SEO Web Development | Custom Web Design

Video: Matt Cutt's not a Huge Fan of Article Marketing as an SEO strategy

2011-03-20T09:15:00.000-07:00

An excellent video about Matt Cutts' explaining why Article Marketing is not a Good SEO Strategy.

From the above video he discuss about sites that has: Great Contents, Naturally has links, Good Social Media Marketing so people are linking to it organically...

Video: Google Really Evil???

2010-09-08T08:26:00.000-07:00

Consumer Watchdog has created a new anti-Google video portraying Google CEO Eric Schmidt has some kind of evil ice cream man. The video is a commentary on what the group perceives to be Google's lack of regard for consumer privacy.

Google and Facebook are two of the biggest companies on the web, whatever you think about the privacy practices of either company, both have received a great deal of criticism in this area (though some think the concern about Facebook has been sensationalized by the media).

Consumer Watchdog President Jamie Court writes on the organization's InsideGoogle blog:

Do you want Google or any other online company looking over your shoulder and tracking your every move online just so it can increase its profits? Consumers have a right to privacy. They should control how their information is gathered and what it is used for.

This avatar-style animation video was created to draw attention to Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s lack of regard for our online privacy.

Some have dismissed Consumer Watchdog as being "out there" or "crazy". Others have similar views about Google as the organization. Update: As a reader pointed out, Silicon Alley Insider has discovered that Consumer Watchdog is doing a little tracking of its own.

Google has actually updated its privacy policies. Though it has not actually changed any of its practices, it has made adjustments to make the policies easier to understand.

Google Co Founder Sergey Brin Picture

2010-08-11T20:42:00.000-07:00

I have found some rare picture of the Sergey Brin almost nude.

Sergey Mikhaylovich Brin (Russian: Серге́й Миха́йлович Брин; born August 21, 1973) is a Russian American computer scientist and industrialist who, along with Larry Page, is best known as the co-founder of Google, Inc., the world’s largest Internet company , based on its search engine and online advertising technology. According to Forbes he and Larry Page are currently tied as the 24th richest person in the world with a personal wealth of US$17.5 billion in 2010.

Official Google Reader Blog: Looking for great stuff to read?

2010-03-11T02:57:00.000-08:00

Where do Arianna Huffington and Thomas Friedman go to get different perspectives on the news? Which economics sites does Nobel prize winner Paul Krugman read? What sites and blogs do the editors of Lifehacker, Boing Boing and Kottke read?

These questions have always interested us, so we decided to approach leaders across a variety of fields and ask them what they read online. We got lots of great responses, which we've collected into our second edition of Power Readers. In this edition, we've expanded from Power Readers in Politics to include journalists, techies, fashion critics, foodies, and more. We hope this will be a good place for you to find more great things to read, whether you're new to Google Reader or already have an extensive reading list. Visit www.google.com/powerreaders to explore and subscribe to any of the participants' reading lists, or to any individual sites and blogs they recommend.

More at Official Google Reader Blog: Looking for great stuff to read?

About Tweets: Google Factors for Ranking Tweets

2010-01-26T20:37:00.000-08:00

I have read an article about this matter?

After the Twitter deals were announced, Bing came out and said, "If someone has a lot of followers, his/her Tweet may get ranked higher. If a tweet is exactly the same as other Tweets, it will get ranked lower."

Read more at Google Reveals Factors for Ranking Tweets

Amit Singhal, was the one who has led development of real-time search at the company. According to him, Google also ranks tweets by followers to a very extent, but it's not just about how many followers you get. It's about how reputable those followers are. Which only means that reputation is the key here. Right?

As for me, many seo's are using dummy account and use twitter as their tool for promoting their business. In this tweets real persons must be involved for perfect business.

Web Redesigning and Principles of SEO

2009-07-28T18:21:00.000-07:00

When redesigning a website, search engine optimization (seo) is taken into consideration since web design must be search engine friendly and user friendly.

The site with old content loses out because the Search Engines think (due to the lack of freshness in terms of content) and that the site is considered dormant or dead. These website could receive great traffic and a potentially lucrative increase in business, but without consideration of SEO. That's why content update is still considered as one factor since search engine is finding Fresh content on previously crawled pages to keep their search indexes always fresh.

So here are some factors when redesigning website:

Flash - Although there have been some significant advancement in Search Engine technology and they are beginning to read some flash, a site that's all flash is likely to be harmful to Search Engines. They look great, but the search engines usually won't rank them highly because the content is essentially unreadable. That's why seo are doing some alternative when they have flash site.

Frames - Frames in website make it difficult for search engines to index its pages. What's more, human visitors really struggle with frames, because difficult to read and it's really hard to get an impression of the site. We know that frames are not search engine friendly so why use frames. That's why CSS coding is alternative for framed sites.

Slow Loading - Slow loading page are both annoying to human visitors and search engine crawlers. Human visitors may not have the patience to wait for the pages to load and search engines almost always rank the faster loading pages above the slower ones. If your site has slow loading pages, they need replaced to faster loading pages.

Outdated Contents - Search Engines will simply ignore this site as if it no longer exists. It may have been ok in the past to leave content for months without updating it, but these days, it will soon slip off the radar without regularly updated content. What's more, nothing puts off a human visitor more than out of date content. Search Engines are always crawling sites that are updated in its contents.

The Power of Anchor Text

2009-07-22T19:00:00.000-07:00

First of all what is Anchor Text? Anchor text is a visible hyperlinked text on the page.

For example:

OutsourcingTo.uS is an Australian outsourcing company with a full time onshore/offshore staff of 150 ready to maximize your online investment. Our own network of sites receives over 10,000,000 visitors yearly so we know how to maximize your online activities.

The word within the hyperlink “staff” is called the anchor text.

In a normally built site, anchor text is used to indicate the page that it links to. For example, the text "affordable web design" indicates to visitors that they can expect to see content about the site pertaining to affordable web design if they visit the link. This pattern of usage has been applied in search engine algorithms to improve the relevance of the "target" or the "landing page" URL for the keywords appearing within the anchor text.

The Anchor Text Enhances the Relevance of the Target Page

Note that the keywords in anchor text enhance the relevance of the target page pertaining to the keywords used. While the relevance of the page containing the anchor text is also enhanced to some degree (because of relevant keywords appearing on that page), the real gainer is the target page URL. Use this knowledge to build the relevance of each page of your site, through optimized anchor text containing important keywords, relevant to the theme of such pages, from other pages of your site.

