Security is the lifeblood of any web application and every online business. No matter how hard you work designing a great site, creating high-end content, building a lively traffic stream, and improving every aspect of your online business, it can easily be stolen away if you aren’t protected.
Protecting your web presence seems like a daunting task, but there are simple solutions that any webmaster can do to increase security of their applications. (more…)
Search engine optimization is not the only solution, SEO, like a tool, serves a very specific purpose and function, which is to increase exposure for your website. However, just because you gain exposure and drive traffic to a page or a website, does not ensure success alone.
Factors such as usability (navigation, image placement, font selection, color choice), having a clear call to action, having impeccable content and using the right triggers to engage your target audience are all part of achieving a successful online marketing campaign.
The tendency to rely too heavily on one marketing medium is a crutch that must be balanced and evaluated for its overall performance, it either works or your attachment to it prevents you from letting it go and finding other alternatives.
SEO is inevitably chained to the calculation of relevance and the whims of engineers who program the search engines to return the most relevant results. The parameters are based on the search query and the ability for the search engine to find relevant information on a topic.
As a result, search engines constantly scour the web looking for websites and solutions to quell such inquiries and provide the ideal solution to each proposed impulse. The obvious attraction to search engine traffic is, if you understand what the search engines are looking for, and your content provides that, then you are a likely candidate for high placement and visibility in their index.
The key is, understanding “how to create and position your content” and how this component is entirely up to you. This is where most fail to see how they can take control over search engine positioning. The days of the 5 page website ranking as the most relevant result are coming to a close, if you want the spotlight, you have to earn it with useful information or immense link popularity from a highly trafficked and trusted site to vouch for your pages.
Topical relevance, trust of the domain (how long has it been around, who links to you, who you link to), site architecture, proper titles and tags, proper use of keywords and context and link popularity all comprise relevant factors that have impact.
Although you may not have control of some of these factors, when you start and how you refine your website is still under your control. No amount of SEO is going to make someone purchase a product they don’t need, just like no amount of SEO or keyword positioning is going to appeal to a person who is not interested in the topic.
Posted by Duncan Morris
Over the past couple of days I have been putting together some internal guidelines on various aspects of our jobs. This should ensure that we are giving consistent information to our various clients. Most of these guidelines have been fairly straightforward with nothing in them to write home about. However, one of the hardest guidelines to write has been the one talking about xml sitemaps. So, rather than horde my thoughts, I’m going to open them up to all of you.
Sitemaps are an easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about pages on their sites that are available for crawling. In its simplest form, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site along with additional metadata about each URL… http://www.sitemaps.org
On the surface this seems to be a great addition to any website’s armoury. However, before you rush away and create your sitemap, there are a number of pros and cons you should be aware of.
The first set of benefits revolve around being able to pass extra information to the search engines
I.B.M. plans to build a $360-million data center in North Carolina and another big one in Tokyo, both for delivering cloud computing services to corporate customers. This follows an announcement of a joint cloud research program from Yahoo, Hewlett-Packard and Intel on Tuesday.
osted by great scott!
Anybody who has ever put together a killer piece of linkbait has thought about it: how could I get this kind of attention to my landing pages? It’s an obvious dilemma. You get a ton of traffic, a ton of links, all of the ranking boost that follows, how could you not want that juice directed toward your conversion-centric pages? Well, there are reasons why the two tend to be mutually exclusive, and that’s what Rand explores in this week’s Whiteboard Friday.
Fear not! There are ways a good piece of linkbait can and will benefit your conversions and we’ll explore several of them in this video.
SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday-Why Landing Pages and Linkbait Don’t Mix from Scott Willoughby on Vimeo.
Let it be known that not all methods discussed are of the fairest shades of habberdashery, but that DOES NOT mean we advocate the dark side. Some of this stuff can get you in serious trouble. We discuss it only to educate and warn our readers of tactics they may see and be tempted to try despite the very negative ramifications that may result.
Posted by Danny Dover
I don’t pretend to be nearly as prolific as people like Robert Scoble or Mike Arrington but I have had some notable success with blogging. In addition to the traditional blogging triumphs (links, notable mentions, social media), I have been able to help a lot of people and learn a lot. The following is my way of giving back to a community that has already given me so much. I believe that if somebody follows each of the steps listed below fully and honestly that they will become a substantially better blogger.
A note on blog content:
I like to compare blogs to mattresses. Every mattress needs to have the right softness to support ratio. I imagine top ten posts, weekly roundups and opinion pieces as the padding that makes mattresses soft. Meaty posts, research based pieces and posts announcing new important information are like mattress springs. The key to a successful blog is maintaining the right ratio. Just like different people prefer different mattress ratios, audiences prefer different blog content ratios. Both kinds of posts are a subtle art form and equally important, but the second type of posts are much harder to write on a consistent basis. The following method mostly applies to writing these more in-depth (spring like) blog posts.
Prepare yourself:
Don’t become an expert by acting like one – This might sound counter-intuitive but it really does make sense. Many inexperienced bloggers try to make their work sound important and reputable even when it is not. This is an easy mistake to make because emulating the industry leaders is a logical path to success. Don’t be fooled. Real success comes from distinguishing oneself in a useful way, not by pretending to be something one is not.
Avoid the temptation to brainstorm – Brainstorming is the gateway to poor posts. If you have to scrape the bottom of the pan to come up with a blog post idea, chances are the resulting blog post won’t be your finest. Great bloggers write what they feel they need to write. The resulting posts are the ones other people feel they need to read.
One month after launching its new recommendation system, Digg is already reporting positive results. Digg recommends stories based on other members with similar voting patterns and interests. Chief scientist Anton Kast writes on the Digg Blog:
- Digging activity is up significantly: the total number of Diggs increased 40% after launch.
- The Recommendation Engine is running strong: at any given point in time, the system is generating over 54 Million Recommendations, with the average Digger having nearly 200 Recommendations from an average of 34 “Diggers like you”.
- Friend activity/friends added is up 24%.
- Commenting is up 11% since launch.
Digg’s recommendation engine takes a Last.fm approach to finding people’s whose tastes overlap with yours and then suggesting stories they’ve Dugg up but that you’ve missed. It is collaborative filtering for news.
As Digg becomes more mainstream, it needs technologies such as this to bring it back to its glory days when everybody was interested in the same niche categories. Social recommendations work best when they are extracted from niche communities who are obsessive about one or two topics. Digg started out as a haven for hardcore techies, but has branched out.
The recommendation system is designed to, in effect, help Diggers carve out their own niche communities again. If you happen to like tech industry news, you will see stories from other like-minded Diggers. If you prefer politics or sports, you’ll get those stories. And if you like a combination, the system will grab recommendations from each appropriate bucket.
At least, that is how it is supposed to work in theory. The recommendations seem decent. But I personally haven’t noticed anything that really strikes home. Over time, it should get better.
