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How to change IP adress?

Flying Fish — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:15:04 -0400

hey
can any one tell me how to change ip adress?

Warning! Mouseover ALL links in PMs - phishing

Faraz_Eagleman — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:06:08 -0400

From time to time efforts are made to phish DigitalPoint users' login information, often via PM.

If you receive an unexpected PM (or even an expected one), quickly mouseover the url to check any links it may contain. They should point to forums.digitalpoint.com, the same as is currently in the address bar.

If they point to anything else, for example, forums-digitalpoint.net, it's a phishing site.

DO NOT enter your login information - it will be used against other DigitalPoint members and chances are you will also lose your account here.

Treat it like you would Paypal or a banking site - would you click on a link in an email and happily enter your banking details? Obviously not
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mcfox

Designing Websites For Humans In A World Of Robots!!

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 01:28:04 -0400

In this day and age, it can be easy to forget the basics of why your website is online. Crawlers/Robots, they come, they go, but they never pay. Thats where your visitors come in.With the ever increasing number of web pages & documents available on the internet, it has become difficult to find information fast and without having hundreds of advertisements thrown into our faces (most of which will have no relevancy to the information we are seeking). There is quite simply no realistic method to finding material on the internet other than using search engines. At this point, everyone should realize that search engines use "robots" in order to "crawl" through the internet and collect web pages & other documents. The search engine will then use these documents to make up the engines "index" or "database". This in itself is not a problem, but to every action there is an equal & opposite reaction (Newton's 3rd law of motion!).

With this expansion of information on the web, which has driven more people to use search engines on a daily basis, it has become a requirement for the search engines to become more active in order to keep their database up to date. This means crawling more web pages at a greater frequency. Website owners have indeed noticed this increase in activity, and they have not stared at it blankly in the face, they have reacted. They now realize that these search engines are producing significant percentages of their traffic (up to 90% in some cases). So what to do'

Again, with the expansion of the web, there has also come more competition in essentially every industry, from computers, travel, food, right down to buying pets online. This competition is healthy in that it has pushed prices lower, but this very same competition has indirectly lowered the overall satisfaction level of website visitors. Let me explain more..

ROBOTS.TXT Primer

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 01:24:33 -0400

There is often confusion as to the role and usage of the robots.txt file. I thought it would be a good idea to dispel some myths and highlight what robots.txt files are all about.There is often confusion as to the role and usage of the robots.txt file. I thought it would be a good idea to dispel some myths and highlight what robots.txt files are all about. Firstly, a robots.txt file is NOT to let search engine robots and other crawlers know which pages they are allowed to spider (enter), it is primarily to tell them what pages (and directories) they can NOT spider.

The majority of websites do not have a robots.txt, and do not suffer from not having one. The robots.txt file does not influence ranking in any way. Its goal is to disallow certain spiders from visiting and taking back with them pages you do not wish for it to do so.

Protect Against Invaders by SPAM-Proofing Your Website

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 01:21:24 -0400

Benjamin Pfeiffer discusses how to SPAM-proof your website. He explains how to use Javascript and mod_rewrite to stop SPAMbots and Spybots from finding email addresses on your website. He also talks about how to find and set up the .htaccess file and gives examples of robots and how to block them.

Despite recent improvement in tools and programs in the battle against SPAM, most of us cannot escape the menace that plagues most of our inboxes on a regular basis. Each day most of us probably receive more SPAM than actual real email, and with Spammers getting more and more creative in their ways to circumvent traditional anti-SPAM tactics, it's vital webmasters empower themselves with some anti-SPAM tactics for their own websites.

In this article I will discuss a few ways to SPAM-proof your website against malicious SPAM robots that inevitably collect your email to be sold by the thousands to Spammers worldwide, whether it be for using your information inappropriately, or simply for no-good reasons. These tactics are so effective that within a month of implementing them, you should see a dramatic drop in the amount of SPAM that makes it through to your website email addresses, not to mention a decrease in bandwidth.

