your favorite websites on one page.

51. Jigg : Jigg.in is a socializing community with the latest stories / news submitted by users and has a familiar name :)

52. Kaboodle : Kaboodle is a 2.0 shopping community where people recommend and discover new things.

53. Kinja : Kinja is a blog guide, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web.

54. Lifelogger : “LifeLogger is a great way to keep things that matter to you alive and sparkling.” And worth considering in a bookmarking campaign.

55. Lilsto : Lilisto lets you store, manage and find your favorite links (or bookmarks) and removes the need to maintain them through your browser.

56. Linkagogo : Favorites and Social Bookmarking Application, its unique dynamic toolbars automatically adapt themselves.

57. Linkarena : German Social Bookmarking site.

58. Linksnarf : Social link sharing with groups of friends.

59. Listerlister :ListerLister is a social list building community where you can create, add to, and vote for both lists and the items added to them.

60. Ma.gnolia.com : Like Furl and Delicious, anoter major bookmarking site which lets users organize bookmarks, search other people’s favorites and make friends and contacts.

61. Markaboo : MarkaBoo is tool for saving websites, files, and notes from your browser, email or mobile phone.

62. Marktd : Marktd is a reference & voting system that highlights marketing articles considered valuable by the marketing community.

63. Memfrag : memFrag stores your favorites personal notes, making them globally accessible from any computer.

64. Memotoo :Lets users centralize and share your personal data.

65. Mister Wong : Mister Wong is a social bookmarking site that originated in Germany, and has since become a popular and widespread tool.

66. Mixx : An up and coming bookmarking and social news sharing network which should rival Digg, Reddit and others, Mixx blends popular photos, videos and stories.

67. Mobleo : Allows you to easily add, organize, and share your mobile phone bookmarks with your friends using your desktop computer.

68. Multiply :Florida-based social network Multiply, which reports nearly 3 million users and $6 million in funding,opened its social bookmarking site recently and has done well. Definite authority :)

69. Murl : My URLs is a free online bookmarks manager, think of it as a bookmarks community.

70. MyBookmarks : MyBookmarks – access your bookmarks anytime, anywhere. Free productivity tool for business, student or personal use. Another popular bookmarking site.

71. Myhq : Store your bookmarks in one central location. Fast, text-based, banner free!

72. MyLinkVault : A free online bookmark manager. Other bookmark managers can be so clumsy to use – trying to rearrange your bookmarks can be slow and frustrating.

73. mySiteVote : mySiteVote is a community where you can vote your favorite site/s and view how popular a site is.

74. MyWebDesktop : A collaboration and communication tool, designed to be as generic and easy to use as a telephone and email.

75. Newsvine : The mission of Newsvine is to bring together big and little media in a way which respects established journalism

76. Newsweight :NewsWeight is a democratic news, information, and entertainment resource.

77. Oyax : Oyax is a social bookmark manager which allows users to easily add sites you like to personal collection of links, categorize those sites with keywords.

78. Philoi : Person-to-person link sharing community. Save bookmarks and share links with your friends.

79. PlugIM : PlugIM is a user driven internet marketing community. Submit content, share articles, comment on projects and promote your favorites to the front page

80. Propeller : Formaly known as Netscape, AOL’s Propeller has become a great social bookmarking news community tool which is considered an ultimate authority by Yahoo Search and passes link juice in its news story profiles. Propeller is also going to redesign very soon, which should be quite exciting.

81. QuickieClick : QuickieClick is a second generation social bookmarking website with a visual twist.

82. Rambhai : An Indian social bookmarking community

83. RawSugar : A social search engine powered by user contributions. Its an online community, with over 130,000 URLs already tagged by their members.

84. Reddit : Timely and shocking news oriented, Reddit stories are instantly voted upon and if liked by the community as a whole, can drive incredible traffic and users.

85. Searchles : Owned by the DumbFind search engine, in my opinion Searchles is a much overlooked bookmarking tool and loved by Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines with its passing of link juice and high rankings for terms within search results themselves. Do not overlook Searchles.

86. Segnalo : Italian Social bookmarking site.

87. Sitebar : A solution for people who use multiple browsers or computers and want to have their bookmarks available from anywhere without need to synchronize them

88. Sitejot :Free online bookmark manager. Like every other social bookmarking site, it allows users to manage all of their bookmarks online in one convenient place.

89. Sk*rt : sk*rt is a social media ranking platform of “pure goodness”, targeted towards women. Given the right story, Sk*rt can send A LOT of targeted traffic.

90. Slashdot : The godfather of social news, SlashDot bookmarks are still quite powerful .. keep in mind the site has a heavy slant towards Linux and Open Source issues.

91. SocialDanger : SocialDanger is a Web 2.0 open source content management system.

92. Socialogs : A Digg-like Social Bookmarking Service.

93. Sphinn : Very popular search marketing oriented social news and discussion site run via the Pligg system.

94. Spotback : Spotback is a personalized rating system that recommends relevant content based on personal rating history using collaborative filtering

95. Spurl : Another cherished bookmarking and tagging site, Spurl lets users keep online bookmarks & tags while offering full text searching, recommendations & storing of entire documents.

96. Squidoo :Kind of spammed out, Squidoo is a 2.0 property which lets people and businesses set up a ‘lens’ which lists links, tags and relevant RSS feeds to different subjects.

97. Startaid : I’ve noticed that StartAid bookmark pages rank highly in Google and other search engines. This basic bookmarking service allows users to describe, tag and categorize sites.

98. StumbleUpon : Owned by eBay, StumbleUpon is an amazing blend of social bookmarking, voting, networking, web surfing, search and blogging. Best of all, StumbleUpon can send major traffic with its userbase of around 3 million users.

99. Stylehive : The Stylehive is a collection of all the best products, brands, designers and stores discovered and tagged by the Hive community

100. Syncone : SyncOne is an Internet aggregator of bookmarking and browsing.

101. Tagfacts : Basic bookmarking and tagging, a social knowledge base.

102. Taggly : Store, share and tag your favorite links.

103. Tagne : TagNe.ws is user-submitted, community voted links and resources related to SEO, Blogging, RSS, Tagging, Internet Marketing and more.

104. Tagtooga : Says that this bookmarking engine can be used to discover great sites difficult to find in Google/Yahoo by browsing categories.

105. Tagza : A very young Social Bookmarking site mostly being used by Indian and Pakistani web masters.

106. Technorati : Always changing and reinventing themselves, this recognized authority offers links to blogposts, tagging and a social bookmarking WTF section.

107. Tedigo : Personal and social bookmarking in Spanish and English made simple.

108. Thinkpocket : Lets users pocket websites you find valuable. It is a web service that aims to help store, organize and share your favorite sites

109. Thoof : Thoof is a user generated news and information service that claims to learn about what users are interested in and delivers news that they care about.

110. Totalpad : TotalPad is a new online news and article community where people are free to voice their opinions

111. Urlex : With URLex system users are able to leave a comment regarding any internet link on any site. Possibly good for linking :)

112. Uvouch : Another basic social bookmarking site, users can save their findings with one click, at one place and access it from anywhere.

113. Vmark : An online bookmark and online favorites manager.

114. Voteboat : VoteBoat is a user-controlled rating and voting site.

115. Votelists : VoteLists lets users create a list of rankable items. Other can add items, comment on them, rate them and more!

116. Vuju : Vuju allows user to submit/publish content which can be tagged and promoted.

117. WeTogether : Social bookmarking site where people will have great opportunities to promote their own sites.

118. Whitelinks : Securely store and quickly access favorite websites whenever connected to the Internet,:

119. Wink : A social search engine where users can share results and answer questions. Users build profiles which can link out to bookmark pages or other web sites (hint
hint).:

120. Wirefan : Social bookmarking, news articles submission site.:

121. Xilinus : Organize and manage bookmarks online.:

122. Xlmark : xlmark is an easy social bookmarking site:

123. Yahoo! Bookmarks: The MOST POPULAR social search and bookmarking service on the web. It’s similar to Delicious and something they launched before acquiring Delicious. Yahoo Bookmarks lets users store bookmarks using their Yahoo Toolbar and access them from any computer.

124. Yattle: Bookmark Management and Mini-Blogging Service.

125. Zlitt: Zlitt is a social bookmarking system which gives users the opportunity to share and tag favorite news, images and videos.

HP New Touch Notebook and Some New Minis

2010-01-06T22:43:00.000-08:00

HP unveiled a few new mobile devices today at CES. These include a new TouchSmart notebook, and a handful of minis.

The HP TouchSmart tm2 builds on HP's existing TouchSmart software, and updates the tx2. "With the convertible tm2, customers can choose the product configuration and input method that is most comfortable and natural, whether on a couch, in an airplane or while surfing the web," the company says. "As a traditional notebook, the tm2 offers a keyboard and touch-enabled display for input. Converted to a slate, the tm2 morphs into a sketchpad with digital pen, allowing artists to sketch on the go and students to take notes in class."

HP lists the following new touch applications that enhance the tm2 experience:

- BumpTop, a touch-enhanced 3-D interface for photos and documents that allows users to spatially organize and “toss” or share files and photos to social media sites or email.

- DigiFish Dolphin, an interactive 3-D screensaver that recreates an ocean environment to be experienced via touch or a mouse.

- Corel Paint it! Touch, which allows users to draw and paint or turn photos into paintings using fingertips.
More details about the TouchSmart tm2 can be found here.

The HP Mini 5102 is described as a "full-performance "netbook designed for mobile professionals and students. It comes in either a standard or touch-enabled version. The touchscreen option includes multitouch gestures, finger taps, and swipes across the screen for navigation. More can be read about this here.

Finally, unveiled the HP Mini 210 and HP Mini 2102, with optional 3G broadband connectivity and GPS in multiple color options. HP says new software enhances the HP Mini 210's multimedia experience:

- HP CloudDrive powered by ZumoDrive allows users to access their synchronized content – documents, photos and music – from the cloud, without having to store it on a local drive.

- HP MediaStream allows users to stream multimedia content from one PC to another over the Internet, without requiring data to be downloaded.

- HP QuickSync software, also available on the HP Mini 2102, automatically synchronizes files created or edited on the road with a home or business PC over a wireless connection when connected to the same network.

- HP QuickWeb allows users to access the web without booting up the notebook by simply pushing a button. In seconds, users have a connection to the Internet and can access websites and other content that normally requires a standard browser, as well as photos, music and more.
More details about the Mini 210 and Mini 2102 can be found here.

The HP TouchSmart tm2 is expected to be available in the US on Jan. 17 in all colors with a starting price of $949. The HP Mini 5102 is expected to be available in the US this month with a starting price of $399. The HP Mini 210 is expected to be available in the US tomorrow with a starting price of $299 for Windows 7.The HP Mini 2102 is also expected to be available in the US tomorrow with a starting price of $329.

Google Has No Suggestions on What Islam Is

2010-01-06T02:31:00.000-08:00

Every now and then, someone spots an oddity in Google's suggestions. Some are funny. Some are disturbing, and some are just weird. Alex Wilhelm at The Next Web has discovered an interesting behavior in Google Suggest involving religion.

With most major religions, you will get suggestions from Google when you type in a query like "example is". If you type "christianity is", or "judaism is" you will get suggestions (which some will no doubt find controversial in themselves), but when you type "islam is", you get nothing.

Here are a few screenshots for different examples of such queries:

To be fair, there are other religions that don't yield suggestions, but all of the biggest ones besides Islam do.

The phenomenon has raised a few eyebrows. Wilhem himself says, "Google is systematically blocking, it seems, all search suggestions for Islam. Why? To remove the chance of an adherent of the faith from being offended by a perhaps severe search suggestion? Why not treat all search terms equally?"

He thinks that either "A: Google is horribly broken and this is evidence of that or B: They seem to be tampering with results."

Danny Sullivan, one of the most influential voices in the search industry weighed in on the conversation, saying, "Google is horribly broken. That’s my call. And they do such a piss poor job explaining why these types of things happen (sometimes not even trying at all) that it’s easier to believe B, that they’re tampering with search suggestions."

He points to a piece he wrote about Google Suggest and Climategate, "Many people are convinced that Google messed with the suggestions for that," says Sullivan. "Google was adamant they did not. I still believe they didn’t. I also can only tell you from covering Google over the years that things like this are far more likely to be because they are indeed screw ups than that they are intentionally aiming to do so."

A query for "islam is" returns about 3,140,000 results. Others have pointed out that there are no suggestions for queries like "Larry Page is" or "Sergey Brin is", although Sullivan is careful to point out that there are plenty for "Google is," and they're not all the most positive things in the world.

Will Google Phone Bring Spotify to the US?

2010-01-04T08:52:00.001-08:00

Even if you haven't used Spotify, there's a good chance you've heard of it. The service's description goes: "A world of music. Millions of songs on your computer, on your mobile and available offline. Brought to you ad free."

People in the US have been unable to use the service so far. There has been talk that this may soon change upon the launch of Google's Nexus One phone, but this may not happen. There was rumored to be a US Spotify app for Google's Android ready just in time for the launch of the phone. Michael Arrington reports:

The two companies sketched out a plan where Spotify’s excellent Android application would be build [sic] into the 2.1 version of Android and would launch in the U.S. with the Google Nexus One phone on January 5. The application – which is available in Europe and allows for offline syncing of songs – would give Google a much-needed competitive answer to Apple’s iTunes. The Android could realistically be seen as a media consumption device, like the iPhone, with things like Spotify built into it.

Google wanted Spotify badly enough that they were willing to cover the label costs for every user of $3 – $4 per month. Spotify would add advertising on top of it, as they do with the free version in Europe, to make additional revenue. Without Google paying those label fees there was no way Spotify could handle the costs of the user flow that 2.1 would provide. Currently, European users must pay for Spotify Premium to use the mobile versions of the service.