Search Engine Algorithms like Anchor Text

The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of site pages. All search engines that matter, give significant weight to the anchor text on site's pages. In fact Google even has a special operator: allinanchor:keyword, which picks up text only from within the anchor text of indexed pages. This really implies that Google's algorithm is configured to index anchor text as separate queryable data, thereby, making it evident, that Google considers it as one important pointer to page relevance. It has also been studied that anchor text, whether from external or internal pages, is important. It should therefore be ensured that significant attention is given to the inclusion of important keywords in anchor text.

SEO Shades

2009-07-20T18:06:00.000-07:00

As I browse the web I encounter this old article which I got curious, these where types of hats of SEO. If you where SEO which of the following type are you?

This are the shades of SEO according to Tim Converse (the "spam fighter" at Yahoo):

Dark Inky Black Hat SEO: Very evil he’s a typosquatter installing spyware. Plain illegal, too.
Charcoal Hat SEO: Optimizing unrelated pages for all kinds of queries, but within the bounds of legality.
Dark Gray Hat SEO: This SEO is a splogger stealing content from other sites.
Slate Gray Hat SEO: An SEO creating link farms and such.
Gray Hat SEO: SEO who actually reads the search engine’s webmaster guidelines, but then tries as much “evil” as he can get away with.
Light Gray Hat SEO: This SEO creates original content (lots of it), but the content is still only aimed at search engines.
Off-White Hat SEO: This guy not only ensures the site is indexable – he’ll also make sure to get lots of backlinks from friends.
White Hat SEO: This person puts up the content that people are actually searching for, and prepares the site to make it very accessible. White Hat SEOs only optimize those of their pages they deem worthy to be ranking top in search engines.
Luminescent Pearly White Hat SEO: Not only does this SEO do everything the White Hat SEO does, the LPW Hat SEO also makes sure pages will not show up for irrelevant queries.

Via Search Engine Watch

Free Seo Tools : Collection of Helpful SEO Tools

2009-07-16T22:21:00.000-07:00

Free SEO tools to use. Helpful to minimize time and effort. In my seo experience during my past 2 years I've been using this reliable tools for seo.

SEOpen - Provides some basic tools to help with search engine optimization. Including google backlinks, yahoo backlinks, PageRank check, http header viewer, and more. All features are available by right-clicking on an open area of a web page, or by using.

* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/570

Informenter - InFormEnter adds a small, clickable icon next to every input field in a web form, from where you can select the item to be inserted - no typing required.

* https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/673

SEO for Firefox - SEO for Firefox is a cool free Firefox extension that pulls SEO market research data into Google's and Yahoo!'s search results.

* http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html

SEO tools from SEOBOOK - http://tools.seobook.com/extensions/

Backlink Checker - http://backlinkwatch.com/

Live PR Checker - SEO tools that check what is the real PR of the site. Also to know whether it PR is fake or real.

* http://livepr.ezer.com/
* http://seopen.com/seopen-tools/pagerank.php

Keyword Suggestion Tool - This seo tool is capable of checking what keywords are popular and how many searches it generates. Good for keyword analysis when starting seo.

* http://www.wordpot.com/Default.aspx
* http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/search.html
* https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal
* http://freekeywords.wordtracker.com/

SEOMOZ Free Seo Tools - http://www.seomoz.org/tools

Bad Neighborhood Link Checker - This tool is intended as a guide to assist webmasters in locating potential problem areas with their linking strategies, it is not intended to dictate who you do or do not link out to.

* http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm

More seo tools to come...:D

Step-by-Step Web Designing Strategy

2009-07-12T18:24:00.000-07:00

Even a site is already established, there are a number of basic steps that are needed to be questioned to ensure you are heading right to your main goal. The answers to these questions will form the basis for your web design strategy.

1) Firstly, what is the purpose of your site? Is it a marketing tool, a shopping cart to enable online sales, or both? What are your main objectives?
2) Secondly, what are your strengths and weaknesses? If you were in your visitor's "shoes", would you buy from the site and what would make you return?
3) Thirdly, how is your income going to be generated? Will it be from advertising, from site membership fees, from affiliate programs, or from selling your own product? What are your capabilities and how will you use them to maintain a competitive advantage over your rivals?

1) THE PURPOSE OF YOUR SITE

What is the purpose of your site? Why does it site exist? Supporting documents can explain the goals in more detail, but for your web design strategy keep it strategic and high-level.

Your main objectives must therefore must be:

1) Clear focused and specific
2) Measurable
3) Feasible and suitable for the niche you are focusing on.

2) IN YOUR VISITOR'S SHOES

Always put yourself in your website visitor's "shoes". If you were the website visitor, what would keep you on the site? What makes your site sticky? By doing this you can easily identify your strengths and weaknesses! The more focused your site it, the more likely you are to satisfy your visitors’ requirements, and the more likely they are to return and use your site in future. The layout and navigation of your web pages are going to affect the usability of your site. It is very important to get this right and to know which web technologies to use. Your website layout and navigation can make or break your site. Even more important is your Content strategy because you need to provide content that is likely to be targeted at your visitors. Are you providing the content your visitors are looking for?

3) TARGET YOUR AUDIENCE

If you are like most organizations then you are no stranger to the need to know who your site is for. Think about the profile of who comes to your site today and who you want to attract in the future. You can get valuable insights into your audience when you examine the data of your Web analytics tool to see where most visitors go, and what they are searching for.

4) HOW YOUR INCOME IS GENERATED

Informational sites usually generate their revenue from advertising, commissions, membership fees, from affiliate programs and making sales to their members or subscribers using off-the-web marketing, for example through a newsletter or direct mail. Selling is the secondary objective. The main objective of an e-commerce site is to promote an effective marketing message and to make the buying process as easy as possible. Creating a marketing base is the secondary objective. They usually have two types of customers, transactional and relational. The purchase decisions of transactional customers are influenced by short-term reasons such as price, convenience, and/or availability. Relational customers have built up a relationship with the business usually through previous contact. Their purchase decisions are based more on the customer relationship that has been built up, quality of support, and knowledge of the product or service or brand. You need to identify where your market is and what your capabilities are. You need to identify what gives you a competitive advantage over your rivals. Once you have done that you will be able to generate qualified traffic, turn the traffic into qualified leads, and turn the leads into customers. Your website strategy is therefore critical to the success of your site. It must be focused, to ensure your site is visible and attracts qualified leads, and your web pages must be usable to ensure you can convert your traffic.

The benefits of a web design strategy are many. It provides a historical reference point for the project. It seeds much better internal communications for your team. Ideally, the Design Strategy document is treated like a living document and ideas for your team’s workload and budget are measured against it. There may be reasons to shift strategy and move in different directions. When that happens your challenge will be to step back and re-tool the design strategy to meet the changing conditions.

