April 2008

Improve your Search Engine Position with Sitemaps

A sitemap is a little-known secret to enhancing your Web site’s position in the search engine listings. No, it’s not a killer secret that will draw in thousands of new visitors overnight, but it is an important addition to your toolset, and not hard to implement. This article will tell you why you need a sitemap, and how to create one and submit it to the search engines.

The term “sitemap” can refer to two different things. Many large, complex Web sites provide a visual sitemap that visitors can use for quick navigation, if they already know roughly where they want to go. If your site is large or complex, you should provide one of these sitemaps for your visitors.

But this article is about the other kind of sitemap: The kind that is made for the search engines, like Google, to use in indexing your site. There are several forms that these sitemaps can take, but we’ll get to that a little later.

First of all, let’s consider why you even need a sitemap. Google and the other search engines will index your site even if you don’t have a sitemap. However, there are four main advantages to having a sitemap:

1. If your site uses non-HTML links, such as Macromedia Flash menus or JavaScript menus, the search engines will not be able to follow these links, and so they will not find all of your pages. A code-driven site must use a sitemap.

2. A sitemap tells the search engines which pages on your site are more important, and which are less important. This prevents the less important pages from competing with your own pages in the listings.

3. A sitemap tells the search engines which pages on your site are updated more frequently than others. This enables the search engines to ignore your static pages, increasing the likelihood that they will have the most current data on your most dynamic pages.

4. A sitemap enables you to tell the search engines when you have added or updated your site’s content. To some extent, this puts you in control of making the search engines aware of your latest content. Of course, it doesn’t force the search engines to do your bidding, but it tends to make it easier for users to find your new pages more quickly.

So, what is a sitemap?
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Computers
Online
SEO

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SEO Myths

There are many SEO myths circulating on the Internet. These misconceptions are often crazy and while some are based on partial reality, others have spread due to the lack of being proved wrong.

Here is an example: Let’s assume you make a change to your website content. Maybe after a few days you notice that your Google ranking for a certain keyword has altered. Now, it would be natural for you to assume that your content change had led to change in ranking. However, it may not be true. Your ranking could have changed due to several reasons, and may have absolutely nothing to do with the changes made to the content. News Inspector

Super Charge Your Traffic Analysis!

Of course, this action of mixing up the cause and effect is a common error on the part of new SEOs. Well, if it were limited to just their work, I wouldn’t really mind it. But these guys are clueless and many a times spread their ignorance to other newbies on blogs and forums and create a ripple effect of newer myths. Here, I am making an attempt to discuss and clear the top 10 organic SEO myths: Kendall PC

Organic SEO Myth 1: You must submit your website URL to search engines. Once upon a time, this could have been the “in” thing. But since the past 5-6 years it has become unnecessary. Wordprezz

Organic SEO Myth 2: In order to get better ranking, you absolutely need a Google Sitemap. It’s partially correct. However, if you have built your site properly (ensured its crawler-friendly) you don’t require a Google Sitemap. That being said, having one won’t hurt you and you can even use other Webmaster Central tools offered by Google, but this doesn’t guarantee higher ranking. Store Blogs

Organic SEO Myth 3: For higher rankings, update your website regularly. Regular updating of your content pages may certainly increase the crawl rate for search engines, but not your website rankings. Only update your website content if it is necessary and not because search engines will like it any better. As a matter of fact, the highest ranked websites on Google are those that haven’t been updated in years! My Rivermaya

Organic SEO Myth 4: PPC (pay per click) ads can help or hurt rankings. What amuses me most is that many people believe that participating in Google AdWords campaigns will hurt their organic SEO ranking, while many others believe that PPC will spike the traffic and up the ranking. All I can say is that neither of this is true! Noli Boy for President

Give Your Site a Voice!

Organic SEO Myth 5: Not following guidelines on Google will ban your website. Google’s guidelines are common sense but not mandatory. It’s advisable to read them, however just don’t do anything purely for search engines and you’ll be fine. NIERP Bros

Organic SEO Myth 6: Buying links can lead to banning of your website. It is partially true again. Google doesn’t like to count paid links as votes for a website page. Mostly Google is unable to find out if the links are paid for, but even if it does, it won’t count the links. Google won’t ban your website in any case. A quick update - Google has made it easier to report paid links in sites that are unrelated to your site. Though the reasoning is yet unclear and best practice should tell you don’t buy links in unrelated sites to your theme. Malufet Ako Maya Blog

Organic SEO Myth 7: Header tags or H1 should be used to ensure high ranking. There is no evidence to prove this. However, this is one of the most common myths. You can reach top Google positioning without H1 but they certainly don’t hurt so use H tags correctly. Red Blogging

Organic SEO Myth 8: Meta keywords tag need to be used on your page. The fact is that a Meta keyword tag was introduced to use keywords that are NOT on the site page already! However, this tag is ignored by Google in any case.

Organic SEO Myth 9: The SEO copy should be 250 words in length. 250 words is not really an optimal number nor is it specific for SEO rankings. Easily, 250 words allows one to write good marketing copy and can be optimized for 3-5 main key phrases. However, shorter SEO copy works just as well.

Forget Expensive PPC Advertising - There is an Alternative!

Organic SEO Myth 10: Your pages should be optimized for the long tail keywords. This is not true. Nowadays, long-tail keyword phrases are no longer effective as not many pages use them and not many people search using long tails. You can include these keywords in blogs or even an article, but that is not really optimization. BalotPenoy Kayo Dyan Barr Ier Blog

Remember don’t go spreading any SEO myths that you believe may be true. Test it yourself several times on different websites before reaching any conclusion as there are other factors involved as well.

