Latest [searchlatest] from Search Journal

Microsoft & Yahoo Dot ‘Is’ & Cross ‘Ts’

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 12:00:00 EST

Microsoft and Yahoo have reportedly hammered out the final terms of their 10-year counter-Google search deal ahead of big foot-dragging Justice Department-European Commission regulatory approval sometime next year. They still hope to close in early 2010. As previously reported Bing will be Yahoo’s search engine and Yahoo will sell ads around it.

The Impact of Real-Time Search on Social Media Marketing

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 14:45:00 EST

The recent launch of Google's real-time search engine is set to have a positive impact on the social media marketing industry and improve the results of campaigns according to Reality Digital, the leading provider of social networking software for brands and businesses. Google real-time search constantly updates as events and conversations occur around the web. The announcement that deals with Facebook and MySpace have followed the previous agreements with Twitter and LinkedIn means that streams from a brand's Facebook and MySpace pages will now have a direct impact on search engine results, and real-time updates from social networks will be visible on the search engine results pages themselves.

Enterprise Search Web Parts Are Still Sealed

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 08:20:00 EST

I am pretty passionate about Enterprise Search and with MOSS 2007 I saw customers really struggle because wildcard search was not offered out of the box and most of the web parts in Microsoft.Office.Server.Search.WebParts are sealed. Luckily, the most important one CoreResultsWebPart was in fact not sealed and I was able to hack together a wildcard search solution by inheriting it and using some hacky reflection.

Google Goggles

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 10:13:00 EST

This is just too cool. Even if it doesn't work well — I'll try it out later — the concept is great, and the video is a great work of product marketing: clear, exciting, and ratcheting up the vision click by click.

Google Adds to Its Wave Team, Announces Fresh Code Release Plans

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 06:30:00 EST

After Google ‘s $10 million Friday acquisition of Applejet, Aaron Iba, AppJet’s CEO has announced that their service would reopen to the public as opensource. Applejet is the developer of EtherPad , a document collaboration service like Google Docs with some enhanced features notably one that displays document updates to all users in real time. With the MIT-led EtherPad team working side by side with the Google Wave development group, Wave is better poised to become a much improved office suite version of Google docs.

Wave on Ulitzer: Confessions of a Google Wave Fanboy

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 18:00:00 EST

Like many who were given early Google wave sandbox accounts, I didn't see the purpose at first. The rather buggy javascript laden interface was actually kind of slow and at times cumbersome and worst of all crashed my browser all the time. This was for the most practical of reasons, I didn't know anyone else using the platform and it was an alpha that was changing on practically an hourly basis.

Google Considered Buying the New York Times: Report

Sun, 06 Dec 2009 13:30:00 EST

Oh, my sainted aunt. Google thought about buying the New York Times, according to Barron’s, which got it from somebody else’s interview with Ken Auletta, author of Google: The End of the World as We Know It. Reportedly the hands of Google co-founder Larry Page and CEO Eric Schmidt were stayed by the thought that the deal would “sabotage” Google’s status as a neutral source. Auletta, who generally writes for the New Yorker, said the reason they were interested is the fact that “Google’s search engine depends on good information.”

My Experience Developing A Google Wave Robot

Sat, 05 Dec 2009 13:30:00 EST

This past weekend I set out explore some of the extension capabilities of Google Wave. One of the weaknesses that have been identified by many is the lack of integration with email. For me, in particular, because Wave is new, many Waves are being orphaned as those playing and testing out Wave don't come back to the conversation for long periods, if at all. My goal was to use email as a means to bring people back to the Wave and keep the collaboration/discussion going in a single environment. Some developers are exploring letting users contribute from email, but in my opinion, that undermines the goal of Wave.

Why Does Everyone Want to Be Your SEO BFF?

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 17:45:00 EST

If you are like me, you are regularly receiving unsolicited email from various quarters, telling you about the latest and greatest SEO solutions on the planet. Just buy the book, or guide, or download the promotional whitepaper and this expert will offer you the latest "Secrets" to search engine success.Google it. At last count I saw millions of results! Well, it's not a very well-kept secret anyway. One reason for the mysterious "secret" is simple: Google and other search engines do not publish their algorithms, and they are known to change without notification. Another reason, of course, that everyone is clamoring for the top spot, is because that's where the eyeballs track. Plus, if you monitor your placement closely, you'll find that it will change at least somewhat, even from one day to the next.

