“What formula does Google use to determine where your website gets listed?” Wow, if we knew the answer to that we’d be rich. The problem with that question is that there is no definitive answer. There is no one formula that can be exploited to ensure your Google ranking is always number one!

With that said, there are some simple, basic strategies that need to be adhered to when putting your website up for public view. These all factor into the Google (and Yahoo, MSN, Bing, Ask.com, etc.) formulas, but how each is weighted varies and in some cases changes daily to ensure the content remains fresh and unexploited.

So, here’s our list of some basic determining factors for SEO ranking:

Tracking and statistics: First and foremost, make sure you have proper tracking on your website, such as Google analytics. These tools are invaluable when tracking the performance of your pages and your website in general. If you don’t have it, get it. Yahoo and Bing have similar setups, but Google Analytics is still the best.

Age of Domain: Age of URL is very important. Sadly, there is no way to speed up this factor. If you are a new website with a new domain name, it’s going to take time to get this factor to go up. The reason this is important is that domain longevity helps build trust. If your website has been online for several years, chances are you have an established business.

  Domain Hosting: Where is your site hosted? In this instance, outsourcing is a bad idea! The country in which your site is hosted plays a big role in how it gets scored. Always use a reputable hosting company. If you are a US based business, host in the US, if you are a UK based site, host it in the UK. When it comes to hosting, don’t go cheap. Also, make darn sure you have a dedicated (non rolling) IP. Some hosting sites that use clouds or virtual dedicated can change IP’s. This is a sign of website instability, so always make sure your hosted server is dedicated and demand a static IP for your server only. Never use the cheapest hosting. Let me be blunt… if you can’t afford decent hosting, then don’t expect to yield good SEO results.

  Your Neighbors: If you have a virtual server or shared server, which even the big name hosting sites like Start Logic and Go Daddy use, chances are your site shares the same IP as dozens (possibly hundreds) of other websites. Make sure that your neighbors on your server are not porn or classified as spam.

Content: Content isn’t just an important ranking factor, it is THE most important (IMHO). Make sure you have your keyword phrases on all your important pages, then make sure it is spread out evenly throughout the page (the beginning, several times in the middle, and at the end). And don’t just write mindless words for the sake of filling a page. The content must be relevant! I’m not saying that search engine algorithms are able to detect BS, but your readers are! The goal of SEO is to get people to visit your site or link. Once they do, you want them to come back. If they visit your site and see it contains a bunch of junk, they’re not coming back. And guess what the major search engines also consider in their rankings? You got it, time on page and returning visitors. Always write your content for humans and NEVER write content for the sole purpose of SEO formula injection.

  URL Structure: Make sure your URL structures are very clean. There should not be any random strings of characters at the end of your URL’s. This is a trap that a lot of resellers fall into. They register the short version of their long URL thinking that bit.ly/Djs8ds is simpler to read and also hides the fact the user is being redirected to a reseller link… And that is correct. But, search engine algorithms don’t understand gibberish at the end of a URL. The tradeoff is that you can fool users into clicking on an obvious reseller link, but you will not score at all in regards to SEO.

Keywords: This is an SEO lesson in and of itself, but some basic information includes making sure your website is optimized using your keyword phrases. This means placing that text in any alt tags for images, meta page information, and existing content (laid out according to our Content rule above).

Bounce Rate: Again, this is something that is hard for you to control, but sticking to some basic guidelines ensures that your bounce rate is kept to a minimum. Make frequent changes to get visitors engaged with your website. Simple things like video tutorials, newsletter subscriptions, and comments will help improve your bounce rate over time.

Internal Link Structure: Make sure your inner pages are linked correctly. Visitors should not have to hunt, peck, and wonder about how to navigate your site. Make menus and links clear, concise, and visible. Every so often, make sure there are no broken links in your navigation chain! Broken links are a punishment in SEO rankings. Make sure the code of your website is verified and keep flash and JavaScript to a minimum, if you can. Clean and easy to read is the way to go.

Trust: How do you gain trust? Well, if you don’t have the benefit of a well aged domain name, you need to provide people (and search engines) with a reason to think your legitimate and here to stay. If you have a physical business address, list it. Search engines like to see that you are not just a web based business, but also a physical business. Phone numbers are important, too. Even if you Skype or GoToMeeting most of your customer interaction, an actual phone number helps users and search engines feel that this is your only business and that all resources are exercised to ensure your availability. At a bare minimum, at least provide a customer service or support email address. The goal is to make it easy for people to do business with you.

