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Tag Archive for ‘way’ rss

Intro to Sitecore

by on Oct 10, 2008 (2) Comments

Unlike many content management systems which maintain content in a haphazard manner, Sitecore maintains data in a structured content tree.

Data is represented as items. These items of different types are combined in a tree structure such that an item can have a parent and child items.

Templates are like Object Oriented Classes. A template contains fields that contain the actual content for an item. An item is an instance of a template just as an Object is an instance of a class. A template can have a “Master” which is used to create an item of a template. A master plays the same role as an Object Oriented Constructor. Masters can be configured to specify default values for fields and can specify sub-items that should be created when an item is first created. Templates can be based on other templates and inherit their fields, much like Object Oriented inheritance.

Personalize Your Link Building

by on Oct 07, 2008 (0) Comments

The ethnographic method is an approach of studying a person or group of people by participating in the culture of interest while still remaining a bit of an outsider. At its core is the focus on cultural relativism, which is seeing something through the eyes of the involved. Thus, to get to know someone or a group of people, you have to lose your own set of beliefs and views and start from scratch as you seek out the functional reasons why things happen.

This method is critical for successfully connecting to people, especially online when you have no physical cues to tell you about a person. In essence, you have to lose your own identity at first, in order to get a better idea of how to best connect to someone new. When you approach a potential link partner, you know very little about that person except for a few clues picked up in the analysis of the site that he or she controls. Your best bet is to pick up that information as quickly as possible, because you have a very limited amount of time to make or break that connection.
Personas makes use of the ethnographic method in SEO and are intensely valuable. This process helps you learn about your audience and mindset, and the resulting personas can help you to compare the output of your efforts to the target market in question. It’s commonplace to use personas in areas like usability and social media, but they also can be a tremendous help when written specifically for link development. An audience IS an audience, after all.

Writing personas

Ask.com Taps Semantics for Smarter Search

by on Oct 06, 2008 (0) Comments

Ask.com rolled out a new version of itself Monday. The revamped search engine includes a new user interface with three new technologies — DADs (Direct Answers from Databases), DAFS (Direct Answers From Search) and AnswerFarm — that offer users the ability to search the Web using commonly spoken language.

The enhancements to Ask.com will help the site retain existing users and attract new, said Caroline Dangson, an IDC analyst.

Natural Language Search

Ask.com’s new technologies differ from those used by competitors such as Google (Nasdaq: GOOG), Yahoo (Nasdaq: YHOO) and MSN Search because they enable Web surfers to type real questions, instead of a series of keywords, said Erik Collier, vice president of product management at Ask.com.

Generating Leads in a Web 2.0 World

by on Oct 06, 2008 (0) Comments

Marketing is going through a revolution online, thanks to the continual adoption of the Web 2.0 concepts originally defined by Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty.

If you want to see some excellent graphics and analysis explaining Web 2.0, subscribe to Ross Dawson’s blog, Trends in the Living Networks.

A New Conversation

Social networking has removed many of the obstacles that got in the way of better understanding prospects and customers, and serving them.

A Beginner’s Guide to Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising

by on Oct 01, 2008 (0) Comments

Pay Per Click or PPC is among the most popular of all web-marketing tools. It is nothing but a small two or three line text advertisement which contains keywords and phrases. These small advertisements are usually found on the right side of search pages on leading search engines. Quite often one or two links are also highlighted on search pages. These links are termed ‘sponsored links’ and can be seen in leading search engines such as Google, MSN Live and Yahoo. These sponsored links are nothing but PPC advertisements.

The three entities involved in PPC advertising are the visitor, the host that carries the advertisement and the advertiser, who has advertised a product or service on the host website, usually a leading search engine. In this form of advertising, advertisers have to bid on keywords and phrases. Whenever someone searches a product or service using certain keywords, the search result page will feature those advertisements which contain the keywords using which the visitor actually searched in the first place.

The Quality of SEO Matters

by on Sep 26, 2008 (0) Comments

The quality of SEO matters now more than ever. With constant revisions to dated algorithms, search engines are savvier than ever in discovering sites that lack the proper quality to rank competitively.

In the not so distant past, obsession with the home page, tons of off-topic links bullied their way past search engine algorithms, now, those days are drawing to a close.

Search engines, like people have become fussy readers with a preference of what they consider as a top caliber website that offers educational or beneficial information based on co-citation and engagement.

No amount of SEO is going to pull the wool over the eyes of advanced artificial intelligence like search engine algorithms that look at link clusters (the time stamp and proximity or link velocity of inbound links), search volume click-through data as well as the quality of the sites referencing your own. To be clear and direct, quality is the cornerstone of a successful online presence.

We have known all along that relevant content strategically organized in a way that fundamentally supports information retrieval such as (theming and siloing), has strong internal links and has persuasive and compelling content and usability was the objective.