SEO Tips - 4 Deadly SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid - SearchEngineChannel

If you are interested in Optimizing your Website, which you should be, read this primer.

"SEO Tips - 4 Deadly SEO Mistakes You Must Avoid

By Cheow Yu Yuan, Saturday, 28th March 2009

Are you getting mediocre results from SEO? If yes, this article is for you. To achieve success with SEO, you must target the right key phrases and build links consistently. It is a continuous process - not a one-time effort.

With this in mind, let us take a look at the 4 deadly SEO mistakes that you must avoid at all cost. These are the mistakes that many optimizers made that prevent them from getting successful results:

1. You do not tag your pages with relevant key phrases. This is the most common mistake that many webmasters made. I believe you have seen websites that place only their company names in their Title tags. Title tags are words that appear on the top left hand side of your Internet browser. You must place keywords in your Title tag because search engines give a lot of weight to it. The title tag is like the Title of a book. It tells readers what the book is about. Likewise, the title tag tells search engines what your website is about. If you are trying to get higher rankings for a keyword but it is not present in your title tag, it is very hard for search engines to award you with high rankings. Therefore, make sure that your title tag describes the content of your page and place important keywords right at the front of it.

2. You do not have enough content or your content is outdated. SEO is more than just tagging your pages. You need to have enough content for search engines to read. To rank high on search engine listings, you must place keywords in your content. Moreover, if your website content is outdated, search engines will visit your site less often, and thus view it as less important. This also prevents your site from getting higher rankings in search engine listings.

3. You optimize the wrong keywords. If you are trying to optimize keywords that are too generic, it is very hard for you to achieve success from your SEO effort. This is because you will get yourself into a more competitive battlefield with other optimizers. So, spend some time to do your research and look for key phrases with lesser competition but relevant to your business. Remember that if you optimize keywords that are not relevant or too generic, even if you achieve high rankings for them, there will be no conversion.

4. You do not build link consistently. Link building is a process of getting more incoming links to your website. Quality inbound links will help your website to achieve higher rankings for competitive keywords. But link building is a continuous process. If you never do it consistently, you will not achieve good result from SEO. So, always build links consistently by using article marketing, blog commenting, directory submissions, and other common strategies that optimizers are using.

These are the 4 deadly SEO mistakes that you must avoid at all cost. Good luck!"

Here's hoping Verizon gets the iPhone!

AT&T's network is vastly inferior to other cell compaines and their customer service has to rank at the very bottom. I hope Verizon gets this deal, so I can replace the iPhone that I dumped.

Verizon Said to Be in Talks for the iPhone


By MATT RICHTEL
Published: April 27, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — The iPhone may be poised to shake up the cellphone industry a second time.

Apple, the maker of the popular smartphone, is conducting high-level discussions with Verizon Wireless to sell a version of the iPhone that would work on Verizon’s network, according to a person briefed on the negotiations. The phone could be available as soon as next year.

The person, who requested anonymity because the deal isn’t completed, said discussions between top company executives intensified two weeks ago.

The iPhone presently is available exclusively on AT&T’s wireless network. That arrangement has lured millions of new customers to AT&T and lifted the company’s revenue in a recession.

The iPhone’s touch screen, GPS capabilities and 25,000 or so downloadable applications made it an instant hit. It has energized competitors who make look-alikes and given hope to device makers and wireless carriers that fretted over where to find growth in a market in which many adults already own a cellphone.

But while its exclusivity has certainly added to its desirability, it also limited Apple’s market for the popular phone. Were Verizon to begin offering the iPhone — whether exclusively or as a competitor to AT&T — it would be a significant development in the increasingly important battle for smartphone users, said Roger Entner, an industry analyst with Nielsen AIG. It would give Verizon, which sells Samsung, Palm and BlackBerry smartphones, another device to lure subscribers who do not prefer the AT&T network.

“The iPhone turned AT&T into a serious competitor now neck-and-neck with Verizon,” he said. If Verizon gets a contract to sell the iPhone, he said, “it will be another major shift.”

Jeffrey Nelson, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless, declined to comment on whether Verizon and Apple were talking. An Apple spokeswoman said that the company was “very happy” with its relationship with AT&T.

“AT&T is a very good partner,” said the spokeswoman, Natalie Kerris. “We have no plans to change the relationship.”

She declined to comment on discussions between Apple and Verizon Wireless.