Outbound links: Make sure the websites that you link to are 100% relevant to your business and industry. Don’t think for a second that a hundred links to unrelated sites is better than 10 links to genre matching content. Consider each and every link.

Want to learn more about SEO strategies and tactics? We’re only a couple of months away from releasing our training section, but until then we have a little SEO primer called “Backlink Generation in Minutes.” You can download it for free using this link.

There are many extensive and exclusive factors that all search engines use when determining where your website ranks amongst the others. The bottom line is is that to truly conquer SEO, your site must be relevant, informative, user friendly, and trusted.

An Example-Driven, Beginner's Guide to Building Interactive Maps with Bing, Yahoo!, and Google Maps is finally here!

Map Scripting 101: An Example-Driven Guide to Building Interactive Maps with Bing, Yahoo!, and Google Maps (No Starch Press, Aug 2010, 376 pp, $34.95, ISBN 9781593272715) is an example-based beginner's guide to map scripting. Author Adam DuVander delivers a cookbook of 73 immediately useful mapping scripts like a local concert tracker, a Twitter friend-finder, and a real-time weather map. And because the book is based on the cross-platform Mapstraction JavaScript library, readers can use virtually any mapping service, including OpenStreetMap, MapQuest, Google Maps, Yahoo!, and Bing.

In this book, you’ll learn to:

Create, embed, and manipulate basic maps by setting zoom levels and map boundaries

Show, hide, and filter location markers and info-bubbles

Customize maps for visitors based on their location

Use common data formats like Google Earth's KML, GeoRSS, and GPS XML (GPX)

Create graphical overlays on maps to better analyze data and trends

Use freely available geodata from websites like Yelp and Upcoming—and public domain geodata from the US government

We do a lot of work with Bing Maps and this book is already getting worn from use. The step by step guide and the library reference is incredibly helpful and drastically cuts our development time. If you work with Google Maps or Bing Maps then this script reference is something that should be open and on your desk!

Microsoft's Russian Web site today revealed details about the new Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) user interface, touting new features such as quick-release tabs and a Chrome-like search bar.

The big changes are to the top section of the browser. They have dispensed with traditional menus, put tabs at the top the browser window and combined the address and search bars, just like Google’s Chrome.

"Your browser is not overloaded with navigation elements, and compared with other browsers leaves more space for the site," a machine translation of the promotional copy read. "Now the user sees only what is necessary for navigation."

Mozilla's next major upgrade, Firefox 4, will feature tabs on top and will eliminate the traditional Windows menus above the browser's content area, two features popularized by Chrome.

One of the neatest features for us was the fact that individual tabs can be placed on the taskbar, thus if you want to bring up a site tab that you have active in IE, you just one-click it off the taskbar.

After it’s release (September 15th), we’ll have to check our stats again and see if the changes have struck a chord with users.

Are you trying to find your way through Starcraft 2 and hitting a few hurdles? Or are you new to the game and looking for some quick examples of what to do and when to do it? Then our FREE Starcraft II guide will get you going. Check out our quick start Tips and Tricks guide to Starcraft II absolutely FREE! We’ve been playing Starcraft 2 since the day it was released,  so we decided to jot down and research a few things that helped get us started. In this FREE guide you will learn:

Basic strategy tips

 Basic economy strategies

 Single player tips and cheats

 Multiplayer secrets

 Do’s and Don'ts

 Players checklist

 PLUS – links to the Internet’s best selling Starcraft 2 Strategy Guide with even MORE tips and tricks.

To get your FREE Starcraft 2 tips and tricks guide, simply Click HERE!

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Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List. It provides a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall.

If you want to feel old, you can read their entire list here. What I thought was interesting were the technological items that you wouldn’t think have taken hold as much as they have. Here are a few examples of what today’s college freshman have grown up with and known their entire lives:

Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.

“Caramel macchiato” and “venti half-caf vanilla latte” have always been street corner lingo.

DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed.

Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.

They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.

The first computer they probably touched was an Apple II; it is now in a museum.

Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine.

They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus.

They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.

I know these are a bit older, but I still have trouble explaining to kids that software used to come on huge 5.25” floppy disks and that noisy modems used to connect us to the new Internet at whopping speeds of 14.4K!

In putting together our training curriculum, we added a section talking about how Google has so many tools and add-ons to make your SEO life a lot easier. One of them is a buried little gem called the “Wonder Wheel.”

At left is a screen shot of where to find the elusive '”Wonder Wheel.” After you enter your search term and Google displays the search results, click on the “More Search Terms” link on the left side menu bar.

