a:active in firefox

Just a quick one because I don't find it well documented. for those who are struggling making a:active to work with firefox, use a:focus instead.

More readings about this issue here: http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-CSS2/selector.html#dynamic-pseudo-classes

eye track

I came across this site recently - great read for web site designers!
http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/homepages.htm

You can check here a snapshot provided by EyeTrack: the way people look at search results.

black hat tools

still think that you need to use "black hat" technics to get traffic. Well, you can check the following sites out then:
http://www.stuntdubl.com/2005/05/16/blackhat-tools/#
http://seoblackhat.com/

New google UI

Check out the results diplayed for the query "Add URL" in google. Yes, the UI is changing for specific queries, with suggestions embedded in results pages.

"Google is testing an automated technique for detecting when an alternate query might help users find what they are looking for more quickly. For these searches, which are both commercial and non-commercial in nature, Google displays one or more alternate queries together with a preview of their top results"

Here we go, Google is following Yahoo steps, and injecting ads in the main listing - I am not sure this is the right move fro them. Bad for SEOs anyway, because it may means that it is now impossible to get ranked on a first page for some keywords!

adsense addict

You are an adsense addict - why don't you download this excellent extension for firefox: adsense extension

You'll then see adsense results in real time displayed at the bottom of your browser - no need to go and check every 5 minutes!

billbiter.co.uk

Here we go, we have just launched billbiter.co.uk - ok, loads of bugs & functionalities to add. but why keeping it on staging while indexation will take about as much time as what it takes to make the site pretty.

We redirect to pages ranked first in google for a specific query - how do we do that? very simple class using google API.

You can do the same easily (just collect your API key first):


<?php


require_once('../include/soap/nusoap.php');

class Google {

    var $parameters;

    var $soapoptions;

    var $max_retries;


    function Google($key, $max_retries){


        $this->soapclient = new soapclient('http://api.google.com/GoogleSearch.wsdl', 'wsdl');

        $this->max_retries = $max_retries;

        $this->parameters = array (

            'key' => $key, // the Developer's key

            'q' => '',         // the search query


            'start' => 0,          // the point in the search results should Google start

            'maxResults' => 1,     // the number of search results (max 10)

            'filter' => false,     // should the results be filtered?


            'restrict' => '',

            'safeSearch' => false,

            'lr' => '',

            'ie' => '',


            'oe' => ''

            );

    }

    function Google_do_search($query=NULL){

        if ($query) $this->parameters["q"] = $query;


        $this->result = $this->soapclient->call('doGoogleSearch', $this->parameters);

        if (!$this-result)


            $this->Google_retry();

        return TRUE;

    }

    function Google_retry(){

        $this->result = false;


        $retry_count = 0;

        while( !$this->result && $retry_count < $this->max_retries ){

              $this->result = $this->Google_do_search( $query, $key, $num );


            if( !$this->result ) $this->error = "Attempt".$retry_count." failed<br>\n";


            $retry_count++;

        }

        return TRUE;

    }

    function Google_url(){

        return $this->result["resultElements"][0]["URL"];


    }

}

?>



google talk

Google talk has just been launched: http://www.google.com/talk/

You'll need a gmail account (drop a comment and I'll send you an invite if you need one).

which tools should I use?

Everybody can practive SEO - this is like everything. I have taught a friend php & photoshop a few months ago - and he managed to pull up a decent site. Is he a website designer? well, not really. But you don't have to be a professional web design to start creating your own stuff on the internet.

The same for SEO - you have just learnt how to build a website. Now, you want to start promoting it.

Here we go - a list of nice tools, free of use, which you can use to start doing bits of SEO at home:
1) Way Back machine: age of a site is important. If you request a link for instance, you may need to know how old the site is, and what it looked like a few months ago.
2) Reverse Keywords lookup: wonder what your competitor is ranking for? this tools checks what keywords yuo competitor ranks for (note: limited set of records though).
3) Hoover: competition analysis - not really SEO - but very good competition analysis tool.
4) Hub Finder: excellent tool to find good inbound links
5) Marketleap: excellent set of tools
6) Good keywords V2.0: Good tool to store on your desktop to analyse page keywords density.
7) DigitalPoints: Very good set of tools as well.
8) SEO moz: relatively new site providing very uiseful tools as well - you'll need API key for Yahoo, google & amazon.

What is important for a SEO tool is to save you time, or provide data you cannot have access directly.