In a recent quarterly conference call with investors, Tim Cook, Apple’s chief operating officer, cast some doubt on the prospect of an imminent deal with Verizon. He said that Apple was wary of building a phone for a network using C.D.M.A. technology — which Verizon’s current network uses — because, Mr. Cook said, the C.D.M.A. infrastructure may have a short life span.

Verizon, however, is moving to a new network in 2010 that would not rely on C.D.M.A technology. Verizon has said previously that even as it deploys its new network, it plans to retain its C.D.M.A. network for a time to transmit voice communications.

The person who had been briefed on discussions between Verizon and Apple said that it was not out of the question that Apple could build an iPhone for the current network.

Apple has not publicly disclosed the financial terms of its deal with AT&T or the duration of its exclusive deal, which began in 2007. Some industry analysts say they believe the arrangement ends in 2010.

Mark Siegel, a spokesman from AT&T, said the company was thrilled with its partnership with Apple. But he had no comment on the company’s own discussions with Apple about extending its arrangement. He said he had no comment on the discussions between Verizon and Apple.

AT&T’s most recent financial quarter showed the influence of the phone on its business. During that first quarter, AT&T said it activated 1.6 million new iPhones — more than 40 percent of them new to AT&T. During that period, AT&T had 1.2 million overall net subscriber additions, indicating that iPhones made a considerable impact on the company’s ability to grow, Mr. Entner said.

“Without the iPhone, their performance in the first quarter would have been worse than T-Mobile’s,” Mr. Entner said.

Verizon has done fine without the iPhone. It added 1.3 million customers in the first three months of the year, though many came from its acquisition of Alltel. Revenue rose 30 percent to $15.1 billion in the first quarter.

Verizon Communications, which owns Verizon Wireless in a joint venture with Vodafone, reported Monday that its net income grew 5 percent in the first quarter to $3.21 billion, or 58 cents a share, from $3.05 billion, or 57 cents a share, a year ago. Revenue rose almost 12 percent to $26.6 billion.

Doing business with Apple does carry a cost. Ed Snyder, an analyst with Charter Equity Research, said that AT&T has spent around $2 billion to subsidize the cost of the iPhones — selling them to consumers well below what it pays Apple for the phones. AT&T does not get a share of revenue from the iPhone App Store.

Further, Mr. Snyder said, the phones put heavy stress on the AT&T network because iPhone users tend to send and receive data more heavily than users of other phones.

That heavy use has its upside. Mr. Entner said that the typical iPhone user generates for AT&T around $85 in revenue a month, 40 percent more than users of other phones.

“It’s been a net plus,” Mr. Snyder said of AT&T’s relationship with Apple. “But it’s been more of a mixed blessing than most people view it as.”

G.E.’s Breakthrough Can Put 100 DVDs on a Disc

By STEVE LOHR
Published: April 26, 2009

General Electric says it has achieved a breakthrough in digital storage technology that will allow standard-size discs to hold the equivalent of 100 DVDs.
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Nathaniel Brooks for The New York Times

Brian Lawrence leads G.E.’s holographic storage program.

The storage advance, which G.E. is announcing on Monday, is just a laboratory success at this stage. The new technology must be made to work in products that can be mass-produced at affordable prices.

But optical storage experts and industry analysts who were told of the development said it held the promise of being a big step forward in digital storage with a wide range of potential uses in commercial, scientific and consumer markets.

“This could be the next generation of low-cost storage,” said Richard Doherty, an analyst at Envisioneering, a technology research firm.

The promising work by the G.E. researchers is in the field of holographic storage. Holography is an optical process that stores not only three-dimensional images like the ones placed on many credit cards for security purposes, but the 1’s and 0’s of digital data as well.

The data is encoded in light patterns that are stored in light-sensitive material. The holograms act like microscopic mirrors that refract light patterns when a laser shines on them, and so each hologram’s recorded data can then be retrieved and deciphered.

Holographic storage has the potential to pack data far more densely than conventional optical technology, used in DVDs and the newer, high-capacity Blu-ray discs, in which information is stored as a pattern of laser-etched marks across the surface of a disc. The potential of holographic technology has long been known. The first research papers were published in the early 1960s.

Many advances have been made over the years in the materials science, optics and applied physics needed to make holographic storage a practical, cost-effective technology. And this year, InPhase Technologies, a spinoff of Bell Labs of Alcatel-Lucent, plans to introduce a holographic storage system, using $18,000 machines and expensive discs, for specialized markets like video production and storing medical images.

