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Steve Astin - My Blog
Britney Spears designs fashion line for school girls
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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) –
Pop princess Britney Spears is joining the growing club of celebrities-turned-designers, launching her own fashion collection that targets the schoolgirl crowd.
Spears, 28, has designed her first collection of clothing and accessories for the Iconix Brand Group Inc's Candie's brand for which she has been the face for the past three seasons.
The juniors' collection, called "Britney for Candie's," will be sold exclusively in Kohl's Department stories from July 1 to kick off the back-to-school season.
"Designing was a really fun, new way for me to express my creativity and I really wanted to create something by me for my fans," Spears said in a statement.
She said the collection, inspired by her favorite music and movies, as a mixture of day and evening looks, ranging from jeans to little black dresses.
A print and television advertising campaign to promote the line features the tagline: "Designed by me for you!"
Spears earlier this year ended a world tour to support her 2008 album "Circus" which was widely regarded as her comeback after a public meltdown when the singer lost custody of her two children, did stints in rehab and shaved her head.
She rocketed to fame as a teenager 10 years ago with hits like "Baby One More Time" and is still one of the best-known celebrities in the world.
(Writing by Belinda Goldsmith, Editing by Paul Casciato)
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With Alex fading, Gulf crews set sights on oil cleanup efforts
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New Orleans, Louisiana (CNN) -- Now that former Hurricane Alex has lost nearly all of its punch, many in the Gulf states were hoping that Friday would be the day that they could get back to cleaning up the massive oil spill.
The dangerous storm had created choppy seas in the Gulf of Mexico and caused hundreds of oil skimmers to be docked.
"We had to stand down because of the storm activity. Now that oil has been spewed all over the Chandelier Islands," Craig Taffaro, the president of St. Bernard Parish in Louisiana, said Thursday. "We are going out again (Friday) to start cleaning it up. We have to go back out, basically start over."
Also in the area Friday will be Environmental Protection Agency administrator Lisa P. Jackson. Jackson is headed back to the Gulf Coast, a day after her agency gave BP a new directive on how to deal with the cleanup of the massive oil spill.
Jackson will hold a town hall meeting in New Orleans, Louisiana, and tour areas of Pensacola, Florida, on Friday. It will be her sixth trip to the area since the April 20 oil disaster, the EPA said.
On Thursday, the EPA and the U.S. Coast Guard issued a directive to BP on how the company should manage recovered oil, contaminated materials and waste recovered in cleanup operations in the Gulf of Mexico.
Among other requirements, the directive requires the oil giant to give the EPA and state agencies access to any waste storage site and to provide specific plans, waste reports and tracking systems for liquid and solid waste.
"While the states of Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida are overseeing BP's waste management activities and conducting inspections, this action today is meant to compliment their activities by providing further oversight and imposing more specific requirements," the Coast Guard said Thursday. "Under the directive, EPA, in addition to sampling already being done by BP, will begin sampling the waste to help verify that the waste is being properly managed."
Waste sampling to date has been done in compliance with EPA and state regulatory requirements, the Coast Guard said.
Lawmakers on Thursday also sent a message to BP.
The House of Representatives passed a bill that removes limits on financial damages that can be awarded for accidents off the U.S. coastline, such as the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon oil rig that killed 11 workers.
The bill updates maritime laws that have been on the books since the mid-1800s and early 1920s. Those laws restricted the amount of money families could obtain to compensate for lost wages and funeral expenses. The bill passed Thursday by the House would allow compensation for non-monetary losses such as pain and suffering.
A similar measure awaits action in the Senate.
Meanwhile, rough seas caused by Hurricane Alex, now nothing more than a blustery low pressure system, kept oil-skimming boats out of the Gulf on Thursday and could keep many tied to the dock through the weekend, said Thad Allen, the retired admiral in charge of the federal response to the Gulf oil disaster.
Allen said seas over 5 feet hinder the effectiveness of most boats used to scoop oil. All but the largest vessels will likely be idled until the weekend, he said.