Those in the US waiting to get their hands on Spotify may have to wait though. Arrington says his sources indicate that the deal has likely "gone cold," but he says there is a chance Spotify could still be part of Google's Nexus One announcement, slated for Tuesday, January 5.

Such a deal could mean big things for sales of Android devices and really give the iPhone a run for its money. It's going to be quite interesting to see how the smartphone competition plays out over the course of 2010. This is only the beginning. Even if a deal is not made, Google is clearly interested in the musical side of mobile, and will likely pursue other options.

Google's One-Minute Guide to Search-Based Keywords

2010-01-04T08:50:00.000-08:00

Google has put together a one-minute guide to using its Search-based Keyword tool. The tool was launched just over a year ago in beta. It lets paid search advertisers see what keywords they may be missing out on based on searches on their site.

"Millions of people use Google each day to find products and services by searching on various keywords," says Dan Friedman of Google's Inside AdWords Crew. "This means that by including all keywords that are relevant to your product or service in your campaigns, you can ensure you can ensure that you will reach a greater set of potential customers. To help you do this, you can use the Search-based Keyword Tool to quickly identify relevant keywords which aren't yet included in your AdWords campaigns."

The guide follows:

Earlier this year, Google made some improvements to the search-based keyword tool. The company not only expanded the reach to Australia, Canada, China, Japan, and New Zealand in addition to the US and the UK, but users can also now select the currency they'd like to see suggested bids in on the setting page.

Google also added some customization features to the tool this year that could lead to more targeted results for users. These include language/country-specific results and ad/search share filters.

Twitter Starts the Year with Some New Faces

2010-01-04T08:45:00.000-08:00

Just as many of us get back to work after the holidays, Twitter has some new people starting work with the company altogether. Twitter reportedly has ten new people (most starting today), and some of them have interesting backgrounds, which could have interesting implications for the company's future.

The one new hiring that is drawing the most attention is that of Bakari Brock, who has worked as a lawyer for Google and YouTube, holding the title of Corporate Counsel with both. Silicon Valley blogger Louis Gray, who discovered the new additions to Twitter's staff, notes that Brock was heavily quoted by the media in late 2008 when YouTube was introducing e-commerce capabilities.

Other new additions to Twitter, discovered via Twitter's Team List, include people with backgrounds with Bebo, Apple, Qik, Ning, TiVo, Cloudera, Ask, VMware, and 23andMe. One of them has also worked at Google in the past.

"Twitter's pedigree is getting increasingly rich at the expense of Google and other Silicon Valley tech titans," says Gray.

He points out that these are not the only new additions to Twitter. On Decemeber 23, Twitter announced its acquisition of Mixer Labs, the creators of GeoAPI.

Twitter is poised to have a very big year as the company will likely start concentrating more on its own monetization and geo-location capabilities. With new hires with experience at companies like Qik and TiVo, you have to wonder if Twitter has some new video-related ideas in mind as well.

Website security tips – What to do if website is hacked or malware infected

2010-01-02T10:14:00.001-08:00

How to detect malware ? Find out if your site is hacked.

First off, if you want to find out if Google found suspicious code on your site, use the following URL, appending your domain name to the end part.

http://safebrowsing.clients.google.com/safebrowsing/diagnostic?site=http://www.diolt.com

Surprisingly many of the times, when a site is hacked, (I don’t mean the ones like Twitter gets once a while, where you get a totally different homepage) webmasters don’t realize that the site is hacked. This is because only a part of the site is hacked, and you know it only when you see a dip in traffic / indexed number of pages.
So the important factor is to identify a hack, as soon as possible, so that you can do all that you can do minimize the ill-effects that may occur.

1. Sudden drop in number of indexed pages

When I say drop, I mean a huge one like in thousands. Indexed number of pages are heavily fluctuated and if you take it seriously can cause unnecessary worries. But if you see that either a huge part of your site is not showing up in the google live index, OR your main pages don’t show up on the live SERPs (with a direct key phrase match) , then you might want to consider worrying.

2. Heavy dip in traffic

Mostly accompanied by a hack is dip in search engine traffic as Google would’ve already found the hacked pages and took the site out of index. You don’t want to let this happen to your site.

3. Google Webmaster Tools shows weird pages

Google Webmaster Tools are pretty quick in detecting malware on sites. And it has a lab feature where all the suspected malware code will be shown.

4. Site shows up for “black listed search queries”

When you search for phrases like “viagra” (unless you;re using them in some context) with your site: command search, your site shows up pages. That’s the last thing you want to see.

What should a webmaster do if he finds his site malware infected.

Step 1 – Check for security configuration on your servers. Check for Directory permission and Apache security. Find more details here.

Step 2 – Remove all outgoing links from the user generated areas of your site. Because, this area is often exploited by hackers. It wont in most probabilities clear the site of malware, but it will stop future risk.

Step 3 – Remove all Ad scripts running on the site. Many a times invisible iframes are used via advertisement codes used on your site without your knowledge, the best option is to keep away from such ad codes (especially from less reputed vendors) but if you end up in a situation, remove them.

Step 4 – Switch from Telnet and FTP to SFTP.
Telnet and FTP are both considered insecure because of their use of plain text protocols. They transmit usernames and passwords in a way that anyone with access to the network can read.

Step 5 – Take the site offline temporarily.
If you can’t get things back to normal, take it temporarily offline, so that Google don’t index more hacked pages and end up in more confusion. Then best way out is to issue s 503 status.

Step 6 – Let Google know that something has screwed up
You can let Google know that one or more URLs in your site has been compromised and you want to take it/them down. Use the URL removal tool from Google Webmasters Tool.

Step 7 – Fix what is wrong
If you can manually fix all the malware, well and good. Generally malware affects only parts of your site, like a footer.php or header.php. In such cases you can manually edit out the bad areas and roll back to fresh code. And once you’re completely sure that things are under control, request a malware review for the site.

Step – 8 Request a malware review from Google
Go to Webmaster Tools Home page, select your site.

In the Parts of this site may be distributing malware message, click More details.
Click Request a review.

If your site is completely screwed and Google has taken you down from the live index, you should think about clearing your site of possible malware by manually checking all the codes and once everything is safe, request a re-inclusion request.

How to prevent future malware problems ?

- Stay away from using WordPress/CMS themes, templates that have not been verified. Some themes (which are even available on popular sites) contain hidden code, that you won’t even realize.

- Do not entertain non-reputed vendors to publish ads on your site. Especially with Javascript code.

Some Additional CMS Security Tips
WordPress – Tips to increase security in WordPress

Joomla – Security Checklist for Joomla

Drupal – Security Tips

Php Nuke – Security Tips

Windows Mobile and Xbox Live coming together, according to Microsoft job ad

2009-12-30T21:17:00.001-08:00

The hints were already pretty strong on this one, but now Microsoft has come right out and said it, albeit in a job posting -- the Xbox Live gaming platform is extending beyond the console and specifically onto WinMo phones. Seeking a Principal Program Manager who would be responsible for bringing "Xbox Live enabled games to Windows Mobile," Redmond is particularly interested in "avatar integration, social interaction, and multi-screen experiences." That leaves an awful lot of room for imagination as to how the two modes of gaming will complement each other, but at least we now (sort of) know that it's going to happen.

Google gives top users at Webmasters Forum a pat on the back !

2009-12-30T21:09:00.000-08:00

If there’s something Google want from you as a webmaster, then (apart from building good websites) it is to participate in its webmasters help forum. I’ve seen Google promote its webmasters help forum where ever possible, and as a matter of fact, if you’re a webmaster you should. When someone asks you to do something, we all take our time to react, and if you’ve not joined of this forum, this is precisely what happened to you. Its probably time you thought about this, and joined the forum.
The Webmasters help forum is an active discussion board where a lot of SEO’s and webmasters hang out talking about all things web, google and search engine optimizing. And unlike many other forums, the signal to noise ration is higher here. One thing is for sure, you can get a lot of doubts cleared here.
Google meanwhile, have gone to publish a post about its “bionic” posters on the forum, congratulating them for their efforts and help. So, what is the moral of the story ? Go join the forum of course !

Google Introduces keyboard shortcuts to access Search results – Accessibility Search

2009-12-30T21:04:00.000-08:00

A few hours ago, Google introduced a new tool to its Labs – the Accessibility Search. This is an opt-in option where you can navigate through the Google SERPs just by using your keyboard. In Google’s words, this experiment is built using the basic functionality provided by W3C ARIA and Google-AxsJAX, an evolving set of HTML DOM properties that enable adaptive technologies to work better with AJAX-style applications.

Google says –
The Accessible View experiment is another step toward making our search results more accessible for everyone. In July 2006, we launched Accessible Search on Google Labs, where the goal was to help visually impaired users find content that worked well with adaptive technologies. We continue to refine and tune the ranking on Accessible Search. And with Accessible View, users can easily toggle between regular Google search results and Accessible Search results by using the ‘A’ and ‘W’ keys.

You can now use keyboard shortcuts to access the Google SERPs.
Here are the shortcuts

Key Behavior
j/k next/previous result
n/p next/previous result, scroll if necessary
enter open current result
up/down next/previous result
left/right switch categories (results, ads, refinements)
a jump to ads
A switch to Accessible Search results
W switch to default Google results
r jump to related searches

Find more info here, also try the tool here.

Source by

How to detect mobile browsers & Redirect mobile users to another URL

2009-12-30T20:58:00.000-08:00

Mobile detection is not difficult to implement on WordPress, just grab any of these plugins and plug it in. Or you can try these mobile version creation tutorials. You get a mobile theme right away. Many of them are awesome too. In fact, I’ve tried more than one and quite honestly, they are really good. The only problem you encounter if at all, would be compatibility issues with other plugins such as the cache plugins.

And also some plugins do not detect all the browser agents, can’t really say that’s a problem but, you know… I’ve tried the mobile Wordpress themes as well and found that sometimes, things can get quite out of hand, like when I tried browsing from Opera, it gave me the mobile version, now that’s something you don’t want to happen with your visitors.

So, here’s an easy work around I found, with help from Lijeesh.
Instead of switching to a mobile theme, I thought why not do something simpler, and of course more reliable ?

The easiest way I found is to redirect mobile visitors to you Google blog reader feed. Amit has a “trick” here, where he explains how you can append the feed reader URL, and get a mobile version of your feeds. After this, using a mobile browser detection script, you can easily redirect the users to your “mobile page”. Here’s how. (Amit does not explain how to automatically redirect mobile users, but this one is a “install and forget” kind of a work around)

Step 1
Download the Mobile browser detection script from here.

Step 2
Upload the script to your theme folder
That would be yourdomain/wp-content/themes/yourthemefolder/

Step 3
Go to your Theme Editor, and then functions.php

Step 4
In functions.php, soon after the php opening tag, add this code –
require_once('mobile_device_detect.php');
mobile_device_detect(true,true,true,true,true,true,"http://www.google.com/reader/m/view/feed/http://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyDose4me");
Make sure you change the feed URL (in my case – http://feeds.feedburner.com/DailyDose4me) to match your blogs. That is after the feed/ portion. That’s it, now close and check via a mobile phone.
Advantages

I realize that there are lot of work arounds available to achieve the same but I found this amazingly simple. Or may be its because I like the idea of redirecting mobile users to the Google reader version effective, because while you do it, you’re actually making it really simple.

- Users can easily subscribe via Google reader
- Your AdSense ads are not missed out (some mobile themes skip it)
- Everything you put into your RSS feeds, show up on the mobile version as well
- No theme glitches, downtimes or screw ups (Unless Google scres up, which is very unlikely)

Google's Year in Custom Search

2009-12-23T02:25:00.000-08:00

Google's Custom Search turned three in 2009, and it had arguably its biggest year to date. The technology is powering "many tens of millions" of queries a day on millions of sites, according to the company.

As many others are doing, Google is reminiscing about the year that is almost over, and reflecting upon some of its accomplishments. The Custom Search Team specifically is reflecting on some of its highlights for 3009.

Google lists the following as key developments for the year in custom search:

integration with several hosters to bring Custom Search to your doorstep
enabled support for rich snippets, giving you more control over presentation of results
it's now easier for you to promote specific content to the top of your search results
we deployed contextual search within Blogger, Google Sites and Wikipedia
automatic transliteration is now integrated into the search box
improved results rendering flexibility with the Custom Search Element
plug-n-play with themes for enhanced customizability of results look and feel
added support for structured metadata and the ability to restrict results by specific attributes

we got you ready for the growing population of users searching your websites with mobile devices, such as Android phones, iPhone, iPod Touch, Palm Pre, etc.
Google promises additional metadata support in the new year, with more results customization and other features for Custom Search. With that in mind, it may be a good time to give Google you feedback, if you are a user of Custom Search. They're openly requesting it.

By Chris Crum

Watch: Google Wave Shows Events of 2009

2009-12-23T02:21:00.000-08:00

To say that 2009 has been the year of Google Wave might be a stretch. It was introduced this year, and invites have been sent out to quite a few people now. It has been the subject of a fair amount of discussion, but it hasn't reached the mainstream yet.

That said, 2009 was the year Google Wave was unleashed upon the world in its most primitive state. There is certainly a lot of potential for Wave, and we will no doubt see that more and more as time goes on if it truly does "catch on."

We have already seen some pretty cool things done with it. For example, the Google Wave Pulp Fiction video has already become something of a cult classic in the tech industry (contains strong language):

Another Google Wave video has surfaced, uploaded to YouTube by RockYourWhirled (via LifeHacker). It recaps the year with Google Wave. It fits in pretty well with the rest of the year-end discussion, and shows how Google Wave can be used to communicate ideas at the same time.

Google Wave was introduced back in May. You can view our coverage of the product from then until now by going here.