To date, holographic storage has not been on a path to mainstream use. The G.E. development, however, could be that pioneering step, according to analysts and experts. The G.E. researchers have used a different approach than past efforts. It relies on smaller, less complex holograms — a technique called microholographic storage.

A crucial challenge for the team, which has been working on this project since 2003, has been to find the materials and techniques so that smaller holograms reflect enough light for their data patterns to be detected and retrieved.

The recent breakthrough by the team, working at the G.E. lab in Niskayuna, N.Y., north of Albany, was a 200-fold increase in the reflective power of their holograms, putting them at the bottom range of light reflections readable by current Blu-ray machines.

“We’re in the ballpark,” said Brian Lawrence, the scientist who leads G.E.’s holographic storage program. “We’ve crossed the threshold so we’re readable.”

In G.E.’s approach, the holograms are scattered across a disc in a way that is similar to the formats used in today’s CDs, conventional DVDs and Blu-ray discs. So a player that could read microholographic storage discs could also read CD, DVD and Blu-ray discs. But holographic discs, with the technology G.E. has attained, could hold 500 gigabytes of data. Blu-ray is available in 25-gigabyte and 50-gigabyte discs, and a standard DVD holds 5 gigabytes.

“If this can really be done, then G.E.’s work promises to be a huge advantage in commercializing holographic storage technology,” said Bert Hesselink, a professor at Stanford and an expert in the field.

The G.E. team plans to present its research data and lab results at an optical data storage conference in Orlando next month.

Yet, analysts say, the feasibility of G.E.’s technology remains unproved and the economics uncertain. “It’s always well to remember that the most important technical specification in any storage device, however impressive the science behind it, is price,” said James N. Porter, an independent analyst of the storage market.

When Blu-ray was introduced in late 2006, a 25-gigabyte disc cost nearly $1 a gigabyte, though it is about half that now. G.E. expects that when they are introduced, perhaps in 2011 or 2012, holographic discs using its technology will be less than 10 cents a gigabyte — and fall in the future.

“The price of storage per gigabyte is going to drop precipitously,” Mr. Lawrence said.

G.E. will first focus on selling the technology to commercial markets like movie studios, television networks, medical researchers and hospitals for holding data-intensive images like Hollywood films and brain scans. But selling to the broader corporate and consumer market is the larger goal.

To do that, G.E. will have to work with partners to license its holographic storage technology and expertise, and the company is already talking with major electronics and optical storage producers, said Bill Kernick, who leads G.E.’s technology sales unit. The holographic research was originally related to G.E.’s plastics business, which it sold two years ago to the Saudi Basic Industries Corporation for $11.6 billion.

17 Reasons Why Your Mac Runs Slower Than it Should

ChrisWrites dot com
by Chris on April 18, 2009

Day by day, bit by bit your Mac has got slower and slower. You don’t really notice because it has happened so gradually.

Until one day you have a chance to use another machine, that’s when you realize what your beloved Mac has become, as slow as an asthmatic ant carrying some heavy shopping.

Well all is not lost, while this list is unlikely to make you mac into a speed demon overnight, one of the following suggestions may just help.

Cluttered Desktop

Having too many files and folders on your desktop can slowdown your machine. Put these files into folders in your home directory and create aliases to them on the desktop.

Desktop
Corrupt Preference Files

Preference files can easily become corrupt and can make programs act weird or run slowly. If your Mac is slow using a particular application you can try deleting its preference file and relaunching he app (applications create a new file when they are relaunched if they can’t find an existing one). Its worth making a backup of the old file just i case you lose some settings that are hard to replicate.

preference .plist
Smart Playlists on iTunes

Smart playlists can make iTunes slower as they have to reload every time iTunes is launched. Disable live updating by going to File, Edit Smart Playlist and untick Live Updating.
Too Many Widgets on Dashboard

Each Widget on your Dashboard uses memory, again you can check the memory usage of your widgets by using the Activity Monitor. Remove any used or memory hogging widgets using the Dashboard control panel.

widgets
Caches, Log files and Temporary Items

It doesn’t hurt to regularly clear out built up Caches, Log files and Temporary Items an easy way to do this is to use an application like OnyX. If you prefer you can delete Caches manually, they can be found in Home/Library/Cache.
Wrong Firmware

Using the wrong Firmware can cause all sorts of problems, keeping your software up to date on a Mac is so easy there is really no excuse. Just click on Software Update in the Apple menu. You can also schedule your Mac to automatically check for updates, go to System Preferences and Software Update and tick Check for updates. You can change the frequency of the checks using the drop down menu.