SEO Guide for Web Designers

2009-07-08T03:46:00.000-07:00

This is SEO guide for web designers who wants to learn about making it easier for websites or blogs to be found by search engines.

Why Should Web Designers Learn About SEO?

SEO isn’t only for online marketers. As a web designer or front-end developer, most on-site SEO is their main responsibility.
If the website is not search engine friendly, it might be losing a lot of traffic that designers not even aware of. Remember, besides visitors typing in “www.yourwebsite.com" and backlink referrals; search engines are the only way people can find the website.
SEO is also a value-added service. As a web designer/developer you can sell your SEO skills as an extended service.

Each search engine has its own algorithm in ranking web pages. Understanding the general factors that influence the algorithm can affect your search result position, and this is what SEO experts are hired for. An SEO’s job has two aspects: On-Site (onpage optimization) and Off-Site (offpage optimization).

On-Site SEO: are the things that web designers can do on website, such as: HTML markups, target keywords, internal linking, site structure, etc.

Off-Site SEO: are the things that you have much less control of, such as: how many backlinks you get and how people link to your site.

This is a guide for web designing and development. The main concern is the on-site aspects. If you do your job right and design a beautiful site and produce useful and informative contents. Also you’ll get off-site backlinks and social bookmarks without even lifting a finger.

If you want to learn more on the basics of SEO. You can check this link:

Beginners Guide for SEO

Effective Web Design Useful Tips

2009-07-03T20:23:00.000-07:00

Fast Loading Website designs

The very number 1 tip that every web designer should always follow. Designing a web site that will look fantastic but few people are going to view it if it takes a long time to load. Web Designs should be optimized for the web and should not take more than 15 seconds to load.

Browser Compatibility

Make sure your site is browser compatible. Your web site should look good in both browsers: Firefox and as well as in Internet Explorer. Don't stop designing your site as soon as you find that it looks great on IE and also in Firefox.

Minimize the use of images

By keeping your site simple but neat will keep visitors returning for more. Don't clutter your page with big, bulky images that take much time to load. Instead use tables creatively and design eye - catching icons that will draw a visitor's attention to a particular section of your site. Note: Visitors are usually more interested in content than in design.

Readable and neat looking fonts

Don't use Comic Sans and other fancy fonts that may not be available on most computers. If the font you use is not available in a visitors computer the web site will use the default font of your computer which will make your content much worse. So try to keep to common and professional web fonts. The fonts that I always use are Arial and Verdana.

Check for broken links

Always check for broken links within a site before uploading it to your web server. Some softwares like Dreamweaver, it can check for broken links by right clicking on any file in the Site Files Window and then clicking on Check links - Entire Site.

Web Designing Tips: What To Do and What Not to do

2009-07-01T18:56:00.001-07:00

Make sure each page of the site has something valuable to offer.

This doesn't really relate to website design but it's actually more important than design, which is why it's the very first tip. Fundamentally a web page exists to provide something that's useful or interesting to visitors.

Avoid using some distracting images, sounds, etc.

Animation and sounds are very distracting. How can anyone concentrate on reading what's on your site when there are things blinking or playing around the page? Also, visitors who have slow connections may resent that you wasted their time by forcing them to load animations and sound files against their will. Don't distract your visitors with blinking or scrolling text, animated GIFs, or auto-loading sound.

Never annoy your visitors with pop-up windows.

Nobody likes pop ups. The only reason a site would have pop ups is because the site owner is thinking of his/her own interests rather than the readers. We all know that when we're browsing we hate pop ups, but suddenly when we switch hats and become the site owner, we lose our ability to see through the users' eyes.

More Web Designing Tips at Website Helpers

Web Graphics: GIFS OR JPEG

2009-06-29T04:20:00.000-07:00

The widely supported web image graphic formats are GIF and JPEG. Many are confused about this type of graphics. When should I use GIF and when should I use JPEG?

The easy rule to remember when making or graphic designing:

1. Use GIF format with graphics that have created on computer such as horizontal rules, buttons, or animation.
2. Use JPEG format when the images are scanned pictures or photographs.

GIF file can contain the maximum of 256 colors (8 bit) or less, which is good for customizing your graphic files. For example, if you create a GIF image of a red arrow, , you can customize the file to have only two colors, read and white. This means that the file is very very small because its palette contains only two colors. GIF file will yield a higher quality and smaller size image, compared to JPEG, when it is used with computer generated graphics such as icons, logos, buttons, etc. GIFs also has some special features such as animation, transparency, and interlacing.

JPEG was built to contain 24-bit (16.7+ million colors) and was developed specifically for photographic-style images. JPEG stores the information of images by keeping track of color changes. The advantage of JPEG is that it can carry a smaller file size than GIF when used in storing photographs and images with a wide variety of shading. But, it will not yield a smaller file when dealing with low color level and details like computer generated graphics.

Web Designing Optimization

2009-06-24T03:33:00.000-07:00

All website designers want to have the most attractive website that leaves a visitor completely amazed about their works. A usual scene of an extremely attractive web design involves lots of graphical elements. By increasing the overall page size which the cause to download the page slowly to the browser.

As the average internet bandwidth rate per computer is raising, more and more webmasters allow themselves to develop complex websites loaded with heavy graphic elements. In very extreme cases you can find websites that take as much as a few minutes to load their content in your browser. Of course the user will never wait that long for a website to load, and will move on to the next website in search results.

Never limit the web designer by placing any restrictions that impact the final outcome. You might make the claim that what a web designer can do with graphic software is impossible to implement by code. I disagree. When the design is finished and you are ready to slice it into small images to be used in the html code, your creativity is been tested. Everything you do at this stage will affect the total page size. If your design contains rounded shapes that overlap each other or areas with color gradients, then you must slice it carefully so the outcome is a small file size.

Web Design eCommerce

2009-06-22T19:12:00.000-07:00

eCommerce site must have a unique character that is designed to lead the visitor to one simple duty – to make an online shopping or purchase. Web designer needs to consider a variety of online selling principles while designing an eCommerce website.

Many are probably already asking why eCommerce website design is different from any other website design. They should be attractive, well organized and using the right or perfect colors that will fits the website spirit and so on.

Here are selling Principles that an eCommerce website needs to follow:

By giving user a pleasing experience during his/her online shopping.
By providing sufficient and certain information on who owns the website and why they should be trusted.
The website must be easy to use or to navigate. If it isn’t, the visitor will go to competitor.