By Chris Crum

How Press Releases Can Be Great For Search

2009-12-21T08:35:00.000-08:00

Press releases are not only great ways to spread the word about any announcements your business might have. They can also drive traffic, particularly from search engines. This is not news, but it's a commonly overlooked fact.

"Search engine rankings are arguably the most important small business marketing tool available today because it drives Web traffic -- and potential prospects -- to a small business' Web site," a PRWeb spokesperson once told WebProNews. "However, because improving search rankings is desirable, achieving results can be both challenging and highly competitive."

Back in the summer, PRWeb shared a case study with us, involving a firm that typically sees a boost in search engine rankings and a 50% spike in web traffic after they issue a release. In fact, for one release in particular, the firm saw a spike of 400% on two different Web sites, and the firm doesn't believe they were from the same users. They also incorporate social media tools like Twitter to extend the "shelf life" of press releases, and say that drives additional traffic.

"When we included a link to our press releases on Twitter and other social media networks, we saw these both expanded the scope of distribution and the extended the longevity of the announcement," the CEO of the company behind the case study had said. "With other news releases we saw an initial spike in Web site traffic on the first two days and then it dropped off. With these features we've seen increases in traffic up to five days after the news release was issued."

In a study from Arketi Group, also back in the summer, journalists were found to use the web in the following ways:

- 95% search
- 92% reading news
- 92% emailing
- 89% finding story ideas
- 87% finding news sources
- 75% reading blogs
- 64% watching webinars
- 61% watching YouTube
- 59% social networks
You've got to wonder if that social networks number has gone up by now. My guess is that it has, and social media has since become all the more important to search, particularly with the inclusion of real-time search results in Google and Google's social search experiment (which may eventually move beyond experiment status).

Marty Weintraub, the President of aimClear shared some great tips and insight into the use of press releases for search in a recent interview with WebProNews. Among other things, he noted that when you do a press release, you're "hitching a ride" in the search engine results and news results. You can use outbound links in press releases, and perhaps more importantly, you're out there where the journalists are looking.

Here are some press release distribution sites (some are paid and some are free):

- Business Wire
- PR Newswire
- PRWeb
- 24-7 Press Release
- PR Zoom
- PR Leap
- I-Newswire
- Webwire
- ClickPress
- PR.com
- PR Log

Beyond the distribution sites, don't forget to include your releases on your own site. Journalists like being able to find the most up to date information from the source itself. Earlier this year I discussed how some companies' own press centers are holding back some marketing opportunities for them. Your site should have a section for press releases, and that should be up to date with the latest release when it goes out. You'd be surprised at how often these go without being updated even when a press release has been spotted elsewhere. It is also a good idea to link to any company blogs, Twitter accounts, or any other place where company announcements are made.

Just How Real-Time is Google's Real-Time Search?

2009-12-21T08:30:00.001-08:00

As you have no doubt heard by now, actress Brittany Murphy tragically passed away over the weekend. As saddening as that news was for many, people wanted information about it. As with any other celebrity death or big news event, people scrambled to find updates. This need for fresh info is really where real-time search has its greatest potential.

Google has only recently begun showing "real-time" results in its search results, pulling tweets from Twitter, updates from Facebook fan pages, blogs, news, outlets, etc. The idea behind Google showing such results, is that people can find the freshest info possible that relates to their query.

Have you found Google's real-time search results useful for finding fresh information? Discuss here.

Real-time search is generally thought of as providing results as they are posted online. In its truest sense, that's what it is, but Google's so-called real-time search may not be as real-time as initially thought. It's close, but not quite there.

Search industry expert Danny Sullivan followed Google's real-time search coverage of Murphy's death closely. He found that Google's real-time results were "wildly out of sync" with the results on Twitter itself. He noted that while Google's most recent result would say that it was 2 minutes old, Twitter would have 700 more results rolling in.

"In fact, I found that Google’s real time results often simply stopped scrolling for minutes at a time," says Sullivan. "To get them to restart, I’d have to reload the page."

But is Google's "real-time" results being slightly behind real-time necessarily a bad thing? As Sullivan says, a lot of this no doubt has to do with Google’s own filtering, and he didn't notice any spam getting through. There is a pretty good chance that those 700 Twitter results contained plenty of spam and/or redundancies (although Sullivan did find a few redundancies in Google's results too).

Google's Matt Cutts commented on Sullivan's report, weighing in on the search engine's handling of alleged real-time results. According to him, the news of Murphy's death was broken at 1:37 PM, and first tweeted about at 1:40 PM. He says Google's real-time results began two and a half minutes later, noting tht this was "entirely algorithmic."

"I think Danny makes fair points about better tools being needed to search the real-time stream and to highlight the important links/stories," says Cutts. "At the same time, the real-time stream worked as intended to highlight a breaking story and to show the flavor of how people are reacting to the event. The rest of the search results are also there to help give important news and context. And even the Google real-time results did a fair job of highlighting news articles, not just tweets."

That said, Cutts does acknowledge that Google can do better, but thinks they're doing a pretty good job for a first-time test of real-time search. Would you agree with him?

Google Launches More New Analytics Features

2009-12-09T00:05:00.000-08:00

Google announced a new set of features for Google Analytics at SES Chicago. New features include annotations, custom variables in advanced segments, custom variables in custom reports, a new analytics tracking code setup wizard, and a new version of the analytics API.

The Annotations feature lets any user with access to a Google Analytics profile leave shared or private notes on the "over-time" graph. The idea is that staff can note certain spikes and dips in traffic that may be hard to explain when looking at the broad picture. For example, if the servers went down, a new campaign launched, when a redesign went live, etc. It's just a way of keeping things organized and accounted for.

"Building upon the concept of bringing Intelligence to data, Annotations complements existing anomaly detection by capturing the tribal intelligence of your company, which tends to be the most expensive and easily lost resource of all," the Google Analtyics team says. "A simple note from a colleague can save hours of real work (and frustration) for an analyst who is tasked to explain a usually dry set of numbers. This short video will show you how to use Annotations."

Back in October, Google announced Multiple Custom Variables. Until now, the only way to view metrics on them was to open the "Custom Variables" report in the Visitors section. Now, you can create an advanced segmentation based on any key, value, or key-value combination of all custom variables.

"In other words, if you've created a Custom Variable such as 'Logged In Member', you can also create an advanced segment based on that variable and see it across all of your reports," says Google.

Custom Reports can also be created with any of the key or value dimensions assocated with any custom variable. You can see how a segment defined by custom variables behaves along any of the metrics available in Google Analytics.

The new tracking code set-up wizard automatically generates tracking code according to the setup options you specify.

Finally, the new Analytics API will feature support for advanced segmentation, and will include access to new data dimensions and metrics, including those in Google's other recently announced features for Analytics. Google says there will be a separate announcement for the API later this week, so expect to find out more about what it has to offer soon.

Header Tags – What are they ? Where and How to Use Them Effectively

2009-12-06T03:42:00.000-08:00

Most of us already know that header tags H1, H2, H3….H6 are an important SEO element in on-page optimization. But how important ? Can we add more than one H1 header tag on a page ? How often should H1 tags be repeated ? Where on a page should it occur ? More questions than answers, right ? Let’s try and answer a few.
How important are headers compared to other on-site optimization factors ?

First off, take off your SEO hat please. Header tags, as webmasters know are used for highlighting important titles on a page. Its been like that for years now. They are more or less like the ‘subject line’ on an email. The gist of what the content is.
For the same reason headers have been used extensively, either manually added or included as they were a part of a CMS or the web design software.
So, if you look at them from a users perspective, headers are anything that appears in large font, as a short description or title of the content, to skim through. Which is pretty much okay, that’s the way we have seen headers on the web all these years.
But looking at it from the SEO perspective (put on your darn hat pls), headers are much more than just large fonts or titles. They are the crux of the content, they are SEO elements search engines take time to read through and understand (figuratively speaking).
So yes, considering the on site optimization factors, headers are important. (We’ll also see how not to abuse them later on.)
Are they just text appearing in large sized fonts ?

Apparently not, even though they could be. Well, technically header tags normally appear as large size fonts because most of the browsers treat them that way. So unless you’ve worked on it, headers appear in comparatively large font to the content, because that’s what you see visually.
To the search engines, they are just text appearing between the header tags. Be it H1 or H2. Search engines might treat them differently based on their value, but font size is only a visual thing.
Where should you place H1, H2 header tags in terms of SEO ?

This is an important question. Regardless of what their font size is, or what the value is, its about where the header tags are placed that matters most. Usually, H1 tags are used for the titles of articles, placed often at the beginning of an article. But less attention is given to the supporting headers H2, H3 and beyond which are either under-utilized or not used at all.
If you select a normal HTML page without SEO being done, you could see that there mostly would be an H2 and may be an H3. Only very few CMS’s use other header tags, or they have to be included manually.
From my experience I’ve seen that H1 tags are best placed at the beginning of the article. Preferably the first header tag to be crawled, they should explain what the content is all about. Obviously use of primary keywords are welcome here.
H2 and H3 tags too perform well if used within the content, contextually, if I can call it that way. That is within the main article, as a subheading or as a paragraph title, where the secondary keywords can go. It supports the main title or the H1 in all possible ways.
Many a times, CMS’s including WordPress places H2 and H3 tags on the sidebar headings and not on the content (which obviously has to be done manually). This in a way, takes away possible attention from the content. Using the other header tags (H2, H3 and beyond) within the content is much recommended.
How can you effectively use header tags ?

As I mentioned earlier, to search engines, header tags are nothing but a piece of text that appears within the H1 / H2..H6 tags. And we know that if you use them with the default values on any CMS, they appear as large fonts, the biggest being H1 and then growing smaller from there.
You can control this by using CSS styles. Suppose you have a subheading within the main content, somewhere towards the middle of it and your primary keyword is used there, you would want to use an H1 on it and grab all the attention. But if you use the normal formatting options, the main title , which might be somewhere on the top of the article is likely to get an H1. To fix this, you could use the H1 on the title lying within the middle of the content and use CSS styling to make it appear with a smaller font. This way, the visual appearance isn’t affected. The main title remains the biggest, and the subheadings appear as usual with smaller fonts.
A word of caution here. Don’t overdo it as it may look “manipulated”. Use it only when required and in a healthy way, where ever applicable.
So, what are your thoughts ? How well have you been using header tags ?

4 SEO Factors Search Engines might talk about more in 2010

2009-12-03T10:37:00.000-08:00

You love being an SEO right ? I mean, the learning experience never ends with SEO, new things roll out each day and its fun. You think you’ve learn it all and there comes something new. lol

Anyways, the guys at Google are looking forward to 2010 as an year of new things. Or that’s what I learn from their communication channels. A lot of stuff is still in labs, lot of things being discussed, planned and chalked out, I’m pretty sure that they’re coming soon. So let’s see what are the new developments going to happen with Google in 2010. Let’s do what we are best at – guess !

1. Page Load Time and Page Speed emerging as a quality factor.

We’ve already seen heated discussions on it and its getting lot of focus these days. It makes sense to me that Google might consider page load times and page speed as a decisive factor in page quality for a site. it may not be a direct influential factor but like a one in hundred factors that decides the quality of a page. I mean, if a page is slick and fast loading it makes lives easier for both bots and users right ? So if there are two sites, one with slower load time and one with quicker load time, then it makes sense that Google might treat the first one as more friendly.

Not saying that sites slower to load will be neglected, but they will sure miss an opportunity. Also, this doesn’t mean that sites on shared hosting servers will take a blow – no. Google probably is thinking of making it fair to al, but the crux will be that faster loading sites, since they have taken the pain in making it an easier user experience, will be merited overall. Let’s wait and watch.

2. Intra document/web page anchor placement.

This is a new concept I’ve learned from Bill Slawski. He talks about a patent being filed that states that search engines (Google) might consider matching search queries with phrases/keywords inside the document/webpage and directly take you to the part on the webpage where the phrase/keyword is present, rather than the webpage itself.
This will be a time saving exercise but again, this also might take webmasters aback, as we were not prepared for this.

3. Social Media Influence on SERPs.

Is it there yet ? I don’t think so. What can be done ? I’m not sure yet. But social media influence on SERPs is definitely going to be more important in the coming years, and search engines have to find out methods to clear off noise from signal and device ways to feature socially popular stories/websites within SERPs in a fair way possible.

This is something really tricky because there are websites that have not embraced social media yet, so it won’t be fair to avoid them from the SERPs just because of that particular reason. But Social Media sure is an influencing factor, and you got to figure out how to decipher it.

4. Dynamic content getting more meaningful and SEO friendly

Dynamic content was like quicksand for SEOs because of its complexities and limitations in optimizing. But its high time we recognize that we got to live with it. Not everyone wat to go “textual”and minimalistic, so search engines have to figure out what they can do to decipher dynamic content and make it search engine friendly. Parameter Filter Handling was a good initiative but we need more.

Try the new Google Interface, if you haven’t yet.

2009-12-03T10:32:00.000-08:00

Rumours have it that Google is actually planning for another redesign of their homepage and the other subsidiaries. There are no official releases of this news yet but looks like many websites have already managed to get an inside look at the new Google redesign.

According to ArsTechnica and Google Blogoscoped, here’s the trick to “reveal” the new Google design. Go to Google.com homepage and replace the URL in the address bar with this code.

javascript:void(document.cookie=”PREF=ID=20b6e4c2f44943bb:U=4bf292d46faad806:
TM=1249677602:LM=1257919388:S=odm0Ys-53ZueXfZG;path=/; domain=.google.com”);
It should go in a single line. Now come back to Google and you should see the new Google design.

The whole thing legitimate to me. According to the new design, there is more smooth and rich color added to the logo, also the shadow gradient looks more sleek. There’s a major shift of focus towards the left navigation bar, where are the Google products get listed. You end up using most of them as they are more evident and grabs a lot of attention. There is an overall “blue shade” that appears predominantly over the search bar, the buttons and the navigation links, which is good.
How did you find the new Google redesign ?

