Developer Shed Weekly SEO News for 2008-07-18

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July 18, 2008 It's time for the weekly issue of the SEO Chat newsletter. So let me start off by telling you about the story we're highlighting this week from eWeek. I guess I must be on a privacy kick. Last week I linked you to an article about the privacy concerns raised by online health records. This week I'm linking you to an article about the Department of Justice being sued by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU to make them turn over records related to the government's program of using cell phones as tracking devices. Check it out; privacy should concern us all. We published a good mix of articles on SEO Chat this week. We kicked off the week with a look at some new features in Google Trends and how you can use them to check the popularity of your web site in several different ways. On Tuesday we wrapped up our review of Viewzi, the search engine with numerous ideas of what visual search should be. Most recently, on Wednesday, we showed you the warning signs for SEO clients to avoid, and explained why you should be willing, when necessary, to turn away clients that aren't a good match for your services -- or your temperament. Be warned, you might even catch yourself remembering a few unpleasant clients or bosses from your past, as I did while I wrote the article. We also have a nice assortment of SEO-related tutorials from Tutorialized for you to check out this week. Who would want to miss "Confessions of an Underground Link Building Ninja"? We also discuss how to brand online by way of SEO, and more. By all means check out the other great tutorials we've published on Tutorialized. Speaking of link building, this week's thread discusses a very specific link-building strategy: leaving links in forums. Is it worth doing? Does Google notice such links? Check out our "teaser" below and get some answers; then visit the thread and leave a few answers of your own. Our Spotlight, just for readers of this newsletter, talks about some exciting news from Yahoo. It looks like they're trying to teach everyone who's BOSS. Yes, that's an acronym, for something they hope will spread their technology -- and their advertising. What is it, and should you care? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out. You will notice below that we have highlighted the Blackberry and GPS Webcast, brought to you by devCentral and Research in Motion. It will be available free to you in the comfort of your own home on July 10th. Be sure to drop us a line and tell us what you thought. You can find more info about this great event here! And last, but certainly not least, be sure to check out the fun and exciting SunQuest Chronicles: Ruby of Destiny choose your own adventure style book, brought to you by the good folks at Sun. Sign-up to the Sun Developer Network and play the game for your chance to win one of seven Sun Spots! Play now! Thanks again for reading. Until next time, SEO Chat Staff

ARTICLES Ask the Right Questions Before You SEO Your Site Meta Elements: A Field Guide Optimize This Page Title SEO on Tutorialized SEO Thread of The Week SEO Chat News Spotlight TOOLS Get Our Content on Your Site with DevText! New Articles, Right To Your E-mail Developer Search Building JavaScript applications with JSEclipse Using JSEclipse, JavaScript programmers now have their own Eclipse plug-in that provides many important features to aid in the development of JavaScript applications. JSEclipse gives JavaScript developers the same ease of use that Eclipse has been providing in the Java language and others for years. Learn to use this tool, while creating a colony of evolving "creatures" on your page. Learn more. BlammoSplat: Build a community Web site of OpenLaszlo animations, Part 3: The community animation Learn to enable users to both rate existing animations and to combine existing animations into new snippets. This is the third in a series of three tutorials that chronicle the building of a site that enables collaborative discussion and animation building using Domino and OpenLaszlo. Learn more.

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It's edgy! It's irreverent! It's all about technology! It's News You Can't Use, and you won't want to miss it! View this week's edition to learn the answers to these burning questions: Why are British companies banning instant messengers at work? When will they ever learn to speak English? The government has developed a weapon to stick words into your head. So did Tommy Tu Tone back in the 80s. DevShed Hulk on scene. Call 867-5309 for details. Yakov is back and is here to tell you about Ghostbusters the video game. Casper the ghost seen flexing his pimp hand. Juan Valdezburg and Carl from Slingblade stop by to give you the scoop. Make mine vanilla please. Watch the video!

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Ask the Right Questions Before You SEO Your Site by Terri Wells 2008-07-16 Every web site owner wants more traffic and higher rankings in the search engines. In the midst of an SEO campaign, however, it is easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. So before you change a single title, you might want to shift your focus to answer some important questions. So what do I mean by losing sight of the forest for the trees anyway? You have probably heard that expression since you were a teenager at least. You may even know that it means focusing on the details to the point that you lose sight of the big picture - and with the amount of detail work that goes into a proper SEO project, that is easy to do. Changing the questions you ask can shift your focus back to that bigger picture. You need to know what the big picture is before you do any search engine optimization, or you will waste a substantial amount of effort. Fortunately, you may only need to change a few words in the questions you already ask. Ease off just a little on the "what" and "how" questions and start asking a few "why" questions. I will give examples in the sections that follow. Read Ask the Right Questions Before You SEO Your Site