The above principles are not new. A path designed to lead the visitor to do what you want him to do…make an online purchase. Unlike the supermarket our website has no smell. In a website the distance from one point to the other is pretty much the same, so the exit is always right there. In a website you can try to order the “shelf” in the way you think will best expose the visitor to many of your products, but there is always a chance that he will find a short cut to another page that can also be the way off your site. As can be seen, although putting your products on the web is much easier then renting space and opening on a supermarket. However, selling your products on the web can be difficult and risky.

A good eCommerce website design will lead the visitor to the right page in one click or two at the most. Sometime web designers will use techniques that would never be considered for non-eCommerce websites. Everyone has seen at least one sales letter website. On these web pages the only link is to the order form. Sales letters are not the most typical eCommerce website because they usually sell only one product. That allows the web designer the ability to exaggerate the one click principle and make it an advantage. All the facts about the product have been presented to the user is a smart way while every few lines he has the option to click on the order form. If he is not yet convinced he will have the option to continue to read more facts and testimonials about the products. Believe it or not, those sales letter websites are actually selling.

An eCommerce web design is also about the layout. One important aspect is where the user’s eyes look first when accessing a web page. Lots of research has been done on this topic. Most research showed that the middle left side area will attract the most attention followed by the center of the page. By using these techniques web designers try to draw the “walking path” for the visitor’s eye, much like what was done at the supermarket. An experienced eCommerce web designer will know how to create designs to meets those demands.

If you are about to open an eCommerce website or you are already own one, make sure you understand the web design principles for online selling. Consider consulting with an experienced website designer preferably someone who has experience with eCommerce websites.

Web Designing Principles

2009-06-18T17:49:00.000-07:00

The basic principles of web design are true for designing a great website. They are illustrated on how to put together design elements in a very effective manner. Designing a web is more than just putting HTML tags up onto a page, and by using these principles will help in building more useful and pleasing web designs.

Balance

Balance, the distribution of light and heavy elements on the page. Larger, darker elements appear heavier in the design than smaller, lighter elements. The principle of balance shows how to lay out pages so that they will work effectively.

Contrast

What do most people think of contrast, usually they typically think of colors or black and white. But there is more to contrast than color. There are contrasting shapes (square vs. circle), or contrasting sizes (large vs. small), or contrasting textures (smooth vs. rough).

Emphasis

Emphasis is what the eye is drawn to in a design. It's tempting to give everything equal emphasis or try to emphasize everything in a design, but this ends up making the design flat and bland. Instead, as a designer you should determine the hierarchy of the page and then apply the emphasis to the elements based on that hierarchy.

Rhythm

Rhythm, also called repetition. It brings an internal consistency to web designs. Patterns are easy for humans to comprehend, and repetition provides patterns that make the site easier to comprehend.

Unity

Unity is also called proximity. It is the principle of keeping like elements together and diverse elements further apart. Unity pulls elements together.

Web Design with the 3 Elements of SEO

2009-06-16T18:00:00.000-07:00

By ensuring that a website is properly optimized for search engines. It is one of the most important steps that an online business will take. Until a business manages to become renowned online (such as amazon, eBay, etc) a huge amount of their traffic will be derived from search engines. Because it is vital that the website appears near the top of search engine results pages. Despite the fact that most online business owners are aware of the importance of achieving a high ranking in the big 3 search engines (Google, Yahoo and MSN) a huge number of them don’t even consider search engine optimization until they have either launched a website or are preparing to. This article aims to explain why it can be hugely beneficial to start an SEO campaign at the same time as, or slightly before, the website is being designed.

Keyphrase Selection

One of the most important steps in the search engine optimization process is the selection of keywords. There are several important aspects to look for in a keyphrase that is likely to prove successful. Firstly it is vital that enough people actually search for a particular term. Secondly it is necessary to analyze the competitors that already hold the page one rankings for that phrase. If the top 20 results in the major search engines are held by dominant authority sites with high page rank ratings it is extremely unlikely that a new website will be able to have a strong impact. Finally the keyphrase has to be considered in relation to how well it relates to the page that it will be linked to. For example, for businesses it is integral that they not only generate traffic but also that the traffic is likely to convert to sales. Typically highly generalized key phrases will generate traffic that is looking for information rather than products or services so it is worthwhile looking into more specific long-tail keyphrases.

When web designing and building a website it is very beneficial if the keyphrases have already been selected. This allows the developer to tie the different sections of the website (or product categories for e-commerce sites) to the keywords making each of these sections far easier to optimize for in the long run.

On-site SEO

One of the first steps that an SEO specialist will take when beginning to optimize a website is to analyze the website and create a list of recommendations on what can be improved to give the site the best chance at achieving high rankings. While often these changes are relatively straightforward to implement after a website is completed it makes far more sense if these recommendations are made early to allow the designer to implement them on their initial build. By doing this the owner of the site can save the considerable amounts of time and money that would have been incurred by writing and then rewriting the code and content on each page.

Copywriting

Another reason for starting SEO before a site is completed is that the copy on the site can be written with search engines in mind. While it is obviously important that the website is written for its human visitors first and foremost there are some straightforward SEO techniques (such as utilising the keyphrase within the text and linking to other relevant pages on the site using keyphrase appropriate anchor text) that can help boost a websites ranking. By figuring out the keyphrases early and writing SEO friendly content from the start a lot of the time and money that is often spent redrafting content can be saved.

Ultimately while it is perfectly possible to embark on an SEO campaign after a website has been completed it usually makes far more sense to start it early and then build the site with the SEO in mind. This can save the considerable amount of time that rewriting Titles, headers, descriptions, content, etc can take and result in a website that is ready to launch with the highest potential to rank highly.

Website Graphic Design Information

2009-06-10T09:01:00.000-07:00

Website design plays a major role in marketing a website and therefore, it is a very efficient and effective way of boosting sales. It is very likely that graphics give the potential customer their first impression of site and it is very important that a consistent overall image of site is created. The quality and positioning of the graphics contained in website are essential for it to look both attractive and professional. If all else fails in a website.

When you're working on a new web design, you need to determine what is the most important part of the page. If your reader gets only one thing from the Web page, what should that one thing be? The challenge of asking this of your clients is that they will invariably say "it's all equally important". If you attempt to make everything on a page emphasized (or bold, or h1, or whatever), you will end up with a page that has very little appeal.

Professional website graphics are attention grabbers and will make your site stand out online . They can enhance your website and increase it's popularity and thus generate revenue. Good website graphics add professionalism to your website, which will in turn entice viewers to return. On the flip side of the coin, poor quality or badly positioned graphics can cause your site more harm than good. Large graphics files can cause web pages to load slowly, potentially losing viewers and damaging your business. Working with graphics is very time consuming and an art form in itself. It might therefore, be more practical/economical, at times, to pay a professional to alter/construct the graphics you require.