How to Stop SPAMbots Dead in Their Tracks

1. Using JavaScript
2. Using Mod_Rewrite

Both of these techniques are effective in blocking SPAMbots and Spybots from finding your email address or other personal information on your website. While JavaScript is an easier solution, using mod_rewrite to block SPAMbots is more technical and requires knowledge of editing your .htaccess file. It's best to try the JavaScript method first, and then venture into using mod_rewrite to further block SPAMbots from hitting your website.

Using JavaScript

To understand how to use JavaScript to block SPAMbots from harvesting your email, let's examine the ways that they find your email in the first place.

1. Mailto: Links - these are common links placed in the HTML code of a website, offering a potential visitor the ability to send an email to the webmaster of the site. A visitor clicks on the email link and it opens an email client with the To: field already filled in with the address specified in the code. These links are the prime target of SPAMbots harvesting your email address, and simple use of JavaScript can cut down on email harvesters hitting your inbox with SPAM. The main objective with using JavaScript is to change the appearance of your email address so that email harvesters do not recognize your email, but still retain complete functionality for legitimate visitors to send you an email.

2. Contact Forms - this is another prime location for SPAMbots to leave their tracks, steal your email address and be gone, ready to report back with fresh email addresses. These forms are another common feature on websites, and the following is what most often causes SPAMbots to find your email.

Score One for the Spiders?

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 01:19:07 -0400

Spiders. Those creepy, crawlies of data mining that scour the web for bits and pieces of information have a habit of getting into trouble. Just ask eBay and Boats.com, who recently had to resort to some legal bug spray in order to get rid of the little pests. Is your data scavenging in danger?

Call them spiders. Call them robots. Call them bargain hunters (or one heck of a nuisance); they're software programs with a mission: to hunt down information and bring it back. Many search engines couldn't live without these electronic assistants to help them keep track of the proverbially explosive growth of the Web. Certainly they can save a lot of time when you're trying to comparison shop online -- just let a spider do the hunting and bring back the results. This is all well and good, unless the owner of the site doesn't take kindly to spiders. eBay won an injunction against Bidder's Edge that forced BE to stop sending spiders to eBay's Web site in search of auctions. But a somewhat similar-looking court case was just recently decided in favor of the spider-wrangling plaintiff. Does this have wider implications for information aggregators who use spiders?

First, let me give my disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, nor do I play one on TV. So check with someone who eats, drinks, and breathes this stuff before you do anything drastic. That said, let's take a look at the cases at hand.

The more recent case was just decided early in April, in a district court in Florida. It involves two companies with Web sites that list yachts for sale...which may in part explain why this case did not attract the kind of attention that the earlier eBay case did. (There are more people interested in buying Beanie Babies than buying big boats.) Anyway, the older Web site in this case is owned by Boats.com, who, for the past nine years, has owned and operated Yachtworld.com, a Web site on which yacht brokers could post information about the big boats they have for sale -- sort of like electronic classified ads, with more interactivity. Enter Nautical Solutions Marketing, in 2001, with their Web site, Yachtbroker.com -- and two services that Boats.com complained blow them right out of the water.

Spider Guts

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 01:17:36 -0400

What's inside the spiders? To get a good ranking in search engines, a good understanding of the fundamentals of SEO and how search robots crawl web pages is essential. The author includes valuable information such as a list of core elements considered by a typical search engine when calculating page relevance.

In the quest for that elusive nirvana of search engine friendliness, we frequently find ourselves searching for "instant fix" ways to improve a page's ranking without considering the big picture; that is, without looking at the problem of optimizing a web page as a whole and instead looking at several separate optimization steps as part of routine markup development or copy writing. While SEO experts do not tend to fit this mold, the average web developer certainly does. How many web pages have you "optimized" by simply adding keyword and description meta tags, and stopped right there? I imagine a hand count at this point would supply a fairly substantial number. An even better question at this point might be, "How many of you have tried to provide SEO for a web page without having even a basic understanding of search robot logic or what it expects to see in your pages?" Once again, I suspect we would have a healthy hand count.