Organic SEO Top 10 Myths
By Seomul Davis (c) 2008

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SEO

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The Technology Behind Springfields Lincoln Museum

I am one of those inveterate museum goers. Often on a business trip I will take some time to stop by a favorite gallery or seek out a new one. And so, when I had a chance to write an article for the New York Times about the Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Ill., I jumped at the chance.

Alas, the story was cut from the paper at the last minute, but I thought I would share with you some of my experiences. What was interesting about the place, which has been open for about three years, is how it combines Vegas glitz and geeky gadgets to bring the scholarship of Lincoln’s life and the Civil War years into a modern context.

I spent about three hours there on a day that was turning into one of those Midwestern snow squalls, and it was fun to tour the place with their IT manager and see how they built some of the attractions. They have a wide variety of tech in place, from the ordinary such as theatrical lighting to the unusual with very advanced digital holographic projectors. It is far cry from a dusty collection of artifacts in glass cases, and the museum designers have succeeded at bringing many parts of the Lincoln story quite literally to life.
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Travel

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Adobe Photoshop CS3 Basics Tutorial

In the following tutorial you will learn about the overall scope of Adobe Photoshop CS3. This program is used mostly to manipulate images. People that do web development, graphic design, and photography will probably prefer the use of this program to edit their images. Once you have grasped this basic knowledge of the software, you will be able to dive into Adobe Photoshop and quite possibly Adobe Fireworks, which works in a similar way. Adobe Fireworks is just a little simpler and has less features. Adobe Fireworks was originated as Macromedia Fireworks. Enough of the chit-chat, lets get down to business!

When you first enter the Adobe Photoshop environment you will see a plethora of features and plug-ins to mess with. Fortunately, with a little training from me you won’t have to be confused by these things. Go to the top left of the screen and select file/new.

Now you should see the picture above. This is the basic variables that you are able to change when you start a new file. You can change the name of Photoshop document to whatever you please. This is best suited when you are trying to organize stuff during your Adobe Photoshop training sessions on the web. The preset window lets you select what type of paper size, resolution, and color mode that you would like to have to start out with. Of course most will just go with custom so that they can personalize their specific project. Most of the time, the project you are working on won’t fit into a category. Adobe has specifically put custom as the first on the list because of this fact. For today session, let’s change the preset to Web.

Following these steps will present you with a black window with the name of the file, percent of the resolution it is viewing at, and the color mode you have chosen at the top of the window.
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Software
Technology

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Motion in photo

There is this new toy known as the flying kite. It can be flown using a remote control. The flying kite is decorated with a lot of colored lights. It looks especially stunning and beautiful when you fly it against the dark sky.

Maybe you are wondering why I am talking about the flying kite. Well, the flying kite accidentally ended in one of my photos taken during a particular night shoot. Yes, I was angry because it had spoilt my photo. I was snapping the fireworks display when this flying kite appeared out of nowhere and flowed into the scene that was being captured.

After my anger was gone, I examined the photo again. I found that there is a ‘trailing blurred effect’ of the flying kite. This effect gives an impression that the flying kite is in flying motion.

You can conduct a simple experiment to see the effect for yourself. Firstly, find a road where there is a lot of traffic during the night. Secondly, set up your camera on a tripod at the side of road to capture the vehicles that are passing by the road. Thirdly, snap a number of photos on the vehicles that are passing by the road. Please ensure you are at a safe location while doing the experiment. You may also conduct the experiment during day instead of the night. But the ‘trailing blurred effect’ is more apparent during the night shoot.

Examine the photos taken from the experiment. You will notice that there is a ‘trailing blurred effect’ for the vehicles that have passed by that road. The reason behind the ‘trailing blurred effect’ is because the camera takes a while to capture a photo. Let say the camera takes about 1 second to capture the photo. At 0.1th second, the vehicle is at point A. At 0.2th second, the vehicle has moved from point A to point B. At 0.3th second, the vehicle has moved from point B to point C and so on. As a result, the camera ends up capturing multiple images of the moving vehicle creating the ‘trailing blurred effect’.
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Photography

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Two Player Card Games

Two player card games are played for fun and are easy to learn. There are classic two player games and specialty deck card games. Classic two player games can be played with a regular deck of cards. Classic two player games include Bezique, Cribbage, Speed, Crazy Eights, Go Fish and Piquet. Special deck cards are used in specialty deck card games. They include games such as Uno and Phase Ten.

Bezique is a two player card game played with 4 sets of 32 cards. The popular form of Bezique is the Rubicon Bezique. Each player receives nine cards and the remaining cards become the stock. Certain combinations of cards score various points. Pinochle is a two player card game derived from Bezique. Cribbage is a two player card game played with a deck of 52 cards. The scoring device in this game is known as the Cribbage Board. Each player receives six cards. The object of the game is to achieve up to 31 cards. Each player scores points for each series. Costly Colours is a two player game similar to Cribbage. Piquet is a popular two player card game with a deck of 32 cards. The points are given to most cards in a suit, sequence and highest set.
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Games

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How To Find A Good Accountant

The first thing you do to find a good accountant, is to build a list of referrals form credible sources. To find resources for these referrals may seem like a daunting task at first, however, it is simpler to accomplish this goal then what you think. You can go to such resources such as your local bank, any type of financial planners that you may have, and you can even talk to your current insurance agent about people they know about to be your accountant. If you have any contacts or affiliations with other businesses, then you can ask them for accountant referrals as well. These are all trusted resources that can provide you with some good leads on who you can trust to be your accountant. Finding accountant candidates through trusted resources such as your businesses bank, is one of the best ways to find an accountant. Most professional referrals like this mean that the accountant has a good reputation.
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Accounting
Business

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