Developer Shed Weekly SEO News for 2009-05-01

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May 01, 2009 It's the end of the week, so it's time for us to remind you of all the wonderful SEO-related items we published for you on SEO Chat. Before we do that, though, we have an important announcement about an Adobe vulnerability from eWeek. If you use Adobe Reader, or know someone who does, you need to read this item. Not only does it explain the issue, it tells you what you can do while you're waiting for Adobe to fix it. Now let's move on to more search-relevant topics. If you want your web site to be spotted in the search engines and appreciated by visitors, you need to structure and build it appropriately. You'll learn how to do this when you read the article we published Wednesday on making your site usable by both visitors and search engine spiders. After you solve those problems, you'll be ready to take on others like some possibly unsuspected causes of duplicate content. If you run an e-commerce web site that uses session IDs, you need to read Tuesday's article. One of the biggest problems new (and sometimes even older) web sites face is getting links, especially potent one-way links. We offer some tips for this in Monday's article. Threads get really exciting when everyone chimes in with an opinion and that accurately describes this week's thread. What are the most overrated and underrated aspects of SEO? And would you believe we already have three pages of awesome posts? Check it out and add your opinion! While you're at it, don't forget to stop by Tutorialized for even more SEO-related content. Not only do we have nearly 100 tutorials on search engine optimization, but we have a good selection of information on other topics of interest to site owners, builders and designers. So get down with graphics, brush up on your knowledge of HTML and CSS, learn more about web hosting...it's up to you! And if you'd like to share your knowledge, you can easily submit your own tutorial. The Spotlight, just for readers of our newsletter, discusses a couple of new search tools just recently rolled out by Google. These could affect the way you choose to optimize your web site. What are they, and what kinds of changes do they indicate for how Google will do things in the future? Scroll down to the Spotlight to find out. As always, thanks for reading. Until next time, SEO Chat Staff

ARTICLES Website Spider and Visitor Usability Preventing Duplicate Content on an E-Commerce Site from Session IDs Requesting One-Way Links 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 IBM eKits Make Development eAsy! Take advantage of free e-kits from developerWorks. E-kits give you a collection of tutorials, articles, webcasts, podcasts, and demos about a particular product, task, or role. This one-stop shop of resources empowers you to maximize your enterprise investment. Learn more. IBM Rational Project and Portfolio Management certification training e-kit Get free PMI training in the IBM Rational Project and Portfolio Management certification training e-kit. As a member of the Project Management Institute's (PMI's) corporate council, IBM has more than 12,000 PMI-certified project managers and has been honored for its educational programs. Now, you can learn more about the difference that IBM's project management curriculum makes with six free courses based on IBM's best-practices processes and tools. 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: News of the Weird will make you laugh and cry. And if it does not, then it is just because you are emotionally challenged. Tech News helps you overcome the Swine Flu. Step One: Do not eat bacon. Porky Pig seen wiping sweat from his delicious brow. Video of the week is brought to you courtesy of a very busy writer. Or a hangover. Whichever is funnier. Watch the video!

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Website Spider and Visitor Usability by Ivan Strouchliak 2009-04-29 In this article we are going to discuss spider and visitor website usability issues. Luckily for us, both search engine spiders and human visitors have similar preferences, and are quite easy to satisfy. Before we get deeply into what you should be doing, though, let us start with some examples of what you shouldn't be doing. Bad Examples of Usability The examples below are from 2008. I've never been to web design school, but from the examples below I get the feeling that universities and colleges are not doing their jobs. The sites below were either done by amateurs or web designers who picked the wrong profession. Go to those sites and try getting ANYWHERE. It's a hassle. Keep mental notes and make sure you AVOID those crimes against usability. www(dot)torchia(dot)com/ - Their motto is "A direct line to functional design." That's quite ironic. The company does architecture, and I'm sure they do a good job, but once I got to their site, the question that popped into my head was - WTF? Not only is their navigation practically unusable, they use flash, which is bad for search engine spiders. Read Website Spider and Visitor Usability

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Preventing Duplicate Content on an E-Commerce Site from Session IDs by Codex-M 2009-04-28 It's very important for your e-commerce website to show up well in the search engines. Unfortunately, you may be fighting duplicate content issues you've never even heard of - issues that can cause your site to rank poorly in Google and never even be seen by searchers. If your site uses session IDs to track visitors, you need to read this article. We'll show you the problem, and provide you with several good solutions. E-commerce keeps getting more and more popular. According to latest survey by Nielsen, the number of Internet shoppers increased by 40 percent in just two years! The growth and popularity of online shopping has encouraged the creation of many e-commerce web sites, selling different types of online products. To get sales, these sites need a lot of visitors coming to them from popular search engines such as Google. Read Preventing Duplicate Content on an E-Commerce Site from Session IDs