Google Gears Ain’t Long for This World

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 13:15:00 EST

Apparently Google Gears ain’t gonna stick around that long. Google Apps will eventually get their offline access from HTML5, the standard-revision-in-progress, and hence the functionality will be built in rather than added on, according to a piece in the Los Angeles Times. Google told the paper, “We’re continuing to support Gears so that nothing breaks for sites that use it. But we expect developers to use HTML5 for these features moving forward as it’s a standards-based approach that will be available across all browsers.”

Microsoft Reportedly Bows to Opera’s Wishes

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 12:30:00 EST

In response to Opera’s complaints Microsoft has reportedly modified the proposed ballot screen that’s supposed to get it out from under the European Commission’s latest antitrust charges. Rather than be inside Internet Explorer, the ballot screen offering Windows users alternatives to IE will appear in a web-page format and the choice of the top five browsers in Europe including IE will appear randomly rather than alphabetically, according to Bloomberg.

Understanding Global Carrier Ethernet with Mark Fishburn at CENX

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:45:00 EST

I first met Mark Fishburn at the Convergence Technology Council (CTC) in Calabasas, California. Mark was a director in the organization, and had very strong ideas about networking and Ethernet. Going beyond the standard role we all play at professional networking venues, he distinguished himself from the group by presenting a passion for teaching others, and presenting his ideas in language nearly anybody could easily understand. Mark was always easy to find at CTC meetings, as he was the center of the largest groups of people who wanted to hear what he had to say.

Bernanke Should Go Back to Teaching

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 11:45:00 EST

I am watching yet another Bernanke speech with a Council of Foreign Relations backdrop. This guy was born to be a University professor. All he is talking about is what a parrot would read from the text books. He is not qualified for th ejob for what we need now during the depression of 2009. No one cares what he thinks. At least Greenspan had the charisma. What is he talking about? Macroeconomics 401? He should be removed from his post and should go back to his university teaching job. Everyone who is in the room is now sleeping before live TV cameras. What is he talking about? This must be a candid camera joke on CBS. Where are the cameras?

Centerstance Joins Google Apps Authorized Reseller Program

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 15:30:00 EST

Google Apps brings simple, powerful communication and collaboration tools to all sizes of organizations. With Google Apps, users have access to applications such as Gmail webmail service, Google Talk instant messaging service, Google Calendar calendaring service, Google Docs program, Google Sites web application, and Google Video for business with their own domain to work together more effectively. Best of all, everything is hosted by Google, so there's no hardware or software to download, install or maintain. "It's a natural partnership," stated John Marshall, Director of Technology Services at Centerstance. "Centerstance is the Northwest's premier Cloud Computing consulting company and Google is a major player in both Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS)."

Canada & Australia Smile of Microsoft-Yahoo

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 13:15:00 EST

The Microsoft-Yahoo deal got approved by regulators in Canada and Australia. The Justice Department and the European Commission are reviewing the plan.

Google Responds to the Bing Challenge

Fri, 27 Nov 2009 11:30:00 EST

"At Google, we run anywhere from 50 to 200 experiments at any given time on Google sites all over the world," notes a Google spokesman in a recent statement on The Google Official Blog. "Right now, we are running a small experiment of a new Google homepage design that shows links when a user mouses over the screen. This is just a test and a way for us see whether our users will celebrate an even simpler search interface."

Success with a Sitemap!

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 15:45:00 EST

Four or five years ago if you said to your web guru, "let's make a site map!" You'd probably end up with a quaint-looking single web page that had a list of links and categories indexing your site. You can still find these from time to time. As it turns out, Apple still has one, go figure. As you may recall, this was yet another alternative to a search engine, to help visitors find your content. Not your grandfather's web code, the "site map" of the 21st century, however, is something a bit different but with the same goal of helping visitors find your content, albeit in a bit more "high tech" fashion.

It's XML not HTML

So we are talking XML sitemaps. These sitemaps are somewhat similar to the old-fashioned kind, they are a list of links and web pages, but in a special structured format, one that Yahoo! and Google know how to scoop right up. It takes search engines time to spider through your regular site menu, and you've just given them an easy shortcut, and they like you for that. Also, these files include time stamps and change frequency, this meta data also tells search bots how frequently they should revisit your site to check for updates. Pardon me while I sample a bit for you:

You are probably thinking, "yikes, does my techie guru have to keep that stuff updated?" The answer is yes, but the good news is really that no one need keep up your entire sitemap manually. There are many tools out there to generate these for you. Really -- don't ever even think about coding it manually!

