Category: Digital

eTrafficJams has an interesting search engine optimization service article that talks about "White Hat" SEO optimization.

Lurking in your website's HTML code can be many "do not enter" signs that you aren't aware of. These roadblocks make it hard or impossible for search engine spiders to fully access every part of your site.

That's a serious problem. Source

To fix it, their SEO optimization experts perform a thorough analysis of your site's design and HTML. They remove any spider traps they find along the way. One often overlooked area for optimization are shopping cart or database-driven web sites. These functions are usually prime candidates for better search engine optimization.

Examples of basic content techniques they use to make sites search engine friendly:

• Title Tag
• META Description
• META Keywords
• Alt tag attributes
• Headings H1, H2, H3 etc
• Body Text
• Link Text (Anchor Text)
• Link Title
• Domain Names, File and Folder Names
• Keyword Repetition, Proximity, Prominence
• Page Size
• Search Engine Friendly Navigation
• Number of Pages on the Website
• Website Freshness/Frequency of Updates
• Number of Outgoing Links
• Site Map

Formatting your content is only the start. The second part of the strategy is to keep ranking up over time through link building and constantly enhancing your content.  SEO firms like this offer a monthly maintenance plan which is vital to your long term success. They monitor your search engine rankings and analyze the progress of your SEO campaign. As necessary, pages will be re-optimized to sustain and improve your rankings in the major engines: Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

Part of 'White Hat' optimization is doing the ethical, search-engine approved methods to enhancing your site. Black Hat optimization such as duplicate pages and white text links on a white background and stuffing pages with keywords is frowned upon.

Rely on an expert to optimize your site or else you may find yourself blacklisted from the search engines!

A new Gallup study reveals a halt in the steady decline of those relying on newspapers for their news gathering.

Despite all of the publicity about people fleeing to the Web for their daily news diet, the Gallup survey found that twice as many still rely on newspapers: 44% daily vs. 22% daily for Internet use.

Read more about these trends.

UK based Carphone Warehouse has created an innovative phone ordering application on their web site, The Phone Spot. There are two things I like about it.

First, they make creative use of animation on their cell phone ordering form. This 'Step by Step Phone Finder' has an animated character on the left which makes the search feel personal, and takes out some of the otherwise intimidating nature of selecting multiple products and configuring a cell phone order. The animation also catches you eye and makes you stay longer on the page, make it more likely to engage the visitors interest.

Secondly, they make good use of diagrams to show the different cell phone types. A picture is worth a thousand words, and this web form certainly makes creative use of illustrations to aid the user in their buying process.

Visit their ThePhoneSpot.com to see this buying experience in action.

I liked how this website monitoring tool is positioned.

They have geographically dispersed monitoring locations which take the 'pulse' of your servers' health. They also have a "triple stage" error verification system and multi-level error correlated notification system.

This type of independent, off-site monitoring of the availability and performance of your web sites allow you to keep tabs on servers and network components, web applications and e-business transactions, web-based and e-mail systems.

This service ensures reliable early problem and error detection with a multi-stage verification process, followed by real-time alerts. Detailed reports and website diagnostic tools allow web system owners and operators to quickly locate and troubleshoot problems.

Note their feature set:

Network & Server Monitoring - monitors any type of server or network device as often as every minute with error detection and real-time multimedia alerts.

Website Monitoring - monitors performance and availability of web sites up to every minute simultaneously from a global monitoring network. Provides full-page downloads with real-time alerts generated if page errors or performance problems occur.

Transaction & Web Application Monitoring - monitors complex multi-step web transactions and the applications they use. Features simultaneous full-page downloads for every step from multiple cities around the World.

Email System Monitoring with Round-Trip - verifies that your incoming and outgoing email services are working from and end-to-end perspective.

Read more about WebSitePulse.

Ever sit up late in school trying to cram for the next days test? Here is a product with an interesting name: CompuCram. They feature software with more than 750 practice test questions written by industry experts. Their educational exam prep software is available for various industries: here is a Real Estate Exam Preparation Software example that can help you pass a real estate license test

Learn more at http://www.compucram.com.

It is often hard to find an affordable website designer, especially if you are a small to medium sized business. Artist's Cafe specializes in web sites for small businesses, designers, and entrepreneurs.They tout affordable rates in the $2-3k range, and advertise themselves as having very creative, passionate and artistic designers.

One issue will going with low-cost website designs firms, in my experience, is the number of design concepts the firm will produce for you. This firm says they provide 4 unique conceptual designs for every new client so they can choose from the options. Once the the client chooses a design direction, Artist's Care will iterate 3 times through the design process to produce the desired outcome. I find this to be a refreshing and reasonable process for web design.

Learn more at http://www.artistscafe.com.

Not protected by antivirus software? With both free and commercial solutions available, there is little reason not to protect yourself.

A nice, free solution is Clamwin. You can even run it on a USB thumbdrive by downloading it from PortableApps.com.

Not sure about using freeware to protect your computer? For commercial solutions, there is nothing better than Norton Anti Virus 2007. Norton will protect your computer from Viruses, Spyware, Trojans and Worms. It automatically detects and removes Viruses, rids your computer of unwanted Spyware, and scans Email and Instant Messaging attachments for Virus threats. Learn more about Norton on this site.

Whether you choose a free or a commercial solution, remember to practice safe computing!

Internet Explorer continues to lose ground:

The downward trend took Internet Explorer to its lowest market share percentage for the year at 79.64 percent. Internet Explorer's loss turned into gains for Safari and Firefox. Safari ended the year at 4.24 percent, and Firefox came in at 14 percent. Source

When Vista launches, look for IE's market share erosion to slow however.

Spam message volumes have doubled over the past 12 months; situation is worsened by the recent emergence of image spam. The BorderWare Security Network has reported that image spam currently accounts for at least 35% of the overall spam volumes and this trend is on the rise. BorderWare data indicates that there are more than 25 image spam campaigns under way at any given time.

Image spam is a technique where the spam message consists of an image and a small amount of text that looks like it is 100% text-based, when in fact it is an image that looks exactly like a regular email message. In addition, while all image spam messages may look the same to an end-user, spammers have programs to automatically create each image to have slightly different coloration, speckle patterns, or fonts. This causes messages to appear unique when received and processed by spam filters. The randomness of the images and the message contents make image based spam difficult to classify. Current filters used to prevent image spam including OCR and fingerprinting are not effective to protect against today’s image spam threats. Source

To help defeat these attacks, BorderWare's Intercept™ Image Analysis is one technology you can use to stop image spam. Intercept Image Analysis is an image classification technique, to be used in addition to the existing and effective threat detection techniques to specifically combat image spam. Learn More

Gickr.com lets you create animated GIFs quickly and easily using images from your Flickr account. You can also individually upload images to Gickr that you want turned into an animated GIF.

No software to install, and free.