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Meta Elements: A Field Guide by James Payne 2008-07-15 Metadata, in its simplest form, is information about data. In this tutorial, we are going to look at the HTML and XHMTL elements known as Meta Elements and learn to use them. Not all are still used by search engines to determine rank, but they still have their purpose, and that is what this article is all about. The word meta is derived from Greek, and means "after." James Ferrier, Scottish God of Philosophy (aka unemployed) and coiner of the word "epistemology," would have you know that it also means "about itself." In other words, meta tags are really narcissistic, willing at any moment to give you information about their favorite topic: themselves. Meta tags are placed in the <head> section of your HTML/XHTML documents and are used to give information such as keywords, a description of the page, the language in which the page is written (i.e.; English, German, Gorilla), expiration date of the page, what type of content -- in short, information about the data within the page. Read Meta Elements: A Field Guide

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Optimize This Page Title by Terri Wells 2008-07-14 Please optimize this page title! It is so boring I am sure you would not want to steal it. Seriously, in this article I am going to explain what page titles are (as opposed to post titles or article titles) and how and why to optimize them. We might even come up with a better title for this article along the way. Look at the top of your browser, above the address bar and the line of links labeled File, Edit, etc. Next to the symbol for the browser itself you will find a title. That is the page title. It should not be confused with the actual title of this article, even though the two read nearly the same. In HTML, you specify the web page title in its title element. You use title tags, like so: <title>This is a web page title</title> Read Optimize This Page Title

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Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other tech related tutorials. Submit Your Tutorial Today! ImproveYour Alexa Ranking Fast An easy way to improve your Alexa rank without boosting traffic. Read the tutorial. Promoting On A Low Budget Learn to promote your site on a low budget! Read the tutorial. Top 15 Link Building Tips for New Webpages New websites need links to develop any sort of search engine visibility. Read the tutorial. Submit Your Website Properly Easy steps to submitting your website in the right category. Read the tutorial. 11 Ways to Get Free Traffic To Your Brand New Site Your new site is live. How do you get visitors? Read the tutorial. SEO Through Standard HTML Highlighting keywords using standard HTML tags. Read the tutorial.

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How can this SEO Newsletter be better? What do you like or dislike about this issue? Is there a topic you want to learn more about? What issues in search engine news are important to you? We'll consider your suggestions and ideas for improvement, so please email us. Email us.

Check out the amazing tutorials from IBM developerWorks and see what all the buzz is about! Learn how to install and use the Rational Asset Manager Eclipse client In this tutorial, you can learn how to install and configure the IBM Rational Asset Manager Eclipse client, explore the different views in the Asset Management perspective, learn various search techniques, work with existing assets, and submit a new asset. Improve your build process with IBM Rational Build Forge, Part 1: Create a continuous build and integration environment Learn how to implement a build management system that uses and extends your existing automation technologies. This tutorial shows, step-by-step, how to install and configure IBM Rational Build Forge to manage builds for Jakarta Tomcat from source code. Build Web services with transport-level security using Rational Application Developer V7, Part 1: Build Web services and Web services clients Build secure Web services with transport-level security using IBM Rational Application Developer V7 and IBM WebSphere Application Server V6.1. Follow this three-part series for step-by-step instructions about how to develop Web services and clients, configure HTTP basic authentication, and configure HTTP over SSL (HTTPS). This first part of the series walks you through building a Web service for a simple calculator application. You generate and test two different types of Web services clients: a Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) client and a stand-alone Java client. You also handle user-defined exceptions in Web services. Test terminal-based applications with Rational Functional Tester Regression testing -- in which code is thoroughly tested to ensure that changes have not produced unexpected results -- is an important part of any development process. But many testing environments neglect the terminal-based applications that still form the backbone of many industries. In this tutorial, you'll learn how the Rational Functional Tester Extension for Terminal-Based Applications works with other Rational Functional Tester to help test terminal-based applications quickly and easily. Improve your build process with IBM Rational Build Forge, Part 2: Automate builds for a real-world Tomcat project Learn how Rational Build Forge can extend a simple compile and package build process by adding customization and deployment capability. Go from a manual method to automating: checking for code changes; getting the latest source; compiling and packaging; customizing; copying to and restarting a deployment server; and sending e-mail notification that a new version is available. Building a grid system using WS-Resource Transfer, Part 4: Using WS-RT for grid monitoring In this five-part "Building a grid system using WS-Resource Transfer" series, we look at the use of WS-Resource Transfer (WS-RT) in different areas of the grid environment -- from using it as a method for storing and recovering general information about grid-to-grid monitoring and management, and security. We also examine how WS-RT can be used for the distribution and division of work. In any grid, there is a huge amount of metadata about the grid that needs to be stored and distributed. Using WS-RT makes sharing the information, especially the precise information required by different systems in the grid, significantly easier. Here in Part 4, we look at both sides of the security session, both in terms of using WS-RT as an aid to the authorization process and at combining WS-Security with WS-RT for secure resource exchange. Application development for the OLPC laptop The XO laptop (of the One-Laptop-Per-Child initiative) is an inexpensive laptop project intended to help educate children around the world. The XO laptop includes many innovations, such as a novel, inexpensive, and durable hardware design and the use of GNU/Linux as the underlying operating system. The XO also includes an application environment written in Python with a human interface called Sugar, accessible to everyone (including kids). Explore the Sugar APIs and learn how to develop and debug a graphical activity in Sugar using Python. Can ClearCase and Subversion Coexist? Leveraging Both for Maximum Results Teams can connect heterogeneous SCM environments using tools like Subversion with an enterprise class SCM solution like Rational ClearCase providing the reliability, security, and stability necessary for the organization.