Software Update
Not Enough RAM

Software can only take you so far. Upgrading your RAM will probably give you the biggest speed increase out of any of these tips. You can use the Activity Monitor application (under Utilities in the Application folder) to check if your Mac would benefit from more RAM. Click on System Memory tab and have a look at the pie chart at the bottom. If the chart is largely red or orange you are running out of RAM. Also take a look at the Page Ins and Outs numbers, if these are continually increasing, its time to upgrade your RAM.

Ram Upgrade
Permission Conflicts

Some issues with applications loading slowly or acting weird can be remedied by repairing permissions. All files in Mac Os X have a set of permissions, these determine which users or applications can have access to them. Sometimes permissions are incorrect and not what the operating system expects. To repair disk permissions you can use the Disk Utility app (in /Applications/Utilities). Select your startup disk and click th First Aid tab, then click the Repair Disk Permissions button.

Disk Utility
Hard Disk Is Nearly Full

Your Mac automatically utilizes free space on your Hard drive as Virtual Memory to free up the RAM. Try to make sure you have 10% free space available for this task.
Lots of Login Items

Removing unwanted or little used programs from your login items. To change your login items go to System Preferences then Accounts and click the Login Items tab.

open at login
Unused System Preference Panes

Clearing out unused preference panes can help free up memory and disk space, check under Other in System Preferences to see what you can remove. You can either disable it in its menu or delete it entirely by removing it from ~/Library/PreferencePanes.
Unused Applications Left Running

All running applications use up your memory and CPU resources, quit applications if you are not going to use them for a while. Some programs have memory leakage issues which means they tend to consume more and more memory the longer they are running (again you can spot these in the Activity Monitor) it a a good idea to quit and relaunch these every so often.

too many apps
Animated Wallpapers

Animated or slide show wallpaper can really impact the performance of your machine so its a good idea to turn this off.
Firefox Overloaded With Extensions

There are loads of awesome Firefox extensions so its easy to get carried away and add too many. Take a few moments to go through your Add-ons (open Firefox and go to tools then Add-ons) and uninstall any you no longer use.

add ons
Internet Settings

If you are finding your browser slow try clearing the cache and deleting your history. In Safari you do this by going to the main menu and clicking Reset Safari, tick Clear History and Empty the Cache then Reset. In Firefox go to Preferences, Privacy and click the Clear Now button.
Favicons in Safari or Firefox

You may see an improvement in your browsers performance by deleting your cached Favicons, for Safari just delete the files in /Library/Safari/Icons. If you use Firefox 3 read this useful tutorial on macosxhints.
Massive Mailboxes

If you have a massive mailbox with thousands of messages it’s going to take longer to load. Try to delete messages you no longer need and split larger mailboxes into folders.

Surprise Tax Refund

Instead of a tax rebate this tax season, US Citizens should beware of a sinister scam that may arrive in their inboxes. An email currently being circulated by spammers to look like it’s from the IRS has been observed by Symantec. This spam email which seems to bear the logo of the US treasury department explains that a tax refund is due to the recipient. It encourages the recipient to click upon a URL link to access the refund online. The URL opens a webpage which asks the user if they want to want to “Get Tax Refund on your Visa or Mastercard”. The recipient is then asked to enter their Social Security number, valid Visa or Mastercard number, name, address and many more personal details. The recipient is “helpfully” advised that “a refund can be delayed for a number of reasons”. This allows the spammer enough time to use the personal information collected as they see fit.

Be suspicious of any email that is not from someone in your contact list. 78.5% of all Email is Spam.

Also be sure you not only have anti-virus software, but also a anti-spyware program running on your computer. Most 2008 Anti-Virus programs provide protection against both gremlins.

Back-Up Your Mac, Effortlessly

Back-Up Your Mac, Effortlessly By DAVID POGUE Published: May 8, 2008

David Pogue tests Apple’s Time Capsule, which backs up your computer automatically, constantly, completely and wirelessly.

Imagine a Wi-Fi base station, of the sort that turns your home into a wireless hot spot, with a huge hard drive inside (and, mercifully, no power brick--just a slender power cable). The Time Machine automatic backup feature of the latest Mac OS X version backs up your Macs onto the Time Capsule, automatically, constantly, completely and wirelessly. And in my book, automatic, constant, complete backups are the only kind that really count.