Creating Sitemaps

If you are using blog software like Typepad or Wordpress, it's typically a built-in feature or an easy plug-in. Many hosted services like Hubspot provide this automatically, but if not, there is software that will generate the XML tags for you. After which, just upload the "sitemap.xml" to the root of your site. That's right, search engines are looking for "sitemap.xml" in the root of your web site. So when you are done, you should see: www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml which will yield a file that looks somewhat like the paste-in above. Google has a fabulous listing of sitemap resources, something I've returned to again and again. If you do have access to a web guru, he or she may want to look at programmatically automating using any of those items list in the "Server side programs" grouping. However, most running a small static site, without the benefit of automatic generation of sitemap.xml, may find any of the "Downloadable Tools" or "Online Generators" useful. In the past, I've had pretty good luck with GsiteCrawler, but don't take my word for it, try others and see what works for you. Also don't forget: if you are managing a static site, you'll want to submit your sitemap to Google via "Web Master Tools," a service that is a MUST for marketing and web professionals alike.

Sitemaps and SEO

It can take many days for a search engine to locate all the pages in a large site. Especially if your site employs Flash or fancy javascript drop-down menus. By creating a sitemap you can do quite a lot to address this challenge. But, having the sitemap in hand is also a chance to analyze your site in terms of Search Engine Optimization and your marketing keywords. So, once your site map has been generated, take a good look at it. Do you see any of your keywords as part of the URL's? Your marketing keywords should be part of your web link schema, and if not you are missing an opportunity. Think of it this way, if you've never seen that web page before, does the URL at least give a hint of what the web page is about? So the quick lesson here is that site maps should be presenting the search engine with your most important marketing keywords, as they will also contribute to your ranking and to the goal of helping visitors find your content.

Search Across Your S3 Buckets with CloudBerry Explorer PRO

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

In CloudBerry Lab we are always thinking how to bring more value to our users. Since we use Amazon S3 heavily ourselves it is easy sometimes to identify things that will make CloudBerry Explorer a better tool and the ability to Search for a specific data is one of them.

eBay Teams Up With Microsoft to Offer Daily Deals

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 10:00:00 EST

Microsoft Corp. and eBay Inc. today announced they are partnering to offer eBay Daily Deals through a new Internet Explorer 8 Web Slice for the holidays. With most holiday shoppers looking to save money, Microsoft and eBay will present online Daily Deals through a new Windows Internet Explorer 8 Web Slice that will showcase popular products selling at deep discounts. Customers will receive continuing updates and detailed information about these Daily Deals for eBay, all within the Favorites Bar in Internet Explorer. 8.

When the Crowd is Racist at Google

Wed, 25 Nov 2009 07:30:00 EST

If you search Google Images for "Michelle Obama" (no quotes), the first image you'll see is a poorly photoshopped picture of her as an ape. You'll also see a Google Ad on that page that links to Google's explanation of why such a blatantly racist photo is the top-ranked one at ...

SEO Tips from a Guy Who Doesn’t Know SEO

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

Aside from not blogging recently, I have been spending alot of time speaking with folks in the online marketing space as I work on building the go-to-market strategy and machinery for VMTurbo. One area which I knew little about when I started having these discussions (although now I do know a little bit [...]

Qwisk Socializes Web Browsing

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:00:00 EST

The ability to effortlessly share cool things you discover on the Web in real time, with friends, family and business colleagues without ever leaving your browser, just became a reality with today's introduction of Qwisk by WebWean, Inc. at the Realtime CrunchUp conference here in San Francisco. Compatible with all web browsers, Qwisk enables web discovery and social engagement to coexist within everyone's browser with no special downloads - creating a natural, free-flowing space for web exploration and sharing by eliminating the need to jump between applications for even simple communication.

Yahoo’s Wasting Away

Fri, 20 Nov 2009 14:15:00 EST

According to the latest figures from comScore, Bing, Microsoft’s new search engine, was a breath away from claiming 10% of US searches in October, up a half-a-point over September while poor consumptive Yahoo at 18%, a new low, lost eight-tenths of a point. Yahoo used to be a plumper 20%-21%. Google like Microsoft was also up a half point. AOL’s got a shrinking 2.9% and it’s on the block with Microsoft considered the likely buyer.

Halifax's DIME closes deal to roll lifestyle screen network in Atlantic Canada chain drug

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 17:37:00 EST

Toronto, Montreal and the Kitchener-Waterloo region (home to BlackBerries) have a lopsided amount of the activity going on in the digital signage sector, but there's absolutely stuff shaking elsewhere. If you subscribe to Google Alerts you see the daily release from PEI-based ScreenScape --- nice product but enough with the carpet-bombing PR, guys. Anyway, there are other things shaking down east, as well, including news of a rollout in an Atlantic Canada drug chain called Pharmasave.