Importance of Meta Tags

2009-06-05T07:56:00.000-07:00

The Importance of Meta-tags: The way it Provides for the Human Touch

For the uninitiated, meta-tags are pieces of code within your website that contain information about each page. These tags are supposed to tell search engines and users what the page is about. If you're a little rusty on your Internet jargon, here's a primer. There are essentially and important three types of meta-tags that concern most internet marketers:

* Title - This is the text that appears in the title-bar of your web browser

* Description - This is a quick summary of the information on the page

* Keywords - These are words that are important in the article

Up until about 4 years ago, there was a tremendous focus on meta-tags as a method of improving search engine rankings. Webmasters and also web designers could stuff all sorts of words into the meta-tags to improve their search engine rankings for the words they wanted to rank well for. It wasn't long before the search engines caught on to this little trick, and as a result the efficacy of "keyword-stuffed" meta-tags dwindled over time. Posts on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) forums heralded the demise of the meta-tag with posters claiming that Google all but ignored the meta-tags. It seemed that there was no use for meta-tags anymore - at least from the perspective of the online marketer.

Meta-tag Re-emergence

But then a funny thing happened. The search market started to fracture. Yahoo and MSN both spun up their own search engines and dropped Google's results from their engines. Both Yahoo and MSN's new engines seemed to use content from the Title and Description meta-tags to display in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). Google is less predictable with regard to the use of meta-tags. Google often uses the title tag to determine the clickable link on it's results pages, but only occasionally uses the description tag content in the page summary that it displays.

Remember the Human Beings/Visitors of your website:

Ok, now that I've put you to sleep with technical details and observations it's time to wake up, because there is a very important marketing point that I'm working towards here. The point that I'm driving at is that although the search engines probably have devalued the SEO value of the meta-tag to a great extent, that doesn't mean that it isn't important. When people search for keywords in your industry it isn't enough to be #1 on the list of results. You still need to convince those humans to click on your link. The way to do that is to design the most effective page description that can possibly appear in the SERPs.

Steps to Take To Improve Your Meta-Tags

As a general rule, Yahoo uses the first 25-30 words of your Meta Description tag in the site description it displays on your SERPs; MSN uses the first 15 or so. Write out a 30-word description of each page of your website that is broken up into two parts. The first 15 words need to get across what the page is about - this is all the MSN searchers will see. The second 15 words should support the first - this will be visible to Yahoo searchers. Google searchers will sometimes see the first 7 - 15 words as well (although you can't count on it). With meta-tags you have to just focus on the things you can control, and right now Google is an unknown quantity so it's probably best not to worry about optimizing for Google.

Don't Drop the Meta-Tags

Several years ago the search engines devalued the use of meta-tags in determining rankings. But because they use the meta-tags as page descriptions in their SERP pages, you must make special efforts to ensure that the content presented to searchers inspires them to click on your links rather than your competitors'. If you don't put meta-tags on your website's pages, then Yahoo and MSN (with a combined market share of around 45%) will just guess at what to put in the description of your website. They will pull phrases out of context (much the way Google does) from your site and slap them in there. The result is not nearly as inviting as it could have been otherwise. That's why it is always beneficial to learn to write effective meta-tags.

What really is Page Rank? How important it is?

2009-05-31T08:26:00.000-07:00

PageRank, a link analysis algorithm used by Google search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.

PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

From Google PageRank Technology:

PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance.

Google Page Rank is a factor that Google assigns to web pages in its index. It is based on the number of links Google has found pointing to a certain web page. Links can be from other web sites as well as from other pages in the same site. The rank varies from 0 to 10. 0 means less (or zero) number of incoming links and 10 means the highest number of incoming links.

PR is just one factor that Google looks at when they determine your site/blog’s SERPs. (View the above video about ranking and listen to 0:53 - 0:54 of Matt Cutt's says page rank included as a ranking factor.)

Another importance of PR in determining SERPs is backlinks (or how many links from other sites (and even within your own sites) point to your domain. In fact backlinks seem to have a more direct impact upon traffic levels. Google considers a link from another page as a vote for quality and PR is difficult to abuse than other ranking factors. And also gaining a PR takes time and it illustrates the establishment of a web site which is a good factor to consider when ranking web sites.

Many SEOs are very obsessed with this PR since I have read about news that through this PR they can earn(buying and selling links) and Google detects it. (Google Caught Selling High PageRank Links, Again & Again). They are making business with this green thing. I've been seo for 2 years and the fact that many seo expert (as they tell us) on the forums, "saying that PR is worthless". For me as long as Google uses it has still value.

Creating Better Links for Visitors to Click On

2009-05-23T20:35:00.000-07:00

Links are the opening points of your site. If you do not have good links, people usually will not continue to browse your site.

Links are the very vital part of a Web page, when most people think of web pages, they also think of the content as the text that is written on the page. During many eyes tracking studies, it has been shown that people viewing web pages are drawn to images. But their eyes are also drawn to links. This is because, in most web pages, links are underlined and in a different color than the surrounding text. They stand out.

Links Make Content Scannable

When your readers come to a web page, they are trying to learn something or be entertained. But because most people do not read Web pages, then scan them. Good Web writing takes this into consideration, and makes the pages as scannable as possible. Because they stand out, links make a Web page more scannable. But you should make sure that the links you are using link to something related to the linked text.

Your Home Page Must Have Links

Unless your site is only one page, your home page will have links to other parts of your site. And most people will scan your home page more than they will read it, so you want to make the links as self-explanatory as possible. That's why web designers and seo go along when creating site with many pages.

Here is some tips on putting links when designing webpage:

* Avoid having a home page that is 100% links. This defeats the purpose of scannability as the links no longer stand out.
* Make the links pragmatic titles, not fancy. Do not make your readers guess where the link will go.
* Link to general pages that also have many links.

The Basics of Web Designing

2009-05-18T06:14:00.000-07:00

When using Graphics, think of the following tips:

#Think small, like 10-12KB per image. Depending on the source, the number of broadband users are going up. Slow pages are still really annoying, huge images are the primary cause of slow loading of webpages. Otimize your images.

# Always use graphics that will fit the content. Just because you have an adorable photo of your favorite picture, it does not mean you should have it on website about web design. The main exception to this is for "design" images. These are images or graphics that will help makes up the design of the page, and are not intended to illustrate the content.