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How does Google value backlinks in forums? That's the question asked in this week's thread. You'll be surprised to see how many different answers were posted to that question. Be sure to stop by the lively thread and share your experience! Backlinks in Forums - Google Value Intravino Hi, Are backlinks in forums important and good to have? I almost have a thousand new backlinks in forums and I did not see any gains in my major keywords in Google. I know that a thousand backinks is not much but before I only had a few. Thanks for your time. ClickyB Are the links "nofollowed" in the forums you're talking about? Are the forums in any way relevant to your subject matter? Even if both answers are "yes" there's still not much value for Google (which is why I don't use mine)! Aleks My point of view is that forum back links are of small value to Google. why I think so: 1. Not only anchor text, but also surrounding text (and amount of it) is important for Google. 2. Low PR of forum's pages, or zero PR. 3. No doubt the page must be relevant. Still I understand why people use links in their signatures - if forum is visited by a great number or people, at least 3% of them click your link. And of course you need to be active on forums to gain more clicks ;) Posts from this thread may have been abridged or removed. Forum members are responsible for the content of these posts. Read the full thread.

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Yahoo to BOSS Around the Competition If you've ever wanted to build a customized search engine on top of Yahoo's technology, your wait is over. Yahoo's BOSS, which stands for Build your Own Search Service, just entered public beta. BOSS is an open platform that offers programmatic access to the entire Yahoo Search index via an API. In plain English, a developer can use BOSS to build a web site independent of Yahoo's with its own search box, pass search queries to Yahoo, get the results returned from Yahoo's search engines, process these results however they wish, and display them to their users. So what exactly can you do with BOSS? According Yahoo's search blog, you can re-rank and blend search results as you see fit; present search results using any kind of user interface you wish, without adding Yahoo branding; mash up BOSS search results with other public data sources; search several verticals, such as news and images; and, best of all, you can do all this with no limits on the number of queries per day. Yahoo said that they're already working on expanding the API functionality and providing more access to Yahoo! Search Technology. This is already more freedom than Google offered when they opened their web services API in 2002 (they unceremoniously closed the beta in 2006). And what does Yahoo get out of this beneficent act? Prabhakar Raghavan, chief strategist for Yahoo Search, notes that There is no payment of any kind we expect from partners, but we do say in the terms of service up front that over time we will require them as they build and grow out to use our search advertising. In other words, the more successful you get, the more Yahoo will expect you to use their advertising in your search engine. The venerable search engine hopes that this move will increase their advertising revenue. And with all the pressure on Yahoo, from irate shareholders, Microsoft, and trying to compete in the search arena, the company can use all the revenue it can get. In any case, Yahoo has lined up an interesting list of BOSS partnerships. These include Standford University, the Indian Institute of Technology in Bombay, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, social search site Me(dot)dium and natural language search engine Hakia. Expect to see more partnerships soon. What does this say about the future of search, search advertising, and Yahoo? It's hard to tell. Building a vertical search engine may become more economically feasible for more companies; they won't have to spend an estimated $300 million to cover the cost of staff and hardware to index the web and handle queries. Powerset sold out to Microsoft recently in part because, as a start-up, it could not afford those expenses. BOSS could make start-up search engines more financially viable another way: though they'll be expected to show Yahoo search advertising, they'll also share in the revenue received from the advertising. But will all of these potentially new ways to search be used by consumers and therefore be profitable to search advertisers? Raghavan acknowledges the unknowns. Will advertisers see better ROI resulting from more focused audiences, or will traffic quality take a nosedive because of audience fragmentation? Only time will tell.

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