WANdisco's Agile Software Development

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:45:00 EST

WANdisco announced that an increasing number of its customers are implementing Subversion MultiSite and Subversion Clustering to support agile practices across their large distributed development organizations. At the core of agile software development is constant collaboration between developers and continuous build integration. These customers found that a centralized server or even a proxy-server architecture was unable to effectively support agile software development with Subversion.

Wiring California with Bob Evans and the Fiber Internet Center

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:00:00 EST

Bob Evans always has ideas. Ideas to make his work, and the work of others, more useful and efficient, as well as easier. We first met Bob when he asked if it was “OK” he develop a route server for our young Internet Exchange Point (Any2 Exchange), which would allow the small to medium Internet access and content provider community to find Internet peering easier, and help with introductions within the community that would make Internet interconnections a utility – rather than a high priced value-added service. That little utility now drives one of the largest Internet Exchange Points in the world.

Real Travel Chooses Exalead CloudView Search

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 13:45:00 EST

Exalead, a global leader of information access solutions and search-based applications for the enterprise and on the web, today announced that RealTravel.com, an award winning travel site that helps people plan trips with advice from other travelers, will use Exalead CloudView to deliver a 'smart' search-based application designed specifically for the travel industry.

Marketing Exec Bruce Johnston Says Social Media Will Revive Mutual Fund Sales

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Last year, as imploding credit markets roiled the economy, mutual fund organizations throughout the country took stock of their revenue prospects. It was clear that a change or two was in the wind at Denver’s Old Mutual Investment Partners, too. For Chief Executive Officer, D. Bruce Johnston, one more change was clear: He wanted to do something different.

Internet Marketing Essentials: 4-Part Series

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Many B2B companies know that they should be incorporating an ongoing social media campaign into their arsenal of tactics to generate leads and sales. But, as a business owner or marketing professional, half the battle is trying to get your head around the social media wave, the crushing amount of information about it, where to even begin, and how to make it all fit into your marketing plans. The great news is that being successful at Internet marketing does not need to be as complicated as others may sometimes make it out to be. It will, however, require some start-up time and dedication to get a solid working plan in place. Here's the thing. The key to effective and profitable Internet and online marketing requires an integrated approach, utilizing the right tools and applying them with consistent effort.

Android and Symbian Platform Technology Development Strategies

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 13:00:00 EST

Google is strongly pushing its open Android platform. With its market share declining, Symbian has also joined the open OS sector in order to protect its market. Android announced the Android 1.6 - codenamed Donut Alpha - in July 2009, followed by the Android 2.0 version - codenamed Eclair - at the end of October. Symbian also plans to launch new versions once every six months, while its platform is expected to become a fully open platform by mid-2010. This report compares the platform architecture of Android and Symbian, analyzes their licensing models, examines the strategies behind their development, and looks toward future developments of the two platforms.

Google SPDY Protocol Would Require Mass Change in Infrastructure

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 09:15:00 EST

Google’s desire to speed up the web via a new protocol is laudable, but the SPDY protocol would require massive changes across networks to support

ArsTechnica had an interesting article on one of Google’s latest projects, a new web protocol designed to replace HTTP called SPDY.

SPDY uses a single SSL-encrypted session between a browser and a client, and then compresses all the request/response overhead. The requests, responses, and data are all put into frames that are multiplexed over the one connection. This makes it possible to send a higher-priority small file without waiting for the transfer of a large file that's already in progress to terminate. Compressing the requests is helpful in typical ADSL/cable setups, where uplink speed is limited. For good measure, unnecessary and duplicated headers in requests and responses are done away with. SPDY also includes real server push and a "server hint" feature.

Having recently emerged from a trip into the world of service-providers and its associated protocols, the description of SPDY immediately brought to mind other asynchronous, message-oriented protocols such as SIP and DIAMETER. It therefore made me seriously consider the kind of massive changes that would be required to support such a protocol across all data center components: security, load balancing, acceleration, web servers, application servers, caches. Basically any network intermediary based on the premise of a strict request-reply, synchronous behavior would likely need radical changes to its core protocol handling systems.

MAJOR DIFFERENCES BETWEEN SPDY and HTTP

SPDY, as described, is asynchronous and message-oriented. Like DIAMETER, SPDY would allow multiple requests per connection, effectively turning a single connection designed to be used and then closed into a long-lived connection. This is more along the lines of a SIP connection which is initiated and held open until the session is terminated.This is very different from the HTTP model in which connections are opened and closed within fairly short time intervals and are not expected to be held open for exceedingly long periods of time. SPDY thus eliminates the overhead associated with opening and closing many connections and the negative impact that has on application performance.