Article source

Speed up your pages like right now !

2009-12-03T10:29:00.000-08:00

So what’s new in SEO world ? Faster Performance, Weight Loss and Shorter Page Load Times, as we had mentioned earlier. Google recently introduced a new tool to their Webmasters stable that will basically check how fast your pages are loading, and give you insights on the same. So what does that imply ?

Page Load Times have become more important than ever. People like fast loading pages, and so do search engines. So if you’re on a shared hosting or have a bloated website by any chance, its high time to upgraded.
You can see the page load time check tool in the webmasters console under the labs section.

What does the Site Performance tool do ?
- Checks overall page loading time, gives you a visual representation of how your pages have been performing all this while.

- Selects pages that take time to load, so you know who’s the culprit.
- Gives you suggestions on how to improve the page load time for the pages on the site.

Essentially, this is a tool that analyzes your overall site performance and helps you improve it, comparing it with the standards. A good move from Google, now its work time for webmasters.

Off to reduce some KBs

Google reveals: The most searched keyword trends of 2009

2009-12-03T10:24:00.000-08:00

Its that time of the year when we get to see annual reports and figures, its the end of the year. Google recently released a whole bunch of data, which shows the most popular trending searches of 2009, which is as predicted, very interesting.
The search trends are categorized into various brackets. And there are some very obvious yet interesting ones in each. Take a look.

Fastest Rising (Global)

michael jackson
facebook
tuenti
twitter
sanalika
new moon
lady gaga
windows 7
dantri.com.vn
torpedo gratis

Why SEO is key to an online advantage

2009-11-28T03:17:00.000-08:00

Search engine optimisation helps potential customers find you on the web before they find your competitors.

Launch website – check. Let people know your online address – check. Ensure your site appears in the top 10 results from search engines – stumped.

Search engines are a primary way people find businesses but making sure potential customers know you exist is easier said than done. This is where search engine optimisation, or SEO, can help. It aligns your website content with how consumers hunt online for your service or product and raises the search-engine prominence of your business.

It largely concentrates on identifying the words and phrases your customers use to find you, as well as tailoring your website to match those words. Many organisations specialise in SEO to simplify what would otherwise be an overwhelming or distracting task for a business to accomplish on its own.

"It's about picking out relevant keywords that could mean business for you and being mindful that you work in a competitive environment and you're doing everything you can to get yourself at the top of the page," the director of search engine optimisation company roi.com.au, Ewan Watt, says. "The higher you are ranked on the search results page, the greater percentage of the market you'll receive."

Watt has been a part of the internet industry for more than 10 years. He says it is important to look at search engine optimisation as a marketing exercise, not a technical one.

"You need to be very targeted in your strategy when it comes to keyword selection," Watt says. "Match your SEO strategy to your business goals."

There are also services available such as the Google Keyword tool, which can help business owners estimate how much web traffic exists for any given term.

"Even if you're a business that is ranking really well, there are always certain keywords you can improve on. You should be refining your strategy to stay ahead," Watt says.

"If you're just starting from scratch, you should be targeting very niche areas and trying to rank highly for those."

Building your website so search engines can read your information is essential, improving a site's search engine ranking.

"It's also about making your site more important to Google through inbound links and updating your site regularly," Watt says. "A combination of all those things will help you get to the top."

Watt has three tips for businesses trying to improve their rankings. First, ask your customers what keywords they use to find you. Second, generate content and optimise your website for those words. And third, measure your performance through tools such as Google Analytics and set traffic improvement goals monthly.

Jean-Christophe Burckhardt has been specialising in providing French provincial furniture and interiors for more than 20 years. He ventured into the online world about five years ago with his site, christophe living.com.au, and admits he didn't know much about SEO.

"I found that there was a big gap between graphic designers, web developers and search engine optimisation best practice, because the focus was on making the site look good," Burckhardt says.

About two years ago he hired ewebmarketing.com.au to improve his website and search rankings. He claims that in the past six months alone his business has increased by about 35 per cent.

"I now find about 80 per cent of my work comes through the website," he says. "Businesses need to ask themselves, 'when my clients are looking for what I offer, what do they ask for, how do they see it?' It's not necessarily obvious."

Using search engines effectively can give a business access to a lot more customers.

"For small businesses that are in niche markets where there's not much competition, it's a good way for them to get a lot of potential visitors without costing an arm and a leg," the chief executive of ewebmarketing.com.au, Gary Ng, says.

Depending on what a business owner wants to achieve from an SEO campaign, Ng says it can cost $1000 to $3000 per month.

Making an investment in SEO work can deliver hefty returns, says Lorinda Van der Velden, founder of online gift store dadshop.com.au.

"By having good rankings, we have corporate customers contact us and it has opened up many other customer opportunities," Van der Velden says. "I think that's the key. If you want a big turnover, you've got to do a big investment."

She advises companies to make sure that when they invest in SEO, they select a company that specialises in search-engine work, rather than one that offers hosting, email and a raft of other unrelated services.

7 tips for improving SEO

Even if you can't afford an SEO expert, there are simple ways to improve your business's ranking in search engines.