Alex hit the Mexican coast, more than 600 miles from the center of the Gulf disaster, on Wednesday night with 105 mph winds. It had diminished to a tropical storm by Thursday afternoon, but it continued to stir up seas of 6 to 8 feet around the site of the 10-week-old disaster.
The system's prevailing winds have affected the direction of the oil slick, steering it away from the western Florida Panhandle toward the environmentally sensitive areas off the coast of Mississippi and Louisiana.
Researchers have estimated that between 35,000 barrels (about 1.5 million gallons) and 60,000 barrels (about 2.5 million gallons) of oil have been gushing into the Gulf every day since April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank off the coast of Louisiana.
For More Info : http://edition.cnn.com/2010/US/07/02/gulf.oil.disaster/?hpt=T2&fbid=GGY8ni898al
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125 Social Bookmarking Sites : Importance of User Generated Tags, Votes and Links
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The positive effects of social bookmarking for publishers of news sites, blogs and other web sites is outstanding. Social bookmarking can introduce the sites that you own or you like to others with relevant tastes, can drive traffic to your site, and valuable backlinks.
Some social bookmark sites like Propeller.com pass on link juice, while some use the NoFollow attribute. But do not let the use of NoFollow fool you, the search engines are looking beyond the incoming links from social bookmarking sites to gauge their value to their search indexes. The external metadata compiled via user generated descriptions, tags, titles and categorization is incredibly valued by the search engines, as in the same philosophy as anchored backlinks, descriptive content about a web site defined by the users of that site who are not associated with the marketing or coding of that site, can be extremely powerful in gauging the importance and relevance of the content and tags which are used on that site.
Bookmarks show how a site is perceived, and when these sites allow voting, they also show the engines or whatever classification system which monitors voting, how people feel about the quality of the site. Furthermore, social bookmarking can introduce a site to the search engines, as in some cases, people may find and bookmark a site or a site’s internal pages before a search engine can find those pages via another form of inbound link.
Monitoring social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Ma.gnolia can help search engines in multiple ways by:
- Indexing Sites Faster : Humans bookmark sites launched by their friends or colleagues before a search engine bot can find them.
- Deeper Indexing : Many pages bookmarked are deep into sites and sometimes not as easily linked to by others, found via bad or nonexistent site navigation or linked to from external pages.
- Measuring Quality : Essentially if more users bookmark a page, the more quality and relevance that site has. A site with multiple bookmarks across multiple bookmarking services by multiple users is much more of an authority than a site with only several bookmarks by the same user.
- External Meta Data : Users who bookmark sites tag them with keywords and descriptions which add an honest and unbiased definition which is created by the public and not the owner of the site.
- Co Citation : Social bookmarking sites tend to categorize sites and pages based upon the tags used by humans to describe the site; therefore search algortihms can classify these sites with their peers.
- Number of Votes : Similar to the number of bookmarks, the more votes a page receives on Digg or Reddit, the more useful that information usually is. If the same page receives multiple votes across multiple social news voting sites, the higher quality the site.
- Categorization : Like Co Citation, categorization can help define the subject of a site, therefore better helping the engine address searcher intent.
To help share the wealth of social bookmarking, I’ve put together a list of 125 social bookmarking sites, some of which are very popular and others which are newer or somewhat unheard of. But besides targeting the major social bookmarking and tagging sites which are listed above, you will find some diamonds in the rough which are niche oriented or treated well by Google and other search engines. I’ve found that one such surprise is Searchles which is regarded as an authority by multiple search engines and bookmarks within Searchles sometimes show up quite high in some branded organic results.
125+ Social Bookmarking/News Sites You Should Consider
- Backflip : Backflip is a free service currently being run by volunteers. Backflip was started in 1999 by Netscape veterans Tim Hickman and Chris Misner. As a research tool, Backflip is clearly of value to the education community, and that community (or at least certain segments) has certainly embraced Backflip. A Google search of sites that contain the term “Backflip.com” results in numerous education-related links, including Teacher Tools.
- barksbookmarks : BARKS=BookmARKS is a website that combines social bookmarking, blogging, RSS, and non-hierarchical editorial control.