The current draft of the SPDY protocol states that “from the perspective of the server business logic or application API, nothing has changed”. But from the perspective of the infrastructure that needs to process the protocol, everything changes.

KEY CHANGES TO HTTP HEADERS

The following are directly from the draft of the SPDY protocol and document the changes from HTTP to SPDY

REQUEST CHANGES

The first line of the request is unfolded into name/value pairs like other HTTP headers. The names of the first line fields are method, url, and version. These keys are required to be present. The 'url' is the fully-qualified URL, containing protocol, host, port, and path.
HTTP request headers are compressed. This is accomplished by compressing all data sent by the client with gzip encoding.
Content-length is not a valid header.
Chunked encoding is no longer valid.

RESPONSE CHANGES

The response status line is unfolded into name/value pairs like other HTTP headers. The names of the status line are status and version. These keys are required to be present
Content-length is no longer valid.
Chunked encoding is no longer valid.

These changes would have a huge impact on infrastructure solutions, many of which rely on URI or HTTP headers (custom and standardized) to perform specific actions such as blocking, scanning, persistence (server affinity), or routing. The requirement that SPDY be transported via SSL has its own, well understood impact on infrastructure and is already dealt with by most devices, but SPDY also requires that headers are compressed via gzip. This means every intermediary requiring to perform some action based on the headers will need to decompress, process, and then likely recompress the headers before sending it on to the next hop. Coupling required compression with SSL would not only require support on all relevant infrastructure but will also likely reintroduce latency that could offset some of the performance gains claimed by testing of SPDY thus far.

SINGLE-CONNECTION: LONG LIVED SESSIONS

That all communication would essentially flow between the client and server over a single connection also poses a challenge for intermediaries that perform any kind of analysis or are required to act on the data exchanged. Load balancers, for example, are not generally designed to handle switching of messages in what becomes a 1:N connection:server scenario. The protocol could likely be supported as is by most load balancing solutions on a strictly layer 4 load balancing basis but advanced features that take advantage of application-aware capabilities such as message header and payload value routing (content-based routing) as well as egress functionality like Data Leak Prevention (DLP) would be much more difficult to implement, if not impossible for some solutions. This capability actually sounds a lot like HTTP pipelining on the request side.

The single, long-lived connection would have more of an impact on the overall architecture and capacity planning. In some respects it would be easier, as there would be an easy 1:1 ratio between users and connections. But because each user is effectively being handed dedicated compute resources, this would actually change the resource consumption model on servers and make it more difficult to support high volumes of users without building out a scalable infrastructure.

ASYNCHRONOUS EXCHANGE OF MESSAGES

Further complicating the ability of infrastructure solutions to handle SPDY is its definition as asynchronous. Essentially asynchronous protocols do not enforce order of replies. That means a client could send three requests in a row without waiting for a response and the server could send back the response in a completely different order. Again, from the draft SPDY protocol:

Because TCP provides a single stream of data on which SPDY multiplexes multiple logical streams, it is important for clients and servers to interleave data messages for concurrent sessions.

This may not sound like a problem, but for infrastructure that is optimized to handle HTTP and has been built around its implicit behavior this would require changes to the core networking stacks on most devices. In a typical HTTP scenario a request is received, the infrastructure solution processes any applicable ingress policies, and then initiates a connection to the appropriate server and waits for a response. It appears that with SPDY, like DIAMETER, the infrastructure still processes any applicable ingress policies and initiates a connection but does not necessarily wait for a reply as it might need to act upon the next incoming message.

This means a single network “session” would need to carefully track multiple incoming requests and outgoing responses at the same time on a per connection basis. This is not something most infrastructure is typically prepared to handle. Combined with the possibility that different requests may need to be routed to different servers within the infrastructure, this complicates the nature of application delivery and load balancing and could have a huge impact on the costs associated with cloud computing. Long lived sessions/connections initiated on secondary or tertiary servers launched to handle temporary capacity increases could hold open those connections long enough to incur excess charges that are unnecessary.

Also similar to DIAMETER is the inclusion of a “real server push” feature. The ability of a server to act like a client and vice-versa is inherent in DIAMETER and this reverse flow of traffic is not something most infrastructure is prepared to process.

THE IMPACT ON INFRASTRUCTURE

Any infrastructure solution that is heavily focused on application layer (HTTP) processing for any purpose would likely need to make radical changes to its core networking and processing engines. Some solutions, particularly those tasked with load balancing and scaling existing message-based protocols may already be capable of supporting a protocol like SPDY. Whether the solutions that support DIAMETER and SIP load balancing and scalability could support SPDY without modification is highly dependent on whether support for the service-provider focused protocols is based on an underlying generic message-based implementation [PDF] or a protocol-specific implementation. The latter would be difficult to adapt to a new protocol while the former would be more easily extended to specifically support the requirements of new message-oriented protocols.

