The Tools and Features of Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop is one of the world's leading graphics editing programs, developed by Adobe Systems. Available on Mac OS or PC, Photoshop is used as one of the leading image design programs for the World Wide Web. The most recent version of Photoshop, or Photoshop CS2, "bridges" between other Adobe products such as Image Ready, Illustrator, Premiere, After Effects, and Encore DVD to produce professional videos and DVDs. Photoshop uses a file format called a .PSD or .PDD to store multiple layers of an image. Recently Adobe released a program called Photoshop Elements in order to give a less expensive version of Photoshop with many of the same features. Although Adobe Photoshop is used primarily in doing touch-up for digital photos, it is also used for creating designs for web pages and professional companies

Adobe Photoshop was originally created as a convenient and powerful way to retouch photos. Its most basic features include easily cropping and straightening photos that were either scanned ore taken with a digital camera. Under- or overexposed photos can be easily rescued with the retouch power of the Camera RAW and other plug-ins. Photos taken in difficult lighting situations can be perfected by a few clicks of a mouse. Filters and plug-ins can be used to make the picture seem old or change to black and white.

Many web and graphics designers use Photoshop to create and design company logos and advertisements. Built in Photoshop effects and filters can make designing professional logos or advertisements a quick and simple process. With the power of layers and opacity, pictures can be blended together and effects such as shadows, blurs, etc. are made possible. And, for those who desire to return to the finger painting days of their youth, Photoshop has a paintbrush tool with countless brush shapes and textures for anyone who just needs to let out their creativity. Text editing has also become easily accessible because of Photoshop. Perspectives, shapes, and type on a path are just a few examples of the tons of amazing text effects that are available. Slimy, dripping letters or cloud-writing in the sky are made easy from filters and text effects built into Photoshop. Web designers thrive on Photoshop for making animations using Photoshop with other Adobe products. The things that can be done with Photoshop are literally endless. This is truly and amazing program.

Five Ways To Win The Favor Of Search Engines

You’ve got a cool new website with all the works: cool Flash presentations, eye-catching colors, informative text, easy-to-use layout, and an interesting topic. You think your site is amazing, and you know that others will agree with you. If only they know it exists.

How do you make your website known? How do you make yours stand out among millions of others? You can spend lots of money on advertisement, but that will not work if you don’t have the money to spare on advertising. So what do you do? Make search engines work for you, that’s what!
Google, Yahoo, MSN, Lycos, Altavista - you want to be at the top of their results list. The higher your site is in a search results page, the better chances that it will be visited. The science behind making your site a popular search result is called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Don’t worry, though - even if SEO is referred to as a science, it is not all that complicated. You just need to take note of a few things, and before you know it, your site will have more visitors than you could ever dream of. Here are five tips to ensure that your site would be a favorite of search engines all around the cyber world.

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Understanding XML Server

XML Server can be a Web Server that stores the XML files in it and serves them on demand. The XML Server would have processing capabilities with an XML engine and to transform the XML document to other forms. Basically a server which hosts and serves the XML documents is called a XML Server.

There are many commercially available XML Servers in the market. The popular among them are the Tamino Server, the Sonic Server and the FDX XML Server. Though the basic functions of these servers are same the way they are implemented and the features that they support varies.

The Tamino XML Server is from Software AG and is used to publish and exchange all kinds of data especially the XML documents in the native format. It handles open standards. Leveraging on the XML technologies will improve an organizations data access. Exchange of data between different applications on different platforms is possible using XML technologies. Hence organizations are moving on to store their data in XML format to take advantage of the XML technologies. Storing the data in XML format improves the performance of delivery and scalability of your applications with low operational and administrative costs.

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SEO Content Distribution Linking For Newbies

The new buzz on the internet is all about getting one-way links by distributing content to other sites in exchange for backlinks. As with every other SEO or website promotion technique ever devised, there are plenty of newbie myths about it that can ruin your chance for success before you even start. Newbie Myth 1: The "Duplicate content penalty." Some webmasters worry that if the content on their sites is suddenly on hundreds of other sites, search engines will inflict a "duplicate content penalty." Why is this concern unjustified? * If this were true, every major newspaper and news portal website would now be de-indexed from the search engines, since they all carry "duplicate content" from the news wires such as Reuters and the Associated Press. * Thousands of self-promoting internet gurus have proven that distributing content is an effective method of improving search engine rank. * Even more thousands of content websites have proven that republishing this content does not carry any search engine penalty. True, the first website to publish an article often seems to be favored by search engines, ranking higher for the same content in searches than higher-PageRank pages with the same content. But the "duplicate" pages do show up in the search engine results, even if lower than the original site. Meanwhile, the reprint content has no effect on the ranking of a site's other pages. The only duplicate content penalty is for duplication of content across pages of a single website. Meanwhile, there is a sort of "copyright theft" penalty, whereby someone who copies content without permission can be manually removed from search engine indexes out of respect for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But that penalty is only for flagrant theft, not minor mistakes in attributing reprint content.
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What Is A Server

For those of you who don’t really understand where or how your web page is sitting on your hosting sever, this is a basic over view of how it works. A server is basically hardware and software and protocol. We will go over these three basics of your hosting server.

• Server hardware. Server hardware is so similar to your old PC hardware that the price of server hardware has come down considerably. Down enough that it’s tempting for a lot of us to host our own server. But that’s a whole different article. All a server is: • Very fast processor. • A large amount of RAM. • A vast amount of Disk Space. • Connection to a T1 line (access to the outside world). The hardware is housed in very large office buildings. There are many racks of servers filling these climate controlled rooms. Most of the server host brag of their 99 better uptime. This is very impressive and another reason to use a server host. How often have you re-booted your PC in the past?