* Create unique, accurate titles for each page. This appears in the tag and forms the first line of what users see in search results. It is also what customers see at the top of their browser when they call up your pages. <br /> <br />* Use the "description" meta tag. This can be a sentence or two. This text is not seen by customers but can be used by search engines to help customers see what you offer. Be concise but informative. <br /> <br />* Give your documents meaningful names. A web page named "consulting.html" rather than "document15.html" can help search engines identify relevant pages for customers. <br /> <br />* Make your site easy to navigate. Group categories of similar content together. For example, put all articles into one directory and all price catalogues in another. <br /> <br />* Provide compelling content. By publishing useful information, you increase the chances that other websites will direct customers to you. These recommendations can help improve your ranking. <br /> <br />* Use meaningful text for links. This helps search engines recognise the relevance of material. <br /> <br />* Include "alt" tags on images. Search engines use these explanations to identify the content of pictures, which can help customers find what they're looking for.<div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google: Page Speed May Become a Ranking Factor in 2010</h1> <p>2009-11-25T10:15:00.000-08:00</p> Over the course of 2009, a consistent theme that Google has been involved with is that of speed. In announcement after announcement, Google has talked about the importance of speed on the web, and how the company wants to do everything it can to make the web a faster place. Has it occurred to you that how fast your page loads may have a direct effect on how your site ranks in Google? <br /><br />Don't worry, it hasn't had an impact...yet. In an interview with WebProNews, Google's Matt Cutts told us that speed may soon be a ranking factor. <br /><br />"Historically, we haven't had to use it in our search rankings, but a lot of people within Google think that the web should be fast," says Cutts. "It should be a good experience, and so it's sort of fair to say that if you're a fast site, maybe you should get a little bit of a bonus. If you really have an awfully slow site, then maybe users don't want that as much."<br /><br />"I think a lot of people in 2010 are going to be thinking more about 'how do I have my site be fast,' how do I have it be rich without writing a bunch of custom javascript?'" he says.<br /><br />I would say that based on Matt's comments it is probably fair to assume that Google will indeed begin taking page speed into consideration as a ranking factor, although he doesn't come right out and say that they definitely will. That said, making your site faster is going to benefit your users and possibly your sales anyway, so you might as well start optimizing it for speed anyway. Then if Google really does start using this as a ranking factor, you will have a head start on boosting your rankings. <br /><br />Google has generally been pretty good at providing webmasters with tools they can use to help optimize their sites and potentially boost rankings and conversions. Google recently announced a Site Speed site, which provides webmasters with even more resources specifically aimed at speeding up their pages. Some of these, such as Page Speed and Closure tools come from Google itself. But there are a number of tools Google points you to from other developers as well. <br /><br />If you're serious about wanting your site to perform better in search engines, and you haven't given much thought to load times and such, it's time to readjust your way of thinking. Caffeine increases the speed at which Google can index content. Wouldn't it make sense if your site helped the process along?<div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google Doesn't Know if Your Site is in the Cloud</h1> <p>2009-11-20T10:36:00.000-08:00</p> Google's Matt Cutts discussed how the search engine handles sites that that are "in the cloud" with regards to how listings are affected. Matt's explanation was a response to the following user-submitted question:<br /><br />Can moving my website to "the cloud" harm my listings? Say my server's in Germany and I move the website to Google's App Engine or Amazon S3. Does this harm my listings for German results - or is it enough to set the "geographic target" in GWT to Germany?<br /><br />Matt broke the question down into separate parts to answer them. First, he took on the part about moving a site to "the cloud" harming the users' listings. His answer for this is basically that Google doesn't even know if your site is in the cloud, so it can't use that information to affect listings.<br /><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/uHafIveB7hY&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en_US&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param></object><br /><br /><br />"We don't know what is happening on the side of your web server. Your web server could be running Perl, PHP, Python, or Ruby on Rails," said Cutts. "All we know is what the web server returns. So your web server could be running code that would go talk to Amazon's cloud or Appspot or anywhere else in the cloud, but we wouldn't even know that. We don't even know whether a page is dynamically created or statically created. All we know is what the web server sends back."<br /><br />He says if your site is talking to the cloud behind the scenes, there is now way for any search engine or bot to know about that. Watch the video above to hear Matt's explanation for the second part of the user's question.<div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google Testing a Revamp of the Search Results Page</h1> <p>2009-11-20T10:05:00.000-08:00</p> Google is testing a new user interface for its search options feature. If you are unfamiliar with the search options feature, it is the link on your search results page that says "show options" and brings up a menu on the left-hand side of the screen providing a number of ways to filter your results.<br />According to Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land, a "small number" of Google users will see the new interface starting today. The aim of the new interface is to provide users with a cleaner display. Sullivan says that if the testing goes well, Google may roll it out after the New Year. He quotes Google's Marissa Mayer as saying, "We're basically looking at a new look and feel for Google. It's an overall cleaning up of the search engine results page.<br /><br />Images of this new look and feel look strangely familiar - similar to that of a certain "decision engine." Take a look:<br /><a href="http://searchengineland.com/google-streamlines-search-options-30143"></a><br /><br /><br /><br /><br />Of course, the Google's search options and Bing have been compared in the past (and other search engines utilize a similar design too for that matter), in terms of the general layout. Their functionalities differ on various levels. It's important to note that this will just be how the search results pages will look, without having to click the search options link to get to it. There has been discussion in the past about how much users actually use Google's search options, simply because the feature is easy to overlook. Such a change would put the options right in your face. <br /><br />Besides being visually different, the options themselves are different in some areas. For example, a "see also" section has been added, which suggests related queries. There is also a section called "show search tools," which now contains things like the Wonder Wheel, Timeline View, and "more shopping sites."<br /><br /><a href="http://searchengineland.com/google-streamlines-search-options-30143"></a><br /><br /><br />Google may start messing around with the top navigation on search results pages next year, but the company has acknowledged that it works well right now. It will be interesting to see the change in use of this top navigation if the left-hand options go mainstream.<div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google Search Results About to Get a Dose of Caffeine</h1> <p>2009-11-11T03:46:00.000-08:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style=" color: rgb(137, 137, 137); font-weight: bold; font-family:'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:14px;">By <a href="http://www.webpronews.com/user/chris-crum" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">Chris Crum</a></span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:130%;color:#898989;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:14px;"><b><br /></b></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:130%;color:#898989;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:14px;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-weight: normal; font-size:12px;"><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">It appears that the effects of Google's Caffeine update may be felt sooner rather than later. That is if you really do feel the effects at all.<br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#FF0000;"><b><br /></b></span><br />If you are unfamiliar with Caffeine, it is an algorithm update that Google <a href="http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/08/11/google-allows-hands-on-preview-of-caffeine-update" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">announced</a> in the summer. Upon the announcement, Google's Matt Cutts said, "The Caffeine update isn't about making some UI changes here or there. Currently, even power users won't notice much of a difference at all. This update is primarily under the hood: we're rewriting the foundation of some of our infrastructure." <a href="http://videos.webpronews.com/2009/08/11/breaking-news-matt-cutts-explains-caffeine-update/" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">Cutts told WebProNews about Caffeine</a> in the following interview:</p><center><table style="border-collapse: collapse; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: auto; "><tbody style="border-top-width: 1px; border-top-style: none; border-top-color: rgb(204, 204, 204); border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-width: initial; border-color: initial; "><tr><td style="font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: left; vertical-align: top; "></td></tr></tbody></table></center><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">When Caffeine was introduced, so was a sandbox, where people could play around with Caffeine based search results, and get a look at how rankings were altered (if at all), and try to get a feel for how it was going to go. Now that sandbox has closed up shop, it looks like<strong>the Caffeine update will be live in Google search before too long.</strong> It will start after the holidays at least though.<br /><br />"I know that webmasters can get anxious around this time of year, so I wanted to reassure site owners that the full Caffeine roll out will happen after the holidays," <a href="http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-caffeine-update/" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">says Cutts</a> on his blog. "Caffeine will go live at one data center so that we can continue to collect data and improve the technology, but I don’t expect Caffeine to go live at additional data centers until after the holidays are over. Most searchers wouldn’t immediately notice any changes with Caffeine, but going slowly not only gives us time to collect feedback and improve, but will also minimize the stress on webmasters during the holidays."<br /><br />The announcement at what used to be the Caffeine sandbox <a href="http://www.google.com/errors/caffeine/unavailable.html" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">reads</a>:<br /><br /><em>We appreciate all the feedback from people who searched on our Caffeine sandbox.<br /><br />Based on the success we've seen, we believe Caffeine is ready for a larger audience. Soon we will activate Caffeine more widely, beginning with one data center. This sandbox is no longer necessary and has been retired, but we appreciate the testing and positive input that webmasters and publishers have given.<br /></em><br />Of course as people tested Caffeine via the sandbox, many of them <a href="http://mashable.com/2009/08/10/google-caffeine/" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">blogged about their results</a> and findings. The general consensus seemed to be that Caffeine is<strong> fast and utilizes real-time search</strong> a great deal. Given Google's frequent announcements <a href="http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/06/05/google-introduces-page-speed-tool" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">related to speed</a>, and a recently announced <a href="http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/10/21/microsoft-scores-bing-deal-with-twitter-and-facebook" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">deal with Twitter</a>, speed and real-time search seem like logical updates to Google search results.<br /><br />When SEOBook's <a href="http://www.seobook.com/google-caffeine" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">Aaron Wall tested Caffeine</a>, he said he thought there was:</p><blockquote><em>- an increased weighting on domain authority & some authoritative tag type pages ranking (like Technorati tag pages + Facebook tag pages), as well as pages on sites like Scribd ranking for some long tail queries based mostly on domain authority and sorta spammy on page text<br /><br />- perhaps slightly more weight on exact match domain names<br /><br />- perhaps a bit better understanding of related words / synonyms<br /><br />- tuning down some of the exposure for video & some universal search results</em></blockquote><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 13px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; "><strong>This stuff should not necessarily be taken as gospel. </strong>These are just the results and speculations of individuals from tests of a product that was only introduced (<em>for testing purposes</em>), let alone finalized. It is what it is.<br /><br />As the Caffeine update rolls out, there will no doubt be more and more mystery unraveled as search industry professionals scramble to stay ahead of the game, and Google drops subtle hints from time to time. It's going to be interesting to see where Caffeine takes the world's most popular search engine. </p></span></b></span></span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Social Media Marketing</h1> <p>2009-11-06T11:35:00.000-08:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Tahoma; font-size: 12px; color: rgb(1, 157, 141); "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="word-spacing: 0px; font: normal normal normal medium/normal 'Times New Roman'; text-transform: none; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 0px; white-space: normal; letter-spacing: normal; border-collapse: separate; orphans: 2; widows: 2; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 19px; font-family: Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: justify; "><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span style="font-family:Verdana;"><strong><span style="color:#008080;"><a href="http://www.diolt.com/psocial-media-marketing-SEO.html">Social Media</a></span> </strong><span style="color:#666666;">are more popular than ever today. There are bigger budgets in online advertising than TV or Radio. People communicate, socialise and network increasingly online. Marketing in forums, social networking and social bookmarking websites can be more difficult than it seems.</span></span></p><br /><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span style="font-family:Verdana;"><span style="color:#666666;">We will introduce your company to the networks and advise on how to add value and reap the benefits of a well-positioned product or service.</span></span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span style="font-family:Verdana;"><span style="color:#666666;">Normal marketing and advertising rules do not apply as communities are sensitive to their unique code of conduct that is respected at all times. Adding value and building trust are key to our approach.</span></span></p><br /><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span style="font-family:Verdana;"><span style="color:#666666;">We offer complete solutions on networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Flicker, Delicious, Bebo, Digg, MySpace, FriendFeed and others.</span></span></p></span></span><br /><table width="615" border="0"><tbody><tr><td width="102"></td><td width="106"></td><td width="98"></td><td width="102"></td><td width="94"></td><td width="87"></td></tr></tbody></table><br /><br /><span class="Apple-style-span" style="word-spacing: 0px; font: normal normal normal medium/normal 'Times New Roman'; text-transform: none; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 0px; white-space: normal; letter-spacing: normal; border-collapse: separate; orphans: 2; widows: 2; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 19px; font-family: Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif; text-align: justify; "><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:85%;"><span style="color:#666666;">Social Media has a structured approach on strategy, analysis, monitoring and timely execution. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="word-spacing: 0px; font: normal normal normal 14px/normal Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-transform: none; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); text-indent: 0px; white-space: normal; letter-spacing: normal; border-collapse: separate; orphans: 2; widows: 2; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); text-align: left; "><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:85%;"><span style="color:#666666;">We’re working on many successful online marketing campaigns for years. For social media <a href="http://www.diolt.com/psocial-media-marketing-SEO.html">marketing campaigns</a> we have a structured and flexible approach. We fully understand the need not to force the issues but rather to engage with people in social media through a conversational and intelligent approach.<br /></span><br /><a href="http://www.diolt.com/contacts.php" style="color: rgb(1, 157, 141); text-decoration: underline; "></a></span></span></span></span></span></span></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google Checkout Gets a New Promotions Feature</h1> <p>2009-11-03T03:27:00.002-08:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Tahoma; font-size: 12px; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); "><div class="article-description" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: justify; ">Google has launched a new feature for Google Checkout, which allows merchants based in the US to create and run their own Checkout promotions at any time.</div><div class="article-body" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 5px; padding-right: 5px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 5px; text-align: justify; ">Users simply need to sign in to their Checkout merchant account, go to the "Tools" tab, and click the "Promotions" link to create a promotion. Google says the process takes less than a minute. Users can specify the date and time they'd like the promotion to run, and choose from different dollar-off discounts to offer their buyers.<br /><br /><br />When you run a Google Checkout promotion, the standard Checkout button on your site will automatically update to display the discount amount and cart minimum. AdWords advertisers will also have their standard Checkout badge that appears on their ads change to show the same information.<br /><br /><br />"These promotional badges have been introduced to enable shoppers who search on Google.com to easily identify and take advantage of promotional offers," <a href="http://googlecheckout.blogspot.com/2009/10/new-and-easy-way-to-offer-google.html" style="color: rgb(1, 157, 141); text-decoration: underline; ">says</a> Google Checkout Specialist Gina Del Vecchio.<br /><br /><br />"Checkout promotions are a great way to attract new buyers, and we're excited to make this functionality more widely available," she adds.<br /><br /><br />Google recently made changes to its content restrictions for Google Checkout. The service now allows the sale of real estate rentals, timeshares, and day sight-seeing tours. Google has just announced a couple of other things that people in real estate might find particularly useful. For one, they have expanded upon their real estate features on Google Maps. Secondly, they are now offering a new type of ad to allow for comparisons between offers.<br /></div></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google Gives AdWords Advertisers New Comparison Option</h1> <p>2009-11-03T03:27:00.001-08:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, 'Trebuchet MS', Arial, Tahoma; font-size: 12px; color: rgb(102, 102, 102); "><div class="article-description" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 10px; padding-right: 10px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-left: 10px; text-align: justify; ">Google announced that it is testing a new AdWords feature called AdWords Comparison Ads. These are ads that let users compare multiple offers from the same <a href="http://www.diolt.com/padvertise.html" style="color: rgb(1, 157, 141); text-decoration: underline; ">advertiser</a> that are relevant to the user.</div><div class="article-body" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 5px; padding-right: 5px; padding-bottom: 5px; padding-left: 5px; text-align: justify; ">Google says the feature is part of its continuing effort to make ads more relevant and useful to users and help advertisers reach the people who are most interested in their products and services.<br /><br /><br />"AdWords uses a host of targeting and relevancy signals to determine the best ads for each query. However, sometimes a user's query doesn't provide enough information for us to confidently predict what they want," <a href="http://adwords.blogspot.com/2009/10/introducing-adwords-comparison-ads.html" style="color: rgb(1, 157, 141); text-decoration: underline; ">explains</a> Dan Friedman of Google's Inside AdWords Crew. "Take, for example, users who search for "mortgage." Do they want a new home loan or a refinance? Do they want a fixed rate or an adjustable rate loan? Comparison Ads improves the ad experience on Google.com by letting users specify exactly what they are looking for and helping them quickly compare relevant offers side by side."<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />If a user clicks a promotion, they are taken to a page with more detailed, sponsored results. There they can choose from the offers listed on the page or refine their search further. If a user finds an offer they like, they can call the advertiser or request a quote.<br /><br /><br /><br /><br />"If a user requests a quote, Google automatically anonymizes the user's phone number and sends you a unique code that you can use to contact the user," says Friedman. "You only pay if a user calls the phone number on your offer or fills out a form to request a quote."<br /><br /><br />Google cites speed, transparency, and privacy as the key points of focus with Comparison ads. They show targeted offers in less than a second, they only show real products (meaning no teaser rates, baits or switch offers), and they won't send advertisers any user information.</div></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Kaspersky tool detects malware in Twitter links</h1> <p>2009-10-30T08:56:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color: rgb(53, 53, 53); font-size: 12px; "><p style="margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17px; ">Kaspersky unveiled a new tool on Thursday called "Krab Krawler" that analyzes the millions of tweets posted on Twitter every day and blocks any malware associated with them.