# Do not use images that blink or move or change or rotate or flash or do anything on page. Or use them all over your site. There have been many studies that show that flashing graphics are very distracting and annoying to people. The fact that in one focus the users actually physically cover up flashing graphics to read the contents.

On Web Site Layout:

# Stick with standard layouts. Some pages use many frames on one page. Another site used a layout had to scroll to the right to read everything on the page. These layouts are great and designers find them fun to build, but they will drive the readers nuts. The reason that the 3-column layout is so popular on Web sites and newspapers is because it works. You might think its boring, but you will keep more readers if you stick with something simple that visitor can understand.

# Whitespace is more than the CSS property, it is a function of the layout. Designers should be aware of the whitespace on their pages: how it affects and how the content is viewed. Whitespace is just as important in a Web layout as it is in a paper layout.

# Use graphics as elements in your layouts. Graphics can be more than just graphics when to use them as actual elements in your layouts. An extreme example is when wrapping the text around an image, but any image on the site is a layout element and should be treated as such.

Regarding Fonts:

# Serif for headlines and Sans-Serif for text. Take any type of print design, this might be exactly the opposite of what you were taught. But the Web is not print. Sans-serif fonts are much easier to read on computer monitors because the screen resolution is not as high as in print. If you use serif fonts for normal text, the serifs can blur together on the screen making them hard to read. Your printer friendly page should use the opposite fonts (serif for headlines and sans-serif for text).

# Limit the number of different fonts. One best way to make your Web site look amateurish is to change the font over and over. Sure, it's possible to do, but limiting your page and site to two or possibly three standard font families are easier to read and looks more professional.

# Use standard font families. Choose "Rockwood LT Standard" as your font on your page, but the chances that one of your readers will have that font as well is pretty low. Sticking with fonts like Verdana, Geneva, Arial, and Helvetica may seem boring, but your pages will look better and the designs look correct on more browsers.

When Advertising:

# Do not be greedy. If you have any control over the number of ads on your site, be aware that your readers are not coming to read the ads, they are coming for the content. If the ads overwhelm the page content, many readers will not stick around long enough to read your purple prose. Yes, it's important to make money from your Web site, but if your ads drive people away, amd ultimately lose your money.

# Treat ads as you would any other image. Keep them small, avoid blinking/flashing, and keep them relevant. Just because you can have an ad on your site, does not mean that you should. If the content is relevant to your readers, they are more likely to click on the ad.

Keep in mind that websites are designed for Readers:

# Test your pages in multiple browsers. Writing Web pages that work only on the most modern browser is both stupid and annoying. Unless you are writing a Web site for a corporate intranet or a kiosk where the browser version is completely fixed, you will have problems with people not being able to view your pages.

# The same is true for operating systems. You cannot assume that just because your page works in IE8.0 for Windows it will work in IE8.0 for Macintosh.

# Write content that they want. Unless you are writing a site purely for yourself, make sure that your content covers topics that your readers want to read.

Is Your Web Design Annoying?

2009-05-13T07:07:00.000-07:00

Have you ever seen or visited websites that are annoying? When it’s comes to web designing know what visitors hate most, unless you don’t want them to visit you again. This article describes what you should do in your website.

Here are some pointers or few things that might be useful to some web designers and webmasters. Some of top 5 lists and decide for yourself whether you have been annoying your visitors.

* Popup windows – Even though popup windows are now blocked by many add on tools, webmasters keep using them. The annoying part of popup that is sometimes actually misses important information because of those anti popup tools. Don’t use pop up windows. Put your important messages in an essential place on your website.

* Huge font size – If you are designing a website for people with a disability then you are doing the right thing, but if not then you are shouting. It is like someone shouting at them that’s the huge font. People really don’t like it when someone shouts at them.

* Small font size – This is also annoying because you need a magnifying tool to view it, specially if it is not visible to naked eye.

* Overlapping layers – Layers can be very useful up to the point. But not when they are being used to put an annoying message in the visitor’s face. Don’t try to force your visitor to read your messages. Try persuasion instead of brute force.

* Background music – Unless you are operating an online internet radio station or sell music CDs, why play a midi/wav file in the background continuously on every page?

Many webmasters, particularly new webmasters are totally “in love” with their thoughts and be likely to go and enjoy with their web design in one way or another.

SEO: Terms and Definition

2009-05-06T05:53:00.000-07:00

WHAT IS SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of methodologies aimed at improving the visibility of a website in search engine listings. The term also refers to an industry of consultants that carry out optimization projects on behalf of client sites. The process of improving web pages so that it ranks higher in search engine for targeted keywords with the ultimate goal of generating more revenue from the web site. There are many SEO techniques. In general, these techniques can be categorized as On-Page Optimization, On-Site Optimization, and Off-Site Optimization. Designing a website so that it ranks highly in the search engines when someone searches for specific phrases related to the site.

A site map (or sitemap) is a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site. Using sitemaps has many benefits, not only easier navigation and better visibility by search engines. Sitemaps offer the opportunity to inform search engines immediately about any changes on your site. Of course, you cannot expect that search engines will rush right away to index your changed pages but certainly the changes will be indexed faster, compared to when you don't have a sitemap.

Cloaking - The hiding of page content. Involves providing one page for a search engine or directory and a different page for other user agents at the same URL. Legitimate method for stopping page thieves from stealing optimized pages, but frowned upon by some search engines resulting in penalties. At the same URL (web address) showing one page to a search engine spider and a different page to a human visitor. Cloaking describes the technique of serving a different page to a Search Engine bot/spider than what a human visitor sees.

A robot is a program that automatically traverses the Web's hypertext structure by retrieving a document, and recursively retrieving all documents that are referenced. The robots exclusion standard, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol or robots.txt protocol is a convention to prevent cooperating web spiders and other web robots from accessing all or part of a website which is, otherwise, publicly viewable. Robots are often used by search engines to categorize and archive web sites, or by webmasters to proofread source code.

301 redirect is the most efficient and Search Engine Friendly method for webpage redirection. It's not that hard to implement and it should preserve your search engine rankings for that particular page. If you have to change file names or move pages around, it's the safest option. The code "301" is interpreted as "moved permanently". This is a special redirect used by most SEO Experts.

302 redirect is described in RFC2616 "The requested resource resides temporarily under a different URI. Since the redirection might be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests".When a URL returns a 302 redirect, it means that the owner of this link asks users to continue to use this address as the redirect could be modified at some later time.

OBL- outbound-link (OBL) is a link from your website to another website.

A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two objects, commonly between two websites in order to ensure mutual traffic.