The steps to optimize a page are well known to the SEO community, and many articles by authors far more knowledgeable than myself on the subject are available to web developers. So with all this knowledge out there, why are there so many developers who lack a big picture understanding of the subject? One word: fundamentals. It is crucial to know how the technology behind the scenes works, but like any other skill, the bulk of people attempting to learn that skill do not start at the bottom. They start somewhere that makes sense in trying to solve a particular problem and then they build up from that point.

If a developer held a greater understanding of the fundamentals of SEO and how search robots went about crawling web pages, they would in turn have a greater understanding of how to populate those alt attributes and meta tags. The objective of this article is to provide a general overview of how search robots (also called spiders) go about crawling and indexing web pages.

How Search Engines Work (and Sometimes Don’t)

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 01:15:13 -0400

You know how important it is to score high in the SERPs. But your site isn't reaching the first three pages, and you don't understand why. It could be that you're confusing the web crawlers that are trying to index it. How can you find out? Keep reading.

You have a masterful website, with lots of relevant content, but it isn’t coming up high in the search engine results pages (SERPs). You know that if your site isn’t on those early pages, searchers probably won’t find you. You can’t understand why you’re apparently invisible to Google and the other major search engines. Your rivals hold higher spots in the SERPs, and their sites aren’t nearly as nice as yours.

Search engines aren’t people. In order to handle the tens of billions of web pages that comprise the World Wide Web, search engine companies have almost completely automated their processes. A software program isn’t going to look at your site with the same “eyes” as a human being. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a website that is a joy to behold for your visitors. But it does mean that you need to be aware of the ways in which search engines “see” your site differently, and plan around them.

Despite the complexity of the web, and dealing with all that data at speed, search engines actually perform a short list of operations in order to return relevant results to their users. Each of these four operations can go awry in certain ways. It isn’t so much that the search engine itself has gone awry; it may have simply encountered something that it was not programmed to deal with. Or the way it was programmed to deal with whatever it encountered led to less than desirable results.

Understanding how search engines operate will help you understand what can go wrong. All search engines perform the following four tasks:

* Web crawling. Search engines send out automated programs, sometimes called “bots” or “spiders,” which use the web’s hyperlink structure to “crawl” its pages. According to some of our best estimates, search engine spiders have crawled maybe half of the pages that exist on the Internet.

* Document indexing. After spiders crawl a page, its content needs to be put into a format that makes it easy to retrieve when a user queries the search engine. Thus, pages are stored in a giant, tightly managed database that makes up the search engine’s index. These indexes contain billions of documents, which are delivered to users in mere fractions of a second.

* Query processing. When a user queries a search engine, which happens hundreds of millions of times each day, the engine examines its index to find documents that match. Queries that look superficially the same can yield very different results. For example, searching for the phrase “field and stream magazine,” without quotes around it, yields more than four million results in Google. Do the same search with the quote marks, and Google returns only 19,600 results. This is just one of many modifiers a searcher can use to give the database a better idea of what should count as a relevant result.

* Ranking results. Google isn’t going to show you all 19,600 results on the same page – and even if it did, it needs some way to decide which ones should show up first. Thus, the search engine runs an algorithm on the results to calculate which ones are most relevant to the query. These are shown first, with all the others in descending order of relevance.

Now that you have some idea of the processes involved, it’s time to take a closer look at each one. This should help you understand how things go right, and how and why these tasks can go “wrong.” This article will focus on web crawling, while a later article will cover the remaining processes.

The Yahoo SLURP Crawler

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 01:12:47 -0400

As SEOs and webmasters, we're always looking for ways to get the search engine spiders to crawl our sites, and the deeper, the better. This article shows you how to target Yahoo's crawler and convince it to stop by regularly.

The search engine wars are fought with strategies, alliances, and robots. As Yahoo! primes itself to be the number one contender for market share after Google, websites that want to optimize for Yahoo must study how Yahoo ranks pages and how it indexes pages. The Yahoo web crawler SLURP should be studied; your site server logs should have recorded visits from various robots, including SLURP. If you do not have records of SLURP visiting your site, then this article will give tips on how to get SLURP to crawl (hopefully deep crawl) your site.

