We’ve all seen it – a name and a date carved into a secluded spot to let us know we were not the first to be standing there. Sometimes it’s unsightly, and even unwanted, but this pocket-knife graffiti also reassures us that we have a commonality with others we’ve never met, others that can come from different cultures, or from another time. It’s nothing hew – graffiti along the lines of “I was here” has even been found inside the Great Pyramid of Giza, etched with chisels by several of the original workers. The point is, we all find certain subjects or places interesting, and we inevitably find others who share the same interests or connections to place, or subject. Social bookmarking is the online embodiment of this graffiti based on a need to cleanly connect to others and share areas of interest, and used effectively, it can also bolster your search engine optimization efforts.

Social bookmarking is basically the practice of bookmarking a Web page in your browser, as you would normally do, but with a twist. Using an application that understands metadata, you can store, organize, search, and manage your bookmarks for public consumption. The degree of sharing can be tailored to suit individual comfort levels. Bookmarks can be shared with a defined group, or on a larger scale, they can be shared with selective networks, accommodating any arrangement of public and private domains. Viewing of the bookmarks can also be tailored by grouping them by date, or predefined category, or even by search engine. 

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admin Blog Articles Social Bookmarking

Between Newbies posting here lately and spammers claiming to work for big companies but with absolutely shoddy code, it came to me the most common problems with people using CSS. Right off let me say that for newbies this should not be embarrassing, I suffered this problem as well when I started.

Beginners basically beginners are hesitant to use CSS, so they commonly try to work with it bit by bit. Wrong approach – just do it. This is usually seen when someone uses CSS just to effect fonts. Another form is tables with CSS. Yes you can do so but it defeats the purpose. Take this to heart, don’t go half way, just jump in.

Thinking it is HTML: Forget what you learned about HTML, this in not HTML it is CSS, another language. All to often you see beginners writing CSS like it is HTML. Just replacing the Font tag with a class name on every paragraph or such.

The idea is to use external style sheets. Every page is linked to this sheet, make a change to this sheet and every page reflects the change. By using styles inside of the  tags, you add wasted code and have to make changes on every element on every page. If you merely define the paragraph tag than every paragraph will have that style, no need to ever ad class or ID’s

Do not mix, it just makes things confusing for everyone. I see many spammers with HTML attributes, inline styles in tags next to these with Block styles in the header and even a link to an external style sheet. These are god awful monsters to control. I am Webmaster of a site that is like that, the simplest changes will almost always break the site. Beware and avoid such sites and those who build them.

If you have any CSS, put it all in external style sheets and most any HTML attributes can and should be done in the CSS as well. Remember this is not HTML you are dealing with, do not just replace HTML attributes with styles in the code. If you are going to use CSS it will only bring and advantage if you learn to write CSS as CSS and not as a HTML attribute replacement.

Classes: Beginners always write classes, then you will see a dozen paragraphs with identical class names. Again this is due to this HTML style of writing we learned first and how we had to write fonts into everything. CSS is not that way.

With CSS you can and should use ID’s. Why? Well ID’s for CSS can also be used as reference points for scripts and internal links, you need not name extra elements. Also for instance you name the upper element with an ID  <div id=?content?>, everything in that ID can be defined specifically using that ID. So rather than 5 paragraphs with 5 classes, you need put define what a paragraph within an ID should look like. #content p { } will define any paragraph in a DIV named ?content? to have a specific style, any other paragraph in another section will not use that style as it is not in that ID.

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admin Blog Articles CSS

It is no new theory that language evolves and that trapping changes in word meaning and word association lies at the heart of the phraseology employed by SEO firms to help target a website’s audience. But what’s more important in some respects are the bursts of attention that often precede changes to a language.

In using the term “bursts of attention”, I’m referring to bursts as defined in a paper entitled “Bursty and Hierarchical Structure in Streams” written by Jon Kleinberg of the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University. The paper examines a fundamental problem in text data mining with regards to targeting and extracting meaningful structure from document streams that arrive continuously over time. What Kleinberg is referring to in the paper are email and news articles because each of these two delivery mechanisms tends to showcase topics in a brief burst of intensity that eventually dissipate to varying degrees, depending on the permanence of the medium. Kleinberg’s work focused on developing a formal approach for modeling such bursts that could eventually lead to flexible frameworks and establish useful analytics.

via Search Engine Optimization Blog.

admin Blog Articles Phraseology, SEO

Online marketing forms the foundation of both Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization. And while online marketing is only one sliver of an online presence – it should be noted that there are other forms of online marketing that can be quite effective at raising your profile and increasing your reputation. One such undiscovered gem is the practice of article writing which can be seen as article marketing.

Whether you do it yourself or press into service a colleague or an available expert, it doesn’t matter, what does matter is that you produce relevant material that will leave the reader with a sense of gratitude and associate your name and brand with valuable information. Let’s look at it this way – your organization specializes in XYZ, and while there are a number of well-established firms offering XYZ services, you want to rise above the rest because you’ve been doing XYZ since the beginning of time and you’re tired of being lost in the pack. If you were to start pecking away at the keyboard and pour out your years of service to XYZ you might be surprised at the volume of valuable information that will flow out of your nervous fingers.