This will expand the menu at left and display additional options for your search and SEO activities.

“Wonder Wheel” is useful for determining the associative keywords for the search term entered. For example, our test search term “email scraper” shows a “Wonder Wheel” of items such as “email extractor” and “email harvester.”

The image at right shows what Google displays when you enter our search term like “eMail Scraper.”

Google does limit the number of spokes displayed to only give you the best options for keyword determination.

The neat thing about this tool is that you can actually crawl through the spokes of the wheel and expand them to get more keyword ideas.

If we hit the link that is for “Craigslist email scraper,” we see that the image now rubber-bands out and we can now see where that spoke takes us.

Now we are presented with a new set of strong keyword phrases that are determined based of the linked text (Craigslist email scraper).

The links and lists can seem to go on forever. It’s best to stick with your power search phrase (“email scraper” in our example) and work with the keywords shown in the first spokes.

Once you have these keywords, be sure to use them within your posts and pages, H1 and H2 tags, your site description and your site content. This is just another example of the type of information you will receive in our training curriculum.

We hope to have initial publishing done this week and will always be adding more and more products and training materials. Be sure to also look for our upcoming PodCasts! Happy marketing!

A custom program is fully customized software based on the specific requirements of your business. For example, if you need custom programming that meets various business demands such as a seamless shopping cart integration into your Web site or a Customer Relations Management (CRM) system to help you manage interactions with your customers, then eSource Development's custom programming software services may be the answer for you.

The key to successful custom programming is project definition. The project software definition defines such things as your customer base and demographics, operational business needs, computer hardware, image requirements and revenue-generating opportunities. It's a consultative process, which combines your business knowledge with our custom programming expertise to provide you with a proper business solution.

eSource Development provides web development, custom software programming and database design solution services. Our consultants work within a discipline that starts with defining your needs in detail. We prepare a firm time-line and setup a reporting process so you know where your project stands every step of the way. From the start-up companies to multinational firms, eSource has a proven record of success. Our staff has worked for companies from small businesses to Fortune 500's.

The services we provide have many different titles - application development, custom programming, web development, IT consulting, b2b development, software design, database design, html programming, web programming, c programming... the list goes on and on. Most of our clients don't know exactly what they want when they call us but they do know of a problem that needs to be solved or an opportunity that needs to be leveraged. We take the client's needs and provide an elegant business solution, turning our client's ideas into digital business reality.

We will work with your business to help you determine exactly what you need, then come up with a plan to achieve it within your time and budget requirements. Custom software programming services and development is a complex process, but we are experts at getting these types of projects completed and implemented quickly. You control the process and can count on us to get your development done in a timely and cost effective manner.

eSource Development turns your ideas into digital business reality. We work with key people within your organization to learn their unique business approach and apply our experience and technical programming expertise to provide the optimum custom technical software solution for your business needs. We build custom programming solutions tailored to your unique business model and geared to optimize the success of your organization for a fixed price.

Our custom software solutions are often cheaper than buying a packaged program. After all, your organization is successful due to its unique value proposition to your industry. Why should the system that runs your business be the same as your competition’s?

We provide support for our applications and monthly reports concerning the performance and state of your system at a fixed monthly cost. With an eSource Development support contract, your application will be periodically upgraded as new, proven programming technologies become available that can improve it.

System Troubleshooting and Performance Tuning

At eSource Development, we leverage the combined experience of our custom development staff, our partnerships, an extensive set of proven tools, and an analytical systematic approach to problem solving that will identify and resolve your computer application problems in a quick and concise manor. We are experts at solving problems with ASP, .NET, C#, C++, VBScript, J Script, Visual Basic, MySQL, Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft IIS, Bing Maps, and much more!

Contact eSource Development if you have a custom programming assignment, question, or bid request. We look forward to hearing from you!

MIGUEL HELFT: SAN FRANCISCO — Computer security researchers are raising alarms about vulnerabilities in some of the Web’s most secure corners: the banking, e-commerce and other sites that use encryption to communicate with their users.

Those sites, which are typically identified by a closed lock displayed somewhere in the Web browser, rely on a third-party organization to issue a certificate that guarantees to a user’s Web browser that the sites are authentic. But as the number of such third-party “certificate authorities” has proliferated into hundreds spread across the world, it has become increasingly difficult to trust that those who issue the certificates are not misusing them to eavesdrop on the activities of Internet users, the security experts say.

The power to appoint certificate authorities has been delegated by browser makers like Microsoft, Mozilla, Google and Apple to various companies, including Verizon. Those entities, in turn, have certified others, creating a proliferation of trusted “certificate authorities,” according to Internet security researchers.