The Google Page Rank

It's no secret anymore that Google ranks as the number one defacto-standard in the field of major search engines. In 2003, Google accounts for more than 85% of all Internet searches on a daily basis. Google now has many versions running in many different countries, including China, Japan, the U.K., Hong-Kong and many others. Rank for Sales knows many small and not so small businesses and companies whose livelihood almost basically depends on Google bringing them new customers, day after day.
When the livelihood of an entire company depends on just one search engine, this tells you a lot about the success of Google. It also underlines the importance of any web site ranking high in Google. In order to develop an independant and objective ranking system that has integrity, is both fair to everyone and is efficient for all end users searching on a specific keyword or keyphrase, Google has developed the Page Rank (PR) Algorithm.
The Google Page Rank value relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the Internet by using its vast global link structure as a prime indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives. It also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important or are favorably viewed as "established firms" in the Web community weigh more heavily and help to make other pages look established too.

How search engines work

Most likely, you have probably used a Web search engine such as Google, Yahoo, AltaVista or MSN to find specific information on the Internet. Did you ever stop and wonder how exactly do search engines find that information?
I will explain that and more in this section. In so doing, you will begin to discover how to efficiently structure your web site to obtain maximum brand strength, utilizing the power of today's modern search engines.
First, let's eliminate the mythsIt's a very common misconception that when a user enters a query into any search engine, it interrogates the Web to find pages that match the query. That is NOT how it works at all. Instead, the search engine looks at its own copy of the Web. Every search engine actually creates its own version of the Internet. This version is called an "index".
The size of a search engine's index varies from search engine to search engine, but it is always much smaller than the Web as a whole. For example, as of February 28, 2004, it is currently estimated that the whole Web presently consists of approximately 15 to 20 billion pages, whereas Google, which has the largest search engine index, has approximately 6 billion pages in it's index.
In fact, as late as October 2003, Google had only about 3.3 billion pages in its index, according to information available on its homepage at that time.
The search engine builds a list of pages to add to its index using a special piece of software known as a crawler or spider. The spider crawls across the Web, adding pages it visits to the list of pages to its index.
The spider is capable of reading text on a Web page and finding links to other pages to visit. In this fashion, the spider travels all across the Web, constantly finding new or modified pages to add or update to its current index.
Some time after a page has been "spidered" (visited by a crawler), the search engine's software effectively adds a copy of new or altered pages to the search engine's index. When a user enters a query into a search engine, the search engine's software searches its index to find the pages matching the search query.
It then sorts those pages into a specific ranking order. Each search engine uses its own search algorithm to find and rank pages, but most base their technology on the frequency and location of the search term on the page.
Apart from Google's Page Rank™ algorithm, engineers at Google have also developed the Hilltop™ algo, which is even more sophisticated.
The Hilltop algorithm determines the relevance and importance of a specific web page, determined by the search query or keyword used in the search box. In its basic, simplest form, instead of relying only on the PageRank™ value to find “authoritative pages”, it would be more useful if that “PR value” (PageRank™ value) would be more relevant by the topic or subject of that same page. Hilltop does that, plus a bit more.

Links are the Gold of the Internet

It is said that in the internet marketing world, content is king. While there is no doubt that strong copy and valuable information is what will ultimately determine whether your site will be a profit machine or a money pit. But, in order to get that buyer ready to part ways with their hard earned cash they must find your site. There are traditional methods that include text link advertising, banner ads, "sponsorships", and directory listings. While that is only the tip of the iceberg of the potential internet methods available, they are all meant to do one thing: Send a reader to your site.

Blogging for SEO

It's no secret that blogs are great for helping to boost your seo rankings. You can use a blog to get a new site ranked quickly and ahead of your main site if you are dedicated to posting on a frequent basis. While the main goal of your blog may be to express your thoughts, talk back to your customers or as a vehicle to promote your product or services, there is another critical element to blogging. Search Engine Optimization & Marketing. Because of the frequency of active blogs (daily - or at least 5 times a week) the search engines have put high weight on blogs that are focused and tend to stay on topic. It's the freshness of content (in a perfect world) that a search engine is craving and rewarding to the blogs. The ideal situation is that the blog would provide for tiny snippets of information that over time build up to a greater whole.

Benefit to the Webmaster

As the web has become more crowded webmasters have been striving to provide fresh and up to date content for their website visitors. Many webmasters have discovered they can easily utilize the information in RSS feeds to provide fresh web content.
RSS feeds are composed in XML, which is a very simple markup language. Similar to HTML, XML uses tags to identify fields. Webmasters can easily parse the RSS feed and dynamically create web pages that contain headlines and summaries. The feeds will continuously update, supplying a steady stream of automatically generated fresh content.
RSS allows webmasters to:1.) Provide fresh and relevant content on their website, which encourages users to return.
2.) Constantly changing content means that search engine spiders will visit more frequently.
3.) Automate content delivery.
The benefits of RSS feeds are not limited to webmasters, surfers too benefit from the technology as well.

RSS Feeds

RSS also known as rich site summary or real simply syndication, arrived on the scene a number of years ago, but was only recently embraced by webmasters as a means to effectively syndicate content. RSS Feeds provide webmasters and content providers an avenue to provide concise summaries to prospective readers. Thousands of commercial web sites and blogs now publish content summaries in an RSS feed. Each item in the feed typically contains a headline; article summary and link back to the online article.

