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While there is no doubt that good SEO consultants can help drive more traffic to your site, many small businesses cannot afford a good consultant.  But you don’t need to despair if you can’t afford an expensive SEO consultant.  If you are one of those DIY type business owners, this article will help you create a fairly decent search-engine optimized site.  Even if you plan to use a web design/development agency and not do it yourself, you can demand that they create a site that complies with basic SEO tenets.

Here is how to go about placing yourself on the right side of search engines:

1. Keyword analysis – This should be done before you start building your site.  If you already have a site, you may have to tweak your content based on the results of this analysis.  Know what keywords are used by your customers to find you.  This may not be industry jargon words.  A good tool to start with is Google’s Keyword Tool.  You need to identify the keywords or phrases that have high volume but less competition.  Once you identify the keywords for a page, mention it a few times on that page.  Do not over-stuff your page with keywords.  Search engines penalize keyword stuffing.  Write naturally, but don’t forget to repeat your keywords a few times.
2. Make sure every page on your site has a proper title tag, meta keywords and meta descriptions.  Again, there is no need to repeat your keywords too many times, but your keyword should be there on the title tag, as it’s the most important tag from a search-engine perspective.
3. Search engine friendly URLs (SEF).  You need to have meaningfully named URLs that accurately describe the page content.  Example: www.example.com/camera/dslr/nikon/D5000 is better than www.example.com?product_id=123.  Carefully choose your URL names and structure.  Now, how do you create search-engine friendly URLs?  You can provide URL rewriting rules in .htaccess if you are using Apache; but it is cumbersome to manage.  Many content-management systems like Drupal and WordPress support SEF, so if you are using these, you’ve got yourself covered.  Most web app development frameworks like Symfony also support SEF.
4. Provide textual description for all non-text elements like images, audio and video.  For example, use alt tag with images.  This will help the search engine better understand your multi-media content.  This has the added benefit of making your site accessible.
5. Search engine bots should be able to spider all your content even if the content resides in a database and are dynamically displayed.  For example, your products may be sitting in your product catalog table in a database, but should create a static looking page for each product.
6. Make effective use of heading tags like h1 and h2 to showcase the relative importance of text.  Your important text should be text and not images.
7. Use ordered lists for creating menus rather than using tables.
8. The anchor text (hyperlink to another page) should contain keywords that describe the target page.  Instead of writing “Click here for D5000 details”, it’s better if you write “check out the D5000 digital SLR camera“.
9. Avoid duplicate content issues.  If example.com, www.example.com and www.example.com/index.php all point to the same page, you should consider one of them as the primary URL.  If you designate www.example.com as your primary or canonical URL, then the other URLs should be permanently redirected to the canonical URL.  You can redirect by using the HTTP 301 code.  Also consider storing the session id or affiliate parameter in a cookie and then redirect the URL with parameters to the canonical version.
10. Never copy-and-paste content from other sites.  You may be violating copyright laws and incurring duplicate content penalty. Likewise, if you are getting your content from a syndication service, check that the same content is not syndicated to other sites.  Do a Google search on your content and if you find that your content has been copied by someone else, file a DMCA request with Google.
11. What if you have multiple top-level domains? Like example.com and example.net?  If you plan to have identical content on all these sites, do a permanent redirect to your primary domain.
12. Multiple language versions of your site – I would say use a different sub-domain for each language.  Example: fr.example.com for French and de.example.com for German.  Using the same URL for different language versions is not a good idea.
13. Block search engines from seeing admin panels, HTTPS content etc by using the robots exclusion protocol.  Password protect those pages you don’t want the outside world to see.
14. How do you know if Google has indexed all your pages?  Search for site:example.com on Google.  It will return the number of pages indexed.
15. Externalize CSS and Javascript.
16. Follow XHTML 1.0 strict standard.
17. Reduce the amount of code in your page, and maintain a good content-to-code ratio.
18. Speed is important.  Your pages should load fast and should not timeout.
19. Use microformats to describe your data.
20. Last but not the least, build quality in-bound links.

Some of the above items need further explanation.  However, there is a wealth of information available in blogs and online articles.  So start digging and learn more on this interesting topic.

The new avatar of Microsoft’s latest search engine, Bing, is here.  An updated version of  Microsoft’s former search engines, namely Live Search, Windows Live Search  and MSN Search, Bing.com went fully online on June 3, 2009.

Bing Features

Here’s a quick look at some features of Bing that could give other search engines such as Google and Yahoo a run for their money (although it would be a while before Google can be, if ever they are, outsmarted!).

Do note that some of these features are available in the United States version only. You can change your country settings using the toolbar at the top right hand side of the Bing site.

• The background image changes daily.  They are mostly striking images of noteworthy places in the world. You can hover over the images to see interesting facts about them. (more…)

Why do we have to live with divides between different types of communication – email versus chat, or conversations versus documents?

Could a single communications model span all or most of the systems in use on the web today,  in one smooth continuum? How simple could we make it?

What if we tried designing a communications system that took advantage of computers’ current abilities, rather than imitating non-electronic forms?

Tough questions! These questions have paved way for Google Wave. Jens Rasmussen and Lars Rasmussen wrestled over these questions since 2004. These geeks were the inventors of Google Maps and now they are ready to unleash Google Wave into the Internet. Google Wave comes in 3 layers. The product, platform and the protocol. Here, we will discuss Google Wave as a product.

Google describes Wave as “Equal parts conversation and document”. It is the next generation of e-mail. A Wave contains a complete thread of message saved in a common server. When this Wave is shared with other users, they can also get into edit mode. The interesting feature is that when a person is editing the wave, others will be able to see the edit process almost letter by letter. So this means that all of them will be able to collaborate in a wave almost instantly. Waves come with a rich text editor and several other functions that will enable the users to work on text, images, videos, maps and many more. Whenever a change is made on a wave, all the collaborators are notified. The complete history is stored within the wave.

Here is a screenshot provided by Google that gives us a first look.

Waves can therefore serve as e-mail and chat. It will work similar to wikis. The next layer ‘platform’ provides various APIs enabling waves to become a place where a group of people can work together to prepare documents, plan events, hold discussions, play games, etc. We will discuss about them in the next section.

Google has added some new features to its already existing features which would make life simpler for its users. Google’s engineers are working round the clock in Google Labs, adding new features to make Gmail more popular and ahead of its competitors. One feature which is very useful is importing your emails and contacts from other accounts to Gmail.

Gmail users can easily import all their emails and contacts from Hotmail, Yahoo, or AOL accounts. All a user needs to do is enter his Webmail account details (user name and password) into Google’s service and over the next 24 to 48 hours, all his emails and contacts will be automatically imported to his Gmail account.

Google now also lets you test drive Gmail. The company offers a 30-day test-drive mode for users to decide whether they like Gmail or not. The feature, presently available to new users, is likely to be extended to current users soon.

Google has also added a search widget in Gmail, which enables users to search the web without opening a new browser.

The new feature shows a search box onto the left side of Gmail inbox. When a user types in a search, a window (like a chat window) appears at the bottom of the screen with search results.

These are some of the new features that Google has added in its Gmail service. To know more about the latest features in Gmail, just visit Google Labs where a whole lot of gadgets and features await you.