My Web Design Source

Sales are down for many businesses due to the slow economy. Business owners and CEOs are looking for that one thing that can pull them through the hard times and keep them afloat. When times get tough, many turn to SEO, hoping that it will be the ticket to increased sales. While SEO is almost always a good idea, if you’re counting on it to save a failing business, you may want to rethink things.

The customers you receive from search engines should not be what your entire marketing plan consists of. SEO is a long-term strategy for increasing your targeted customer base. It’s the gravy to the rest of your marketing initiatives. It’s a way to reach those extra customers whom you wouldn’t have been able to reach previously, but it should never be the meat and potatoes of your business.

Sales are down for many businesses due to the slow economy. Business owners and CEOs are looking for that one thing that can pull them through the hard times and keep them afloat. When times get tough, many turn to SEO, hoping that it will be the ticket to increased sales. While SEO is almost always a good idea, if you’re counting on it to save a failing business, you may want to rethink things.

The customers you receive from search engines should not be what your entire marketing plan consists of. SEO is a long-term strategy for increasing your targeted customer base. It’s the gravy to the rest of your marketing initiatives. It’s a way to reach those extra customers whom you wouldn’t have been able to reach previously, but it should never be the meat and potatoes of your business.

Here’s why:

SEO isn’t a quick fix. If you didn’t design your website with SEO in mind and you haven’t given much thought to it, it’s going to take time to plan your SEO strategy. It will take weeks to do the initial research required to even know where to begin. While there may be some low-hanging fruit you can grab quickly, without the necessary research, you wouldn’t even know where to find it.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

Have you ever wondered why some websites are outrageously successful while others wallow in the depths of cyberspace? Well the answer to the riddle is ‘words’. In the game of the internet, use the right words and you win; use the wrong words and you lose. It’s that simple.

One common mistake a lot of businesses make is to add a website to their marketing toolbox without really considering how to use it. You see the problem is, even though you need your website to help market and grow your business, what you actually need first is a strategy to promote your website.

Your primary goal must be to attract visitors to your site because without them, the whole game plan comes undone. If you intend to rely heavily on free search engine traffic for your website exposure and your site never makes it past position #200 on the search engine results pages, chances are no-one is ever going to know you exist because few people bother to look past the first four pages of results. There are literally billions of websites out there all hoping one day to make it into the top 20. Sadly, most will languish in the wait or just give up trying. So what do you do to make it happen? Well a good place to start is with keywords.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

Web 2.0 has annoyed legions of information technology professionals by providing an experience for consumers that, in many ways, is just plain better than what everyone gets at work. At some point after the year 2000, consumer companies grabbed the ball from business technologists and led the way with innovation.

One key refrain that expresses this trend is heard in companies around the world: "Why can’t we have a Google inside the four walls of our company?" While at first this seems like a good idea, the problem of using search inside a company is much more complicated than just indexing documents, throwing up a search box and asking people if they feel lucky.

This week, JargonSpy explores just what "enterprise search" means and why it is a complicated challenge that is becoming increasingly urgent for most companies to solve.

The first realization that enterprise search is an entirely different animal comes in the rush of disappointment that follows the installation of a search appliance from Google (nyse: GOOG - news - people ) or some other vendor. Instead of the satisfying experience of finding information that was previously unknown, the results page often shows a million results in a random order, or perhaps it shows none. While this is an improvement over no search at all, it is not what we are used to getting from the best searches on the Web, where relevant results usually cluster at the top.

The gap has many causes. First, and most important, Internet search is built on the link network that constitutes the Web. Every time someone links to content, he is effectively voting for its importance. This is the genius of Google’s Page Rank and related ranking algorithms: They favor pages based on incoming links.

In the enterprise, there is no corresponding link structure and the quality of the results suffer. Other problems include the varying formats of documents–everything is not HTML and PDFs like it is on the Web–as well as varying access and file permissions systems. And it isn’t unusual for confidential documents that were left lying around to show up in search results.

On the other hand, people inside companies are usually not trying to manipulate search results through inaccurate tags or link bombing. The clues to the relevance of a document usually can be taken at face value.