- BibSonomy :BibSonomy is run by the Knowledge Data Engineering Group of the University of Kassel, Germany. Its specifically designed for researchers, in sharing bookmarks and bibliographies
- Blinklist :A social bookmarking site launched by Mindvalley. According to their site, they launch several web businesses a year and are focused in 3 areas. – Technology, media and Marketing. BlinkList does have a user friendly interface indicating that its being run well and efficiently. They also quote “fully profitable” on their site. Furthermore, you can label and comment about any web page on the Internet.
- Blipoo :Meet Blipoo, a social bookmarking site for “cool” people sharing “cool” stories. It claims to help bloggers drive more traffic to their blog because they allow self promotion..
- BlogBookMark : Designed specifically for Blog hunters, BlogBookmark.com claims to have the hottest news, gossip, and blog chatter from around the web. I highly sugggest that mainstream bloggers bookmark their entires here.
- BlueDot : This basic social networking service allows users to save and share bookmarks.
- blurpalicious : Get Blurped! Not too different from other social bookmarks, but I love the tagline.
- Bmaccess : Social bookmarking with thumbs :)
- Bookkit : BookKit.com is an absolutely free web service designed to facilitate bookmark (favorites) management needs.
- BookMarkAll : Bookmarkall is an online bookmark community where users can create, organize and share their favorite web links online and access them anywhere.
- Bookmark-manager : Organizer for bookmarks, calendar, diary and knowledge.
- bookmarktracker : Free online storage, management, synchronizing and RSS sharing of your bookmarks.
- Bookmax : You can store your bookmarks and links to your favorite sites online and access them from wherever you are : basic Social Bookmarking.
- Buddymarks : The online personal, group and social bookmarks manager.
- Bukmark : Bukmark is a social bookmarking website.
- Chipmark :Another basic social bookmarking site.
- Citeulike : A free service to help academics to share, store, and organise the academic papers they are reading.
- Claimid : Manage your online identity. Although this is not a normal social bookmarking site, users can bookmark sites which reference their identity and build backlinks in this fashion.
- Clipclip : Clipclip allows you to save images and text, with a “bookmarklet”.
- Cloudytags : A unique word analyzer connects to your page, gets all the words and suggest you the real tags your site is showing to the world.
- Complore : Derived from com-(with,together) and explore-(search, research). As the name suggests, complore is a vision to connect people from diverse backgrounds
- Connectedy : Lets you establish a personal link directory online. As you surf the web, you collect links, categorize them in a way that makes sense to you.
- Connotea : Social bookmarking (for researchers).
- Contentpop : It has the latest Web 2.0 features such as social bookmarking, blogging & RSS. It also uses the word POP in the title which means it must be good.
- coRank : coRank is a site where you can share whatever you find interesting on the web with people who value your opinion
- Crowdfound : CrowdFound is essentially a social bookmarking website, but with a different vision in mind
- de.lirio.us : Store, share and tag your favourite links. Open source clone of del.icio.us with private bookmarking, tagging, blogging, and notes
- del.icio.us : THE social bookmarking site : It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links and to categorize those sites with keywords. Not to mention that if enough people save your site in a bookmark, it will make their popular page and send a lot of traffic. Delicious is owned by Yahoo and is a MUST for your social media and bookmarking strategy.
- Diigo : Social bookmarking on steroids.
- Digg : The social news site that changed the Internet, Digg is a high power authority and a listing in Digg for a site, even if it only has a couple of votes, will rank highly on Google and other search engines for certain terms. If your site is shared and voted upon on Digg, and makes the Digg homepage, you’ll get a lot of traffic and attention from other bloggers who read Digg.
- Dropjack : DropJack.com is a social content website and owned by the ExactSeek company.
- Easybm : Allows users to bookmark their frequently visited sites on their private page, allowing 1-click access to their favorite web sites.
- Enroll : Social bookmarking system based in India.
- ez4u : Social Bookmarking – Ez4u to Bookmark : “Ez4u to Organize Ez4u to Share with Others Ez4u to Remember”
- Favoor : Favoor is your personalized new start page. Collect your favorite internet addresses.