One way link is a term used among webmasters for link building methods. It is a Hyperlink that points to a website without any reciprocal link; thus the link goes "one way" in direction.

SERP- Abbreviation for search engine results page, the Web page that a search engine returns with the results of its search.

IBL - Inbound Link - A link from another page that links to your page. A link from a site outside of your site.

A grey hat is a skilled hacker who sometimes acts legally and in good will and sometimes not. They are a hybrid between white and black hat hackers. They hack for no personal gain and do not have malicious intentions, but commit crimes.

Doorway pages are web pages that are created for spamdexing, this is, for spamming the index of a search engine by inserting results for particular phrases with the purpose of sending you to a different page. Doorway pages are easy to identify in that they have been designed primarily for search engines, not for human beings. This page explains how these pages are delivered technically, and some of the problems they pose.

(ex. http://www.tamba.co.uk/web-design-and-development/web-design-uk.htm)

Mirror Site - is a web site that is a replica of an already existing site, used to reduce network traffic (hits on a server) or improve the availability of the original site. Mirror sites are useful when the original site generates too much traffic for a single server to support. Mirror sites also increase the speed with which files or Web sites can be accessed: users can download files more quickly from a server that is geographically closer to them.

A link farm post large amount of unrelated links on their site. Link farm sites and the links that the site provides are pretty much useless and not worth adding links to. (aka FFA - Free for All).

Landing Page - An Entry page is the first page visible to web visitors and is also known as home page.

Spam is flooding the Internet with many copies of the same message, in an attempt to force the message on people who would not otherwise choose to receive it. Most spam is commercial advertising, often for dubious products, get-rich-quick schemes, or quasi-legal services. Spam costs the sender very little to send -- most of the costs are paid for by the recipient or the carriers rather than by the sender.

PageRank is a function of Google that measures the quality of a website on a scale of 0 to10. The theory is that high quality sites receive a higher PageRank based on visitors and traffic your site receives. PageRank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the internet. PageRank is essentially a score out of ten as to the “value” of your site in comparison to other websites on the Internet. It is based on two primary factors; the number of links you have pointing to your website and the value of the links pointing to your website. Real PR is updated all the time, but toolbar PR is generally updates every couple of months. Some says every 3 months.

Link popularity - A measure of the quantity and quality of sites that link to your site.

Keyword prominence - the measure of how close the keyword appears of the beginning of the sentence. The closer to the beginning your targeted keyword appears, the higher the prominence will be, with a higher keyword prominence being favorable. Prominence applies to word in the title, web page body, META tags, Heading tags, and the alt-tags. It is how close to the start of the area that the keyword appears. In general, a keyword that appears closer to the top of the page or area will be more relevant. However, sometimes it helps to have a keyword in the middle of an area, or even toward the end of the area.

Prominence plays a critical role particularly in directory based engines such as Yahoo. Often having the keyword slightly more towards the beginning of the site description or site title will make a large difference in your ranking.

Examples of prominence:

If a keyword appears at the beginning of an area, its prominence will be 100%.

If a keyword appears in the middle of an area, its prominence will be 50%.

If the keyword appears at the beginning of the area, then another repetition appears at the end of the area, the prominence would be 50%.

If the keyword appears at the end of the area, prominence would be 0%.

Keyword proximity is the measure of closeness between two keywords.

Keyword density - calculates the percentage of keyword words and phrases compared to the total of words in your web page body.

An example of 3-way linking is when a person owns two Web sites, and uses one of the Web sites to offer link exchanges, in an attempt to build up the popularity of the other. In doing so, he or she adds a link to your site on the link exchange Web site, and asks in return that you link to the main site being promoted.

KEI stand for Keyword Effectiveness Index, which measures how effective a keyword is for your web site. It compares the number of search for a keyword (popularity) with the number of search results (competitiveness) to identify which keywords are the most effective for your campaign. The higher the KEI value the more popular the keywords are and the less emulation they have. So the better chance they can get into the top position.

.htaccess is the default name for a file that is used to indicate who can or cannot access the contents of a specific file directory from the Internet or an intranet. The .htaccess file is a configuration file that resides in a directory and indicates which users or groups of users can be allowed access to the files contained in that directory.

LSA - LATENT SYMANTEC ANALYSIS

LSI is a methodology involving statistical probability and correlation that helps deducing the semantic distance between words. It’s obviously a complex methodology but can be easily applied to understand the relation between certain words in a paragraph or in a document. This methodology is being used while indexing a page in the search engine’s database/s. LSA / LSI websites are constructed with the specific intention of taking away the top rankings of ordinary web sites. These new sites are ruthlessly efficient at bumping “ordinary” sites out of the top slots for a very wide range of search phrases. Latent semantic indexing adds an important step to the document indexing process. In addition to recording which keywords a document contains, the method examines the document collection as a whole, to see which other documents contain some of those same words. LSI considers documents that have many words in common to be semantically close, and ones with few words in common to be semantically distant. This simple method correlates surprisingly well with how a human being, looking at content, might classify a document collection. Although the LSI algorithm doesn't understand anything about what the words mean, the patterns it notices can make it seem astonishingly intelligent.

Who is Matt Cutts?

From Wikipedia, Matt Cutts works for the quality group in Google, specializing in search engine optimization issues. He is well known in the SEO community for enforcing the Google Webmaster Guidelines and cracking down on link spam. He is the one of the co-inventors listed upon one of the most well-known patent filings from Google, involving search engines and web spam, which was the first to publicly propose using historical data to identify link spam. His blog is http://www.dullest.com/blog/.

Spider - a program that visits Web sites and reads their pages and other information in order to create entries for a search engine index. The major search engines on the Web all have such a program, which is also known as a "crawler" or a "bot." Spiders are typically programmed to visit sites that have been submitted by their owners as new or updated. A program that automatically fetches Web pages. Spiders are used to feed pages to search engines. It's called a spider because it crawls over the Web. Another term for these programs is webcrawler.

Meta Tags - Tags included in an HTML document which are used by search engines to categorize a web site. They include information about keywords and description. Meta elements provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly, and are inserted into the HTML code in the format illustrated above, but are not visible to a user looking at the site. HTML tags that provide information describing the content of the pages a user will be viewing.

Anchor text refers to the visible text for a hyperlink. For example:

< href="http://teamcreatives.com/"> Website Design and Development Outsourcing Company (This is the anchor text)< /a >

Back Link - Any link on another page that points to the subject page. Also called inbound links or IBLs.

Bot - Abbreviation for robot (also called a spider). It refers to software programs that scan the web. Bots vary in purpose from indexing web pages for search engines to harvesting e-mail addresses for spammers.