The Preamble

Yahoo SLURP evolved from Inktomi SLURP. The Yahoo SLURP robot is an upgrade from Inktomi’s SLURP. Yahoo used Inktomi’s search engine to replace Google, which used to take care of its search results. This officially triggered the second search engine wars (the first was won by Google without it declaring hostilities).

Yahoo has at least 130 million registered users on its network. Granted, Google is the definitive search engine, but Yahoo is large enough that it should not be ignored.

Medicalschoolresources.com

BHealth — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 14:50:44 -0400

Medical School Resources is a web site for medical students, professionals and the general public to find, post, and share links to medical education websites. Each medical education website is listed in order of its popularity.

20 Things You Need to Know Before Optimizing a Web Site

hotboard — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 06:37:57 -0400

One of the most important aspects of a search engine optimization project is also one of the most overlooked - preparation! There are some important steps to take in advance of optimizing your site that will make sure your SEO is successful.

Before You Start

Before you start any search engine optimization campaign, whether it's for your site or that belonging to a client, you need to answer the following questíons:

1) What is the overall motivation for optimizing this site? What do I/they hope to achieve? e.g. more sales, more subscribers, more traffíc, more publicity etc.

2) What is the time-frame for this project?

3) What is the budget for this project?

4) Who will be responsible for this project? Will it be a joint or solo effort? Will it be run entirely in-house or outsourced?

Answering these questíons will help you to build a framework for your SEO project and establish limitations for the size and scope of the campaign.

Ready: How Search Engine-Compatible is the Site Currently?

Something I find very useful before quoting on any SEO project is to produce what I call a Search Engine Compatibility Review. This is where I carry out a detailed overview and analysis of a site's search engine compatibility in terms of HTML design, page extensions, link popularity, title and META tags, body text, target keywords, ALT IMG tags, page load time and other design elements that can impact search engine indexing.

I then provide a detailed report to potential clients with recommendations based on my findings. It just helps sort out in my mind what design elements need tweaking to make the site as search engine-friendly as possible. It also helps marketing staff prove to an often stubborn programming department (or vice versa!) that SEO is necessary. You might consider preparing something similar for your site or clients.

Steady: Requirements Gathering

Next, you need to establish the project requirements, so you can tailor the SEO campaign to you or your client's exact needs. For those of you servicing clients, this information is often required before you are able to quote accurately.

To determine your project requirements, you need to have the following questíons answered:

1) What technology was used to build the site? (i.e. Flash, PHP, frames, Cold Fusion, JavaScrípt, Flat HTML etc)

2) What are the file extensions of the pages? (i.e. .htm, .php, .cfm etc)

3) Does the site contain database driven content? If so, will the URLs contain query strings? e.g. http://www.site.com/longpagename?source=123444fgge3212, (containing "?" symbols), or does the site use parameter workarounds to remove the query strings? (the latter is more search engine friendly).
4) Are there at least 250 words of text on the home page and other pages to be optimized?

5) How does the navigation work? Does it use text links or graphical links or JavaScrípt drop-down menus?

6) Approximately how many pages does the site contain? How many of these will be optimized?

7) Does the site have a site map or will it require one? Does the site have an XML sitemap submitted to Google Sitemaps ?

8) What is the current link popularity of the site?

9) What is the approximate Google PageRank of the site? Would it benefit from link building?

10) Do I have the ability to edit the source code directly? Or will I need to hand-over the optimized code to programmers for integration?

11) Do I have permission to alter the visible content of the site?

12) What are the products/services that the site promotes? (e.g. widgets, mobile phones, hire cars etc.)

13) What are the site's geographical target markets? Are they global? Country specific? State specific? Town specific?

14) What are the site's demographic target markets? (e.g. young urban females, working mothers, single parents etc.)
15) What are 20 search keywords or phrases that I think my/my client's target markets will use to find the site in the search engines?

16) Who are my/my client's major competitors online? What are their URLs? What keywords are they targeting?

17) Who are the stake-holders of this site? How will I report to them?

18) Do I have access to site traffíc logs or statistics to enable me to track visitor activity during the campaign? Specifically, what visitor activity will I be tracking?