But that’s only load balancing and scalability. There are many other infrastructure devices that are used to secure, monitor, accelerate, and otherwise manage HTTP that would need to be updated to handle such a new protocol. The upheaval across data centers would likely be on par with the anticipated challenges associated with mass migration from IPv4 to IPv6. Like that migration, however, support for both SPDY and HTTP could be achieved through the use of translating gateways; infrastructure capable of supporting both SPDY and HTTP or able to translate between the two could be utilized to enable a smoother transition.

While it’s a fascinating and exciting notion, the introduction of a completely new protocol to replace HTTP seems more academic than realistic. More realistic would be for gradual implementation through adaptation of SPDY’s core concepts into the next generations of HTTP until HTTP is indistinguishably from a protocol such as SPDY. Making modifications and improvements to HTTP would be an evolutionary step rather than the revolutionary change implied with SPDY that would be almost too disruptive to adopt.

That said, not everything that comes out of Google Labs is adopted as an industry wide solution. It’s an experimental environment and a good one at that. What may come out of the SPDY project may well in fact be changes to HTTP rather than the presentation of a new, radically different protocol. Regardless, SDPY and Google’s efforts have people talking about what’s wrong with HTTP and how it might be fixed and that conversation is one we’ve probably needed to have for quite some time now.

You can read more about the tools Google offers and general problems with web performance at Google’s “Let’s Make the Web Faster” site.

Related blogs & articles:

Technorati Tags: MacVittie,F5,Google,SPDY,HTTP,infrastructure,DIAMETER,protocols,web,internet,IPv4,IPv6,acceleration,security,load balancing,application delivery,application security,architecture

Video SEO Drives "Free" Leads to Local Businesses

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 17:30:00 EST

Local businesses can significantly increase the rate at which they are found by consumers on the Internet by creating and distributing a video, a study released today by Spotzer Media showed. Spotzer data showed that businesses were more than 30 times more likely to receive customer attention when they created a professional video and distributed it through a process called Video Search Engine Optimization ("Video SEO.")

TheLadders.com Recruits 3PAR and Saves on Storage

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:00:00 EST

3PAR, the leading global provider of utility storage, announced that TheLadders.com cut their total cost of storage in half by replacing their legacy storage infrastructure with 3PAR Utility Storage. The online job search website deployed 3PAR Utility Storage in conjunction with server virtualization from VMware as part of a datacenter virtualization initiative. This initiative reduced the company’s storage capacity requirements by 66%, which also reduced storage administration time. In addition, by consolidating onto a single, highly virtualized 3PAR InServ Storage Server, TheLadders.com was able to eliminate the use of separate arrays for different applications and reliance on costly consulting services.

Unix Co-Creator Writes New Open Source Programming Language for Google

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 10:30:00 EST

Ken Thompson and Rob Pike, a couple of the revered old soldiers who wrote Unix, Plan 9 and Inferno at Bell Labs – and programming languages like B, without which C probably wouldn’t exist, and Limbo – have come up with an experimental new programming language called Go that Google, their current refuge, open sourced Tuesday under a BSD-style license. If it catches on, it would be the first major systems language to emerge in a decade.

Google Wave Finds Exegete

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 18:00:00 EST

Someone has volunteered to try to explain what the heck Google Wave is. Whether it was worth her time remains to be seen. See http://completewaveguide.com/.

Cisco Buys China Set-Top Biz

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 17:45:00 EST

Cisco has made yet another acquisition spending ~$44.5 million to buy the set-top box business of China’s DVN Holdings, giving it a toehold in China’s great and expanding cable market. Meanwhile, Tandberg isn’t going gently into the Cisco fold. Its stockholders, at least 24% of them, want more than the $3 billion 38.3% premium Cisco has offered for the world’s second-largest videoconferencing equipment maker and a strategic acquisition for Cisco.

The Process Of Search Engine Optimization

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 01:15:00 EST

How to find and select Keywords: Remember this is a start-up's guide the science of keyword research is so vast that only this step can take so much time and effort of a newbie that he might give up the field after few mismanaged projects or might get stuck into never ending reading and learning process. To keep things simple and straight I will present here the most obvious and necessary steps here and as our knowledge will grow I will introduce more advanced methods, tools and tips. But do not worry for now, if you do the things correctly you will get results motivational enough to keep your spirits up.