But the biggest difference is that when you are searching in the enterprise, you might not exactly know what you’re looking for. Your desire is frequently not to find a particular piece of information but to explore the collection of available knowledge and find out what’s there. Even in searches that are not intended to be exploratory, it is common to find that results are ambiguous and in need of interpretation and refinement.

In library science, there is a whole set of best practices involving specialization, research interviews and consultation between librarians and researchers. The key to getting enterprise search right is to imitate these processes in an automated system. As my guru for enterprise search, Daniel Tunkelang, chief scientist of Endeca, puts it, "We know the system is doing its job when it is telling you something you don’t know."

Read Full News

Resources for 

My Web Design Source

You might have noticed that I love tables in general and Excel in particular. Once you view any data in Excel, you notice things you wouldn’t have seen otherwise. The greatest benefits allowing to effectively process huge volumes of information are:

• Sorting function;
• Pivot tables;
• Find / Replace option, etc.

Thus today I am listing 6 ways to export your backlink information to Excel to further work with it:

1. With Yahoo! SiteExplorer you can export results to TSV file and open it as Excel:

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

Reasons you should know who is visiting your website.

Many businesses still rely on services like Google Analytics to track activity on their website. While such top-level analytics play a role in the online marketing mix, they do not offer the type of detailed, qualitative data that tells you which companies have been viewing your website and what they might be interested in buying.

Caspar Craven, Co-Founder and Director of Trovus, makes a case on why SMEs should know who’s visiting their website – and how this valuable knowledge can turn browsers into buyers and interest into real revenue. 

In today’s economic environment, it is more important than ever that every pound you spend in your business delivers tangible ROI.   And for many businesses, their web activity constitutes an expensive brochure ware website showing little tangible return.

Everyone knows that the web should deliver more value and that it has to be a core part of the marketing mix, but what is the easiest way to maximise your company’s web presence?

A new generation of web analytics software could be the answer. Most businesses use tools such as Google Analytics which tell them how many people have visited their web site, what search terms they have used to get there and what the most popular pages are.

However, the latest generation of analytics tools goes even further and looks to identify the organisations who have been visiting your site, how they found it and what they are looking for.

Why is this valuable and how does this help you deliver ROI for your business? A good question and there are four key reasons why your business needs to know who is visiting your website and why:

• Understand who is visiting your website

Are they your potential customers, your clients, new recruits or just competitors? Who are the actual people who you want to arrive at your website – for many businesses, potential customers are the main target, but are they finding and looking at your website? By using an analytics tool which tells you the “who and why”, you can have a much greater understanding of how your site is working.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

During Google’s launch of its Chrome Web browser, the company went out of its way to acknowledge the debt it owes two open-source projects, Firefox and WebKit. But Microsoft, an uncommon ally in the open-source realm, might also deserve a tip of the hat.

After some digging through the Chrome source code, Scott Hanselman, a senior programming manager for Microsoft, found that the browser uses an open-source Microsoft project called the Windows Template Library, software for building a Windows user interface. (It uses an abstraction layer so other interface software can be employed on other operating systems.)

On its open-source Chromium site, Google lists WTL 8.0 as included third-party software.

Microsoft, while keeping its crown jewels proprietary, has been lurking around the fringes of the open-source realm for years now. Open-source software may be moved freely from one project to another; though license particulars sometimes erect barriers, both Chrome and WTL use relatively liberal licenses.

There’s a bit more intrigue with some other Microsoft technology, though. For security technology called Data Execution Prevention, which can help block various forms of attacks, Google also apparently used an undocumented interface from Microsoft to get the feature working in Windows XP SP2.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

During Google’s launch of its Chrome Web browser, the company went out of its way to acknowledge the debt it owes two open-source projects, Firefox and WebKit. But Microsoft, an uncommon ally in the open-source realm, might also deserve a tip of the hat.

After some digging through the Chrome source code, Scott Hanselman, a senior programming manager for Microsoft, found that the browser uses an open-source Microsoft project called the Windows Template Library, software for building a Windows user interface. (It uses an abstraction layer so other interface software can be employed on other operating systems.)