19) How do I plan on tracking my or my client's conversion trends and increased rankings in the search engines?

20) What are my/my client's expectations for the optimization project? Are they realistic?

Answers to the first 10 questíons above will determine the complexity of optimization required. For example, if the site pages currently have little text on them, you know you'll need to integrate more text to make the site compatible with search engines and include adequate target keywords. If the site currently uses frames, you will need to rebuild the pages without frames or create special No-Frames tags to make sure the site can be indexed, and so on.

This initial analysis will help you to scope the time and costs involved in advance. For those of you optimizing client sites, obtaining accurate answers to these questíons BEFORE quoting is absolutely crucial. Otherwise you can find yourself in the middle of a project that you have severely under-quoted for.

The remainder of questíons are to establish in advance the who, what, where, when, why and how of the optimization project. This will help you determine the most logical keywords and phrases to target, as well as which search engines to submit the site to.

For those of you optimizing web sites for a living, you might consider developing a questionnaire that you can give clients to complete to ensure you tailor the web site optimization to their exact needs.

Go!

So now you are clear about your motivations for optimizing the site, you know more about the target markets, you know how compatible the existing site is with search engines and how much work is involved in the search engine optimization process. You're ready to tackle the job.
________
By Kalena Jordan ©

Top 12 SEO Tips for 2008

newbiz — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:26:19 -0400

1.Get your page titles 100% optimised for search. Page titles are the single best element of overall on-site optimisation that you can control, and one of the top things that a search engine, with its almighty power, uses to decide the destiny of the page. Will it rank your page or send it to the depths of the supplemental results where a bloodhound would find it difficult to sniff out?

Theories vary on how best to format the title for 100% optimisation. Long tail titles, key word stuffing, commas, density, bars and dashes have been tested and debated for many years.

I have found the best performance using the following method; First, I sit down and pick my top keyword, then I run it through one of many keyword tools out there that will show me the number of queries, demographic and geographic data, annual search trends, competition stats and so on. I take these results and start classifying them by this information to establish the pages that I will build. I continue to do this until I get down to 4 or even 5-word phrases.

From here I'll start to diagram the navigation of the new section using themed-based threads from the top to the bottom. In some cases I also use buffer words to control keyword weighting. So if I had a "blue widgets" page the next might be "Find Blue Widgets" and below that "Find Blue Widgets in Akron" and maybe even one more "Where Can I find Blue Widgets in Akron Ohio?" if it's been searched to some degree.

This is called going after the longtail and some friends of mine over at a company called HitTail made a cool little tool that I put on all my clientsâ€™ websites. It gives you real time results for the keywords that people are typing to find your site, as well as the search engine they are using.

Traditional logfile analysis can be expensive and difficult for the inexperienced and many times if you have a site getting 10,000 unique visitors a day or even a week you lose many of the prime longtail key word strings in the piles of data. Itâ€™s also a good way to monitor related buzz on your product/service/offering. It is perfectly okay to have the following title: Buy Widgets | Blue Widgets in Akron. I try not to stuff the title tags at all, but I always make sure I use it twice and I don't duplicate the page titles. Then when you are building content in the next steps you will have unique but relevant text to use in the link.

Yahoo!'s New Search Engine

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:47:02 -0400

On February 18th, Yahoo launched its new search engine, Yahoo Search, a mix of technologies built around its subsidiaries Inktomi and Overture Services, and replaced Google as search engine results provider. A day earlier, Google officially announced that it had reached an important milestone with immediate access to more than 6 billion items, including 4.28 billion web pages, 880 million images, 845 million Usenet messages, and a growing collection of book-related information pages. Why would Google brag about its leading position at this auspicious time? Because changes are coming

Such changes will have immediate impact on search engine rankings and traffic as the main search engines' market share is anticipated to change dramatically.

According to a Nielsen//NetRatings report released on February 23rd, search engine use in the United States increased to include one of every three Americans or, 39% of the US population! Specifically, 114.5 million unique users turned to search engines to find information about products and services in January, and each spent nearly 40 minutes there.