Power of RSS Content Syndication

Enlarge ImageRSS content syndication is relatively new legitimate practice in the world of search engine optimization (SEO). Marketing professionals specializing in SEO techniques are beginning to recognize the value of RSS content syndication however, and it seems that the more popular this technique becomes the more effective the results. The value of RSS content syndication lies in the links contained within the content. This is because the big search engines like Google and Yahoo! pay a whole lot more attention to incoming links to a website than they did in the past. We’ll get to content a little later, because it still counts, but it is so important to understand why syndicating content to RSS feeds across the web may make you more money and cost you LESS! RSS feeds are appearing on websites across the internet in order to keep people up to date with the latest news or information on a particular topic quickly. And we all know that users expect quality content, but even more so they expect that content to appear immediately! And, they want to see the content. They do not want to look for the content. They do not want to link to the content. They want the content to jump off of the screen and into their brains in 10 seconds or less! Perhaps this is why Really Simple Syndication, or RSS, came about in the first place. It’s great news for web site owners too, however. Taking advantage of the huge variety and sheer number of RSS feeds that accept submissions from other websites provides a very cheap and simple way to develop more web site traffic and higher income. Did I mention cheap? A minimal amount of time invested will allow you to not only provide a way for your loyal visitors to stay aware of your newest updates, but also to expand the awareness of the world about your services or products. I did mention cheap, right? Well, RSS content and article syndication allows you to spend some time preparing content in the standard XML RSS format and then to make it available to many free RSS feeds across the world. If you have ever spent a large amount of money on an online marketing program – you already know the drawbacks of traditional internet marketing. Mass emails are no longer effective due to the increasing power of spam filters. Directory listing services are finding that their clients are removing their links due to retribution by the major search engine algorithms. And, Pay Per Click… well it’s just really expensive if you intend to see real results. With RSS syndication, you are never going to face any of these issues. If you can write an html file for your website, you can syndicate your own RSS content. The basic process is quite simple to master, and as you become more familiar your skills will expand quickly as well. What’s even better news for web site owners? The major search engines are not only approving of RSS syndication, they are providing RSS feeds open for submission in a huge array of topic areas like sports, entertainment, world news, travel, health and technology. There is a topic for every web site owner willing to put in a little effort! And people use their sites already, so what a better place to syndicate your content? When you place content in an RSS feed, a link appears to your web site. This is noticed by the major search engines, and helps to increase your link popularity among the search engines. Link popularity will potentially move your site up in the search engine results pages (SERPS). Combine these two facts, and you will see that no matter how you look at it, RSS syndication will get you more traffic. It doesn’t really matter whether your additional visitors found you through an RSS feed, or if your visibility and increased link popularity allowed them to find you through a major search engine! Think about that, and you are sure to see the true benefit of RSS content. There’s that word again… "Content." RSS content is different from what you might normally expect in an SEO campaign. The reason that most web sites containing RSS feeds put them there in the first place is to provide extra information for their visitors. Think about it, if you publish a web site geared towards IT professionals you might be providing content that is of a fairly specific nature. You may be giving information, tutorials or even advertising for a certain software package. Although this information is important to a large majority of the visitors who click on your link, some visitors may be more interested in a different area of the IT field. Providing an RSS feed that displays the latest in the world of IT news may be a great answer. If the information found in your RSS feed is quality and relative to your visitors’ interests, they will bookmark your site. Then they will COME BACK! But what does that mean to you as the RSS syndicated content provider? It means that you will need to produce quality content – because it’s your content that keeps the users coming back to the original site. As long as your content is quality, and you remain a part of that RSS feed, you will see increased new and return visitors. And generating traffic is the largest goal of an SEO campaign, so why wouldn’t you want to syndicate quality content for RSS feeds? This simple and inexpensive method of marketing your website is gaining popularity, and becoming visible now as a content provider will only mean greater returns in the future.

Step Ten - Reward Yourself

So you've done it. It's taken many many hours of work but you're rankings are doing well. What you've created is a solid position that will stand the tests of time provided that you continually revisit the above noted steps and insure that your website is always one step ahead of your competition (who have noticed you climbing and succeeding as you would notice others climbing up around your ranking). Now it's time to turn off your computer, take your partner out (you haven't had much time for them lately) and have a great week(end). You've got a lot of work to do to maintain and build on these rankings but the hardest part is over. Congratulations!

Step Nine - Monitoring

Whether you use WebPosition Gold or just run searches manually by hand you will have to monitor the major search engines for your targeted phrases. Also, you will need to review your stats to see where your traffic is coming from and what search terms are being used to find you. If a month passes and you don't see any changes then more work needs to be done. I'm certainly not stating that you should take a month off, a solid search engine positioning strategy involves constantly adding content, building links, and insuring that your visitors are getting the information they want to have and finding it as easily as possible

Step Eight - Link Building

All of the major search engines give credit to sites that have quality links pointing to them. How many is enough depends on your industry and targeted phrases. Running a search on Google the reads "link:www.yourcompetition.com" will reveal approximately how many links a competitor has. The first place to seek links is with general and topic-specific directories. After that you may want to move into reciprocal link building. Reciprocal link building is the exchange of links between two websites. Some webmasters will simply link to any website that links back to them. I highly recommend being more particular than that. Find websites that you believe your site visitors would genuinely be interested in and you've probably found a good link partner. You want to find links from sites that are related to yours. There are obviously many more methods to building links than directories and reciprocal link building. Again though, this is a whole article (or more) in itself.