But wait – I know what you are going to say – I have all this valuable information that I’ve spent a lifetime acquiring and you want me to post it to the Web so my competitors can take it for nothing? Yes – and here’s why. Your competitors may take some information, let them have it, but to the vast majority of online users, you will be associating your name, your company’s name, and your brand with the definitive body of knowledge on XYZ. Remember, a body of knowledge that has relevance to the wider community is one very powerful method of building trust with customers, and writing articles is one method that anyone can do to help build this body of knowledge. Even if you only post the material to your own website, if the material is sound, others will link to it and thereby drive targeted traffic to your site.

There are several benefits to article marketing. Firstly, you build business credibility by growing your reputation as an expert in your field. Your voice, and therefore your brand, become associated with reliable material that users find usable, and like I mentioned earlier, you get inbound links that increase your reliance to search engines which ultimately nets you get better search engine positions.

If you wish to have your site optimized, the SEO firm should be able to provide you with a report of your article activity. You will be amazed at how far one collection of words can travel. For a good overview of article marketing, visit the good folks at Wikipedia.

Source: http://www.metamend.com/blog/2009/02/20/articulate-article-marketing/

admin Blog Articles Article Mangement

Zen Cart is an open source online store management system. It is PHP-based, using a MySQL database and HTML components. Support is provided for several languages and currencies, and is free available under the GNU General Public License.

Zen Cart branched from osCommerce as a separate project. Beyond some aesthetic changes, the major differences between the two systems come from Zen Cart’s architectural changes(e.g. a template system) and additional included features in the core. Among the modules already included are a Gift Certificate/Voucher module which allows to create, send and manage the digital coupons. A module to sell downloads(pdf or other media files) is included as well.

admin Blog Articles Shopping Cart, Zen-Cart

Joomla! is a free open source content management system for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranets as well as a Model–view–controller (MVC) Web Application Development framework. The system includes features such as page caching to improve performance, RSS feeds, printable versions of pages, news flashes, blogs, polls, website searching, and language internationalization. Joomla is licensed under the GPL, and is the result of a fork of Mambo.

It is written in the PHP programming language and uses the MySQL database.

admin Blog Articles CMS, Joomla

A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to provide their own website accessible via the World Wide Web. Web hosts are companies that provide space on a server they own for use by their clients as well as providing Internet connectivity, typically in a data center. Web hosts can also provide data center space and connectivity to the Internet for servers they do not own to be located in their data center.

The scope of hosting services varies widely.The most basic is web page and small-scale file hosting, where files can be uploaded via File Transfer Protocol (FTP) or a Web interface. The files are usually delivered to the Web “as is” or with little processing. Many Internet service providers (ISPs) offer this service free to their subscribers. People can also obtain Web page hosting from other, alternative service providers. Personal web site hosting is typically free, advertisement-sponsored, or cheap. Business web site hosting often has a higher expense.

Single page hosting is generally sufficient only for personal web pages. A complex site calls for a more comprehensive package that provides database support and application development platforms (e.g. PHP, Java, Ruby on Rails, ColdFusion, and ASP.NET). These facilities allow the customers to write or install scripts for applications like forums and content management. For e-commerce, SSL is also highly recommended. The host may also provide an interface or control panel for managing the Web server and installing scripts as well as other services like e-mail. Some hosts specialize in certain software or services (e.g. e-commerce). They are commonly used by larger companies to outsource network infrastructure.

admin Blog Articles Web Hosting

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web (abbreviated WWW or W3). It is arranged as a consortium where member organizations maintain full-time staff for the purpose of working together in the development of standards for the World Wide Web. W3C also engages in education and outreach, develops software and serves as an open forum for discussion about the Web.

W3C was created to ensure compatibility and agreement among industry members in the adoption of new standards. Prior to its creation, incompatible versions of HTML were offered by different vendors, increasing the potential for inconsistency between web pages. The consortium was created to get all those vendors to agree on a set of core principles and components which would be supported by everyone.

admin Blog Articles W3C

Template-based website design is different from custom website design in that the person building the website begins from a pre-selected layered Photoshop or Flash template. There are many companies selling templates for website customization on the Internet. There are also numerous sites offering free templates as an enticement to their site. Template based sites work best for relatively simple sites with limited interactivity or need for customization. They are generally inexpensive and can help jump start a web project or business. On the down side they can be very restrictive. To effectively work with many of the available templates you will need to be familiar with web design software or work with a web designer / developer.

TEMPLATE RESOURCE: Find thousands of professional website templates at:
http://www.socalwebworx.com/web_design_templates_search.php

admin Blog Articles Template Website Design

Sticky content refers to content published on a website, which has the purpose of getting a user to return to that particular website or hold their attention and get them to spend longer periods of time at that site. Webmasters use this method to build up a community of returning visitors to a website.

Examples of sticky content include the following: Chat room, Online forum, Webmail, Internet games, Weather, News, Horoscopes, and much more.

Sticky content is also sometimes called sticky tools or sticky gear. Websites featuring sticky content are often referred to as sticky sites.

admin Blog Articles Sticky Site Techniques