The heavy usage of search engines in January was no different from the reliance on search engines during the 2003 holiday shopping season:

* 36 % of those surveyed said they used Google during the shopping season
* 25 % used Yahoo! Search
* 14 % used MSN Search
* 5 % used either AOL or Ask Jeeves.

Not surprisingly, the top five search engines in January were:

* Google (59 million visitors)
* Yahoo! Search (46 million)
* MSN Search (45 million)
* AOL Search (23 million)
* Ask Jeeves (13 million)

What the Nielsen report did not indicate is the intricate connections between the main search engines and the results they provide to their partners. In January, Yahoo used to show the organic search engine results provided by Google. MSN Search provides organic search engine results provided by Inktomi, a Yahoo company. And AOL Search shows Google-provided search engine results. This complex interdependence between the main search engines makes current changes in the web search market place more intriguing

Optimizing for Yahoo: The Next Big Thing

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:44:43 -0400

February 2004--Yahoo decides that they had had enough of Google subservience for their search results, finally pulling the plug on their alliance with Google for search technology, and aligning instead with Inktomi. Not only does this herald the advent of yet another eminent contender to defy Googleâ€™s dominion in the search market--Yahoo makes quite a significant chunk of the online traffic coming to a website--but it also sets the stage for a battle to be waged in SEO, with all sights now set on Yahoo.

With Google SERPs now beginning to make sense and offering some respite to most webmasters and SEOs, those webmasters and SEOs wonâ€™t be pulling any punches in trying their hands on the SERPs at Yahoo; the good SERPs at Yahoo that once used to come like a windfall for good optimization at Google now need to be specifically earned.

The New Scenario

The rules of the game have changed, and identifying the SEO rules is the name of the game. Thankfully, the new Yahoo SERPs still donâ€™t show a marked departure from the existing Google algorithm, and the affinity between the two algorithms is still perceptible. This wipes out the need to make a fresh start while optimizing for Yahoo, and just weighing the Google SERPs against the Yahooâ€™s would suffice to make out the new algorithm Yahoo uses for ranking web pages.

Submitting Your Site to the Yahoo! Directory

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:40:48 -0400

While most webmasters strive to get their websites listed in the Open Directory Project (DMOZ), there are other important directories available to list your site. Some of the other important directories, offering both free and paid inclusion, are the Yahoo! Directory, Zeal/Looksmart, JoeAnt, GoGuides, and Gimpsy. Because of its high profile, we will examine the costs and benefits of having your website listed in the Yahoo! Directory.

The Yahoo! Directory

Because of its possible importance for PageRank, as another incoming link, and for potential business referrals, you may want to consider the Yahoo! Directory. While the directory may not be suitable for all websites, some site owners may find a real benefit to being included in it. As with all directories, especially those like Yahoo! that offer paid inclusion, you have to consider your own budget and traffic requirements.

Why is Directory Inclusion Important?

Each of the major directories provide additional traffic to you your site. They also provide valuable incoming links, that enhance your Google PageRank, and perhaps your rankings on the search engine results pages (SERPs) as well. If your site isnâ€™t listed in the Google search engine, becoming listed in directories is a great way to get your website crawled by the Google spider. Other search engine spiders crawl the major directories, on a regular basis, as well.

The Yahoo! Directory http://dir.yahoo.com/ is crawled on a regular basis by the search engine spiders, including the Google spider. The directory may offer a quick entry into the Google listings for many websites.

Will Your Google SEO Help You With Yahoo?

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:35:59 -0400

When employing the most basic search engine optimization techniques to your site with hopes of scoring high search rankings with Google, you can also gain extra value in the Yahoo! search engine. Learn more about the benefits of DMOZ and adding fresh content on your site.

If you are like most website owners who have applied some search engine optimization (SEO) efforts to your site, your main target has been ranking well in the Google search engine. While Google may be the dominant search engine, there is still much Internet visitor traffic to be gained by placing well in the Yahoo! search engine as well.