Cloaking - Cloaking describes the technique of serving a different page to a search engine spider than what a human visitor sees. This technique is abused by spammers for keyword stuffing. Cloaking is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Conversion - Conversion refers to site traffic that follows through on the goal of the site (such as buying a product on-line, filling out a contact form, registering for a newsletter, etc.). Webmasters measure conversion to judge the effectiveness (and ROI) of PPC and other advertising campaigns. Effective conversion tracking requires the use of some scripting/cookies to track visitors actions within a website. Log file analysis is not sufficient for this purpose.

CPC - Abbreviation for Cost Per Click. It is the base unit of cost for a PPC campaign.

CTA - Abbreviation for Content Targeted Ad(vertising). It refers to the placement of relevant PPC ads on content pages for non-search engine websites.

CTR - Abbreviation for Click Through Rate. It is a ratio of clicks per impressions in a PPC campaign.

Gateway Page - Also called a doorway page. A gateway page exists solely for the purpose of driving traffic to another page. They are usually designed and optimized to target one specific keyphrase. Gateway pages rarely are written for human visitors. They are written for search engines to achieve high rankings and hopefully drive traffic to the main site. Using gateway pages is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Keyword/KeyphraseKeywords are words which are used in search engine queries. Keyphrases are multi-word phrases used in search engine queries. SEO is the process of optimizing web pages for keywords and keyphrases so that they rank highly in the results returned.

Keyword stuffing refers to the practice of adding superfluous keywords to a web page. The words are added for the 'benefit' of search engines and not human visitors. The words may or may not be visible to human visitors. While not necessarily a violation of search engine Terms of Service, at least when the words are visible to humans, it detracts from the impact of a page (it looks like spam). It is also possible that search engines may discount the importance of large blocks of text that do not conform to grammatical structures (ie. lists of disconnected keywords). There is no valid reason for engaging in this practice.

PFI - Abbreviation for Pay For Inclusion. Many search engines offer a PFI program to assure frequent spidering / indexing of a site (or page). PFI does not guarantee that a site will be ranked highly (or at all) for a given search term. It just offers webmasters the opportunity to quickly incorporate changes to a site into a search engine's index. This can be useful for experimenting with tweaking a site and judging the resultant effects on the rankings.

Portal - Designation for websites that are either authoritative hubs for a given subject or popular content driven sites (like Yahoo) that people use as their homepage. Most portals offer significant content and offer advertising opportunities for relevant sites.

PPC - Abbreviation for Pay Per Click. An advertising model where advertisers pay only for the traffic generated by their ads.

Google Adwords - PPC program where webmasters can create their own ads and choose keywords.

Robots.txt - Robots.txt is a file which well behaved spiders read to determine which parts of a website they may visit.

SEM - Abbreviation for Search Engine Marketing. SEM encompasses SEO and search engine paid advertising options (banners, PPC, etc.)

Spider Trap refers to either a continuous loop where spiders are requesting pages and the server is requesting data to render the page or an intentional scheme designed to identify (and "ban") spiders that do not respect robots.txt.

Stop Word - Stop words are words that are ignored by search engines when indexing web pages and processing search queries. Common words such as "the".

CPM - Cost per thousand impressions (page views). It is increasingly becoming important as many sites which get a lot of visitors daily and repeatedly having thousands of pages will benefit from CPM instead of CPC if the click through rate is low for the site.

Social bookmarking is an activity performed over a computer network that allows users to save and categorize (see folksonomy) a personal collection of bookmarks and share them with others. Users may also take bookmarks saved by others and add them to their own collection, as well as to subscribe to the lists of others. A personal knowledge management tool.

Sticky Thread is a thread that always shows at the top of the threads listed in a forum.

A CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing Test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a challenge-response system test designed to differentiate humans from automated programs. A CAPTCHA differentiates between human and bot by setting some task that is easy for most humans to perform but is more difficult and time-consuming for current bots to complete. CAPTCHAs are often used to stop bots and other automated programs from using blogs (see splog) to affect search engine rankings, signing up for e-mail accounts to send out spam or take part in on-line polls.

Link bait is content on your site to which other sites link because they want to, not because you ask them to. Link bait is any content or feature within a website that somehow baits viewers to place links to it from other websites. Attempts to create link bait are frequently employed in the overall task of search engine optimization. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything "... interesting enough to catch people's attention." Link bait can be an extremely powerful form of marketing as it is viral in nature.

Spamdexing was describes the efforts to spam a search engine's index. Spamdexing is a violation of the Terms Of Service of most search engines and could be grounds for banning.

Web design is the ability of designing presentations of content (usually hypertext or hypermedia) that is delivered to an end-user through the World Wide Web, by way of a Web browser or other Web-enabled software like Internet television clients, micro blogging clients and RSS readers. A company gets a website designed to reach out masses through search engines. While designing a web site, proper design should be use with the guidelines laid down by the search engines. This will help to have a website which is more interesting as well as search engine friendly.

Link velocity refers to the speed at which new links to a webpage are formed, and by this term we main gain some new and vital insight. Historically, great bursts of new links to a specific page has been considered a red flag, the quickest way to identify a spammer trying to manipulate the results by creating the appearance of user trust. This led to Google’s famous assaults on link farms and paid link directories.

Social Bookmarking Sites | Benefits of Social Bookmarking

2009-05-06T05:39:00.000-07:00

Social bookmarking is a process or procedure of Internet users to store, search, manage and organize bookmarks of web pages on the Internet with the help of metadata, that is typically in the form of tags that collectively and/or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, "the method by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content".

In a social book marking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another mixture of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

BENEFITS OF SOCIAL BOOKMARKING:

1. Quick Indexing: The fastest way to have any webpage or site visited by the search engines and indexed.

2. Traffic Generation: There is more to book-marking your pages online than just getting indexed; guaranteed some traffic from these sites as soon as you submit to them.

3. Personal Branding: Most of the social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon also give you the opportunity to develop own pages on their site.

4. Quality Backlinks: By building a personal page on a lot of the social book-marking sites.The effects of these is that pages will be frequented by the search engine robots, indexing any new content that you post on it.

Popular Social bookmarking sites that helps in promotion and drives more traffic:

Digg.com
del.icio.us
reddit
Furl
StumbleUpon
Propeller
Zimbio
Jumptags
Yahoo! Buzz
Technorati
Mixx
Spicy Page

More social bookmarking lists at

125 Social Bookmarking Sites
Top 20 Social Bookmarking Sites
81 social bookmarking websites

* Note: Just don't spam! :D