Step Seven - Submissions

I take a different philosophy than most when it cones to search engine submissions. I submit to directories (both general and topic-specific) and to a few topical search engines but for the most part I've found submitting to Google, Yahoo, MSN and the other major engines has proven to be a bit of a waste of time. The major search engines are spidering search engines, which means they will follow links to wherever they go. Simply having sites that are spidered by the major search engines linking to you will get your site found. When I have spent time submitting my sites I have found they get picked up in about a week. When I have simply skipped this step and sought out reputable directories and other sites to get links from I have found that at least the homepage of the site gets indexed in as little as two days. Neither will hurt your rankings but simply to make the best use of your time, seek our directories and other websites to get links from and leave the spiders to find you on their own.

Step Six - Human Testing

So now you have your site, it's optimized and you have your navigation in place. The next step is to put it past someone who has never seen your site (and preferably who won't know how much work you've put in and tell you it's great even if it's not). Ask them to find specific information and see how long it takes. Ask someone else to just surf your site and watch which links they click and ask them why they chose those ones. Most importantly, find out how the content reads to them. You've spent hours working through the content at this point and are probably not the least biased on its readers. Find out how it reads to someone who has no invested interest in the site and correct any issues they may bring up.

Step Five - Internal Linking

To insure that your website gets fully indexed you have to make sure that the spiders have an easy path through your website. Text links make the best choice as the anchor text (the actual words used to link to a specific page) add relevancy to that page for the words used to link to it. For example, if I ran a website on acne and had a treatments page I could link to it with an image, with text reading "Click for more information on how to treat this skin condition" or simply "Acne Treatments". When a search engine spider hits an image it has no idea what the image is and, while it will follow the link, it will not give any weight to the page it hits. If you use text that does not contain the keywords you are targeting you are essentially supplying the engine with the same lack of relevancy as with an image, but if you use the phrase "Acne Treatments" to link to your acne treatments page you are attaching relevancy to that page for those keywords. There are two main ways to insure that your site gets well spidered AND that the relevancy is added. The first is to place text links on the bottom of your homepage to your main internal pages (not EVERY page, that just looks odd). The second is to create a sitemap to all your internal pages and link to it from your homepage. Both methods have advantages and disadvantages but that's a whole article unto itself.

Step Four - Optimization

Once you have your keyword targets, your content created and your site structure established you must now move on to the most obvious step, the optimization of your content. As noted above, a spider places importance on what it reads highest on the page and so beginning with a sentence that includes your targeted phrase only makes sense. That said, stuffing in keywords in hopes that it will add weight to your page generally doesn't work. The term "keyword density" refers to the percentage of your content that is made up of your targeted keywords. There are optimum densities according to many reputable SEO's though exactly what they are is debatable. Estimates seem to range anywhere from 4 or 5% to 10 to 12% (quite a gap isn't it). Personally, when it comes to keyword density I prescribe to one rule: put your keywords in the content as much as you can while keeping it comfortably readable to a human visitor. Some do it first, I do it last, regardless of when you do it you must choose your heading. At the beginning of your content you have the opportunity to use the H1 tag to specify the heading of your content. This tag is given extra weight and is also an indicator to the search engine of where your actual content starts. Make sure to use your keywords in the heading but don't shy away from also adding additional words (though not too many).

Step Two - Site Content and Step Three - Site Structure

Step Two - Site Content Even before I optimize websites I like to get a good deal of new content down in order to insure that I know exactly where I'm going and exactly what I need to do to get there. Creating some of the new content before starting the optimization process can be doubly helpful in that it can reveal potential additions to your website that you may not have considered (a forum or blog for example). If you already have a site, perhaps simply sit on your back deck, sip on a coffee and image what you would do if your whole site was lost and you had to start again (other than launch into a very colorful discussion with your hosting company). Step Three - Site Structure A solid site structure is very important. Creating a site that is easily spidered by the search engines yet attractive to visitors can be a daunting and yet entirely rewarding endeavor. To adequately structure your website you must "think like a spider" which is not as difficult as it may sound. A search engine spider reads your web page like you would read a book. It starts at the top left, reads across, and then moves down. Priority must be given then, to what you place near the top of your page.

Step One - Choosing Keywords

You first must choose your keywords. This is perhaps the most important step of the process as incorrectly targeting phrases can result in traffic that is not interested in your product. There are three tools that I use virtually every day to help pick the most appropriate keywords:
Overture's Search Term Suggestion Tool
WordTracker
A Brain The last in the list is the most important. Look through the potential keyword phrases and think, "Who would be searching using that phrase?" If the answer is, "a student looking for information" then chances are it won't result in a sale. If the answer is "Someone who is looking specifically for a product I offer," then obviously this is a prime candidate as a targeted keyword phrase. Step Two - Site Content Even before I optimize websites I like to get a good deal of new content down in order to insure that I know exactly where I'm going and exactly what I need to do to get there. Creating some of the new content before starting the optimization process can be doubly helpful in that it can reveal potential additions to your website that you may not have considered (a forum or blog for example). If you already have a site, perhaps simply sit on your back deck, sip on a coffee and image what you would do if your whole site was lost and you had to start again (other than launch into a very colorful discussion with your hosting company).