</p><p style="margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17px; ">The tool looks at every public post as it appears on Twitter, extracts any URLs in them and analyzes the Web page they lead to, expanding any URLS that have been shortened, Costin Raiu, a senior malware analyst at Kaspersky, said in an interview.</p><p style="margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17px; ">The company is scanning nearly 500,000 new unique URLs that appear in Twitter posts daily, he said. Of those, anywhere between 100 and 1,000 are malware attacks. Twitter has also been targeted by the Koobface virus which posts malicious links from infected users' accounts.</p><p style="margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17px; ">About 26 percent of the total posts contain URLs, and many of those lead to spam sites that are marketing products or services and aren't considered malware, according to Raiu. Tens of thousands of different accounts are posting spam links, most likely from accounts created by bots, he said. The most frequent URLs posted lead to online dating sites, he added.</p><p style="margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17px; ">Twitter has its own <a title="Twitter warms up malware filter -- Tuesday, Aug 4, 2009" href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10302479-83.html" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: bold; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(0, 67, 127); text-decoration: none; cursor: pointer; ">filtering system</a>, but some malicious links still manage to get through, Raiu said.</p><p style="margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17px; ">While Kaspersky's regular antivirus software may detect and block 95 percent of the malware Twitter users are threatened with, malware code changes frequently to evade filters and it could take between two and 12 hours for new stuff to be classified as malicious and detected, he said.</p><p style="margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17px; ">While antivirus companies have traditionally focused on protecting e-mail-borne viruses, they are increasingly turning their attention to social-media sites as attackers do.</p><p style="margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17px; ">Trend Micro has technology that monitors Twitter posts for malicious URLs, as well as looks for attack patterns in the posts, such as use of popular terms to indirectly lead people to malicious links, said Morton Swimmer, a senior threat researcher at Trend Micro.</p><p style="margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17px; ">Meanwhile, Finjan offers a free browser plug-in dubbed <a title="Finjan offers free SecureTwitter browser plug-in -- Thursday, Jun 25, 2009" href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-10273067-83.html" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: bold; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; color: rgb(0, 67, 127); text-decoration: none; cursor: pointer; ">SecureTwitter</a> that warns users when they encounter a malicious URL in Twitter, as well as Gmail, Blogger, MSN, MySpace, Google search, Yahoo, and other sites.</p><p style="margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17px; ">Social-media sites are popular for attackers not only because people are flocking to them, but also because users seem to trust messages that appear to come from friends on those sites more than they trust e-mails, Raiu said.</p><p style="margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 17px; ">"People are worried about unsolicited e-mail, so they are careful not to run the programs they get by e-mail, but they aren't prepared to deal with these kinds of new attacks," he said.</p><div class="cnet-image-div image-large float-none" style="margin-top: 8px; margin-right: auto; margin-bottom: 8px; margin-left: auto; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 12px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; float: none !important; width: 610px; "><p class="image-caption" style="margin-top: 2px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 2px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-width: 0px; border-right-width: 0px; border-bottom-width: 0px; border-left-width: 0px; border-style: initial; border-color: initial; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 11px; font-family: inherit; text-align: left; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 15px; color: rgb(85, 85, 85); ">The most common piece of malware associated with Twitter links is Trojan-Clicker.HTMLIFrame, a malicious JavaScript that can get downloaded to a computer when it visits a compromised Web site.</p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size:100%;color:#555555;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 11px;"><a href="http://news.cnet.com/8301-27080_3-10386144-245.html">Source</a></span></span></div></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google Page rank updated October 30 - 2009</h1> <p>2009-10-30T03:04:00.000-07:00</p> After all google has updated page rank after 4 months. Last page rank was updated at <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; ">6/24/2009. </span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'Times New Roman';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: medium;">Diolt.com has ranked 4 from 3 in short span. Congratulation. :)</span></span></div><div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: medium; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(102, 102, 102); font-family: 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px; ">In the last days Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Round table points to <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6a1d6250e26e9e48&hl=en" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">a thread</a> featuring an explanation from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa, said that Google has quietly gotten rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools.</span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:100%;color:#666666;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 20px;">Well Toolbar page rank has its importance and shows the website strength.<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space:pre"> </span> </span></span></div></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google Ditches PageRank in Webmaster Tools</h1> <p>2009-10-29T11:45:00.001-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; ">Google has quietly gotten rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable points to <a href="http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=6a1d6250e26e9e48&hl=en" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">a thread</a> featuring an explanation from Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa.<br /><br />"We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true," says Moskwa. "We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."<br /><br /><a href="http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020960.html" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; "></a>Search marketers are wondering why Google tells people not to focus on PageRank and removes it from Webmaster Tools, but still keeps it in the Google Toolbar. "Back in 2007, Google wanted feedback on removing PageRank from the Toolbar," <a href="http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020960.html" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">says</a> Schwartz. "I felt it was a good idea but the idea died out. Google cannot remove PageRank from the Toolbar, it is too much of their branding. No matter how much Matt Cutts and the Google search quality and webmaster trends team want it removed, I cannot see Google's executives allowing it."<br /><br />Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim <a href="http://www.marketingpilgrim.com/2009/10/google-is-finally-killing-pagerank.html" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">says</a> the role of PageRank has been reduced to nothing more than a "comfort blanket for SEO Noobs." He adds, "I say this, with a high degree of confidence that most experienced SEOs pour over the data in Google Webmaster Tools, whereas those new to the industry likely let the toolbar be their only guiding light."<br /><br />He also notes, however, that PageRank data can still be useful. For example, it can be a good indicator of a site's behavior in Google's index. "Any green means 'go.' No green, means there's something to investigate," says Beal.<br /><br />Despite this usefulness though, Moskwa pretty much closes the case on Google's position on it. In fact, she even points to <a href="http://sites.google.com/site/webmasterhelpforum/en/faq--crawling--indexing---ranking#pagerank" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">a FAQ page</a> about crawling, indexing, and ranking, which says that webmasters shouldn't even bother thinking about it. It also says that PageRank is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed, and ranked.<br /></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Get 25% off on bulk submission</h1> <p>2009-10-27T04:48:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 12px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); line-height: 19px; "><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; ">We want as many businesses as possible to benefit from our web directory. When the economy isn't the strongest, it's even more important to drive potential clients to your website. One of the most effective ways to do so is through Search Engine Optimization and building back links.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; ">Much like the old paper directories, diolt's <a rel="nofollow" onclick="javascript:pageTracker._trackPageview('/outgoing/article_exit_link');" href="http://www.diolt.com/" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 102, 204); ">web directory</a> contains links to almost every topic, and current categories range from arts and entertainment to home improvement and housewares. The web directory works through 2COl, allowing clients to feel secure during all money transfers. Throughout the steps, Diolt also provides fast answers to technical questions and general inquiries.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; ">When users submit URLs to Diolt, they are also able to include supporting information about their link. With this added information, businesses are given the opportunity to provide a message to potential clients, allowing them to better understand the services offered.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; ">All of this functionality and convenience is included as part of Diolt 'Just you.' This new, value-added promotion is a strong reflection of the overall business philosophy of the leading web directory firm.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; ">We have always had a strong focus on customer service -- always doing what we can to help clients who have a question or technical concern. We have also streamlined the process to add links and guarantee that new links will be reviewed within 24 hours. Now, through our value-packed promotion.</p><p style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; ">To take advantage of the 'Just you', bulk submission users should send an email at info at diolt.com. Users looking to submit on a per-listing basis can use the submission form on the website: http://www.Diolt.com</p></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google search inWeek 10/2/09</h1> <p>2009-10-02T21:27:00.001-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); ">At Google, we're completely committed to the needs of our users. This is one reason we make constant changes to the <a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS319US319&defl=en&q=define:User+Experience+&ei=Ek_GSruBAo6gswP9nJiiBQ&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title">user experience</a> — so you have a better search experience. Some of the changes are larger features like our <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/more-search-options-and-other-updates.html">Search Options</a>; some are small visual refinements, like our <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/now-s-u-p-e-r-sized.html">larger search box</a>. Starting today, we'll post a story each Friday that showcases some of the user experience updates we've made to our search in the past week, complete with example searches, and how and where to see the improvements. This way, loyal search aficionados can see and experiment with all of updates in one easy-to-access place.<br /><br /><b>Hot Trends highlighted on results page</b><br />Have you ever wondered how many people query [tsunami] or [samoa] right after they read about it in the news, or are you the only one looking? For years, <a href="http://www.google.com/trends">Google Trends</a> has let you search an aggregation of what other people are searching for. Now we're taking that concept to the results page and showcasing fast-rising terms with a graph at the bottom of the page. To see it, try one of these searches and scroll to the bottom:<br /><br />Example search: [<a href="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&rlz=1C1GGLS_enUS291US304&q=olympic+bid&aq=f&oq=&aqi=g10">olympic bid</a>]<br />The queries here are rather fleeting by nature — one minute they're hot; the next, cold. (Apologies if [olympic bid] no longer shows this off.) The easiest way to be sure to see this feature is try one of the searches from our <a href="http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?sa=X">Hot Trends</a> page. You'll see the hot trend featured at the bottom of the search results page, highlighted with a graph.<br /><br /><b>New tools in Search Options</b><br />We've just added a host of new tools in our Search Options panel. To view the Search Options, do a search, find "Web" in the top blue bar, and click on the "+ Search Options" link to the right of it. A navigation bar on the left side of the screen will appear. We launched Search Options back in May, but this week we're adding a <a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/10/refine-your-search-results-with-new.html">set of new and exciting features</a>. Among them:<br /><br /><i>Better way to shop and research products</i><br />Have you ever found that your search sometimes feels too commercial when you're just starting to think of buying? Or maybe you've experienced the opposite, where you can't find an online store to buy something despite your best attempts. We've just introduced a way for you to control the number of stores you see in your results.<br /><br />Example search: [<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=flip%20camera">flip camera</a>] <div>Click on the link in Search Options that says "Fewer shopping sites" and you'll see mostly reviews and technical specifications. When you're ready to buy, click on the link in Search Options that says "More shopping sites." You'll see mostly stores listed, and the results even note the prices and specific products right on that page.<br /><br /><i>Learning from history</i><br />If you use personalized search and web history, it's now easier for you to see which of the search results you have visited already and which you haven't.<br /><br />Example search: [<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=youtube">youtube</a>] </div><div>With the Search Options panel open and while you're signed in to Google (look for your user name in the upper righthand corner), click on the "Visited Pages" tool. Your results will then show only pages you've visited that contain the term 'YouTube.' Now, click on the tool "Not yet visited" where you will see only pages you haven't yet seen that contain 'YouTube.'<br /><br /><i>Keeping up with time</i><br />The Search Options panel has always helped users search over time, but now there are two new features that help you do this even more flexibly: "Past hour" and "Specific date range."<br /><br />Example search: [<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=obama">obama</a>] </div><div>Click on the "Past hour" link and you'll see all the recent news and web pages published in the past hour on [obama].<br /><br />Example search: [<a href="http://www.google.com/search?q=michael+jordan">michael jordan</a>] </div><div>Now click on "Specific date range" and try the period surrounding Jordan's last championship (5/1/98 through 7/31/98), and you'll see all the press from the Chicago Bulls' win and various articles covering him that summer.<br /><br /><b>Personalized Suggest now on Mobile</b><br />Finally, here's a fun tidbit that bridges web search on the desktop to web search on mobile. New this week, Google Suggest (the suggested queries that appear below the search box as you type) on your mobile phone is personalized, based on searches from your desktop. This feature only applies when you are signed in to your Google account, and only for searches done while you are signed in. We think this small feature is significant because it enables you to easily migrate your search tasks from the desktop to your phone. It's also one of the first instances in which your desktop search usage can improve your mobile search experience, and vice versa.</div></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Getting your website optimized for the search engines</h1> <p>2009-09-11T07:41:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; color: rgb(1, 157, 141); font-size: 12px; "><div class="news-body"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#333333;">Getting your website on the top of the page ranking is the primary concern of almost all webmasters. And therefore, for this reason they seek the help of some SEO company or the other to get the </span><a href="http://www.diolt.com/pseoservice.html" style="text-decoration: underline; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#333333;">Search Engine Optimization</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#333333;"> job done for them. However, </span><a href="http://www.diolt.com/pseoservice.html" style="text-decoration: underline; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#333333;">Search Engine Optimization</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#333333;"> is a wide concept and includes several features and functions and a lot of things to be done side by side so that the whole Search Engine Optimization job can be done perfectly and the website may rise in its page ranking. Therefore for all these purpose there is the need to seek the help of some SEO service providing company so that you may not have to worry too much and spend your valuable time in getting your</span><a href="http://www.diolt.com/pseoservice.html" style="text-decoration: underline; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#333333;">website optimized </span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#333333;">as per the demands of the leading search engines.<br /><br />It is true that you can do the Search Engine Optimization for your website all by yourself, but it is always better to get the help of the SEO experts. And in this way not only you can save your valuable time but also there is the chance of better Search Engine Optimization for your website as the </span><a href="http://www.diolt.com/" style="text-decoration: underline; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#333333;">SEO companies</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#333333;"> possess better knowledge and experience of how to do the whole thing in the correct order.<br /><br />As stated earlier there are several things in relation to the Search Engine Optimization that are to be done to get the best results. But the first and foremost thing for optimizing your website is the keyword research. As we all know that the keywords are those specific words that are commonly used by the Internet users to search for specific services or products. To look for any information over the Internet you need to enter these keywords into some search engine and then the search engine would return the result in its result page where there would be several links to those pages containing information in relation to your keyword search. Therefore the keywords are the medium through which the web traffic is directed towards your site. Thus it is easily presumable how important the choice of keyword is for any website.<br /><br />Now the importance of the choice of keywords is understood you must remember a few guidelines for getting better results from your keywords. As for example it is always better to choose less competitive keywords because if you choose some popular keyword the competition on that field would increase to a great extent and it would be tougher for you to yield more traffic from that keyword. On the other hand a less competitive keyword definitely would yield better results than the popular ones. Another thing to be remembered in relation to your keywords is that you should not stuff your website with several keywords as it may lead your website to be charged of manipulating the search engines and using unfair means.<br /><br />Other than the keywords the most important thing for Search Engine Optimization is the link building. This in itself is also a wide concept. It is perhaps the most important thing that can get your website on the top of the page ranking.</span></div><div><br /></div></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Pay Per Click (PPC) management and advertising</h1> <p>2009-09-01T01:46:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style=" color: rgb(1, 157, 141); font-family:Verdana;font-size:12px;"><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">We provide a fully comprehensive Pay Per Click search marketing service, including:</span></span></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><h2 style=" margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-size:1em;"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">PPC Management and Campaign Planning</span></span></h2><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Choosing the right keywords for your</span><a href="http://www.diolt.com/ppay-per-click-ppc-management.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"> PPC campaign</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"> is vital to get the most out of </span><a href="http://www.diolt.com/ppay-per-click-ppc-management.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Pay Per Click advertising</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"> and generate high-quality, motivated traffic to your site. We are highly experienced in setting up PPC campaigns, from keyphrase research to budget projection.</span></span></p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">As part of your pay per click (ppc) management, we constantly monitor your account to ensure that positions don't slip.</span></span></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">We also ensure that we get the best ROI for your business by advising of the right phrases to target. It's about attracting buyers not browsers!</span></span></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><strong><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Example:</span></span></strong></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Targeting the phrase "golf" - someone using this phrase could be searching for the latest model Volkswagen Golf, a second hand Volkswagen Golf, a shop selling golf clubs, a golf course in Edinburgh… the list is endless.