7 Winning Search Engine Optimization Tactics

7 Winning Search Engine Optimization Tactics
by: Lee Kendrick

Search engine optimization should always be considered long before your website structure, colors, layout, and overall site design. But, the majority of people usually get caught up "in the moment"... thinking of riches instead of "how" they're going to attract more website visitors. This article is meant to get you back on track, and provide you with 5 winning search engine optimization tactics.

Identify Keywords

1. The single biggest mistake that most business owners make is trying to think of a "cool name" for their website, when they should have chosen a keyword-rich site name like 'prevent-corporate-bankruptcy.com' instead of SmithLawOffice.com' (as an example). Your potential customers search for keyword phrases... not business names... unless you're already a household name like Wal-Mart, eBay or Apple. Facing reality, many business owners gave up on websites ever helping their business a long time ago... usually because of a poor website name choice. And, it doesn't have to be this way.

Simply, discover what terms people are searching for. Identify the "action" keywords and phrases that people are actually using when they are searching Google, Yahoo, MSN or any of the other major search engines. I highly recommend looking for keyword phrases that incorporate the following keywords: buy, want, need, order, download, etc. I'm sure you're getting the idea now. Then, you need to purchase website names that are centered around the most popular keyword phrases. And, redirect these visitors to your current website. And, I promise that you can setup a website redirect in less than one minute... even if computers scare you. You just need to have access to your website hosting interface, with cPanel being the most popular choice.

Optimizing Your Web Page

2. After identifying a minimum of 10 keyword phrases, I recommend optimizing your current website pages' title tags, meta tags, image "alt" tags. You need to start using these keywords within your webpage content in bold text, underlined text, and as text links. Do not overuse these keywords though. These keywords should only comprise 4-6% of each page. So, if you have 500 words on a webpage, limit your keyword usage to 20-30 words. Most of the major search engines index every word of your page and compare them to your title META description and META keywords. So, you should never hide or add non-related keywords to your webpages: like Anna Kournakova, Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, etc. This is a "black hat" tactic and should never be used, unless your want your website to be permanently banned by the search engine directories.

Most of the major search engines don't even consider the META keywords anymore, which is why the actual content of your webpages is becoming more and more important. Excessive repeating of keywords is considered as spamming, which will get your website penalized with a lower ranking. And, be sure mix your keywords in different combinations throughout the page and in your ALT tags, instead of using the same phrase over and over again.

Link Popularity

3. One of the most important factors to achieve a high ranking in the search engines is link popularity. The overall number of links to your web site is important, but the quality of the links are even more important. All the search engines are very fond of "on topic" links. Links from sites that contain your same keyword content and are focusing on the same topic as your site, are known as "on topic" links. Three of the best ways to get "on topic" quality backlinks are to comment on other industry-related blogs, make comments in industry-related forums, and to submit articles to article directories. Just make sure that you're adding comments or articles to high pagerank sites, avoiding low page rank sites.

Misspellings

4. Adding misspelled keywords within your META tags can also boost your website traffic, because many people are likely to misspell your keywords when browsing the search engine directories. As an example, here are several popular misspellings I found people making when they searched for a site submission service, as follows: "free search engine submision", "sumit", "subit", "search egnine submission", "submition", and "saerchengines".

Add Fresh Content

5. Adding fresh content to your website on a regular basis is another key factor that plays a critical role in your search engine rankings. Adding new content regularly gives your visitors a reason to come back. Search engine robots will also visit your website more often, once they notice that you update regularly. This is one of the main reasons why WordPress blogs are so popular right now. When visitors leave comments about blog posts you have made, the search engine bots see this as new content. And, it really helps your site rankings when a visitor makes a comment with a permalink back to their high pagerank site. This helps website owners save time, by allowing website visitors to create content for them.

Don't Kill the Search Engine Crawlers

Avoid using flash intro pages where it says "Click Here to Enter Site", because the search engines have a very difficult time indexing (seeing) anything beyond the intro page... unless you've submitted every webpage of your site to the search engine directories manually, which is very time consuming. Even if you use the alt attribute to specify alternate text for flash images, that text will not be anywhere near as important as real text on a main index page.

