Knowledge From the People, For the PeopleWritten by Jesse S. Somer
I’ve heard about it a lot but until today I had never checked it out, Wikipedia free on-line encyclopedia. (http://en.wikipedia.org) Now this is a pretty cool invention, let me tell you. This is an encyclopedia made by masses for masses, and anyone (even you) can add or edit pages. This means that if you’ve got a piece of knowledge that you think is worth knowing, after checking that it is not out there already you can add to this huge body of knowledge that is growing everyday. There are over half a million articles in English alone, but there are also articles from many other different languages, some with over 100,000. In old days we had to spend a lot of money to buy encyclopedias. They took up a lot of space and were produced by private corporations hoping to make a monetary gain. Now we can write book and read it for free!I did some random searches today on Wikipedia site reading about various things from Saddam Hussein, McDonalds, to a small town I used to live in called Bowling Green, Ohio. I learnt a lot of interesting stuff, like fact that Saddam once set up a literacy program in Iraq as well as a compulsory free education system. This doesn’t take away fact that he killed and persecuted many people, but it gives us a more balanced human picture and proves that there is always more than meets eye when it comes to watching our news on privately owned media channels. Did you know McDonalds owns more playgrounds than any other privately owned organization? Or did you know that they buy more pork than any other company in U.S.A.? Where does all that pork go? I hope it’s not in milkshakes! One of main features that excited me on Wikipedia is amount of links that you can click on in an article that will lead you to other articles. If you are doing research it seems that you can go very deep into rabbit hole indeed. If you do look up something that hasn’t got too much information about it, it’s your chance to widen our horizons with your own knowledge. There are a few rules of course, one of which is that we (WE!) are looking for real facts, not opinions. The articles are being constantly edited so if you write or witness someone else putting in gibberish or vandalism there are many controls to keep pages free from misappropriation.
| | Search Engine Optimization - A Do-It-Yourself Guide for the Small Business OwnerWritten by Colleen Happ
So your company has a website – an important step to validate your company, boost its visibility and increase its sales. Now how do you get it to show up on Google and other search engines like Yahoo and MSN?A high search engine ranking for your website is essential. At least 85% of people looking for goods and services on internet find them through search engines. To increase your website’s ranking on search engines, you could hire a company to do it for you. There is a whole search engine optimization (SEO) industry that will gladly take your money. SEO is simpler than it is made out to be, and there are several steps that you can do yourself to increase rank of your website. 1. The content of your website is key. Search engines check to see if search words appear close to top of page and their frequency on page. You must first determine what key words that your customers search with. Consider website from perspective of a potential customer and try to understand what they would be searching for on web. Aim to have 100-250 words on each page with those key words used as often as possible. Those same key words should be included in title tag of your coding, but keep it to six words or less. (this is coloured bar at top of page). The site at http://www.related-pages.com/seoTools.aspx?cb=wgyr has some great tools to help you optimize key words. 2. Link Popularity. This is a factor that is extremely important in search engine rank. Almost all of search engines use link popularity to rank websites. Inbound links matter most, and highly ranked sites linking to your site are worth more that lower ranked sites. If you can provide content that other sites want to link to, you will move up in rankings. This means that you may have to actively solicit links to your content and perhaps write articles for other websites. 3. Proper Page Structure. This can be tricky for people who don’t know HTML, but it really isn’t that complicated. Your pages should be coded correctly so they are easier for search engines to index. Your site should have easy to follow text navigation, and you should avoid using Flash to build your entire page because it makes site harder to index. If you want dynamics on your page generated by other languages such as JavaScript, you should have these codes in external files. There is also an html validation tool at http://validator.w3.org/ that is useful. Errors in programming code and incorrect html can keep search engine robots from indexing your web pages. Keep coding clean and simple.
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