The Great Google Coverup? - Page 2 The Neville Brothers were formed by the hard life and hard times, but they are also heirs to America’s richest musical tradition: the aural gumbo of New Orleans. As New Orleans Jazz fest kicks off here’s John Ed Bradley’s 1991 GQ profile on the Neville Brothers. The Neville’s are a national treasure and this behind-the-scenes look lets us in on the men behind the magic. The subject is in good hands. Bradley is the author of six novels, including Tupelo Nights, as well as one of the finest sports memoirs ever written, It Never Rains in Tiger Stadium . In the meantime, dig into his story, “Bards of the Bayou” and then do yourself a favor and listen to some tunes by the Neville brothers. Tipitina's in the warm blue fog, squatting beneath a crescent moon so sharp and clean you could shave a wild hog with it. Art Neville enters the famous New Orleans honky-tonk wearing a hipster's suit and studded leather boots, his wife, Lorraine, in hand. "My new album's called Look for God,” he says. "No.
SEO Audits – Strategic vs. Tactical For many years I operated in a bubble performing audits on client sites. Coordinating and providing consulting in the implementation of my findings, yet not ever having an open dialogue with other professionals in the industry regarding what commonalities or differences we had in our approach. As I began writing blog articles on my approach, and fielding questions from others regarding how I went about the process, I began to learn of two typical approaches. One involves a quick audit, an hour or two, where the most common mistakes or issues are found, followed by broad recommendations. Personally, I take a different approach, one that works well for my needs, though it may not work for yours. Strategic SEO Audits The vast majority of my work these days involves strategic audits. I also spend a few minutes up to an hour or so reviewing the competitive landscape and set up one or more sweet spot charts, looking for areas of weakness in the landscape. Patterns Reveal Bigger Problems
Basic Drupal SEO: On-site Optimization Summary Enable Clean URLsEnable Path Module and install and enable Pathauto, Global Redirect and Token Modules.Configure the Pathauto ModuleInstall and enable the Meta Tags Module.Install enable the Page Title ModuleDo NOT install the Drupal Sitemap Module.Fix .htaccess to redirect to "www" or remove the "www" subdomain.Fix your theme's HTML headers if they aren't rightRecommended: create a custom front pageModify your robots.txt file. Enable clean URLs Search engines prefer clean URLs. Install the pathauto module and enable it The pathauto module is highly recommended. Think carefully about how you want your URLs to look. At the very least, enable the path module and install the pathauto module. Caution: The above advice is directed towards new Drupal sites. Here are some pathauto settings to watch out for: For update action choose "Do nothing. There is also a more comprehensive Pathauto tutorial. Install the Global Redirect Module Read more about the Global Redirect Module. Further Reading
RSS Creation - How to create RSS Feeds JournalSeek - A Searchable Database of Online Scholarly Journals Link Building Has Changed When I first started in SEO, link acquisition was almost always a manual process. I'd search the engines for links that pointed to the competition, find relevant directories and link lists, email relevant sites and beg, borrow or bribe (aka buy advertising) to get a link. I tried reciprocal link building (and did some pretty dumb stuff). Then, as I got more intertwined in the SEO community, I found vendors who built large networks of sites, spammed blogs/forums/guestbooks and ran text link sales operations. I leveraged these services to help clients rank better, almost always with great success. Over time, I got smarter. As our clientele and foci changed, we changed again. I figured a visual history might make for a compelling view: Now, link building is changing again. Twitter really is cannibalizing the web's link graph, or at least, the blogosphere's and Google seems to be using Tweet counts in some way (though possibly only in the QDF algo).