Provide Relevant Title Tags

7. Making your page titles simple, descriptive, relevant and "keyword rich" makes it easier for search engines to know what each page is about. Keyword rich titles help the search engine directories provide consumers with more relevant search results, helping them determine whether your website contains what they are trying to find. The title description is the most important element of your website design, after you have chosen your website domain name.

About The Author
Lee Kendrick has been featured by numerous magazines & article directories as a successful internet marketer, search engine optimization expert, and aspiring writer. Visit http://get-more-website-traffic.com/ to discover the tools, tips & "white hat" tactics that Lee uses to dominate Google on a daily basis. I also recommend registering for his 'Insane Website Traffic Tips' newsletter at http://leekendrick.com/internet-expert too.

Oracle 11G's Strong Verifier and Case Sensitive Password

Oracle 11G's Strong Verifier and Case Sensitive Password
by: Paul Fleming

As an Oracle DBA, you probably have heard a lot about the new security features in Oracle 11G such as database vault, audit vault, strong verifier, enhanced ASO, etc. But with a busy schedule, how do you find the time to study all the topics in depth? Are all of them going to affect your daily DBA operations? What should you know first and foremost? Of course, depending on the particular database you are administering, you will have your unique need. But as a rule of thumb, what tends to affect you the most is almost never those cool new features. The reason is simple: if you don't use them, they won't affect you. What tends to affect you is the change in the existing features that might lead to compatibility or interoperability issues. When that script you have used for years suddenly stops working, you will be disappointed. When your boss or above calls to ask what happened, you could feel terrible.

In this article, we discuss the new password case sensitivity feature in 11G. Every Oracle session starts with authentication. If the authentication fails at the beginning of your script, everything that follows will almost certainly be broken. So what was changed, why, and what should you know?

A Primer on Verifier

I'll start with a primer on password verifier. As you probably know, for security reasons, Oracle user's passwords are never stored as clear text. Instead, they are stored as a "verifier", a one-way hash value calculated from the clear text password. Hash verifier has a few unique features. One, it is "one-way": It is easy to calculate the hash value from a clear text password, but it is nearly impossible to figure out the clear text password from a hash value. Two, different clear texts almost never yield the same hash value (called collision). These features allow Oracle database to store the hash value of a user's password as a surrogate for the clear text password. When a user provides a password to logon, Oracle calculates the hash value from that password, and allows the user to logon if it matches the hash value that is stored in the database. To get a feel what an Oracle verifier looks like, take a look at the PASSWORD column in the user$ table in SYS schema (of course, you will need SYSDBA privilege to do that).

SELECT NAME,PASSWORD FROM SYS.USER$ ORDER BY NAME;

What Was Changed

Prior to 11G, Oracle passwords were case insensitive. "foobar", "FOOBAR", and "FoOBaR" are identical when used as an Oracle password. They yield the same hash value. If a user could log in with password "foobar", he could log in with "FOOBAR" as well. In 11G, however, when you create or modify user accounts, by default passwords are case sensitive. 11G also introduces a "salt" in the hash value generation so that even two users have identical passwords, their verifiers would still be different.

Oracle allows to you to control password case sensitivity for backward compatibility by setting the SEC_CASE_SENSITIVE_LOGON initialization parameter. Only users who have the ALTER SYSTEM privilege can set the SEC_CASE_SENSITIVE_LOGON parameter. Set it to TRUE to enable case sensitivity or FALSE to disable case sensitivity.

ALTER SYSTEM SET SEC_CASE_SENSITIVE_LOGON = TRUE FALSE;

How Case Sensitivity Affects Password Files

As you may remember, Oracle stores the passwords (again in the form of verifiers) of users with SYSDBA and SYSOPER privileges in a "password file" on the server, rather than in the database. You can enable or disable case sensitivity for password files by using the ignorecase argument in the ORAPWD command line utility. The default value for ignorecase is n (no), which enforces case sensitivity.