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Requesting One-Way Links by Ivan Strouchliak 2009-04-27 Reciprocals have lost their SEO value. In fact, too many reciprocals can hurt rankings; I have heard many SEOs state that rankings can actually go up after the removal of a reciprocals page. Instead of reciprocals, you can try getting one-way links. Here we describe how you can do that. Finding Sites to Get Links From Go on Google and do a couple of searches with your core terms. Find leaders. Take their URLs and plug them into Yahoo Site Explorer to get back link data. Yahoo will show you the links it is aware of. There's a lot of controversy around using Yahoo link data for Google optimization, but unfortunately Google obfuscates its data on purpose, so using the "link:site(dot)com" command on it is pointless. You can try SEO Moz's Linkscape or Majestic SEO if you want more detailed link data. Linkscape gets data from all over, while Majestic SEO does its own crawling. Read Requesting One-Way Links

Check out the amazing tutorials from IBM developerWorks and see what all the buzz is about! WebSphere Service Registry and Repository Manage, govern, and share services across your organization by using WebSphere Service Registry and Repository. Follow the hands-on exercises to learn how to navigate the Web interface to publish, find, reuse, and update services. 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 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. NEW! 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.

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Tutorialized is dedicated to programming, designing, and many other tech related tutorials. Submit Your Tutorial Today! Search Engine Optimization for Your Online Store Getting a good ranking in search engines is essential. Read the tutorial. How to Choose Keywords Part of SEO work is putting golden keywords in your website. Read the tutorial. Social Media Optimization Basics - Part 1 The basics of using social media sites in website promotion. Read the tutorial. How Search Engines Operate How do search engines and their spiders actually work? Read the tutorial. Social Media Optimization Basics - Part 2 Harvesting the power of social media for website promotion. Read the tutorial. Duplicate Content Avoid duplicate content in print ready pages. Read the tutorial.

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.

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Who loves a good, civilized debate? Why, everybody who has an opinion, of course. Throw out a topic people can sink their teeth into, such as which SEO practices are most overrated and underrated, and watch the responses. Read this week's thread to see what happened when someone did just that, and don't forget to participate! Webby Underrated & Overrated SEO factors I was part of a 5 strong open question panel at SMX Munich last week when a visitor asked the panel... "What one thing would you class as overrated as a ranking criteria in SEO and what one thing would class as Underrated?" 5 different panels members and although many agreed with the most overrated (guess what that might be :-) ) there were some interesting answers for underrated. I thought it would make a good discussion here. What (briefly, one each) would you class as most overrated and what would you class as most underrated in terms of SEO? There is no right or wrong answer here by the way. A LOT of SEO methods are in general overrated and underrated. Alan P. S. I'll give the panel's answers later :-) EGOL Webby, great to see a post from you here and thanks for starting this great discussion... Overrated... links from forums, directories and blog comments Underrated... visitor behavior data europa Over rated = Content So many SEOs and their minions talk about content in the wrong way. Perhaps over rated isn't the right phrase, but properly educated about the value of linkable content not fresh content "because the search engines love fresh content." Every time I hear that phrase I duck and run. Under rated = High quality links I've seen plenty of SEOs out there saying, we will analyze your competition's "meta tags" and other silly stuff and providing no demonstrable methodology on how they will acquire the necessary high value in bound links that will truly make a difference on a website's ranking. 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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Google Unveils New Search Products Google constantly innovates; this explains why it's so successful. The BBC recently reported two experimental services the search giant unveiled that reflect some deeper changes in the company's attitude. They open the door to a better understanding of how the search engine thinks. The first feature, Similar Images, should help anyone who has felt the frustration of seeing a lot of unrelated graphics in the results. It lets the searcher use an image as the focus of a search, rather than words. Google's director of engineering used the example of searching for Paris and then being given the choice of clicking on an image of Paris Hilton, the Eiffel Tower or a photograph of an old church to find related images. In use, I found it almost too specific, but it could be great if you're looking for different views of the same item. The real breakthrough is that the search engine is returning similar images to a query that is expressed as an image, without text. The second feature, Timeline, should appeal to the historian in everyone. It organizes items already available in Google News and displays them chronologically. You can put in a keyword and control whether you're viewing news by the day, week, month, year, or decade. Try pulling back to the decade view and putting in a key word like racism or financial crisis, and you get an excellent historical view of this topic. You have to go to Google Labs to try out these features...and if you do that, you'll notice that it's changed a bit. There's an RSS feed to keep you informed about what's happening in Google Labs. The search engine added pictures of the engineers with a brief description of their projects. What's going on? Google director of project management R. J. Pittman says that the company is trying to close the gap at the point of which a new idea is hatched and the time it takes to get into the hands of users for feedback." This way, engineers don't waste time with projects that won't be used, or can more quickly reshape a project that has potential to make it better. What does this mean for you? Keyword search is never going to go away; Google has said as much, and anyway it's way too useful. But you might find your content being used in ways you didn't expect. This can be a good thing. Also, you can take advantage of Google's new features to improve your own content. For example, when writing a travel piece, use Similar Images to track down better views of tourist locations to use in the article (make sure you're allowed to use the image, of course!). Or if you're working on a piece about our current financial crisis, use Timeline to research other financial crises throughout history to give readers of your article the long view.

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