10 Steps To Higher Search Engine Positioning

While there are many methods out there for building a profitable website, from banner ads to email campaigns, by far the most cost effective over time has proven repeatedly to be search engine positioning. That major advantage search engine positioning has over other methods of producing revenue online is that once high rankings are attained and provided that the tactics used were ethical and that continued efforts are made to keep them, they can essentially hold and provide targeted traffic indefinitely. Your site will rise and your site may sometimes fall in the rankings but a solid and complete optimization of your site will insure that through algorithm changes you may fluctuate but you will not disappear. I have been ranking websites highly on the Internet for quite a few years now and there are some essential rules that, if followed, will insure that over time your website does well and holds solid and profitable positions on the major search engines. Here are the 10 steps to higher search engine positioning:

Microprocessors

Microprocessors technology has taken a once bulky series of switches and miniaturized powerful electronic circuitry to be able to fit in personal computers, cell phones, pda's, and other popular devices. When referring to microprocessors, people are usually talking about the CPU, which is made up of at least one microprocessor that handles the chief "brain" functions. According to scientific law, the speed of microprocessors will increase rapidly from year to year, and you can see evidence of this as current technology becomes outdated very quickly. Microprocessors are necessary in almost any engineering project. Circuit board design may depend on a specific microprocessor construction that can be supplied through contract manufacturing, and outsourced services.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – An Overview

Run a search on any of the 200 major search engines, and the results will come up in similar orders on quite a few of them. How a website owner/operator gets their website to the top of a list is called Search Engine Optimization, or SEO. Optimizing a website involves many of the same techniques, whether the aim is to optimize for Google adwords, Yahoo, Ask Jeeves or others. There is a list of what not to do as well, and that list is applicable to all engines, as it mostly refers to tricks and hacks unscrupulous designers use to try to trick the engines. These kind of pages generally get removed by automated tools and don't generally last very long, so they are not recommended to bother with. Website optimization starts with content. If the content is irrelevant, the website will not last long in the rankings, no matter how many keywords are included. The best way to get relevant content is to get an expert to write the content. General content may be more friendly to beginners, but in the search optimization arena, content is what is going to keep readers coming back and webmasters linking to the page. Many search engines use link counters to rank sites. If enough people like and value the site, they will link to it from their own site as an example of expert help for visitors seeking more detailed information than they can provide, or are willing to provide. Often, general-interest sites will link to expert sites, thereby also driving their own traffic up as the initial portal to those expert sites and improving their own rankings in the optimization listings. The quality of the sites linked is also a major factor in the rankings, as quality sites such as Microsoft and Google are going to be more effective "heavy hitters" than a link to Bob's House of Website Optimizing. When the content is being created, keywords are the "anchors" that search engines hook onto, but just filling your content with keywords risks being dismissed as a spam site, as many spammers merely fill a page with keywords, hoping to hook anyone searching for anything. These kind of pages are usually removed quickly, but they exist nonetheless. Specific keywords are the key--instead of Search Engine, use Search Engine Optimization for Google, or combinations of the key words or phrases. Optimization for Search Engines in one area, then Optimizing for higher Search Engine rankings in another increases the chances of an engine ranking your website content a little higher than it may have otherwise. The guidelines for content also go for Meta tags such as the title. Title is very important, as it is one of the bigger spots for an engine to catch, as well as the hook that draws a surfer in once the rankings have been displayed. A recommended length is 50-80 characters (including spaces), with keywords located near the beginning in case the window is resized on the screen. A good example would be "Search Engine Optimization tips and tricks for Google", instead of "How to do important SEO for websites." Search Engine Optimization--what to avoid: Don't use huge strings of keywords without relevant content--you may be labeled as a spammer and blacklisted off the engine(s) you're trying to climb. Stay away from pop-ups, excessive load times (by keeping the page clean and using fast hosting servers), and lots of flash animation, as this takes time to load and also detracts from the readability of the site. More specific information can be found by typing "Search Engine Optimization" into any major search engine like Google or Yahoo and following the links. Good luck!

Links from other websites

Links from other websites One of the biggest things that search engines look for, after content and theme, are quality links to your website from reputable internet addresses. Just any links won't do. They must be roughly the same subject matter and rank well on the search engines. This can be one of the most difficult parts of the optimization process but if your site is interesting, full of rich content and you keep growing your website they will come. Website Promotion Remember that while search engines are a primary way people look for web sites, they are not the only way. People also find sites through word-of-mouth, traditional advertising, the traditional media, newsgroup postings, web directories and links from other sites. Many times, these alternative forms are far more effective draws than are search engines.

Optimization tips

1. Are your keywords in your title tags? (This includes the filename and page title) 2. Are your keywords in your content? (Especially the first and last paragraph of each page) 3. Do your keywords accurately describe the theme or subject of your page? 4. What words will users type into search engines to find your website? 5. Does the page contain JavaScript? If so, how much of it precedes content? (CSS and JavaScript is nice, but engine robots don't have a clue as to what to do with it and often give up if there's no content nearby.) 6. If your website is a business, have you made sure your business address and other information is easily available on each page? (Directories look for this when reviewing business sites.) 7. Did you optimize several pages of your site for certain targeted keywords? Be sure that your page titles reflect your keywords and be sure to repeat them in the body text of the page. 8. Are there plenty of text links on your pages for robots to follow? (They don't follow image map links or options in drop down menus.) 9. Did you read each engine FAQ to make sure you avoid SPAMMING their database before you submitted your URL? (FAQ's change often, so you need to keep checking back.) 10. Do you have any web sites linking to your website? Links from other web sites similar to your own will increase the relevancy of your website in search engine results. Focus on your keywords and keyword density but don't sacrifice your message. Utilize the meta tags keywords, description and title. Use your keywords when naming your pages.

How to Optimize Your Website the Easy Way

Search engine optimization Search engine optimization is crucial to your traffic flow. Having your website listed on the first page of a search engines results will give you maximum exposure. And, the closer you are to the top of the page the greater the number of visitors you will receive. Thus, you should learn the basics of how to optimize your website. Not all search engines operate exactly the same. But, if you follow the simple outline below you will do just fine. This will give you an overview of what most search engines are like and what they are looking for.