Here is an example of how to enable password case sensitivity for SYSDBA and SYSOPER users

orapwd file=orapw entries=100 ignorecase=n Enter password for SYS: password

This creates a password file called orapwd. Since ignorecase is set to n (no), the password entered for the password parameter will be case sensitive. Afterwards, if you connect using this password, it succeeds(as long as you enter the password using the exact same characters with the exact same case as created). If you enter the same password with different case, it will fail If you, the DBA, sets the system to ignorecase to y, then the passwords in the password file are case insensitive, and this means that you can enter the password using any capitalization that you want.

It is important to note that given the way it is controlled, within one Oracle system, the password's case sensitivity of a regular user and a SYSDBA/SYSOPER user can be independent.

How Password Case Sensitivity Affects Import and Upgrade

What happens when you export some users from a previous database where the password is case insensitive into 11G? The case-insensitive passwords in these accounts remain case insensitive, even if the 11G system has turned on password case sensitivity. This makes sense because otherwise old users may not be able to log on from a previously working script or client program. This, however, will change when the user changes his or her password.

You can find users who have case sensitive or case insensitive passwords by querying the DBA_USERS view. The PASSWORD_VERSIONS column in this view indicates the release in which the password was created. For example:
SELECT USERNAME, PASSWORD_VERSIONS FROM DBA_USERS;

USERNAME PASSWORD_VERSIONS
------------------------------ -----------------
JONES 10G 11G
ADAMS 10G 11G
CLARK 10G 11G
PRESTON 11G
BLAKE 10G

The passwords for accounts jones, adams, and clark were originally created in Release 10g and then reset in Release 11g. Their passwords, assuming case sensitivity has been enabled, are now case sensitive, as is the password for preston. However, the account for blake is still using the Release 10g standard, so it is case insensitive. Once he changes his password, it will become case sensitive and more secure.

Conclusion

Users' passwords in Oracle 11G database become case sensitive by default. Regular user and SYSDBA/SYSOPER user's password case sensitivity can be controlled independently. If you have a script with inconsistent password cases, the script may stop working with 11G even though it works fine with previous releases. To learn more about this topic, read "Security Guide" (Oracle Part Number B28531-03).

About The Author
Peter Dwyer is an internationally known System and Database Architect for Oracle environments. He is founding principal of The Certainty Group (http://www.certaintygroup.com/), a Boston-based Oracle database consultation company specializing in quickly assessing and correcting complex problems in multi-vendor, mission-critical systems that demand high performance and reliability.

Cashing in by Blogging, Adsense,Pay Per Click,Money from Blogging

Cashing in by Blogging
by: Len Hutton

Believe it or not, but it’s actually possible to make money from blogging. One teenager has, in fact, earned $5,000 a month just from making posts on his blog! Of course, not every blogger is this lucky. It does take some skill, and some luck to make money from blogging. What it also takes is some knowledge of how exactly to generate income just by posting blogs. In this newsletter, we will go over three specific methods of making money on your blog: Adsense, Pay Per Lead, and Affiliate Links.

So how exactly do I make money on my blog?

You do it by working with another company that wants to use your blog as a form of advertising. It sounds like selling out, right? Not exactly. The advertising can be as in your face or subtle as you want. And it can still make you money, provided you have enough visitors to your blog.

What is Adsense?

Adsense is a program offered by Google. The program, if installed, will display ads provided by Google.

How do I get Adsense?

You’ll need to go to Google.com, first. At the bottom of the screen is a link for “Advertising Programs”. Click on that. Then click on the link for “Adsense”. Scroll down on the page that comes up and click “Click Here To Apply!” You then fill out the form with information about yourself. After 12-48 hours, Google will notify you via email whether or not your site has been accepted. When you’ve been accepted, set up your ads by doing either of the following:

1. If your blog is hosted on Blogger.com, you can set up your AdSense ads by going to your profile, selecting settings>template>add an element. Then select AdSense and login with your account info. Next, you’ll configure your ads and save the template. That’s it.

