Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has grown into one of the most popular techniques in the modern Internet connected world. However, its use raises many complexities on top of which I would place this question: is SEO a technician’s or a marketer’s job?
In fact, when SEOing a website (and I mean good effective SEOing), you will be required to achieve a set of technical and marketing tasks:
- Technical tasks: Create robots.txt file, generate a sitemap, rewrite URLs via .htaccess files, use valid CSS/XHTML to code or recode the website…
- Marketing tasks: Determine keyword traffic potential, assess keyword difficulty, analyze competition, write descriptions and titles for search engines as well as for humans…
As you can imagine, it is hard to decide if SEO is a technical or a marketing issue thus causing a difficulty in finding someone to do it the right way. The obvious solution is of course to have a team work on it, and that’s the tendency we are witnessing more and more.
The other major trend on the web in general and SEO in particular, is the booming interest in local content and traffic. Accordingly, services offering local SEO have become more and more popular.
As an example, let’s take a look at a Phoenix SEO company called “First In Search” who are offering standard worldwide SEO along with local Arizona SEO services. In addition to the fact that they are serious and certified, the fact that they can help you with your local SEO needs is a major plus given local specific factors like a reduced competition and a better customer understanding which result in better ROIs and minimal efforts.
A few days ago as I was trying to modify a VB.NET application currently using MS ACCESS as DB to make it access a remote MySql database I had created on my VPS, I found that it was more difficult than it actually seemed at first hand.
A few days later, I found the solution and that wasn’t easy so I said to myself this could be useful to you too so here is how you need to proceed if you want to access a distant or remote MySql DataBase.
The principle is simple, you need to tell your mysql server that remote IPs (not only local ones) CAN access the DB because those connexions are blocked by default. This is something you can do just by edition the config file “my.cnf” so you need to have access to all your server options which is not always the case on a shared hosting.
For detailed instructions, take a look at this page where everything
is explained step by step:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/how-do-i-enable-remote-access-to-mysql-database-server.html
Everytime Microsoft issues a Service Pack for one of its versions of Windows, I see tens of people asking this same question on forums: Should I install the latest Service Pack?
While this is a legitimate question, one has to keep in mind that the deployment of Service Packs goes through many stages the last being its availability through Windows Update. This means that if the SP is available for you to download and install throught Windows Update, the Service Pack has not caused any major issues to corporate customers, professional testers, early adopters… You are then probably safe installing it.
The second question is to decide if it is worth taking the risk and time to install the new SP. This mainly depends on the features the SP will add to your OS but in general, it is wise to install the first SP of every version of Windows as it is usually meant to correct some major bugs and problems. Later versions are less usefull/critical. This is the case of SP3 for Windows XP.
Windwos XP’s latest and last Service Pack doesn’t add any useful features for end users and only minor improvements to the systems have been included. This is why I do not recommend installing it before it is available on Windows Update and even then it should be restricted to those of you having issues with the system.
One thing that sets blogs apart from other more classic websites, is the fact theat they are frequently updated. This particularity and the growing popularity of blogs have led many Internet actors including big G to come up with a new way of indexing websites that is more adequate to blogs than the good old crawler.
It is called pinging. Pinging goes down to informing other websites that you have posted new content on your blog. Today, you cannot run a successfull blog without being a pinger, so you need to maintain a list of up to date pinging services that should be pinged whenever there is a new post on the blog.
I wanted to share my list with you as a starting point in your promotional efforts. If you know of any other major pinging services, please go ahead and share with us.
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080
I am a fan of Yahoo! Mail service as I find it to be one of the best mailing services around even compared to paid solutions. However, Yahoo! Mail is currently experiencing recurring technical problems one of the most annoying ones being the impossibility to view the content of some of your emails.
I have accidentally found that closing your session completely and reopening it could solve the problem and give you access to the text of your emails.
Hope that helps
Here are the new coupons from NameCheap to save on your domain renewals and transfers:
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That’s all I have got on that.