How To Track Your Social Media Strategy The author's posts are entirely his or her own (excluding the unlikely event of hypnosis) and may not always reflect the views of Moz. Social media is becoming increasingly important for SEO. Just in the last week we've seen the launch of Google +1 and early correlation data showing Facebook shares are highly correlated with rankings. In this post I'm going to walk through a bunch of different ways of tracking your social media strategy. We'll start with the basic/easy stuff and move up to more complicated things (Google Docs! APIs! 3rd Party Tools There are a million and one social media monitoring/tracking/reporting tools. PostRank PostRank is a neat service that tracks your pages (either through inputting manual pages or via an RSS feed) and gives you engagmenet metrics for your content. There is a free plan or a paid plan that is only $15 / month so it's very easy to get started with PostRank. Topsy Ok, Topsy is cool - we're getting close to analysing our competitors. Sharedcount
Drupal SEO is Easy | DevBee I began the Devbee website back in March as a way to help others by way of documenting what I have learned about Drupal and also to drum up a little bit of business for myself. The content of this site is extremely targeted, and I don't ever expect to see more than a few hundred visits a day. This definitely does not reflect the expectations, or at least hopes, of most website owners. Back in the day (way back during the last millennium), all one needed to do was have a simple HTML page containing relevant words or phrases and he was fairly likely to make a decent showing in results pages. Fortunately for us, as Drupal users, we have a secret weapon, Drupal itself. Stumbling upon Drupal SEO Today I discovered that an article I wrote recently is the top result for the query "opcode cache" on Google. This is not unusual. And more than half of my very modest traffic comes through these search results. What's the Secret? Now comes the mysterious part. Drupal SEO The Right Path Sitemaps
10 Tips for Budding Web Programmers and Designers - Chrys Bader - Tales of an Entrepreneur September 25th, 2007 1. Use Firefox This is the most important platform you have at your fingertips. Firefox is essential for developing websites. I'm not saying you need to use it as your browser -- you can use whatever browser you want for surfing. Since the birth of Firefox, there have been a few extensions developed that are a MUST HAVE if you want to speed up development and learn faster. Web Developer Extension by Chris Pederick. This extension has many useful tools, though most of them have been trumped by FireBug (which I will talk about next), some are still useful. Resize the browser window Quickly and easily resize the browser to 800x600, 1024x768, or any other size you want. Firebug Extension by Joe HewittOften at the office we ask the question, "Remember life before Firebug?". Inspect the DOM (Document Object Model) Click 'Inspect' and hover over elements of the DOM to see where that element is in the HTML code and what CSS styles it has. 2. 3. Be tasteful. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9.
What SEO/SEM Professionals Should Know About Website Usability In an effort to differentiate themselves from competitors, many SEO/SEM firms come up with interesting unique selling propositions (USPs). Some SEO/SEM firms emphasize search engine advertising and create quite useful tools to help manage PPC campaigns. Some SEO firms specialize in training, again creating tools that help newbie and experienced SEO professionals optimize existing web pages. For the past two to three years, I have been watching SEO/SEM firms increasingly focus on the user, specifically offering website usability services. Although I laud the evolution of SEO/SEM firms to increasingly focus on the user, I admit that I find some of their conclusions and methodologies rather troubling. Website usability and user-friendly design are certainly great terms to use during the sales process. Rather than give my personal opinion, for this two-part article, I decided to ask some of my well-known colleagues about the usability industry’s opinion of search engine optimization.
Le mythe du sitemap XML Google Création de site hôtel et restaurant L'hôtellerie est un secteur qui a profondément changé avec l’arrivée d’Internet. Selon les études, en France, entre 70 et 85% des réservations de chambres d'hotel passent par Internet. L'objectif clé de la création d'un site internet d'un hôtel ou d'un restaurant et de son référencement est simple : augmenter le nombre de réservation en direct, sans avoir de commission à donner à un distributeur. Sans site de qualité, ce sont les centrales de réservations qui profite de cette manne avec des commissions allant de 17 à 25 %. Qu’est ce qu’un site internet de qualité pour un hôtel ? Séduire Le site Internet d'un hôtel doit : donner envie de venirdoit mettre en avant les atouts de votre établissementrefléter fidèlement son ambiance Avec une création graphique travaillée et adaptée aux spécificités du Web, nos experts vous proposerons les meilleurs solutions dans le respect de votre budget. Être visible Offrir un contenu utile Un site unique à votre image
TheRarestWords: Intriguing Semantic SEO Project from Russia A mysterious yet intriguing project from Russia has come across our inbox. It is a search-engine optimization analysis tool for Websites called TheRarestWords. For any given URL, like Microsoft’s or Techcrunch’s, it shows you the rarest keywords on the homepage (i.e., the ones most likely to give your site some search-engine juice), other sites with related keywords, and a list of categories the site would fit under based on those keywords. For Microsoft, some the rare keywords it identifies are “silverlight,” “biztalk,” “onecare,” “skydrive, “popfly,” “ballmer,” and “ozzie.” You can try your site by going to TheRarestWords then tries to tap into crowd intelligence by letting anyone add a 100-character definition for each keyword, which could give it a semantic edge in trying to categorize each site. The developer is a mysterious Russian who does not want to give out his name. For example, here’s TechCrunch Vs.
Top 25 Free Icon Resources for Web Designers :Speckyboy Design Magazine Please note that this post is fairly old, for the latest free icons you should browse the Free Icons category. 1. Fam Fam Fam (www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/) 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.Fast Icons (www.fasticon.com/freeware/ 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. and the rest…