Optimal Website Design

Optimal website design offers your viewers a logical flow while making your website interesting and easy to understand. It will lead your viewers to the starting point and then direct them through your site without confusing them. Here are some excellent tips that can help you develop a user friendly site and please your visitors senses. Give your site a chance. 1. Use lots of white space. Don’t feel that because you have a whole screen you need to fill it up with stuff. Your page should follow a clean outline. Include your site name at the very top. Below that, list the subject of your page and below that, expand on your topic. Leave adequate space between each section. Don’t cram a lot of pictures and ads on your site. If you have an ad keep it off to the side or subtly intersperse it between your text. The idea is not to overwhelm your reader. 2. Don’t use animation and flashing objects. As advertisers we feel the need to get our viewers attention. This is important but we need to do it gracefully. Flashing objects and scrolling images distract your visitor and take away from the content. If your product is better demonstrated with animation or some other multi-media, allow your viewer to select the option. Don’t force it on them. 3. Every page of your site should contain an ‘about’ link. The internet can be a rather cold and quiet environment. If someone can come to your site and find out about who you are and what you are about, they can feel a little better about doing business with you or taking advice from you. Always include your business address and phone number and email address as well. This lets viewers know that you are serious about your business and that you welcome contact. 4. Include a ‘Privacy’ Link Viewers like the reassurance that you have a policy that follows privacy guidelines. They want to know that you will not sell or give away their information. In these days of rampant spam, your privacy policy needs to be prominently displayed. Many viewers and business partners won’t do business with you unless you have it. 5. Always keep your links in blue. Why does that matter you might say? It’s an expectation that viewers have along with the links being underlined. There’s certainly no law that says they need to be as such but people spend a lot of time on the internet and it’s good practice to keep your navigation consistent and recognizable. If it’s not you may lose out on clicks. 6. Keep navigation consistent What you do on your index page should be done the same way on the rest of your site’s pages. Keep the colors consistent. Don’t force your viewers to relearn each page of your site. Keep your navigation bars and links the same for each page. 7. Understandable buttons and links. Title your links appropriately. Don’t use cute or misleading names. For example, if you have a link to sports equipment don’t label the link ‘Great Outdoors’, call it ‘Sports Equipment’. If you have a link to ‘cameras’ don’t label the link ‘hotshots’, label it ‘Cameras’. Your viewers don’t want to waste time figuring out what things are. Be clear with your labeling. 8. Focus on the ‘YOU’, not the ‘ME’. Make it obviously clear to your readers that you are there for them. What can you do for your reader? What benefits are there for your viewer? How can you make their life or business more profitable? Request feedback on their success. Find out what they want to know and offer it to them. 9. Make sure your page loads fast. If viewers have to wait for a page to load they will click elsewhere. Here’s a site that will help you determine how well your page loads. If a page doesn’t load in 8 seconds you lose 1/3 of your visitors. Here’s a great free tool to help you check your website’s load time: http://www.1-hit.com/all-in-one/tool.loading-time-checker.htm 10. Use a site map. A site map will give visitors a "guide" on viewing your site and also eliminate confusion, especially with larger sites. it’s a road map for your visitors to follow while they are on your site. Sitemaps will also increase rankings and placement within the Search Engines.

History of Computers

The first electronic digital computer was called "ENIAC" built in 1945 in Philadelphia. It used so much electricity that lights in the nearby town dimmed every time it was used! What a long way we have come in a half-century, with personal computers in homes, offices, and schoolrooms across the world. After the arrival of the microprocessor, many different computer companies appeared and began developing their own microprocessors and microcomputers. Companies such as Apple, Compaq, and Commodore started during this period of confusion. At the conclusion of the timeline is the first home personal computer or PC, by IBM in 1981. Computers began to steadily and rapidly increase in speed and power while becoming more compact and more user friendly from the early 1980's on. The progress, however came in many small steps, rather than fewer major events like earlier years. From the start of the decade to today, PCs in the home have become immensely popular. Computers have increased their role from professional and business machines to entertainment and educational tools. Telecommunications advancements such as the Internet have shown themselves to be useful both in education and business. Hard disks or Computer hardware were invented in the 1950s. They started as large disks up to 20 inches in diameter holding just a few megabytes. They were originally called "fixed disks" or "Winchesters" (a code name used for a popular IBM product). They later became known as "hard disks" to distinguish them from "floppy disks." Hard disks have a hard platter that holds the magnetic medium, as opposed to the flexible plastic film found in tapes and floppies. At the simplest level, a hard disk is not that different from a cassette tape. Both hard disks and cassette tapes use the same magnetic recording techniques. A typical desktop machine will have a hard disk with a capacity of between 10 and 40 gigabytes. Data is stored onto the disk in the form of files. A file is simply a named collection of bytes. The bytes might be the ASCII codes for the characters of a text file, or they could be the instructions of a software application for the computer to execute, or they could be the records of a data base, or they could be the pixel colors for a GIF image. No matter what it contains, however, a file is simply a string of bytes. When a program running on the computer requests a file, the hard disk retrieves its bytes and sends them to the CPU one at a time. The Internet was the result of some visionary thinking by people in the early 1960s who saw great potential value in allowing computers to share information on research and development in scientific and military fields. The Internet, then known as ARPANET, was brought online in 1969 under a contract let by the renamed Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) which initially connected four major computers at universities in the southwestern US. The Internet was designed in part to provide a communications network that would work even if some of the sites were destroyed by nuclear attack. The early Internet was used by computer experts, engineers, scientists, and librarians. E-mail was adapted for ARPANET by Ray Tomlinson of BBN in 1972. He picked the @ symbol from the available symbols on his teletype to link the username and address. As the commands for e-mail, FTP, and telnet were standardized, it became a lot easier for non-technical people to learn to use the nets. Most Internet Service Providers or( ISP’s ) make use of these protocols in E-mail, Usenet newsgroups, file sharing, the World Wide Web, Gopher, session access, WAIS, finger, IRC, Mud’s, and Mush’s. Of these, e-mail and the World Wide Web are clearly the most used, and many other services are built upon them, such as mailing lists and web logs. The Internet makes it possible to provide real-time services such as web radio and web casts that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. The Internet is also having a profound impact on knowledge and worldviews. Through keyword-driven Internet research, using search engines, millions worldwide have easy, instant access to a vast amount and diversity of online information. Compared to encyclopedias and traditional libraries, the Internet represents a sudden and extreme decentralization of information and data. A current trend with major implications for the future is the growth of high speed connections. 56K dialup modems are not fast enough to carry multimedia, such as sound and video except in low quality. But new technologies many times faster, such as cable modems, digital subscriber lines (DSL), and satellite broadcast are widely available now, and growing fast. The rapid growth of local networks, even in homes, has increased the demand. Common methods of home access include dial-up, broadband and satellite communications. As the commands for e-mail, FTP, and telnet were standardized, it became a lot easier for non-technical people to learn to use the nets. It was not easy by today's standards by any means, but it did open up use of the Internet to many more people in universities in particular. Other departments besides the libraries, computer, physics, and engineering departments found ways to make good use of the nets--to communicate with colleagues around the world and to share files and resources. We have come a long way in computer technology since the ENIAC. Now eighty percent of American households have at least one computer, and most households have one computer exclusively for the use of PC games, music, videos, and surfing the web.