 
According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, more than 650 organizations can issue certificates that will be accepted by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox, the two most popular Web browsers. Some of these organizations are in countries like Russia and China, which are suspected to engage in widespread surveillance of their citizens.

It’s a disturbing trend, especially when bringing in China or Russia. In some cases, like GoDaddy, they seem to simply be a reseller for Verisign, as opposed to being their own issuing authority. A reseller situation is different than outsourcing. Reseller’s are given restricted access to only the art of selling the product. The distribution and overall ownership of that certificate remains with the owning company, like Verisign. Outsourcing on the other hand gives the contracted entity full access to manage, distribute, and record the public and private keys of all applicants.

It’s probably nothing to worry about in regards you using big name sites like BofA, American Express, or any other Fortune 500 company’s who take that security extremely seriously. Plus, these sites are likely housed in the US, so even the transmission and storage of that information is at east on the home court.

I came across this on Ars Technica and found it interesting, but not for what you think.

I had been under the opinion over the last year or so that IE usage was way down, especially with Google’s push of Chrome and Firefox’s constant surge.

It wasn’t that long ago when Firefox version 1.0 was but a laughable newcomer, since IE had 90 percent of the Internet users? As of April, fewer than 6 out of 10 people now use Internet Explorer.

“The browser trends that we've noted over the past several months are continuing with no sign of alteration: IE continues to slip, Firefox and Opera are fairly static, Safari is very slowly moving forward, and Chrome is pushing ahead at breakneck speeds.”

During April, only Internet Explorer and Opera failed to show positive growth.

“Between March and April, Internet Explorer dropped a significant 0.70 percentage points (from 60.65 percent to 59.95 percent) and Firefox increased 0.07 percentage points (from 24.52 percent to 24.59 percent). Chrome jumped a sizeable 0.60 percentage points (from 6.13 percent to 6.73 percent), Safari gained 0.07 percentage points (from 4.65 percent to 4.72 percent), and Opera dipped 0.07 percentage points (from 2.37 percent to 2.30 percent).”

One reason I started to pay attention to this was when I went to the Apple store to buy my iPad and I noticed that our very own eSource Development didn’t show up correctly in Safari. When I got back to the office, I looked at our stats to see what percentage of users were actually using what. Here’s what we found:

Our data (tracked over a 1 week period) shows the opposite relation between IE and Firefox. 52% of our visitors use Firefox while only 30% use IE. The logging does not count connections from within our offices so these are actual external random customers hitting our website, which to me makes a pretty good representative sample.

Now if you’ll excuse me I have to get our web page working under Safari!

In addition to our new training area, we are also expanding our reach by offering free Podcasts of our SEO training and tips. We plan on offering a weekly Podcast that will summarize valuable SEO and Internet Marketing tips, tricks, and techniques to our subscribers.

In anticipation of this, we had to do some research to learn how to actually get our Podcasts published and distributed. The process is easier than you might think. Below is our step by step ‘tutorial’ on how to create and list your Podcast on iTunes.

Step 1: Write out your dialog and record your first episode. Make sure it's in one of these formats that iTunes supports: .m4a, .mp3, .mov, .mp4, .m4v, and .pdf.

Step 2: Your Podcast material must be placed on a publicly accessible URL. You will then need to create an RSS feed file and place the URL of your RSS feed onto your server.

Step 3: Open up iTunes and the iTunes Store, and click on Podcasts. In the middle of the screen, amongst the numerous podcasts, there will be a button called "Submit a Podcast." This will take you to a screen where it will request the URL for the podcast RSS feed that you would like to consider adding into the iTunes Store.

Step 4: After entering your RSS feed URL, you will see a summary page. Depending on whether you have added tags already, a second screen might come up, asking you for more information--such as language, category, and whether the podcast requires explicit tags.

Your going to have to wait a while after that last step. The iTunes staff will have to approve your Podcast before it is accessible via search or browse. Give it a half a day and then search for your Podcast. You should see it no later than 24 hours after submission. After which you can create ‘episodes’ on a regular basis and continue building your following.

Notes:

Before you submit it, you should test that your RSS feed works. You can do that by either dragging the URL into the Podcast playlist or going to the Advanced menu in your Toolbar, clicking on Subscribe to Podcast, and typing it in.

If you are asked to add summary information after you submit your URL (because your RSS feed didn't have tags), you can always go back and change them by including tags on your feed. The information on the RSS feed is what is going to be the definitive source of information for your podcast.