On its open-source Chromium site, Google lists WTL 8.0 as included third-party software.

Microsoft, while keeping its crown jewels proprietary, has been lurking around the fringes of the open-source realm for years now. Open-source software may be moved freely from one project to another; though license particulars sometimes erect barriers, both Chrome and WTL use relatively liberal licenses.

There’s a bit more intrigue with some other Microsoft technology, though. For security technology called Data Execution Prevention, which can help block various forms of attacks, Google also apparently used an undocumented interface from Microsoft to get the feature working in Windows XP SP2.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

During Google’s launch of its Chrome Web browser, the company went out of its way to acknowledge the debt it owes two open-source projects, Firefox and WebKit. But Microsoft, an uncommon ally in the open-source realm, might also deserve a tip of the hat.

After some digging through the Chrome source code, Scott Hanselman, a senior programming manager for Microsoft, found that the browser uses an open-source Microsoft project called the Windows Template Library, software for building a Windows user interface. (It uses an abstraction layer so other interface software can be employed on other operating systems.)

On its open-source Chromium site, Google lists WTL 8.0 as included third-party software.

Microsoft, while keeping its crown jewels proprietary, has been lurking around the fringes of the open-source realm for years now. Open-source software may be moved freely from one project to another; though license particulars sometimes erect barriers, both Chrome and WTL use relatively liberal licenses.

There’s a bit more intrigue with some other Microsoft technology, though. For security technology called Data Execution Prevention, which can help block various forms of attacks, Google also apparently used an undocumented interface from Microsoft to get the feature working in Windows XP SP2.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

Chrome, Google’s shiny new Web browser, has some eye-catching features, but I’m not ready to trade in Firefox for it.

I downloaded Chrome last week, when it first became available. I haven’t run any benchmark tests on it, but my impression is that it’s generally about as fast as Firefox, which is my everyday browser. However, I had a hard time figuring out how to do simple tasks like printing in Chrome, found it more difficult to search sites other than Google and was frustrated that I can’t yet use it on my Mac at home.

The big difference you notice with Chrome right away is that it doesn’t look like Firefox - or any other Web browser. It doesn’t have a menu bar, and there’s no way to add one to it.

Instead, at the top of the Chrome program window, you’ll find the browser "tabs" for each Web page you have open. In order to change Chrome’s settings, print the page you’re on or clear your cache, you have to click on one of two icons located near the location bar.

As Google developers describe it, their idea was to emphasize the "content" that you’d access through Chrome, not the browser program or its features. They thought the best way to do that was to keep Chrome’s interface - the buttons, options and icons - to a minimum.

The problem is that a minimal interface makes it difficult to figure out how get the browser to do what you want it to. In Firefox, if I want to, say, create some folders for my bookmarks, I go to the "bookmarks" menu option and click on "organize bookmarks." Easy enough.

In Chrome, though, it’s not so clear. There’s an "other bookmarks" button, but clicking on it gives you your list of bookmarks. Through trial and error I finally figured out that I needed to right click on one of the buttons in my bookmark toolbar and select "add page" or "add folder."

I mistakenly clicked on "open all bookmarks" - the top choice when you right click - resulting in dozens of browser tabs being opened at once. The good news is that I was able to close all those tabs without either Chrome or my computer crashing.

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source

Few companies have made a bigger impact on the world than Google, the omnipresent technology company launched by two whiz kids in a Stanford University dorm room 10 years ago.

Started as simply a better way to search online, it’s become far more than that: Google is now a verb; one of the world’s most valuable businesses (about $140 billion in market valuation); the future of advertising; and possibly the major reason why all of us feel like we’re living in an attention-deficit disordered world. Unquestionably a wonderful success story, the 10-year anniversary of Google also brings up unsettling questions about the company - and its impact on us.

Will it be able to live up to its motto, "Don’t be evil"?

Google is amassing the world’s biggest trove of sensitive user data. When governments like China and even the United States come calling, can we trust it to hold out? Can we trust it to understand that there is a fine line between "monetizing" user information and blatant invasions of privacy, and does the company understand where that line lies?

Read Full News

Resources for

My Web Design Source