Freebies – Free Antivirus Software

In this world where money plays an important can you imagine getting something for free? Do not panic today you can find many outlets that give away stuffs for free. No, they are not doing any social work. But yes they are giving different freebies. These outlets provide you free stuffs with best possible bargains and absolutely free. To find out who they are just perform a short search online and you can find a list of such sites. There are number sites that give away absolutely free goods, completely free of no cost, but sometime you may have to pay for a shipping charge which is nominal. Other most popular way to get real free freebies is to fill a short survey and send your feedback about the companies’ newest product. Among the best giveaways are "the crazy frog free ring tones, cash for surveys, cinema tickets, quality beauty freebies, and car cash back offers. The list is endless. There are hundreds of places where you can get legitimate freebies. One of such free stuffs that you can find online is free antivirus software. If your computer is getting frequent virus pop ups, it’s the time you start thinking about free anti virus software. With hundreds more viruses being created every month, all computers should have some form of virus protection. There are number of sites where you can find a round up of the Web's best freeware anti-virus checkers and cleaners, which stop all kinds of "dodgy" files from entering your PC. You'll no doubt be pleased to hear that the majority of programs listed here provide comparable protection to most commercial packages. Getting good antivirus software is critical for the health of your computer, which is as good as getting a vaccine for your body when you are down with viral infection. Fortunately enough, this is a well-developed industry and there are many good anti-virus products on offer.

What actually does FTP software do?

We refer to computers configured to accept FTP requests as FTP servers. These servers store a tremendous amount of information, and it is available to anyone on the Internet using FTP. In an FTP client/server connection, the user's computer is called the client or local computer. The FTP server is called the host or remote computer. Downloading refers to transferring files from the FTP server to the client computer. Uploading refers to transferring files to the FTP server from the client computer. One of the primary design goals of FTP is to hide the details of the file system from users. Thus, users do not need to be concerned with whether their files are on Windows, UNIX, Linux or any other system. All they need to be concerned about is the business of moving around and transferring data. FTP is designed in such a way that it uses two connections between the FTP client and the FT server. One connection is used to communicate to the web server using standard Telnet commands. The other is used to transfer data. This means that FTP is fast and efficient, since it can send extremely large amounts of data and still receive commands, handle aborts and do error correction. Web servers do not have this luxury, since they have to wait for sends and receive to cease.

Free FTP software download

What is FTP software? FTP (File Transfer Protocol) is an Internet protocol that allows users to exchange files, programs, etc. over the Internet and uploads them to a Web server or downloads them to their personal computer. Today one can find number of websites that provide the facility of free FTP software download. All of them are ideal for finding software from remote computers and equally useful for webmasters, who need to upload files.

What is the role of "a tester"?

A tester is a person who tries to find out all possible errors/bugs in the system with the help of various inputs to it. A tester plays an important part in finding out the problems with system and helps in improving its quality. If you could find all the bugs and fix them all, your system becomes more and more reliable. A tester has to understand the limits, which can make the system break and work abruptly. The more number of VALID BUGS tester finds out, the better tester he/she is!

Why there is need of testing?

This is a right question because, prior to the concept of TESTING software as a ‘Testing Project’, the testing process existed, but the developer(s) did that at the time of development. But you must know the fact that, if you make something, you hardly feel that there can be something wrong with what you have developed. It's a common trait of human nature, we feel that there is no problem in our designed system as we have developed it and it is perfectly functional and fully working. So the hidden bugs or errors or problems of the system remain hidden and they raise their head when the system goes into production. On the other hand, its a fact that, when one person starts checking something which is made by some other person, there are 99% chances that checker/observer will find some problem with the system (even if the problem is with some spelling that by mistake has been written in wrong way.). Really weird, isn't it? But that’s a truth! Even though its wrong in terms of human behavior, this thing has been used for the benefit of software projects (or you may say, any type of project). When you develop something, you give it to get checked (TEST) and to find out any problem, which never aroused while development of the system. Because, after all, if you could minimize the problems with the system you developed, it’s beneficial for yourself. Your client will be happy if your system works without any problem and will generate more revenues for you.