- Folkd : Folkd is a social web-service about pages, news, audios, videos and blogs.
- Freelink : Freelink.org provides free pages of links that you can access anywhere at anytime.
- Freezilla : FreeZilla claims to be the first Web 2.0 freebies and promotions social networking site.
- Fungow : Fungow was designed to help better organize and keep track of your bookmarks.
- Furl : Like Delicious, LookSmart’s Furl.net is one of the first social bookmarking sites and considered an authority by the major search engines. Listing your sites in Furl will lead to traffic from organic rankings and its popular page drives traffic.
- Gather : Gather is a place to contribute articles and content, blog, tag and connect with people who share your passions. (Plus you can link out from the articles in this authority site).
- Getboo : GetBoo.com is yet another free online bookmarking service which allows you to store, edit and retrieve your bookmarks from anywhere online.
- Google : Allows users to save and create bookmarks in their Google toolbar that can be accessed anywhere online. Google is getting more social by the day, so take advantage of their Google Bookamrks and citations, because one day they probably will have some kind of influence on external meta data considered by the Google ranking algortihm.
- Hanzoweb : Hanzoweb – Bookmark, tag & share knowledge online
- Hyperlinkomatic : Hyperlinkomatic – bookmark list manager.
- i89.us : i89.us offers a free service which allows you to save your favorite website/links at one location that can be accessed from anywhere.
- Icio : Danish Bookmarking engine.
- Ikeepbookmarks : Popup feature allows you to add links while surfing the web
- Iloggo : Simple web based bookmarking tool that you can use for attractively displaying your favorite websites on one page.
- Jigg : Jigg.in is a socializing community with the latest stories / news submitted by users and has a familiar name :)
- Kaboodle : Kaboodle is a 2.0 shopping community where people recommend and discover new things.
- Kinja : Kinja is a blog guide, collecting news and commentary from some of the best sites on the web.
- Lifelogger : “LifeLogger is a great way to keep things that matter to you alive and sparkling.” And worth considering in a bookmarking campaign.
- Lilsto : Lilisto lets you store, manage and find your favorite links (or bookmarks) and removes the need to maintain them through your browser.
- Linkagogo : Favorites and Social Bookmarking Application, its unique dynamic toolbars automatically adapt themselves.
- Linkarena : German Social Bookmarking site.
- Linksnarf : Social link sharing with groups of friends.
- Listerlister :ListerLister is a social list building community where you can create, add to, and vote for both lists and the items added to them.
- Ma.gnolia.com : Like Furl and Delicious, anoter major bookmarking site which lets users organize bookmarks, search other people’s favorites and make friends and contacts.
- Markaboo : MarkaBoo is tool for saving websites, files, and notes from your browser, email or mobile phone.
- Marktd : Marktd is a reference & voting system that highlights marketing articles considered valuable by the marketing community.
- Memfrag : memFrag stores your favorites personal notes, making them globally accessible from any computer.
- Memotoo :Lets users centralize and share your personal data.
- Mister Wong : Mister Wong is a social bookmarking site that originated in Germany, and has since become a popular and widespread tool.
- Mixx : An up and coming bookmarking and social news sharing network which should rival Digg, Reddit and others, Mixx blends popular photos, videos and stories.
- Mobleo : Allows you to easily add, organize, and share your mobile phone bookmarks with your friends using your desktop computer.
- Multiply :Florida-based social network Multiply, which reports nearly 3 million users and $6 million in funding,opened its social bookmarking site recently and has done well. Definite authority :)
- Murl : My URLs is a free online bookmarks manager, think of it as a bookmarks community.
- MyBookmarks : MyBookmarks – access your bookmarks anytime, anywhere. Free productivity tool for business, student or personal use. Another popular bookmarking site.
- Myhq : Store your bookmarks in one central location. Fast, text-based, banner free!
- MyLinkVault : A free online bookmark manager. Other bookmark managers can be so clumsy to use – trying to rearrange your bookmarks can be slow and frustrating.