Create SEO Plan

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 06:20:00 EST

Learn How To Create SEO Plan: Following are the steps that I think are crucial in any SEO plan or strategy. The article will a little longer than usual, but I believe it will be noteworthy and helpful to most of the people. Let's start the SEO plan.

Competitive Analysis:

Competitive analysis is one such step you should take in the very beginning of your SEO efforts. It should be right at the top of your to-do list, along with keyword analysis and tagging your web site. In fact, you should probably do a competitive analysis even before you begin tagging your site. Get a list of 3 of your major competitors and note the following points:

Site rankings:

Page saturation: How many of the competition’s pages are indexed?
Page titles
Meta data
Site design
A robots.txt file
Content quality and quantity
Link quality and quantity

Prioritizing pages:

You should realize that not every part/page of your website requires equal amount of work and attention. Similarly, if you have a long list of products then you should focus on high demand product pages first and then move on to other product pages or conversely if you can not manage the high competition at the beginning then you should focus on those products which have demand but less competition; however it all depends on your overall plan but make a decision first and then stick to it, so that you can always know what is working and what not.

Site assessment:

Your SEO assessment should be a document that outlines the current standing of the main SEO elements of each page. It should contain columns for the element of the site you’re assessing, the current status of that element, what needs to be improved in that element, and the deadline for improvement. It’s also helpful if you have a check box next to each item that can be marked when improvements are completed and a column for follow-up, because SEO is a never-ending process. The elements that should be considered during an assessment include:

Site/page tagging: The meta tags that are included in the coding of your web site
Page content: How fresh is your content? How relevant is it? How often is it updated? And how much content is there?
Site links: links to be in-context, meaning the link must come from or lead to a site that is relevant to the page that is being indexed.
Site map : make sure it’s accurate and up to date.

Note the strategies you plan to use:

It include strategies that can be efforts such as submitting your site or pages from your site to directories manually and planning the content you’ll use to draw search crawlers, or they can be keyword marketing plans or pay-per-click programs you plan to use. Also be sure to include a time line for the testing and implementation of those efforts as well as for regular follow-ups.

Follow-up:

Follow-up is also an essential part of your SEO plan. Give your plan at least three months but no more than six between checkups.

User experience:

User experience is a little harder to quantify than other site-ranking elements. It’s easy to say that users will find your site simple to use, that they will find the information or products that they’re seeking, or that they will have reason to return to your site. But in practice, that’s a little more difficult to achieve.

Site interactivity:

We now live in the Interactive Age. Most of us want to interact with the web sites we’re visiting. That interaction might take the form of a poll, the ability to comment on a blog post, the downloading of a file, or even a game that relates to the site content. No matter what the type of interaction, users expect it, and search crawlers look for it.

Why is interaction so important? Simple. If you can influence a user to interact with your site, you have more of a chance of gaining a goal conversion. Goal conversions are the completion of some form of activity designed to gather further information about your user. A goal conversion can be something as simple as enticing users to sign up for a newsletter, or it can be more specific, like persuading them to make purchases.

Interactive forums: When you’re creating your web-site content, consider interactive forums. If you’re adding articles to your site, give users a forum in which they can respond to the article, or a comments section. This leads to more frequent updates of your content, which search crawlers love. The result? An interactive relationship with your web-site users will keep them coming back, and give an extra boost to your search engine ranking.

Navigation:

Take the time to design a navigational structure that’s not only comfortable for your users, but is also crawler-friendly.

Caution about cookies: Any navigation that requires cookies will cause the crawler to be unable to index the pages.

Understanding entry and exit pages:

Although this aspect is a part of another topic i.e. Landing Page Optimization, but you should note that in your SEO plan about your top landing pages and how do you want to improve them. [You can find separate tutorials on Landing Pages and How to Optimize them on this very site, kindly check this: Landing Page Optimization]

Creating great content:

Two points should be kept in focus while developing content contemplating and completing. Great content starts with the right keywords and phrases. Select no more than three keywords or phrases to include in the content on any one of your web pages. Have a keyword density of 5 to 7 percent the freshness and focus of your content is also important. Also remember to write powerful page titles with compelling calls to action.

Using blogs:

One reason many companies began using blogs on their web sites was that blogs are updated frequently and they’re highly focused on a specific topic. This gives search engines new, relevant content to crawl, and crawlers love that.

Consider implementing a content strategy that includes regularly adding more focused content or expanding your content offerings. It doesn’t have to be a blog, but news links on the front page of the site, regularly changing articles, or some other type of changing content will help gain the attention of a search engine crawler. Don’t just set these elements up and leave them, however. You also have to carry through with regular updates.