The question on the mind of many webmasters is whether optimizing for Google will provide benefits in the Yahoo! search results. The two search engines have differing search algorithms for calculating the search engine results pages (SERPs) for their individual searches. Because of the differences in the algorithms, there is some difference in emphasis on content and link value.

Concentrating heavily on links will certainly provide additional benefits for Google. Placing added emphasis on content of all types will pay dividends in Yahoo!. By understanding the importance of links and content to both search engines, you can successfully optimize your site for both. A balanced approach to links and to content will result in high search engine rankings in both Yahoo! and Google.

While it might seem fairly straightforward to simply add more incoming links and more on-page content, some fine tuning of your optimization efforts will pay off with both search engines. By taking a holistic approach with both Google and Yahoo optimization in mind, your site will achieve top rankings on both search results. With the added high search engine placements, your site traffic will increase, adding many more potential clients and customers to your online business.

Think in terms of both Google and Yahoo, and share in the best of both search engine worlds.

Think Content and Relax

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:26:33 -0400

Achieving high rankings in the Yahoo! search engine requires a content-oriented approach. If you think in terms of adding content, you can relax and know you are in good hands with Yahoo!â€™s algorithm. More than almost any other search engine, Yahoo! is content oriented in the way it calculates its search rankings. If in doubt about your potential to rank well in Yahoo!, seriously consider adding more content.

The question arises as to what type and form of content will work best with Yahoo!'s search algorithm. As with all additional content, you have to consider on page, off page, and off site content. Consideration must be given to each of these factors when seeking extra fresh content.

Also included in your content additions must be a careful analysis of your targeted keywords. The level of keyword saturation for Yahoo! is different from that emphasized by the dominant Google search engine. You need to know the optimum amount of keywords your content will bear, without facing a potential keyword stuffing problem.

Equally important, if not more so, is the necessity of creating content that keep the needs of your visitor traffic in mind. As your potential customers and clients, your visitors are the life blood of your online business. Make certain your Yahoo! algorithm oriented content is also reader friendly for your visitors. Strongly written sales copy will work well in the search engine and even better for your site's sales conversion rates.

Optimizing for Yahoo! is somewhat different from striving for high search engine rankings in Google. You must consider the differences in the importance of links and link anchor text. Keyword density tolerance is different. Even something as obscure and trivial as meta tags make a difference in Yahoo!, while they are of almost zero value in Google.

Overall, content is truly king in Yahoo!. If you think about being contented, you can rest more easily with Yahoo!'s search results.

An Insider`s Secret To Seriously High Rankings With Yahoo

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:20:44 -0400

The key to getting a high ranking in the search engines is to keep adding keyword rich, relevant content to your website regularly. If you are updating your site all the time, the search engines will know they need to come back and spider it all the time. But who has the time to keep on top of that? Isn't there an easier way? Danny Wall explains how to get other people to update your site with relevant content...for free.

There are a lot of different SEO (which stands for Search Engine Optimization) tricks, tips, and tactics out there right now. Some of them work, but most are giant wastes of time for the benefit provided.

Sadly, a few will actually demolish your rankings and worse yet, if you use a couple of the "tricks" I've seen for increasing your ranking in Yahoo you can count on your site being banned outright (ouch).

What if you could put up a website and have that site both indexed and databased (meaning available for display in search results) in only 72 hours?

What if I further told you that this "backdoor" technique does not require you to spend any money on PPC advertising or special listings with Yahoo?

Finally, what if I told you that this technique will actually get Yahoo to rank you higher than a "regular" page?

In a previous article for DevShed I explained how to implement RSS (which stands for Really Simple Syndication) for your website. That article was entitled "Rockin' RSS With PHP On Your HTML". It is that article that provides the functionality you'll want to take advantage of to accomplish what I'm talking about here.

Search Engines and Algorithms: Optimizing for Yahoo! Search and AltaVista

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:15:59 -0400

Yahoo is considered the number one search engine above all other search engines. Yahoo search queries make up approximately 28% of all search engine traffic. And just in raw traffic reported by Alexa rankings, Yahoo! demolishes competitors such as Google and MSN. The Y! web portal has continued to offer its visitors comprehensive searching capabilities through its evolving algorithm. Search optimizers would be wise to consider its attributes and quirks, which Jennifer Sullivan reviews in the second part of this series.