2. If you are self-hosting your blog, you’ll have to set up AdSense in more of a manual way. You’ll create your ads(which can be as small or as tall as you want) and then copy the HTML/Javascript code Google gives you. Then you’ll paste it into your blog(on the left, right, or top of the screen).

For the first few days, the ads displayed by Google will be Public Service Announcements. After the ads have been up a few days, though, the ads will switch to ads that are relevant to your blog.

How does Adsense work?

Every time a visitor clicks an Adsense ad, you get a little bit of money(usually around 30-60 cents). The amount you get for each ad clicked depends on the number of unique visitors you receive on your blog. The more visitors, the more money that can be earned.

Google will then send a check or pay you through Paypal once you’ve made at least $100 from the ads.

It is important to remember that Google will penalize you if you click your own ads, or if you ask visitors specifically to click ads. So don’t do that!

Pay Per Click

Pay Per Click is basically just like AdSense, except you don’t just work with Google—you work with multiple companies. BidVertiser is one such company you can sign up with to do Pay Per Click advertising.

How do I get Pay Per Click

You sign up with a site like Bidvertiser and then follow their instructions to set up the Pay Per Click ads on your site.

How does Pay Per Click work?

It works by paying you money each time someone clicks an ad that you display. You won’t get paid for multiple clicks from the same user in the same visitor, nor will you get paid for someone simply visiting your site. You only get paid for legitimate clicks.

Affiliate Links

Affiliate links are basically links which people pay you for. Companies will actually pay owners of popular blogs to post links on their blog. You can do as much Affiliate linking as you want.

How do I get Affiliate Links?

You can get Affiliate links by searching for “Affiliate Link Programs” on the internet. Once you find an Affiliate link program that looks good to you, sign up for it. Then you can follow their instructions for putting the link(s) on your blog.

How do Affiliate Links work?

Like the other two methods mentioned above, Affiliate links work by paying you money each time they are clicked. You get paid for each click per unique visitor.

So that’s it. There’s three legitimate ways to make money from blogging. It is important to keep in mind that the amount of money you are able to make depends on how many visitors your blog draws. If you draw a lot, you’ll make a lot. If not, the money you earn will be modest. But it’s still extra money, so why not do it?

About The Author
Len Hutton is a information publisher specialising in helping people start their own home based business. Get a no cost video showing you step by step how to set up a niche ebook empire at www.nicheresidualincomes.com If you are considering using Google Pay-Per-Click Ads to promote your blog check out this web site http://rowner.freegoogle.hop.clickbank.net/

The Battle of the Browsers

The Battle of the Browsers – The History and the Future of Internet Browsers
by: Nicholas C Smith

With Internet Explorer 8 now available, can Microsoft hope to retain market dominance over fierce open source rivals such as Mozilla's Firefox or the feature packed Opera web browser. Can history give us a clue to what the future of web browsers/browsing might hold? How did Netscape Navigator go from having a dominant 89.36% market share of all web browsers in 1996 and yet only 3.76% by mid 1999?

Let us take a journey that will begin long before even the intellectual conception of Internet Explorer, that will glance at its long defeated rivals, examine the current browsers available and will end with a prediction of what the future of browsing will offer us – and which browser(s) will still be around to offer it.

People often think that Internet Explorer has been the dominant web browser since the golden age of the internet began. Well for a very long time now it has indeed been the most popular browser and at times been almost totally unrivalled. This was mainly a result of it being packaged free with Microsoft Windows, in what some would later call a brutal monopolisation attempt by Microsoft. The last few years however have heralded the arrival of new, possibly superior browsers. Mozilla's Firefox has been particularly successful at chipping away at Explorers market dominance. So where did it all begin, and why were Microsoft ever allowed to have a hundred percent market dominance?

Origins

The truth is they never did have total dominance, but at times they have come very close. Microsoft actually entered the Browser Battle quite late on. Infact a man named Neil Larson is credited to be one of the originators of internet browsers, when in 1977 he created a program – The TRS-80 - that allowed browsing between “sites” via hypertext jumps. This was a DOS program and the basis of much to come. Slowly other browsers powered by DOS and inspired by the TRS 80 were developed. Unfortunately they were often constricted by the limitations of the still fairly young internet itself.