</span></span></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">The secret of successful Pay Per Click campaign management and good ROI is to use as targeted phrases as possible. PPC Creatives</span></span></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Pay Per Click advertisements have to be written to very strict guidelines. We are experts at working within these guidelines to produce tight, focussed copy that's proven to produce results.</span></span></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><h2 style=" margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-size:1em;"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Bid Management</span></span></h2><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Effective bid management is the key to maximising your revenue from a Pay Per Click marketing campaign while keeping expenditure down. As part of the </span><a href="http://www.diolt.com/ppay-per-click-ppc-management.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Pay Per Click (PPC) management</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">, we use a combination of manual and automated bid management techniques to ensure that you're getting the best possible placement for the lowest possible cost.</span></span></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><h2 style=" margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-size:1em;"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Tracking</span></span></h2><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">PPC tracking provides you with details of those people signing up as a result of your PPC advertising. This allows us to assess the effectiveness of your campaign and provides us with the detail to adjust your campaign appropriately.</span></span></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><h2 style=" margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-size:1em;"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Analysis</span></span></h2><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span><a href="http://www.diolt.com/ppay-per-click-ppc-management.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Pay Per Click campaigns</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"> offer unprecedented levels of customer intelligence which we can use to assess what the strengths and weaknesses of your campaign are and adjust your campaign appropriately.</span></span></p><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><h2 style=" margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-size:1em;"><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Pay Per Click Reporting</span></span></h2><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /></span><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">As part of the </span><a href="http://www.diolt.com/ppay-per-click-ppc-management.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Pay Per Click (PPC) management</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">, you are provided with detailed, comprehensive monthly reports so you can see exactly how each keyphrase in your campaign is performing. Reports include summaries of top performing phrases, conversion rates as well as advice on the best way forward. In addition, deeper analysis is provided for each phrase: no. of impressions, no. of clicks, average click through rate, average cost per click</span></span></p></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Effective Link Building for SEO</h1> <p>2009-08-25T09:30:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: verdana; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px; ">As a widely used activity in <a href="http://www.diolt.com/pseoservice.html">Search Engine Optimization (SEO)</a>, <a href="http://www.diolt.com/plink-building.html">link building</a> is considered one of the essential factors to help make SEO effective. It involves the generation of links, whether through, but not limited to blog and forum posting and directory submission.<br /><br />The establishment of several inbound links leading to your main website can help your pages being ranked higher in search engines, depending on the keywords you are optimized for. One-way links are much more helpful in boosting your page rank than reciprocal or multi-way links.<br /><br />A website’s targeted traffic is a main consideration before starting <a href="http://www.diolt.com/plink-building.html">link building activities</a>. It determines where you want to place the links leading to your website to ensure that you will fetch users that are highly interested in your products or services. The more relevant traffic you drive in, the more chances of your profits to be increasing.<br /><br />As mentioned above, the most effective link building is by establishing one-way links directing to your website. It is an inbound link pointing only to one direction. Thus, it is given the highest recognition by search engine bots in defining the relevance of your pages. One-way links can be built by sending articles related to your site to article directories and content sites, many of which can be found online.<br /><br />Another method of link building is through multi-way linking, which entails the creation of several non-reciprocal links among at least three partner websites. The links only go one-way. Other ways of building links include posting videos, images, or RSS feeds on your partner sites.</span><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;font-size:100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px;"><br /></span></span></div><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:verdana;font-size:100%;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px;">A website owner can embark on a link campaign with the help of <a href="http://www.diolt.com">professional SEO services</a>. Such companies offer to do your link building campaign for you at specific rates. <a href="http://www.diolt.com/plink-building.html">Professional link building services</a> usually offer to increase the relevance of your web pages through planting relevant and permanent inbound links pointing to your website.<br /><br />Their activities include submission of articles to directory listings, submission to sites with high PR links, distribution of articles to article and blog sites, and social network listing. The main goal of link building is to help you reach your marketing goals by driving your targeted traffic back to your main website and allowing them to convert or take the course of action most profitable to your business. This means that your inbound links should be placed in sites related to yours, sites that preferably have high PR links.<br /><br />However, you should avoid over linking, which means having too many hyperlinks. Search engine bots for main search engines such as Google and Yahoo can recognize whether or not certain links are relevant. They sense excessive links of a page and disregard them in determining your page rank.<br /></span></span></div><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Using Website SEO to Boost Traffic</h1> <p>2009-08-21T22:53:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; color: rgb(1, 157, 141); font-size: 12px; "><div class="news-body"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">More and more people these days are using websites as a way to help pay their bills. Some people are even using them as their sole source of income! Creating a thriving, successful website isn’t easy and it takes a lot of hard work. One of the keys in making a website successful is to know how to execute SEO, or </span><a href="http://www.diolt.com/pseoservice.html" style="text-decoration: underline; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Search Engine Optimization</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">properly.<br /><br />What is search engine optimization? Simply put, it’s basically the process of increasing and improving the quality and volume of traffic to a specific web page. When someone types a specific search term into a search engine, that search engine begins scanning its internal database, looking for that specific phrase, or “keyword.” Then the search engine returns reference to the web pages that best match the search terms. The higher up in the search results a web page is, the more likely it is to improve its traffic flow.<br /><br />Search engine optimization is a strategy web designers and SEO specialist use to ensure a web page is one of the first web pages returned on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP). SEO really becomes important when the competition for a given product or service is high. You may have the best thing going for consumers but if your search engine placement is low your traffic will suffer. So to give a web page an edge, people employ SEO tactics to place keywords within the content of their pages to improve their chances of getting traffic.<br /><br /></span><h2 style="font-size: 1em; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Here are some great guidelines to follow when decideing to implement SEO.</span></h2><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"><br /><br />First choose your keywords or key phrases carefully, keeping in mind that you should select only one, two or three at most for each page you decide to optimize. The keywords/phrase must be relevant to the page and must be terms that people will use to search for your product or service.<br /><br />SEO is done on a page by page basis. Each and every page of a website can be optimized but you should concentrate on 1 – 3 pages of your site (more if the site is large). No need to do SEO for an About Us or Contact Us type page.<br /><br />If possible select a URL for your site that contains the main keyword/phrase for the Home page of the site. It is difficult to find the perfect URL these days so consider being creative by using dashes (-) in the URL. I.E. ( my-site-is-the-best.com)<br /><br />Make full use of Meta Tags. There are three important Meta Tags (Keywords, Description and Title). Search engines use the information defined in these tags to help determine what the page is about. Place the most important keyword/phrase as close to the front of the Meta Tag definition as possible. Keep keywords/phrase to a minimum, using too many keywords will dilute the value.<br /><br />- Use the keywords/phrases within the content of the page. When you place text on the page, be sure to use the main keyword/phrase often but without excess. Overuse of the keyword/phrase can be deemed spammy by the search engines and make the page hard to read by the visitor.<br /><br />- Use the keyword/phrase in main headers, Alt Tags of images or graphics on the page and if possible as anchor text links from other pages within the site.<br /><br />- Something called semantically related words and or synonyms to the keywords can be extremely effective to SERP. For instance, if your main key phrase is “wooden chairs”, words like stool or bench or seat will give additional value to the main keyword/phrase and will aid in boosting your SERP. A very good tool to assist you with the selection of semantically related words can be found at http://labs.google.com/sets. Once you find additional related words use those in the content often but again without excess. Strive to keep the written content on the page natural sounding.<br /><br /><a href="http://www.diolt.com">SEO</a> is an extremely powerful technique used for the sole purpose of getting available traffic for a given keyword/phrase to a web page. By careful selection of keywords/phrase and using those words appropriately on a web page, additional free traffic can be obtained. SEO does not guarantee sales success, once a visitor makes it to the website it becomes the responsibility of the site content (text, graphics, layout, etc) to make a sale or conversion.</span></div><div><br /></div></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>How to avoid Google penalisation?</h1> <p>2009-08-21T22:52:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; color: rgb(1, 157, 141); font-size: 12px; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Webmasters are still at the stage where they are unaware of the potential dangers that lurk in internet marketing. For years now they have been developing sites without really knowing that one day it could harm your status in the search engines. To help web designers and developers, and even those doing home internet marketing, Google released its webmaster guidelines that go through the areas webmasters need clarity on so that they can avoid taking part in black hat (unethical) seo techniques.<br /><br />One of the classic errors that webmasters make is producing hidden text or embedding hidden links on pages. This sort of content can give Google the impression that your site is untrustworthy because the content seen by users is different to that of the search engines. Hidden text can be done setting same colour text on same colour background, putting text behind an image, using CSS to hide text and setting the font size to 0.<br /><br />Cloaking is also seen as bad,as is redirecting. Again, this is the process of dishonesty because the content seen by users is different to that of the search engines. Presenting results that are different can cause a site to be deemed as misleading and may see pages removed from the index. An example of cloaking is presenting different content to </span><a href="http://www.diolt.com/pseoservice.html" style="text-decoration: underline; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">search engines</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"> than to users.<br /><br />Using software such as Web Position Gold,which sends automated queries to Google, takes up valuable resources, so it’s best to avoid this at all costs.<br /><br />It’s very easy to assume that you know how search engine optimisation marketing works, but at the end of the day, if you’re not equipped with the right tools you won’t get the full impact that you could receive for your efforts. Packing pages full of keywords will not get you to the top of Google, in fact the opposite. It will declass you and earn you a penalty, if not, exclusion from the search engine index altogether.<br /><br />The key to a successful campaign involves avoiding the above, but using fresh, original, and relevant content. This will not only benefit the user, but will add points to a website and gain better positions in the SERPS. </span><br /></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Professional Website Design, Web Development and Web Marketing Services</h1> <p>2009-08-13T12:37:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: arial; color: rgb(51, 51, 51); font-size: 12px; line-height: 12px; "><p style="padding-top: 6px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 6px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 18px; "><span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Quality, price and on-time delivery that’s what is all about. It is a leading website design company that provides custom website design on time and on budget.</span></span></p><p style="padding-top: 6px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 6px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; line-height: 18px; "><span style="color:#008080;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Within a short span of time we have earned a strong reputation as a website design company and as a result we have got the global giants as our clients. We are known for professional </span><strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">website design</span></strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"> that are technically excellent and user friendly.<br /><br />We value your time and money. You are going to get </span><strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">stylish and affordable </span></strong><strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">web design</span></strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"> that describes your business in the best possible way. You can get the professional website design services with a personal touch.<br /><br />You want to start a </span><strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">new website</span></strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">? We will offer you the best </span><strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">website design</span></strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">.<br /></span><strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Diolt</span></strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"> team is a perfect blend of price & quality. We ensure efficiency and reliability.<br /><br />We cater to the individual need of our clients. Whether you are a small organization or a corporate body requiring </span><strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">brochure</span></strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"> </span><strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">website or e-commerce website</span></strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">, we are there to provide you the best effective solutions for your online presence.<br /><br />Our team of experienced </span><strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">website designers</span></strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">, </span><strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">web developers</span></strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"> and </span><strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">SEOs</span></strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"> make sure that your website exceeds the highest standards of web design, development, usability and traffic.<br /></span><br /><strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;">Diolt.com</span></strong><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color:#000000;"> has redefined the standards of website designing.</span><br /></span></p></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Diolt.com</h1> <p>2009-08-06T03:34:00.000-07:00</p> We have almost changed the website design, it took 5 days. Please view website and give us your valueable comment and ideas.<div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div>www.Diolt.com</div><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Do Meta Geo Tags Influence Google?</h1> <p>2009-07-22T07:53:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'normal Arial';font-size:12px;"><h2 style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 3px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font-size:16px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; font-size:12px;"><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; "><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-weight: normal; "><b>Matt Cutts Talks Geo Tags and Webmaster Tools</b><br /><br /></span></b></p><b><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 5px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 5px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: left; vertical-align: top; float: right; display: block; width: 50px; height: 61px; "></div><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Google's Matt Cutts frequently posts useful tips for webmasters on the <a href="http://www.youtube.com/user/GoogleWebmasterHelp" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">Google Webmaster Central YouTube channel</a>. The short clips generally offer valuable nuggets of info that can have an impact on your site's performance in Google.<br /><br />In these videos, Matt always answers questions submitted by users, and in <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JD0y0Jk-zzQ" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">a recent one</a> he answers the question:<em> </em>"How do meta geo tags influence search results?" </p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; "><br /></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; "><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/JD0y0Jk-zzQ&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowScriptAccess" value="always"></param></object></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; "><br /></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; "></p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Cutts says it's not something Google really looks at at all. He says they do look at:</p><blockquote>- IP Address<br />- gTLD<br />- ccTLD</blockquote><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">He also points out that there's a feature in <a href="https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home?hl=en" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">Google's Webmaster Tools</a>where you can tell it that your site pertains to a specific country even though it's a dot com. "Typically the geotags that are in meta tags are not as useful and We don't tend to give those as much weight if at all," says Cutts. He suggests spending your time:</p><blockquote>- trying to make sure you have the right domain name<br /><br />- trying to make sure you have the right IP address if you can<br /><br />- If you have content (even if it's geo-located) even if it's a sub-domain or a sub-directory, you can specify it in Google's Webamster Tools. You can tell it that certain content is relevant for a particular country.</blockquote><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">These are good things to keep in mind if geographic information is important to your site. Have you used the Webmaster Tools Feature Cutts refers to?</p><p></p></b><p></p></span></h2></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google Shares More Chrome OS Details</h1> <p>2009-07-10T02:42:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'normal Arial'; font-size: 12px; "><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">The initial announcement about Google Chrome OS was, while exciting, extremely lacking in details. Now, Google's decided to share a bit more info, and the facts paint an interesting picture about the state of the operating system's development. </p><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 5px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; text-align: left; vertical-align: top; font-size: 10px; float: right; width: 200px; color: rgb(153, 153, 153); "></div><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Is it nearly finished? Not even started? Here's the evidence supporting that first idea: according to a FAQ post on the <a title=""Google Chrome OS - FAQ"" href="http://chrome.blogspot.com/2009/07/google-chrome-os-faq.html" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">Google Chrome Blog</a>, the Google Chrome OS team is working with an impressive list of computer products corporations including Acer, Adobe, ASUS, Freescale, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Qualcomm, Texas Instruments, and Toshiba.</p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">So it might be that the operating system's already getting stuck in various ready-to-buy boxes.</p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">On the other hand, the post states, "If you are interested in a full time position as a software engineer please visit the jobs pages for the following offices and indicate that you are interested in Chrome." Then the cities of Aarhus, Kirkland, London, Montreal, Mountain View, Reston, San Francisco, Santa Monica, St. Petersburg, and Tokyo are named.</p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">So apparently the Google Chrome OS team is far shy of full strength.</p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Both pieces of information point to an intensive, global effort, however, which is worth recognizing.</p><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Also, with regards to the FAQ, the Google Chrome Blog post promised, "We'll be sure to add more to this list as popular questions come in," so even more details may soon be shared.