- mySiteVote : mySiteVote is a community where you can vote your favorite site/s and view how popular a site is.
- MyWebDesktop : A collaboration and communication tool, designed to be as generic and easy to use as a telephone and email.
- Newsvine : The mission of Newsvine is to bring together big and little media in a way which respects established journalism
- Newsweight :NewsWeight is a democratic news, information, and entertainment resource.
- Oyax : Oyax is a social bookmark manager which allows users to easily add sites you like to personal collection of links, categorize those sites with keywords.
- Philoi : Person-to-person link sharing community. Save bookmarks and share links with your friends.
- PlugIM : PlugIM is a user driven internet marketing community. Submit content, share articles, comment on projects and promote your favorites to the front page
- Propeller : Formaly known as Netscape, AOL’s Propeller has become a great social bookmarking news community tool which is considered an ultimate authority by Yahoo Search and passes link juice in its news story profiles. Propeller is also going to redesign very soon, which should be quite exciting.
- QuickieClick : QuickieClick is a second generation social bookmarking website with a visual twist.
- Rambhai : An Indian social bookmarking community
- RawSugar : A social search engine powered by user contributions. Its an online community, with over 130,000 URLs already tagged by their members.
- Reddit : Timely and shocking news oriented, Reddit stories are instantly voted upon and if liked by the community as a whole, can drive incredible traffic and users.
- Searchles : Owned by the DumbFind search engine, in my opinion Searchles is a much overlooked bookmarking tool and loved by Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines with its passing of link juice and high rankings for terms within search results themselves. Do not overlook Searchles.
- Segnalo : Italian Social bookmarking site.
- Simpy [late addition]: Social bookmarking & search, Simpy lets users “save, tag, search and share bookmarks, notes, groups and more.”
- Sitebar : A solution for people who use multiple browsers or computers and want to have their bookmarks available from anywhere without need to synchronize them
- Sitejot :Free online bookmark manager. Like every other social bookmarking site, it allows users to manage all of their bookmarks online in one convenient place.
- Sk*rt : sk*rt is a social media ranking platform of “pure goodness”, targeted towards women. Given the right story, Sk*rt can send A LOT of targeted traffic.
- Slashdot : The godfather of social news, SlashDot bookmarks are still quite powerful .. keep in mind the site has a heavy slant towards Linux and Open Source issues.
- SocialDanger : SocialDanger is a Web 2.0 open source content management system.
- Socialogs : A Digg-like Social Bookmarking Service.
- Sphinn : Very popular search marketing oriented social news and discussion site run via the Pligg system.
- Spotback : Spotback is a personalized rating system that recommends relevant content based on personal rating history using collaborative filtering
- Spurl : Another cherished bookmarking and tagging site, Spurl lets users keep online bookmarks & tags while offering full text searching, recommendations & storing of entire documents.
- Squidoo :Kind of spammed out, Squidoo is a 2.0 property which lets people and businesses set up a ‘lens’ which lists links, tags and relevant RSS feeds to different subjects.
- Startaid : I’ve noticed that StartAid bookmark pages rank highly in Google and other search engines. This basic bookmarking service allows users to describe, tag and categorize sites.
- StumbleUpon : Owned by eBay, StumbleUpon is an amazing blend of social bookmarking, voting, networking, web surfing, search and blogging. Best of all, StumbleUpon can send major traffic with its userbase of around 3 million users.
- Stylehive : The Stylehive is a collection of all the best products, brands, designers and stores discovered and tagged by the Hive community
- Syncone : SyncOne is an Internet aggregator of bookmarking and browsing.
- Tagfacts : Basic bookmarking and tagging, a social knowledge base.
- Taggly : Store, share and tag your favorite links.
- Tagne : TagNe.ws is user-submitted, community voted links and resources related to SEO, Blogging, RSS, Tagging, Internet Marketing and more.
- Tagtooga : Says that this bookmarking engine can be used to discover great sites difficult to find in Google/Yahoo by browsing categories.
- Tagza : A very young Social Bookmarking site mostly being used by Indian and Pakistani web masters.