In 1988, Peter Scott and Earle Fogel created a simple, fast browser called Hytelnet, which by 1990 offered users instant logon and access to the online catalogues of over five thousand libraries around the world – an exhilarating taste of what the internet, and web browsers, would soon be able to offer.

In 1989 the original World Wide Web was born. Using a NeXTcube computer, Tim Berners-Lee created a web browser that would change how people used the internet forever. He called his browser the WorldWideWeb(http://www/., which is still likely to sound familiar to internet users today. It was a windowed browser capable of displaying simple style sheet, capable of editing sites and able to download and open any file type supported by the NeXTcube.

In 1993 the first popular graphical browser was released. Its name was Mosaic and it was created by Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. Mosaic could be run on both Unix, and very importantly, on the highly popular Microsoft Windows operating system (incidentally it could also be used on Amiga and Apple computers). It was the first browser on Windows that could display graphics/pictures on a page where there was also textual content. It is often cited as being responsible for triggering the internet boom due to it making the internet bearable for the masses. (It should be noted that the web browser Cello was the first browser to be used on Windows – but it was non graphical and made very little impact compared to Mosaic).

The Browser Wars - Netscape Navigator versus Internet Explorer

Mosaic's decline began almost as soon as Netscape Navigator was released (1994). Netscape Navigator was a browser created by Marc Andreessen, one of the men behind Mosaic and co-founder of Netscape Communications Corporation. Netscape was unrivalled in terms of features and usability at the time. For example, one major change from previous browsers was that it allowed surfers to see parts of a website before the whole site was downloaded. This meant that people did not have to wait for minutes simply to see if the site they were loading was the actual one the were after, whilst also allowing them to read information on the site as the rest of it downloaded. By 1996 Netscape had almost 90% market dominance, as shown below.

Market Share Comparisons of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer from 1996 to 1998 ....................Netscape.......IE October 1998..........64%.........32.2% April 1998............70%.........22.7% October 1997..........59.67%......15.13% April 1997............81.13%......12.13% October 1996..........80.45%......12.18% April 1996............89.36%.......3.76%

In these two years Netscape clearly dominated the internet browser market, but a new browser named Internet Explorer was quickly gaining ground on it.

Microsoft released their own browser (ironically based on the earlier Mosaic browser which was created by one of the men now running Netscape), clearly worried about Netscape's dominance. It was not so much the worry that it would have a 100% market share of internet browsers on their Windows operating system, but more the worry that browsers would soon be capable of running all types programs on them. That would mean foregoing the need for an actual operating system, or at the most only a very basic one would be needed. This in turn would mean Netscape would soon be able to dictate terms to Microsoft, and Microsoft were not going to let that happen easily. Thus in August 1995, Internet Explorer was released.

By 1999 Internet explorer had captured an 89.03% market share, whilst Netscape was down to 10.47%. How could Internet Explorer make this much ground in just two years? Well this was down to two things really. The first, and by far the most important was that Microsoft bundled Internet Explorer in with every new copy of Windows, and as Windows was used by about 90% of the computer using population it clearly gave them a huge advantage. Internet Explorer had one other ace it held over Netscape – it was much better. Netscape Navigator was stagnant and had been for some time. The only new features it ever seemed to introduce were often perceived by the public as beneficial for Netscape's parent company rather than Netscape's user base. (i.e., features that would help it monopolise the market). Explorer, on the other hand, was given much attention by Microsoft. Regular updates and excellent usability plus a hundred million dollar investment would prove too much for Netscape Explorer.