Keep the links included in the content active:

Dynamic content links can occasionally break. Be sure you’re checking this element of your content on a regular basis and set up some kind of a user-feedback loop so broken links can be reported to your webmaster.

Graphics:

Images or graphics on your web site are essential. You’re not going to be happy with using plain text instead of that cool new logo you had designed for your company, and neither are your users. They want to see pictures.

One technique that will help your SEO make use of graphics on your site is to tag those graphics with alt tags inside the img tags.

You want to tag your images as part of your SEO strategy for two reasons. First, crawlers cannot index images for a search engine (with an exception, which is covered shortly). The crawler “sees” the image and moves on to the text on the page. Therefore, something needs to take the place of that image, so the crawler can index it. That’s what the alternative text does. If this text includes your keywords, and the image is near text that also includes the keywords, then you add credibility to your site in the logic of the crawler.

Duplicate content:

If you must use content that’s not original, or if you must have multiple copies of content on your web site, there is a way to keep those duplications from adversely affecting your search rankings. By using the <robots.txt> or <noindex> tags, you can prevent duplicated pages from being indexed by the search engine. That small tag of code tells the search engine not to index the page, but to follow the links on the page.

Internal and external links:

Links can be incoming, outgoing, or internal.

Using Internal Links:

One linking strategy that’s often overlooked is internal linking. Internal links are those that lead people from one page to another within your web site. This is different from the navigational structure. Internal links are more natural links that occur in the text on your web pages. Without a good internal linking strategy, you run the risk of not having your site properly spidered. It’s not enough simply to have a navigational structure or a site map (though site maps help considerably). You should also have links that lead from one element (like a blog post) to other important elements (like an archived article or news clipping on your site), so site visitors find that moving through the information they’re examining on your site is a natural process that takes place without too much difficulty or thought.

Getting External Link:

Getting links from other websites towards yours is bit time consuming and effort seeking, the techniques require an other article to explain, but I will list common methods to acquire links.

Requesting Links - You can simply ask other related sites to link to you,if you have link worthy content.
Writing Articles
Blogs
Press Releases
Affiliate Programs

I hope this will give you a good start on your SEO project and you can fine tune you SEO plan later on by experience. Kindly share you comments below and If you have got question, ask them here.

First Lesson In SEO

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 02:42:00 EST

Although it is a first lesson in SEO, but believe me, as far as my experience is concerned, this is the lesson that most seo's learn in the last and the hard way i.e. after many failures. Remember the purpose of SEO is not to SPAM or Dodge search engines nor to fool the internet searcher. SEO is a very responsible task that requires deep thinking and long term focus, rather than short trem benefits. First Lesson: Know Your Audience

The fist and foremost thing that you should focus with all web-site design, the best objective for your site, is to help your visitors achieve a desired result, whether that’s purchasing a product, signing up for a newsletter, or finding the desired information.

You should be able to answer these questions i.e. Why people are coming to our site? Where they are coming from? And what they do once they get there?

If you do not have clear answers for these yet, my advice is to forget everything for now and solve these seemingly innocent and easy but very diffult and core questions first.

Next keep in mind the

Important Elements of a Website

Search engine optimization is essentially the science of designing your web site to maximize your search engine rankings. This means that all of the elements of your web site are created with the goal of obtaining high search engine rankings. Those elements include:

Entry and exit pages
Page titles
Site content
Graphics
Web site structure

The second imporatant thing is :

Search Engine Criteria

Some of the chief criteria by which a search engine crawler determines the rank your site should have in a set of results include:

Anchor texts
Site popularity
Link context
Topical links
Title tags
Keywords
Site language
Content
Site maturity

Much has been said and written about the definitions of these terms that I have listed above, if you have not yet mastered them fully, do not worry, I will clarify them in detail in coming posts, however if you are curious enough, read my internet marketing article on Google Knol and other on SEO at Hubpages.

If you have read these articles and you have questions, feel free to ask them in the commnets below, and I will try to answer them one by one. Thanks

Browser Underdogs Want Ballot Screen Changes

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:45:00 EST

Microsoft’s browser rivals aren’t satisfied with the tentative “ballot screen” settlement that the company came to with the European Commission, which would offer all its European users a chance to download a rival browser. Google, Mozilla and Opera want changes made. According to the New York Times, Mozilla doesn’t like the idea of the top five browsers by market share in Europe would appear in a row alphabetically from left to right. That would put Apple’s Safari first. Mozilla doesn’t think that’s fair on the theory it would give Safari – not your first thought for an Internet Explorer substitute – an advantage; it wants them to appear randomly.