Yahoo has changed its search engine several times drastically. Yahoo is striving to produce relevant results to its searchers in areas that computer algorithms simply fall short, areas like opinions and personalized results. For example, â€œWhat is the best online electronics site?â€ or â€œWho has the best Italian cuisine in town?â€ are representative of questions that would be an opinion that a searcher would be interested in, but is difficult for a search engine algorithm to put them in touch with. Personal results are indicative of a userâ€™s personal preferences, and not based solely upon the opinion of the majority, and serendipity brings to mind the notion of becoming familiar with the searcherâ€™s own tastes, such as what might be personally relevant to a user, or something family and friends would be a better source of information regarding, rather than a machine. Searching for the term â€œappleâ€ doesnâ€™t always mean that a user is looking for Macintosh computers.

Yahoo! Social Search

With this in mind, Yahoo introduced Social Search, called My Web 2.0. It is a new kind of search engine â€“ a social search engine â€“ that complements web search by enabling users to search the knowledge and expertise of their friends and community in addition to the web.

The technology powering the social search is called MyRank. According to Yahooâ€™s My Web 2.0 FAQ, â€œMyRank leverages all the advances in algorithmic search and combines these advances with a very simple idea - your definition of a 'better answer' may be very different than somebody else's definition. The MyRank technology powering My Web 2.0 enables you to tap into the knowledge of the people you know, and leverage this knowledge to find better answers that are more relevant to you. Friends, colleagues, and other contacts in your community are invaluable sources of information and advice in the offline world. These are the people that share your interests, work in your industry, live in your neighborhood, and have potentially searched for many of the same topics as you - along with topics that you never thought of in relation to the people you know. By fusing the power of algorithmic search with the ability to tap into your community, MyRank technology enables you to find better, more relevant answers for you.â€

The way they accomplish this is by adding the ability to tag, save, and then share information with other people, as well as obtain the information that other people wish to share with you. Instead of simply book-marking a page, you have the enhanced ability to tag a bookmarked page with keywords you assign to it. This allows a user to comment on pages they find useful, then give extra information about it to others in the community the user builds. Then, when web searches are performed, not only algorithmic findings are used, but also the information in the personal tags saved by the user, which provides personalized search results based on the shared knowledge of the people they trust.

Social search complements web search, which is driven by publishers and web sites, by providing a better search experience that is powered by people and communities. Weâ€™ll talk more about other social searches in a later article in this series.

Looks Like it`s Back to the Drawing Board for Yahoo 360

Faraz_Eagleman — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 14:12:51 -0400

Yahoo 360 has been trailing the more popular blogging sites such as MySpace and Blogger. Will the latest redesign help it catch up? And if not, what will? Hugo Guzman takes a look at Yahoo 360 and its competitors to find out.

As far as blogging platforms go, Yahoo's is pretty bad. Actually, it's not so much about being bad as it is about being non-existent.

And so with that in mind, Yahoo vice president of product development Bradley Horowitz made a public announcement regarding the future of their Yahoo 360 offering. During the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, Horowitz told the crowd that, "Yahoo 360 may be doing a 180 [degree turn]."

He was responding to an audience member who voiced his displeasure with Yahoo's current blogging platform, which has been in the beta stage since it was launched in March of 2005.

A quick look at http://360.yahoo.com offers little to titillate the senses or the intellect, so I decided to take a closer look at what Yahoo 360 has to offer (or more specifically, what it doesn't offer) by opening a user account and logging on.

At first glance, it appears as if Yahoo made a half-hearted attempt at making Yahoo 360 more than a simple blogging interface, blending in some of the social networking features that make Myspace.com such a popular locale for web users. So in essence, Yahoo 360 appears to be a melding of a straight publishing interface like Google's blogger.com and the aforementioned Myspace.com. Mind you, these two portals are the No. 1 and No. 2 blogging interfaces in the world, respectively, but we'll get back to that later...