2000 – 2005

These years were fairly quiet in the Battle of the Browsers. It seemed as if Internet Explorer had won the war and that nobody could even hope to compete with it. In 2002/2003 it had attained about 95% of the market share – about the time of IE 5/6. With over 1000 people working on it and millions of dollars being poured in, few people had the resources to compete. Then again, who wanted to compete? It was clearly a volatile market, and besides that everybody was content with Internet Explorer. Or were they? Some people saw faults with IE – security issues, incompatibility issues or simply bad programming. Not only that, it was being shoved down peoples throats. There was almost no competition to keep it in line or to turn to as an alternative. Something had to change. The only people with the ability and the power to compete with Microsoft took matters into their own hands.

Netscape was now supported by AOL. A few years prior, just after they had lost the Browser Wars to Microsoft, they had released the coding for Netscape into the public domain. This meant anybody could develop their own browser using the Netscape skeleton. And people did. Epiphany, Galeon and Camino, amongst others, were born out of Netscape's ashes. However the two most popular newcomers were called Mozilla and Firefox.

Mozilla was originally an open sourced project aimed to improve the Netscape browser. Eventually it was released as Netscape Navigator 7 and then 8. Later it was released as Mozilla 1.0.

Mozilla was almost an early version on another open source browser, Firefox. With it being an open source the public were able to contribute to it - adding in what features it needed, the programming it required and the support it deserved. The problems people saw in Internet Explorer were being fixed by members of the open sourced browser community via Firefox. For instance, the many security issues IE 6 had were almost entirely fixed in the very first release of Firefox. Microsoft had another fight on their hands.

2005 – Present

Firefox was the browser that grew and grew in these years. Every year capturing an even larger market share percentage than before. More user friendly than most of its rivals along with high security levels and arguably more intelligent programming helped its popularity. With such a large programming community behind it, updates have always been regular and add on programs/features are often released. It prides itself on being the peoples browser. It currently has a 28.38% market share.

Apple computers have had their own browser since the mid 1990's – Safari - complete with its own problems, such as (until recently) the inability to run Java scripts. However most Apple users seemed happy with it and a version capable of running on Windows has been released. It has had no major competitor on Apple Macs, and as such has largely been out of the Browser Wars. It currently holds a 2.54% market share and is slowly increasing.

Internet Explorer's market share has dropped from over 90% to around 75%, and is falling. It will be interesting to see what Microsoft will attempt to regain such a high market share.

Opera currently holds 1.07%.

Mozilla itself only has a 0.6% market share these days.

The Future of Web Browsing

Web browsers come and go. It is the nature of technology (if such a term can be used), to supplant inferior software in very short periods of time. It is almost impossible for a single company to stay ahead of the competition for long. Microsoft have the advantage of being able to release IE with any Windows using PC. That covers over 90% of the market. They also have the advantage of unprecedented resources. They can compete how they wish for as long as they wish. So there is no counting IE out of the future of web browsing.

Safari is in a similar position, being easily the most popular Mac web browser. Its long term survival is dependant upon Apple and the sale of their computers.

These are the only two browsers that are almost guaranteed another five years of life, at least. Firefox may seem like another candidate, but the public is fickle, and one bad release, or if it seriously lags behind the new Internet Explorer 8 for long, could easily see its popularity quickly descend into virtual oblivion.

However, it seems likely community driven browsers, such as Mozilla and Firefox, will be the only types of browser capable of competing with the wealthy internet arm of Microsoft in the near future.

As for web browsing itself, will it change any time soon? Well it already has for some online communities. For example, if you want to buy clothes you could try entering an online 'world' creating an online virtual You to go from 'shop to shop' with, looking at products and trying/buying what you see. Some 'worlds' allow you to recreate yourself accurately including weight and height and then try on things apparel such as jeans to give you an idea of how you would look in that particular item.

Will 'worlds' like this destroy normal web browsers such as IE ? - It seems unlikely. Traditional web browsers provide such freedom and ease of access that it is hard to see any other alternative taking over. However they are part of the new, 'thinking out of the box' wave of alternatives that some people will find attractive, and really who knows what the future will bring.

About The Author
Nicholas C Smith is the project manager at Breakfrom Limited, who specialise in affordable ecommerce solutions and general web design knowledge and advice. For more information and advice visit http://www.breakfrom.com/