Why we go for testing?

Well, while making food, its ok to have something extra, people might understand and eat the things you made and may well appreciate your work. But this isn't the case with Software Project Development. If you fail to deliver a reliable, good and problem free software solution, you fail in your project and probably you may loose your client. This can get even worse! So in order to make it sure, that you provide your client a proper software solution, you go for TESTING. You check out if there is any problem, any error in the system, which can make software unusable by the client. You make software testers test the system and help in finding out the bugs in the system to fix them on time. You find out the problems and fix them and again try to find out all the potential problems.

Software Testing - An Introduction

Software Testing can be defined as: Testing is an activity that helps in finding out bugs/defects/errors in a software system under development, in order to provide a bug free and reliable system/solution to the customer. In other words, you can consider an example as: suppose you are a good cook and are expecting some guests at dinner. You start making dinner; you make few very very very delicious dishes (off-course, those which you already know how to make). And finally, when you are about to finish making the dishes, you ask someone (or you yourself) to check if everything is fine and there is no extra salt/chili/anything, which if is not in balance, can ruin your evening (This is what called 'TESTING'). This procedure you follow in order to make it sure that you do not serve your guests something that is not tasty! Otherwise your collar will go down and you will regret over your failure

Advantages of Exploratory Testing

Exploratory testing can uncover bugs, which are normally ignored (or hard to find) by other testing strategies.
It helps testers in learning new strategies, expand the horizon of their imagination that helps them in understanding & executing more and more test cases and finally improve their productivity.
Exploratory testing helps tester in confirming that he/she understands the application and its functionality properly and has no confusion about the working of even a smallest part of it, hence covering the most important part of requirement understanding.
As in case of exploratory testing, we write and execute the test cases simultaneously. It helps in collecting result oriented test scripts and shading of load of unnecessary test cases which do not yield and result.
Exploratory testing covers almost all type of testing, hence tester can be sure of covering various scenarios once exploratory testing is performed at the highest level (i.e. if the exploratory testing performed can ensure that all the possible scenarios and test cases are covered).

Who Does Exploratory Testing?

Any software tester knowingly or unknowingly does it! While testing, if a tester comes across a bug, as a general practice, tester registers that bug with the programmer. Along with registering the bug, tester also tries to make it sure that he/she has understood the scenario and functionality properly and can reproduce the bug condition. Once programmer fixes the bug, tester runs a test case with the same scenario replication in which the bug had occurred previously. If tester finds that the bug is fixed, he/she again tries to find out if the fix can handle any such same type of scenario with different inputs. For an example, lets consider that a tester finds a bug related to an input text field on a form, where the field is supposed to accept any digit other than the digits from 1 to 100, which it fails to and accepts the number 100. Tester logs this bug to the programmer and now is waiting for the fix. Once programmer fixes the bug, it sends it across to the tester so as to get it tested. Tester now will try to test the bug with same input value (100: as he/she had found that this condition causes application to fail) in the field. If application rejects the number (100) entered by the tester, he/she can safely close the defect. Now, along with the above given test input value, which had revealed the bug, tester tries to check if there is any other value from this set (0 to 100), which can cause the application to fail. He/she may try to enter values from 0 to 100, or may be some characters or a combination of character and numbers in any order. All these test cases are thought by the tester as a variation of the type of value he/she had entered previously and represent only one test scenario. This testing is called exploratory testing, as the tester tried to explore and find out the possibility of revealing a bug by using any possible way. What qualities I need to posses to be able to perform an Exploratory Testing? As I mentioned above, any software tester can perform exploratory testing. The only limit to the extent to which you can perform exploratory testing is your imagination and creativity, more you can think of ways to explore, understand the software, more test cases you will be able write and execute simultaneously.

Why do we need exploratory testing?

At times, exploratory testing helps in revealing many unknown and un-detected bugs, which is very hard to find out through normal testing.
As exploratory testing covers almost all the normal type of testing, it helps in improving our productivity in terms of covering the scenarios in scripted testing and those which are not scripted as well.
Exploratory Testing is a learn and work type of testing activity where a tester can at least learn more and understand the software if at all he/she was not able to reveal any potential bug.
Exploratory testing, even though disliked by many, helps testers in learning new methods, test strategies, and also think out of the box and attain more and more creativity.

Brief Introduction To Exploratory Testing

What is an Exploratory Testing? Bach’s Definition: ‘Any testing to the extent that the tester actively controls the design of the tests as those tests are performed and uses information gained while testing to design new and better tests.’ Which simply can be put as: A type of testing where we explore software, write and execute the test scripts simultaneously. Exploratory testing is a type of testing where tester does not have specifically planned test cases, but he/she does the testing more with a point-of-view to explore the software features and tries to break it in order to find out unknown bugs. A tester who does exploratory testing, does it only with an idea to more and more understand the software and appreciate its features. During this process, he/she also tries to think of all possible scenarios where the software may fail and a bug can be revealed.

A New Approach Towards Software Development

The Waterfall model is the most simple and widely accepted/followed software development model, but like any other system, Waterfall model does have its own pros and cons. Spiral Model for software development was designed in order to overcome the disadvantages of the Waterfall Model.

Enlarge ImageIn last article we discussed about "Waterfall Model", which is one of the oldest and most simple model designed and followed during software development process. But "Waterfall Model" has its own disadvantages such as there is no fair division of phases in the life cycle, not all the errors/problems related to a phase are resolved during the same phase, instead all those problems related to one phase are carried out in the next phase and are needed to be resolved in the next phase, this takes much of time of the next phase to solve them. The risk factor is the most important part, which affects the success rate of the software developed by following "The Waterfall Model".