blogging 102

What is RSS and Why is it Important?

May 13, 2010 by Ian Logsdon  
Filed under Readership

Leave a Comment

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes

With the growing number of technologies used across the web, it can be difficult to keep track of and understand all of them. One of the most widespread of these tools is the technology known as RSS, short for really simple syndication. RSS is exactly what the name sounds like, a language for syndicating websites for easy consumption. The popularity of RSS has grown in direct proportion to the spread of blogs, podcasts, and online video. RSS is an XML technology, and its purpose is to provide a means for websites to spread their content independent of their site. An RSS feed is created by taking site content, such as an article in a blog or the mp3 file of a podcast, and creating a document that is constantly updated whenever the page is. This allows individuals to use software, known as RSS readers, to check all their favorite sites at once.

The RSS feed is not generally meant as a replacement for your website, rather the most common usage is to syndicate the headline and synopsis of a story, and then if a reader is interested in your content, they simply click on the headline of the story and can read the rest on your site. What this serves to do is eliminate the need for a subscriber list on your side, as anyone who wants your content can simply subscribe to your feed. Instead of having to email newsletters or synopses of recent updates to your site, you can use RSS, and anyone who wants to read will have a chance. This is just the beginning of RSS, however, as it is more and more often being used to syndicate media.

iTunes, arguably the best known online resource for finding music, is one of the driving forces behind syndicating media content. Any user who feels inclined can syndicate their podcasts or videos and submit them to iTunes, where they will be searchable and downloadable, making uploading such content to an iPod a one click process. iTunes is not the only way to view such files, indeed most RSS readers now work with mp3s and videos, depending on format. The increasing sophistication of these files allows imbedded advertising (one can often simply click on a video to be taken to an advertiser’s website), so you are given the opportunity to earn more revenue from advertisers by delivering their ads directly to customers.

RSS is becoming an extremely ubiquitous technology, with readers now built into Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari, and most recently Microsoft’s Internet Explorer; it is a technology that doesn’t appear to be going anywhere. Using it correctly can help make your blog or other site more accessible to customers, and keep them coming back for more. Syndication can replace unnecessary email lists and keep customers informed about new versions of products. By taking advantage of this technology you can put your product into your customers’ daily lives, increasing the likelihood they come back to your site.

Author: Ian Logsdon
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Canada duty rates

SEO Rankings – The Secrets For Better Search Performance

May 13, 2010 by Obinna Heche  
Filed under SEO

Leave a Comment

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

With proper optimization techniques, you can increase your website SEO rankings to the extent of enabling serious business growth. Actually, the concept of page rank is attributed to the mode used by Google to evaluate web pages on the basis of link structures. SEO rankings are achieved by the right choice of keywords and their good integration in the web page content, so that Internet surfers have immediate access to the page when they perform the search. SEO rankings are expressed on a numeric scale from 0-10, but also considering the number of page visitors and the relevance of the keywords.

SEO jobs usually include performing complex search engine optimization with the increase of the SEO rankings by the creation of good friendly links. This part of SEO rankings is also known as the Google visibility in search results. When you contract a SEO company, remember that search engine optimization needs long-term planning, and that traffic is built in time, in parallel with other applications developed stage by stage. Sites could thus go from poor to great SEO rankings within days or weeks.

The time lapse necessary to make the site competitive is influenced by the number of web pages and the age of the site. It makes a great starting point for SEO rankings to choose a web consultant that is familiar with your type of system, thus, the search engine optimization will go a lot faster. Another case when SEO takes more time is when the restructuring or copy writing of a system are necessary. From the moment a web master starts working for you, improvements in SEO rankings should appear within the first month, particularly if the page was not ranked high in Google.

Another relevant case when the improvement of SEO rankings gets difficult is when your site has been using applications that Google qualifies as unethical. Nevertheless, a SEO expert will tackle with the inconvenience. Then, once the on-page work is done, link creation is initiated. This means that you start targeting other sites to create inbound links to the personal page. The process of link building is somehow permanent, meaning that links have to be constantly submitted for the unceasing evolution of the SEO rankings, traffic and sales.

Author: Obinna Heche
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
US Dollar credit card

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – What is it and How it Works?

May 13, 2010 by Nicole McCullum  
Filed under SEO

Leave a Comment

Reading time: 4 – 6 minutes

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is the process of making your website easy for Search Engines such as Google, Yahoo and others to find.