- Technorati : Always changing and reinventing themselves, this recognized authority offers links to blogposts, tagging and a social bookmarking WTF section.
- Tedigo : Personal and social bookmarking in Spanish and English made simple.
- Thinkpocket : Lets users pocket websites you find valuable. It is a web service that aims to help store, organize and share your favorite sites
- Thoof : Thoof is a user generated news and information service that claims to learn about what users are interested in and delivers news that they care about.
- Totalpad : TotalPad is a new online news and article community where people are free to voice their opinions
- Urlex : With URLex system users are able to leave a comment regarding any internet link on any site. Possibly good for linking :)
- Uvouch : Another basic social bookmarking site, users can save their findings with one click, at one place and access it from anywhere.
- Vmark : An online bookmark and online favorites manager.
- Voteboat : VoteBoat is a user-controlled rating and voting site.
- Votelists : VoteLists lets users create a list of rankable items. Other can add items, comment on them, rate them and more!
- Vuju : Vuju allows user to submit/publish content which can be tagged and promoted.
- WeTogether : Social bookmarking site where people will have great opportunities to promote their own sites.
- Whitelinks : Securely store and quickly access favorite websites whenever connected to the Internet,:
- Wink : A social search engine where users can share results and answer questions. Users build profiles which can link out to bookmark pages or other web sites (hint hint).:
- Wirefan : Social bookmarking, news articles submission site.:
- Xilinus : Organize and manage bookmarks online.:
- Xlmark : xlmark is an easy social bookmarking site:
- Yahoo! Bookmarks: The MOST POPULAR social search and bookmarking service on the web. It’s similar to Delicious and something they launched before acquiring Delicious. Yahoo Bookmarks lets users store bookmarks using their Yahoo Toolbar and access them from any computer.
- Yattle: Bookmark Management and Mini-Blogging Service.
- Zlitt: Zlitt is a social bookmarking system which gives users the opportunity to share and tag favorite news, images and videos.
- Zurpy: Saves bookmarks, text clippings, images, files, and news feeds in one place.
Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/125-social-bookmarking-sites-importance-of-user-generated-tags-votes-and-links/6066/#ixzz0p1oNSQJe
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55 Quick SEO Tips Even Your Mother Would Love
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Everyone loves a good tip, right? Here are 55 quick tips for search engine optimization that even your mother could use to get cooking. Well, not my mother, but you get my point. Most folks with some web design and beginner SEO knowledge should be able to take these to the bank without any problem.
1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.
2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.
3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.
4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.
5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.
6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.
7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.
8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.
9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.
10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.
11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.
12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.
Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.
13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.
14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.
15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.
16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.
17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.
18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.
19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.
20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.
21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.
22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.
23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.
24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.
25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.
26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.
27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.
28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.
29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.
30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.
31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.
32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.
33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.
34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.
35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.
36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!
37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.
38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.
39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.
40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.
41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:
(1) Log out of Google
(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar
42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.
43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.
44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.
45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.
46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.
47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.
48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.
49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.
50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.
51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.
52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.
53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.
54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.
55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.
Read more: http://www.searchenginejournal.com/55-quick-seo-tips-even-your-mother-would-love/6760/#ixzz0p1jqYjAm
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Suicide car bomb kills 10 in north Iraq
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A suicide attacker detonated a car bomb on Friday outside a sports stadium in a predominantly Shiite town in northern Iraq, killing at least 10 people and wounding another 120, police and hospital officials said.
According to the police official, the bomber blew up his vehicle near the doorway to the stadium where a crowd of people were gathered,. A hospital official confirmed the casualty figures.
Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they were not authorized to speak to the press. Located between the Syrian border and the volatile city of Mosul, Tal Afar's residents are predominantly Shiite of Turkomen ethnicity, and have been recurring targets of suicide bombers.
The most recent attacks in the city before Friday's blast took place in October and previous to that in July, with dozens killed in both cases. The deadliest assault in the northwestern city was in March 2007 when truck bombs hit crowded markets, killing at least 152 people.
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