Google, Yahoo, etc can be used directly to collect useful info: backlinks (just type"/www.site.com" and you'll a complete list of backlinks), related keywords (type ~keyword in google and you'll find in bold a list of all related keywords. you can then list them one by one, just by removing them from the listing: ~keyword -keyword1 -keyword2 etc ... #

If you have got programming skills, you'll see that most of the tools listed above are actually not a big deal to program oneself. It then depends on whether you want to invest some time to do so, and customise the tools the way you want, or are just happy to use existing tools.

from photoshop to CSS

A great tutorial can be found here:
http://veerle.duoh.com/comments.php?id=208_0_2_10_C

back to SEO basics

A friend of mine asked me to make his site ranking well for 5 combination of keywords. I then asked:
- do you use these keywords in your copies: no
- how many pages have you got on your site: 5

Before thinking about marketing your site in search engines, think about how to market a book. Would it be easy to market a book of 5 pages, and try to reach people looking for specific themes not even explicetely anywhere in the pages? no.

Well my first advice was: build some content around these keywords, categorise the content, use syndication and free articles, or better pay some copywriters to write articles about this theme. I gave him a couple of advice about how to organise the actual info on the site, and that was it - once this is done, use your network to request a few deep links to this content, and watch your ranking.

If the keywords are not too competitive, this should be enough.

News from the CMS world

It has been a while I have not written about CMS. Here we go, a selection of news from this fast moving sector:

• Mambo Creates a Foundation: Folllowing Zope steps, Mambo (one of the open source CMS leader) has decided to create its own foundation. the development of an independent organizational body represents an important milestone in the maturation of a open-source project - and specifically, some developers felt Mambo was too closely tied to its original founders.
• Putting a CMS Behind Your Existing Website: CMSWatch studis the trend. A way to increase market reach indeed, and grab a vast market of websites owners who don't want to start from scratch, but who still need more control over their website.
• Can your CMS manage your CMS: an other "hot" topic I think, even though a bit technical - "taxonomy", what's the hell is "taxonomy". Well, let's put it this way: it's the way your content management system is organised. The question Tony Byrne raises is: should a good content management system let you manage its own structure (not only the structure of your site). This is exactely what the JDD does! I'll have to drop an email to Tony.
  

funny firefox extension

Jsut found this website (looking for info about firefox if you ask how!):
http://www.squarefree.com/pornzilla/why-firefox.html

Found the idea funny - I can imagine myself posting a project such as:
Jazar, Best Content Management system for porn sites.

Well, could be a PR hit, but after a lot of thoughts, I don't think we are going to do it ...

Interested in big numbers?

Wondering how much Google's founders have already cashed in from their shares. Here we go - don't get dizzy:

Name	Title	No. of shares sold	Value
Sergey Brin	Co-founder	3.9 million	$824.3M
Larry Page	Co-founder	3.7 million	$740.4M
Omid Kordestani	Senior VP	1.8 million	$366.9M
K. Ram Shriram	Director	1.6 million	$305.9M
Eric Schmidt	CEO	1.4 million	$257.7M
David Drummond	General Counsel	380,976	$79.4M
Jonathan Rosenberg	VP of Product Management	362,603	$76.6M
George Reyes	CFO	273,985	$54.9M
Wayne Rosing	Former VP of Engineering	239,649	$36.8M
John Doerr	Director	236,605	$50.9M
Shona Brown	VP of Business Operations	55,913	$10.9M
Alan Eustace	VP of Engineering	27,180	$6.7M
John Hennessy	Director	10,498	$2.5M

SEO in 2006

I have just read an article this morning, which I found quite intetresting. The guy (Brad Callen) is lloking into a new SEO tactic, expecting it to the break through in 2006. Let's sum it up:

1) Create a new page on your site, targeting specific keywords. Each paragraph should focus on a specif keyword (or set of keywords), with an internal link to a section on your site (optimised for this keyword or set of keywords) - this is the "internal linking" optimisation part.

2) Once the page is complete, identify niche partners - contact them, and offer them to write an article for them. content is king, everybody knows that, and they will be more than happy to host the article (unique) to boost their search engines ranking. Just ask them to keep the links to your site in them in return.

this is a very good way to get:
- one way inbound link to your site
- control the anchor text

Nothing really new here, but it is just what SEO is all about - clever marketing, clever marketing, clever marketing.

and an other link

Here we go, I browse I browse tonight (I remember now the words from the guy who sold us a dedicated solution 2 weeks ago, about one of his competitor: "their directors spend his day on the internet, browsing forums and stuff".... well... is that bad? I wish I could have time to do the same, surfing is something everybody involved in this business should do, as much as they can!

so... here we go - looking for a html doctor? here we go : http://www.doctor-html.com

I though jazar website was ok, doc has found 100's of things wrong! mmmh, doesn't really matter as points out Vincent Flander in his article "Mystical belief in the power of Web Standards, Usability, and tableless CSS.".

struggling with browsers

Every designer has been struggling with Browser compatibility - looks fine in IE & Firefox on a PC, you switch to IE 5 on a MAC, and ...BADABOUM.