For example, when a person living in New York City uses Google to locate a website design company in New York, they will likely type “website design New York” into Google’s search field.

The top results that come up first, under “sponsored links,” will be paid links. This means that people have paid for this placement through a program called Pay-Per-Click advertising.

The results immediately following these paid links still enjoy the same prime real estate space-without having to pay the ad costs. How did they get that level of ranking without paying for it? The answer is SEO. They knew how to make the most of their websites’ SEO potential. And with this article, you’ll develop some understanding of how you can, too.

By using SEO techniques properly throughout your site, you can achieve higher search engine rankings for the keywords that you optimize for.

When you search for a term in a search engine, like “website design New York,” the search engines want to provide you with the very best and most relevant websites for your inquiry. It’s important to understand how search engines work in order to understand SEO.

And the first thing you should know is that search engines prepare ahead of time for your keyword search. Here’s how:

” Crawling: Search engines have already used programs called “spiders” to automatically “crawl” the web. The spiders have made their way around the web and its files to get an idea of where and what things are. The spiders crawl websites on an ongoing basis.

” Indexing: After a website and its pages have been “crawled,” the search engines put these pages into categories (called indexes)-so that they are easier to find later. This is one of the reasons why ongoing SEO is important-because each time they crawl, if your website has been updated with fresh content it will be re-indexed. Search engines give special attention to sites that are updated frequently with new content. Sites with fresh content are more likely to get better rankings.

When you do a keyword search in a search engine, here’s what happens:
” Let’s say you type “website design New York” into a search engine.
” The search engine checks its index and finds all the websites that match your request.
” Then, the search engine uses an algorithm (mathematical sorting equation) to determine which of these documents is the most relevant to your query of “website design New York.”
” The search engine displays your results.
” Therefore, the websites that were optimized for the search term “website design New York” are far more likely to show up in these results than those websites that haven’t been optimized. This is where SEO can do wonders for your business. If you have properly optimized your website, then your site is more likely to show up every time someone searches for keywords that are related to your business. This will ultimately increase the traffic, and leads to your site.

Why is ongoing SEO important?

The major search engines change their algorithms frequently, so staying on top of your SEO is an ongoing process. Each of these algorithms places different amounts of importance on things like keyword density, meta tags, links, indexes, and unique content. What works today may not work tomorrow, so ongoing SEO efforts are essential to gain rankings, and keep them.

In closing, search engine optimization is all about making your site visible to the search engines for the keyword searches that are most related to your business. SEO is not advertising. The idea behind SEO is to increase your search engine ranking because your site is relevant to a particular search term, not because you pay. Because of this, SEO is often referred to as “organic” or “natural” placement.
The other thing about SEO is that unlike paid Pay-Per-Click advertising, it doesn’t guarantee first page placement. However, when done properly, it can significantly increase your chances. As a matter of fact, any website that doesn’t take advantage of some basic SEO is doing itself a disservice, and missing out on viable traffic.

Author: Nicole McCullum
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Smiling shark

SEO Company

May 13, 2010 by Naina Jain  
Filed under SEO

Leave a Comment

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

Due to the growth in outsourcing projects, SEO companies in India are increasing on a significant way. These agencies offer a pool of services to support your website and to help you get business leads. Reliable and cost-effective, SEO companies with their planned strategic steps, help increase quality traffic to the websites. SEO experts can aid to successful online business and help attain popularity and visibility.

SEO India Services are world famous that why the world is looking towards India for its SEO Services because of their in-depth knowledge and specialization in IT sector. There are lots of well established search engine optimization services organization that have experts working for them who understand the requirement of the website and the hurdles that is coming in the way of becoming your website search engine friendly. Traffic generation is significant to the success of any website and making your website search engine friendly can help you in doing so. The mass of your business will increase if you are able to generate traffic and this will take place only by a proper search engine optimization of your website by a SEO expert.

Search engine optimization is arising in India and around the world at a fast speed. In a very short span of time, SEO services in India got success because it has become need for every one who wants to achieve success in web marketing. SEO teams consist of trained, experienced internet marketing experts, internet marketing, PPC campaign, etc. SEO services from India have a positive point about cost and the quality of the work Indian SEO work hard to meet the deadline of their project and the cost of the project is one third than SEO from US, UK and Australia. And the quality of the work of Indian SEO is better than any SEO of the world.