The beautiful thing about this arrangement is that it backs up your laptops automatically and completely, too--without your having to hook them up to anything. Any time the laptop is open and turned on, like when you're using it, the Time Capsule backup is quietly doing its thing. An animated icon on your menu bar--a tiny clock whose hands move backward--lets you know when Time Machine is doing its thing.

And what is that thing, exactly? As I wrote in my original Leopard review: "Time Machine keeps multiple backups of everything--programs, settings, files, photos, even the operating system itself--on a second hard drive…Time Machine updates its mirror of your main drive every hour, although you can also trigger updates on demand. At day's end, Time Machine replaces those hourly backups with a single daily backup; at the end of the month, those are replaced by a single month-end backup. (Apple assumes that it won't take you a whole month to notice that your hard drive had crashed.)

"If disaster strikes--sunspots, clueless spouse, overtired self--you enter Time Machine's recovery mode. The sleek, modern-looking Leopard desktop falls away like a curtain, revealing, startlingly, a deep-space starfield. The window that once contained your files remains floating before you, with dozens of iterations of itself, like file cards, receding into the background. You can now scroll backward through time until the window looks as it did before the unfortunate event. (You can also use the Search box to find missing files.) When you find the files you want and click Restore, the regular desktop slides back up into view. The recovered icons are back in their original window."

The Time Capsule is another machine in Apple's recent family of round-cornered, squat white square boxes, like the Apple TV, the Mac Mini and the AirPort Extreme wireless base station. Only an intermittent fan whir tells you that there's a hard drive in there, too. It comes in 500 and 1,000-gigabyte models for $300 and $500. It's got Ethernet jacks on the back, meaning that it's also a regular router for wired gadgets on your network.

It also acts as a regular network-attached hard drive, serving as a central data bucket for both Macs and Windows PCs on your network. (The Time Machine auto-backup feature isn't available for Windows, of course, although some regular Windows backup programs can use the Time Capsule as a regular external drive.) Oh, and you can attach a USB printer to it. Presto: all of your computers can share that one printer.

Despite my initial enthusiasm, I ran into some headaches early on. (Judging by the buyer reviews on Apple's own Web site, this isn't unusual.) I kept getting a wacky error message that said, "This backup is too large for the backup volume. The backup requires 70.3 GB but only 927.0 GB are available."

Um, hello? Run those numbers by me again?

Meanwhile, during the first couple days of Time Capsuleness at our house, my wife's laptop experienced a weird refusal to wake from sleep about three times.

Both of these problems went away by themselves.

Apple advises that the very first backup can take a very long time, as in overnight. Using an Ethernet cable (rather than the wireless feature) cuts the time dramatically, and so does putting the laptop as close as possible to the Time Capsule if you're going wireless.

Now, both of our machines are completely, automatically, silently backed up all the time. Whenever I need a little reassurance that all is well with the world, I click that little backward-clock icon in the menu bar to read those reassuring words: "Last Backup: Today, 8:30 pm."

You can't imagine how satisfying it is to know that if your hard drive dies, you will lose no more than one hour of work. Even if you've made a mess of some document, and want to rewind to an earlier, better draft, you can dip back into the past to retrieve it.

There are, of course, other network-attached hard drives, many with more features (like a media server, print server, RAID options, if you even know what those are). But none seem to have the Time Capsule's combo of capacity and wirelessness. This is a classic case of Apple's insistence on simplicity taking its own version of the network hard drive into a higher realm. Setting it up was very simple, and using it is beyond simple--you just ignore it.

Go on, gods of drive failure--do your worst. I'll be ready.

Adding Dates to a BlackBerry

excerpted from the New York Times

Q. Can I sync the appointments on a Web-based Google Calendar with my BlackBerry communicator?

A. Google offers a piece of software on its site that should let you use Google Calendar with your BlackBerry. To get rolling, aim your BlackBerry’s browser at m.google.com/sync and look for the Download Google Sync link.

Open the menu and choose Get Link and then select Download on the next page. Once the software downloads, it should install itself on your BlackBerry and a new Google Sync icon should appear on your home screen. Select the icon and, when you see the login screen appear, type in the same Google account name and password that you use to get to your calendar online.

Once you log into your account, the Google Sync software signs you in. You can use the Options item on the menu here to change any synchronization settings between the Google Calendar and the BlackBerry.

When you are ready to sync it, go to the bottom of the Welcome screen and press the Sync Now button.

If you have a jam-packed schedule, the actual synchronization process may take several minutes the first time.

Need assistance with your BlackBerry? Call us at Scoby Systems