Well, if you have got a mac avaialble for testing.

If not, http://www.browsercam.com can definitely make your life easier. with a free 24 hours services, you can always try it out, and register with different email addresses to test it out a bit longer.

Keyword Discovery

Keywords Discovery: http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/

Sounds like a great service:

Linking strategies, affiliate programs, site sponsorships and website
advertising can generate substantial traffic. The KeywordDiscovery referrer
reports tell you which sites drive the most traffic to your competitor's pages.

This service simply gives you an overview of what referrers drive the most traffic to your competitor's website (list of referrer with percentage of traffic they generate compared to the overall one).

where do they get the data from?! the service is very cheap, far cheaper than hitwise for instance. Cannot imagine that they have got agreements with ISPs. I have contacted them about that... waiting for an answer.

the state of e-commerce

First, a big picture snapshot: online shopping continues to grow at a healthy pace in the US (and most likely to be the same over here in europe), with a 25% increase in spendings compared to last year! A few extracts:

Newbie online shoppers tend to cling to the familiar. They are 81 percent more likely than experienced shoppers to shop only at sites they've shopped at in the past.

As a related point, the growth in online spending is fueled by more transactions per user, as opposed to more total users.

Moral of the story: if an e-commerce site wants to get in front of eager shoppers, it needs to be highly visible in search engines.

Not surprisingly, broadband users are far more likely to shop online: while households with narrowband connection spent an average of $217 per quarter online, households with broadband spent $311, or 43 percent more.

The number of sites that shoppers visit before making a purchase is rising, according to comScore. In the apparel segment, using 2002 as the base year for comparison, total number of sites visited increased 2 percent in 2003, 11 percent in 2004, and 21 percent in 2005.

As to why shoppers shop online, most survey respondents listed "convenience" as the main reason. Note that the following three reasons, "compare price," "window shop" and "lower price," are essentially the same thing: Online shoppers are aggressively looking for a good deal.

if consumers continue to increase the use of search engines, whether Web searches or product search engines, that trend opens up the marketplace to those who specialize in one product to deliver a price advantage.

100% pure chinese

Here we go, our first website %100 pure chinese is up and running: http://www.ozly.info/

Big thank you to Daisy to take care of the editorials. Long life to ozly.

marketing for geeks

... But I do admit that a big problem happens when a geek becomes the founder of a software product company. Suddenly the geek must do a whole bunch of stuff they were never trained to do. Somebody has to keep track of the finances, make the coffee and devise clever ways for management to mistreat the employees.

Luckily, a lot of this "non computer science stuff" is fairly intuitive. We've got no training on such matters, but if we can figure out how to write a multithreaded network server, we can probably rent some office space without screwing it up too badly.

Is that what you are thinking ... ?

here we go :

So you proceed to build your killer app. Of course, you are terrified that somebody else will discover your amazing idea, so you keep everything a secret. You setup a small office in the corner of your basement and paint the windows black. You tell your wife you are downstairs looking at porn so she won't get suspicious about what's really going on. Not a single human being on earth gets a glimpse of your product until you are finally ready to unveil your 1.0 release. You emerge from stealth mode and wait for the world to overload your web storefront with traffic.

But the orders don't come in. Several months go by and eventually you realize the truth: The reason nobody else was selling this kind of product already is that nobody really needs it. If any substantial number of people were willing to pay for the solution you created, then somebody else would already be trying to relieve them of their money.

He gets it right. And this is something everyone should pin on a big wall before setting up a software company. We have got it printed in gold on the toilets door.

chinese is hot

Learn chinese on http://www.chinese-tools.com

WASHINGTON: China is casting such a huge shadow on the United States that many Americans are scrambling to learn the Chinese language in a bid to retain their competitive edge.

"Interest in learning Chinese among American youth and their parents has grown dramatically in the past five years," said Vivien Stewart, vice president at the Asia Society, a US group trying to bridge the gap between Americans and the peoples of Asia and the Pacific.

China's dramatic rise to near superpower status and its telling effects politically, economically and culturally are driving the interest to learn the language, experts say.

From kindergartens to high schools, studies by the Asia Society show, there is a "rapid rise" in interest among pupils to study the Chinese language. This is despite the fact that most of the schools lack qualified teachers or do not currently offer the language in their curriculum.

"The Chinese rich cultural traditions and blossoming economy mean that is now essential for all of our students to be better prepared to engage them and seize opportunities together," said Michael Levine, Asia Society's executive director of education.

A 2004 College Board survey found that 2,400 high schools -- an incredibly high number -- would be interested in offering the Advanced Placement.