Author: Naina Jain
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Canada duty tariff

Organic SEO – 7 Tips to Conquer the Search Engines

May 13, 2010 by Daniel C Smith  
Filed under SEO

Leave a Comment

Reading time: 4 – 7 minutes

If you’re just getting started in online business and don’t have much money to spare, you’ll want to discover the secrets behind organic SEO as quickly as possible. Google dominates the search engine world and the key to conquering organic SEO is satisfying Google that the content on your website is the most relevant to the keyword search entered in Google’s search box. Google is constantly changing the way they decide what content is most relevant and it’s a difficult task to keep up with it all. So what is organic SEO all about?

Here are 7 SEO tools you can use to master organic SEO:

1. Effective Keywords. Use Google’s free keyword tool to find effective keywords for your industry. Start by putting together a list of keywords that are relevant to the theme of your site. To fully utilise organic SEO, you must properly position your keywords by having an individual page on your website for each keyword phrase. When optimizing your website, keep your customers in mind as the more you know about your customer the more effective keywords you can use on your website. Mixing relevant keywords is the key to satisfying Google and achieving a high search engine ranking.

2. Onpage Intelligence. When it comes to the web design of your site, onpage intelligence refers to the aspects of the site you have full control over and can change at any time. The first and most important aspect of web design is applying the title tag. A title tag informs any web browser of the name of each of your web pages as well as defining the title of your listing in Google. A title tag is embedded within the HTML coding of your website and is often one of the first bits of HTML code shownL.

3. Buying Your Domain Name. When deciding upon a domain name for your website, it’s critical that your primary keyword is within the domain name. This can make a huge difference on the ranking your website will achieve in the search engines. It’s best to limit your domain name to fewer than 25 characters and only use a “.com” extension to make the most of organic SEO.

4. Architecting Your Site. It’s important to understand what your potential customer is searching for online and structure your site according to your customer’s wants and needs. When performing organic SEO research, if you were to discover your customers want videos that teach them a “how to topic” then you might add a videos web page to your site. Go out and find some awesome videos on YouTube that you can add to a videos page on your website with helpful videos that they can watch directly on your website. This way they don’t have to waste time searching YouTube for relevant videos. This will provide another organic SEO benefit, as it will give you authority in Google’s eyes as they can see you are linking to YouTube. You want to overwhelm your customers in your web marketing efforts and keep them always wanting more.

5. Sitemapping Techniques. This is like a blueprint of your entire website. You want to have a sitemap that is easily accessible for the search engines and the best location for this is on your root domain for example (www.domain.com/sitemap.xml). The search engine spiders love sitemaps because they can easily see how your website is developed. This will allow your website to get indexed much faster as a result of having a sitemap. The most popular free sitemap tool you can use is “xml-sitemaps” which will allow you to create a sitemap in a matter of minutes. It’s important to ensure your web design incorporates “Meta Taggs” when creating a sitemap.

6. Offpage Intelligence. You simply cannot afford to skip offpage intelligence for organic SEO. The more incoming links you have for your website, the more of an authority you will appear in the eyes of the search engines. Be careful you don’t make the mistake of getting too many incoming links too fast. This doesn’t look real to the search engines and you will be frowned upon for doing so. You simply want to build incoming links to your website over a natural period of time. There are many different ways you can get incoming links. Some of the more popular methods include link directories, trading links with other people, forums, writing articles and paid link advertising.

7. Competitive Intelligence. This is your instant shortcut to success online if you simply follow others that are doing well online. Find out who your top competitors are by searching Google for the top page rankings, then spy on what types of organic SEO they are focusing on. Try and create link exchanges with these top sites to help your search engine ranking. Search Google to see how many incoming links your top competitors have to their websites and you’ll have a benchmark to compare your website to.

Organic SEO can be a monster to learn. Search engines change on a daily basis. Learning organic SEO is certainly not a short term fix, but stick with it and you’ll reap the rewards on a long term basis. Make sure you incorporate a sitemap on your website to favour the search engines. The beauty of search engine optimisation is it may not flood your bank account with money overnight but if you stick with SEO for an ongoing basis it’s going to put money in your bank account on a regular basis. And this wraps up my article about organic SEO.

Author: Daniel C Smith
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Canada duty rate