</p></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google Wave - An Online Communication and Collaboration Tool</h1> <p>2009-07-06T10:59:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:Arial;font-size:21px;"><div id="webshot" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; float: left; "><a href="http://wave.google.com/" rel="nofollow" onclick="reportStats('continueToAppGoogle_Wave/img') target=" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; color: rgb(71, 144, 18); "></a></div><div id="description" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 230px; "><h1 style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 5px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 0px; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: -1px; color: rgb(71, 144, 18); font-family:tahoma;font-size:28px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="color: rgb(0, 0, 0); letter-spacing: normal; font-family:Arial;font-size:21px;"><a href="http://wave.google.com/">Google Wave</a> is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.</span></h1><div><br /></div></div></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Demomemo - A Social Quotation Service</h1> <p>2009-07-06T03:24:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 21px; "><div id="webshot" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; float: left; "><a href="http://deepmemo.com/" rel="nofollow" onclick="reportStats('continueToAppDemomemo/img') target=" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; color: rgb(71, 144, 18); "></a></div><div id="description" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 20px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 230px; "><h1 style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 5px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 5px; margin-left: 0px; font-size: 28px; font-weight: normal; font-family: tahoma; letter-spacing: -1px; color: rgb(71, 144, 18); "><a href="http://deepmemo.com/" rel="nofollow" onclick="reportStats('continueToApp/Demomemo/ttl') target=" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; color: rgb(71, 144, 18); text-decoration: none; ">Demomemo - A Social Quotation Service</a></h1><br />deepmemo allows easily and quickly to save everything interesting you come across in the Internet. Using tags you can easily organize your quotes and notes and find the information you need among all the rest that you saved.<a href="http://deepmemo.com/" rel="nofollow" id="continue" onclick="reportStats('continueToApp/Demomemo/btn')" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 20px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 270px; color: rgb(71, 144, 18); display: inline !important; text-align: center; "></a></div></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>With 3.5 launch, Firefox faces new challengers</h1> <p>2009-07-02T22:53:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; "><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">A funny thing to happened to <a href="http://www.cnet.com/firefox-3/" section="luke_topic" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">Firefox</a> on the way to vanquishing Internet Explorer: the Mozilla browser's success opened the door for a host of its other competitors.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Even as Internet Explorer's market share has slipped--down a dramatic 8 percentage points to 65.5 percent in about the last year--Firefox programmers face a surprising question: should they be more worried about the programmers in Redmond, Wash., or about those working on Apple's <a href="http://download.cnet.com/mac/browsers/2001-2137_4-0.html" section="luke_topic" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">Safari</a>, Google's Chrome, and Opera?</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Firefox has gained about 3 percentage points to 22.5 percent in market share, according to Net Applications' statistics since July 2008, and Firefox backer Mozilla doubtless hopes for more gains with <a href="http://news.zdnet.com/8301-17939_109-10275863-2.html" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">Tuesday's release of Firefox 3.5</a>. But Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome each gained 2 percentage points, to 8.4 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively, indicating a growing appetite for alternatives to Internet Explorer that's not completely met by Firefox. Opera stayed flat at about 0.7 percent.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">In short, Firefox isn't the only scrappy underdog in town, and Firefox fans' easy us-versus-them polarization is transforming into a more complicated multilateral equation.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Having other IE challengers helps legitimize Firefox, because the idea of straying from the IE fold appears more legitimate, but the alternatives also collect some of the new users venturing farther afield. For its part, though, Mozilla likes to see the glass as half full.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">"One of our biggest challenges is helping people to understand that they have a choice about their Web browser, and how big a difference that choice can make," Firefox director Mike Beltzner said. "Every release is an opportunity for us to bring improvements directly to our growing user base, but also help many users indirectly by putting pressure on Microsoft to improve their product as well."</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Version 3.5 has been, relatively speaking, long in the making. It began its life as what was intended to be a quick and modest upgrade to Firefox 3.0, but the version number expanded along with Mozilla's ambitions for the software.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">And it is indeed an important release, both because of competitors and because of <a href="http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/comingsoon/" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">new Firefox 3.5 features</a>.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; "><b style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">What's in it for users?</b><br />Firefox 3.5 has a host of improvements, some the sort of thing people can notice immediately and some plumbing improvements that could help the Web in the long run. With a release in 70 languages, a lot of people will be able to try</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Under the covers but providing a direct benefit it <a href="http://news.zdnet.com/8301-1001_3-10023723-92.html" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">TraceMonkey</a>, the new engine that runs Web page programs written in the common JavaScript language. That will mean Web applications such as Google Docs get faster today and, if JavaScript speed improvements continue, more sophisticated tomorrow.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Another feature people might appreciate directly is private browsing mode, which erases evidence on your computer of where you've taken your browser. It's flippantly called porn mode, but it also can be useful to keep your boss from knowing what you've been up to while on company time or searching for Valentine's Day gifts. Along with private browsing goes the ability to excise particular sites or recent activity after the fact, too--though it should be noted that none of these options erase your fingerprints from the servers you visited.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Mozilla also is excited about HTML video, which makes it possible not only to embed video in Web pages without using plug-ins such as Adobe Systems' Flash Player, but also to have that video interact with other elements on the Web page. That's not likely to revolutionize the Web in the short term, especially because of prickly issues regarding file format support, but it could help in the long run.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Design fans will be excited about <a href="http://craigmod.com/journal/font-face/" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">embeddable fonts</a> that can spruce up Web pages, though typeface designers might be leery of yet another avenue for unlicensed copying of their work.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Deeper down, Firefox 3.5 also adds HTML 5 storage abilities to help make Web applications work when offline, "Web Workers" to let Web applications work on tasks in the background without the user interface bogging down, and improvements to standards such as CSS and SVG for better graphics. And a geolocation function can let Web sites know where you are, handy for maps and other local services.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Collectively, it's an important foundation, though just getting them into version 3.5 is only the first step. Firefox users tend to update relatively swiftly, but they're still a minority on the Web, and Web programmers tend to wait for some critical mass before they can afford to support the latest browser features.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; "><b style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Fending off rivals</b><br />Competitors aren't standing still. Chrome was missing many important features such as bookmark management when it launched in September, but Google has rapidly been fleshing out the product, including the addition of rough <a href="http://www.cnet.com/apple-mac.html" section="luke_topic" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">Mac</a> OS X and Linux versions in May. Also notably, Google has continued to drive its V8 JavaScript engine ever faster, and Chrome's extensions mechanism is rapidly maturing.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Meanwhile, <a href="http://download.cnet.com/8301-2007_4-10260313-12.html" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">Apple released Safari 4</a> in June for both Windows and Mac OS X. Safari uses much of the same WebKit engine for rendering Web pages that Chrome, but it uses a different JavaScript engine, called Nitro by Apple and Squirrelfish Extreme at WebKit. Apple is loudly banging the "fastest browser" drum for Safari, and though the claim is grand, it does spotlight that performance is a major issue in today's browser competition.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Don't view Firefox developers as complacent, though. Performance improvements are a top priority in the <a href="https://wiki.mozilla.org/Firefox/Namoroka" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">successor to Firefox 3.5, called Namoroka</a>, including fast launch speed, a present Chrome advantage. The new version is scheduled for release in early to mid-2010.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">A host of other improvements also are under development. Among them:</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">• <a href="https://labs.mozilla.com/2009/06/weave-0-4-0-released/" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">Weave</a> is a project to synchronize bookmarks, passwords, preferences, and other settings across multiple browsers, including the mobile version of Firefox, code-named Fennec. Weave also can sync <a href="https://labs.mozilla.com/projects/firefox-personas/" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">personas</a>, another new feature that lets people customize Firefox's appearance.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">• A project called <a href="http://mozillalinks.org/wp/2009/06/first-results-of-electrolysis-multi-process-firefox/" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">Electrolysis</a> is designed to improve isolation between different tabs and between plug-ins and tabs, improving security and reliability.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">• <a href="https://jetpack.mozillalabs.com/" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">Jetpack</a> is designed to be a new framework for add-ons that can be developed using Web page design standards. That's the same approach Google chose for Chrome extensions.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">• People use more and more tabs, and tab management is tougher, so work is under way to address the issue--perhaps with an <a href="http://limi.net/articles/reinventing-tabs-for-the-browser" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">automatically expanding or contracting tab list</a> on the left edge of the browser instead of on a strip along the top.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">• <a href="https://labs.mozilla.com/projects/snowl/" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">Snowl</a> is a system that tries to unify messaging operations, whether messages originate from e-mail, Web forums, RSS feeds, social networks, or other sources.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">• <a href="https://labs.mozilla.com/2009/06/ubiquity-0-5-preview-release/" style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; text-decoration: none; color: rgb(0, 77, 153); cursor: pointer; ">Ubiquity</a> is designed to let Firefox interpret a wide range of formal or informal text commands, turning the browser into a more general window on the world.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Also, Firefox has some incumbent advantages of its own--enough market share that Web developers need to test their sites for Firefox compatibility and a range of add-ons to customize the browser, for example. Those are strong enough to keep people from rapidly switching away even if they're trying other browsers, too.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">So yes, Firefox has abundant new competitors. But it hasn't been pushed aside.</p></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>The breaking news of Michael Jackson's death on Thursday triggered an alert at Google over a potential malware attack.</h1> <p>2009-07-02T22:49:00.001-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Verdana; font-size: 12px; line-height: 18px; "><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">As reports began to circulate, first of Jackson's hospitalization, then of his death, some people searching for news on Google found themselves looking at a page that said: "We're sorry, but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application."</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">The page asked users to enter a Captcha code in order to continue their searches.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">"When you get huge volumes of searches, an interstitial page comes up to make sure we aren't coming under attack," a spokesman for the company told ZDNet UK on Friday. "The volumes searching for Michael Jackson during the night were such that a page did come up, and it slowed things down for a short period."</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Asked how the volume of searches compared with other breaking-news events, Google's spokesman described the spike as "volcanic" — the term used in the Google Trends labs project to define the highest level of search volumes.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">"This is one of the biggest [spikes] we've seen in recent times," the spokesman said.</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; ">Google malware alert over Michael Jackson's death:</p><p style="padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; margin-top: 15px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 15px; margin-left: 0px; "><br />The interstitial page delivered by Google to some people searching for news on Michael Jackson's death.</p></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google Gives SEO Advice to the World</h1> <p>2009-06-05T22:20:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'normal Arial'; font-size: 12px; "><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Google <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/seo-starter-guide-now-available-in-40.html" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">announced today</a> that its SEO Starter Guide is now available in 40 languages. This covers 98% of the global Internet audience according to the company. <br /><br />"We hope that webmasters around the world can use the guide to improve their sites' crawlability and indexing in search engines," says Brandon Falls of Google's Search Quality Team. <br /><br />If you are unfamiliar with Google's SEO Starter Guide, it is a "compact guide" that lists best practices according to Google that both teams within the company and external webmasters can use to improve the indexing of their sites.</p><center></center><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">The guide was announced <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2008/11/googles-seo-starter-guide.html" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">back in November</a>, focusing on areas like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, etc.<br /><strong><br />Here's the list of the languages it is now available in:</strong><br /><br />- Arabic<br />- Bulgarian<br />- Catalan<br />- Chinese (Simplified)<br />- Chinese (Traditional)<br />- Croatian<br />- Czech<br />- Danish<br />- Dutch<br />- English<br />- English (GB)<br />- Filipino<br />- Finnish<br />- French<br />- German<br />- Greek<br />- Hebrew<br />- Hindi<br />- Hungarian<br />- Indonesian<br />- Italian<br />- Japanese<br />- Korean<br />- Latvian<br />- Lithuanian<br />- Norwegian<br />- Polish<br />- Portuguese (BR)<br />- Portuguese (PT)<br />- Romanian<br />- Russian<br />- Serbian<br />- Slovak<br />- Slovenian<br />- Spanish<br />- Swedish<br />- Thai<br />- Turkish<br />- Ukrainian<br />- Vietnamese<br /><br />You can get the download link for any of those languages <a href="http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/06/seo-starter-guide-now-available-in-40.html" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">here</a>. If you want to make sure your site is ranking as well as it should be in Google, it's probably not a bad idea to go over it and apply the advice to your site - particularly if you are new to the game.</p></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>The Making of Google's New Search Options</h1> <p>2009-05-16T03:49:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'normal Arial'; font-size: 12px; "><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Earlier this week, Google <a href="http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2009/05/12/google-takes-the-next-step-in-personalized-search" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">launched</a> what I consider to be the company's next step in personalized search - "search options." Essentially, it is a link searchers can click, which brings up a left-side navigation menu that allows for different ways of searching. <br /><br />The following video shows how it works if you have not yet experimented with it for yourself:</p><center style="text-align: left;"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/MtirDMfcOKE&rel=0&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param></object><br /></center><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px;">Google has now provided a "behind the scenes" look at how they came up with the user experience and design of "search options" that we see today. They tested some options and used eye-tracking and usability studies to aid them along the way.</span></p><center><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/behind-scenes-of-search-options-panel.html" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; "></a></center><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">"After each study, we iterated on the designs, making changes to everything from the order and behavior of the options, to the location of the panel and the way people opened and closed it," says a post from the User Experience Team. "We also paid close attention to the visual design of the options panel. We wanted it to feel familiar –- not only to work the way you expect from Google, but to look and feel like Google, too. Even though you just started using the panel, we hope it will seem as if it were there all along."<br /><br />The team provides a look at some samples of designs for "search options" that were considered before settling on the one that is now available:</p><center><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/behind-scenes-of-search-options-panel.html" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; "></a><br /><br /></center><center><a href="http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/05/behind-scenes-of-search-options-panel.html" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; "></a></center><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">People seem to be generally pleased with the "search options" feature. A quick Twitter search to see what people are saying about it brings back comments like "very impressed, "more irrelevant noise filtering," and "Finally! Thank you Google!" I'm sure Google appreciates this positive feedback considering the backlash the company's been receiving with regards to other issues.</p></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> <article> <h1>Google Launches Recommendation Gadget for Friend Connect</h1> <p>2009-05-16T03:46:00.000-07:00</p> <span class="Apple-style-span" style=" ;font-family:'normal Arial';font-size:12px;"><b>Let Users Vote on Content on Your Site</b><br /><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">Google has introduced some recommendations gadgets for Google Friend Connect. Site owners with Google Friend Connect enabled can now recommend content they like to other users.</p><center><a href="http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2009/05/surface-your-best-content.html" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; "></a></center><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; ">"Members can recommend the content they like, anything from a whole page to a single photo, by simply clicking a button," <a href="http://googlesocialweb.blogspot.com/2009/05/surface-your-best-content.html" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">explains</a> Mendel Chuang, Product Marketing Manager, Google Friend Connect. "Then you and anyone who visits your site can see what parts of your site are the most popular. The items with the most votes will surface to the top of the list, making it easier for others to find even if it's buried deep within your site. You can even see which members have recommended a given item and learn more about them."</p><center style="text-align: left;"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/9jJI-9fqhz0&border=1&color1=0xb1b1b1&color2=0xcfcfcf&hl=en&feature=player_embedded&fs=1"><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></object><br /></center><p style="margin-top: 10px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal 'normal Arial', Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: collapse; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 2px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 2px;">Google has set up a sample site here for you to get an idea of how it works. On this particular site for "City Photos" users have voted on specific photos which appear in the gadget under the heading "Recommended Photos."</span><br /><br />Chuang notes that there is a session called "Google Friend Connect Gadgets: Best Practices in Code and Interaction Design" at Google I/O on May 27th that developers looking to build gadgets can attend. To get gadgets including the one discussed here, simply go to<a href="http://google.com/friendconnect" style="color: rgb(0, 105, 210); text-decoration: none; ">google.com/friendconnect</a>.</p></span><div class="blogger-post-footer"></div> </article> </main></body></html>