SEO Roadmap & Strategy: Getting Aligned With Product Development
SEO roadmaps are very important for an in-house SEO. They are the basis for task prioritization, seeing how things fit into the grand scheme, and they give you a broad understanding of which projects you want to push.
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Simple Rules to Guide You in Searching for a Miami SEO Company
Finding the right Miami SEO company is never always easy. Especially if you’re a first-timer, you will some challenges insurmountable without the help of prior experience. Fortunately, there are ways to make your search relatively easier.
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Build Links Locally: Strategies to Improve Local SEO
Optimization for local listings is an important way to attract business for many companies and organizations that are jumping online these days. There are plenty of blog posts outlining how to optimize your listings in the local search engines and with your chamber of commerce, but where can you turn to [...] Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Build Links Locally …
This past weekend, Network Solutions Senior Vice President Stephanie Leffler paid a visit to MSNBC’s “Consultants Corner”, where she talked about how companies can ensure that their Web sites come out at the top of the search engines. Because being found via search engines such as Yahoo! or Google can be the difference between success and failure for small businesses, Stephanie gave three tips for “leading the listings”. Credit: Check out www.MonsterCommerce.com & www.NetworkSolutions.com for services related to this & more.
Keyword Research Basics For SEO
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again … there is no more important step in the SEO process than keyword research. One could make a compelling argument for link building or for architecture or for copywriting but at the end of the day – ranking highly for keywords that either don’t convert or which you close up shop waiting to rank for isn’t going to help too terribly much so in my opinion …
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Big Jump in Demand for SEO in Australia
Webarena has published data, based on its own data as well as Google search trends, that indicate a dramatic rise in demand for search engine optimisation (SEO) in Australia over the past 2 years. This is due to more and more small businesses going online to take advantage of an increasing number of consumers using the Internet to source local services.
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SEO Made Easy for Software and Technology Companies
SaaS Newswire is accepting press releases and news updates from Software and Technology companies and says that they will provide Free SEO services to all articles that request.
If you are a serious business website owner, chances are you are constantly on the lookout for ethical means to promote your website to your target market. Chances are also good that you probably read somewhere or heard from someone that your most practical promotion solution is to trust your business to a search engine optimization company. The processes of promoting your site and increase your online visibility is called Search Engine Optimization or SEO. If you are familiar with the term but do not have the expertise to properly implement SEO for your website, then you might want to consider hiring a to do that work for you.
What is a Search Engine Optimization company? It is an organization whose objective is to provide the necessary tools and expertise to optimize your website towards the goal of securing for you a first or second page ranking in the search engine’s list of keyword-responsive sites. A Search Engine Optimization company’s role is that of an influencer, i.e., the strategies it employs for your website are geared towards influencing the search engine’s “spiderbot” to give it a high relevance rating which, in turn, influences its ranking. A Search Engine Optimization company’s indirect role is also to influence the surfer to visit your website but is not responsible for what happens to the visit.
There are many Search Engine Optimization companies that have hung their virtual shingle in cyberspace, with many more sprouting up each and every day. With so many choices available, it is important that you are guided in selecting the right Search Engine Optimization company that best suits your requirements and budget. Here are a few tips in selecting that Search Engine Optimization company:
• Always Go for Reputation and Experience
This is pretty much a common sense tip. When you are headed for the unknown, it always makes sense to go with a guide who knows what you don’t. A Search Engine Optimization company that has years of experience as an organization and has people working for it with years of individual experience is normally a good choice. Experience, however, is just one half of this selection criterion, the other half being REPUTATION. A Search Engine Optimization company may have the experience, but if it has a track record of unethical or even illegal SEO activity, then the experience counts for nothing.
• Avoid SEO companies that Spam
A Search Engine Optimization company that sends spam email to promote itself is not a good Search Engine Optimization company and will get your site banned costing you more that it will ever benefit from.
• A company that hides everything, has something to hide
Beware of the Search Engine Optimization company that has a “black box” solution for everything that ails your website, i.e., you don’t need to know how it works; you just pay. In all likelihood, what this type of Search Engine Optimization company is hiding from you is, at best, unethical, or at worst, illegal. It is very important for you to understand what is going to be done with your website (in lay man’s terms) because, at the end of the day, it IS your website and you will have to live with whatever the Search Engine Optimization company does to it.
• Go Window Shopping
Like with every important purchase decision you make, you must check out more than one Search Engine Optimization company before you make a decision. Ask for a list of the websites they claim to have worked on, and do your own research. Also, ask each Search Engine Optimization company you are considering about what they think of the other candidates in your list. Be wary if they launch into a negative marketing pitch about their competition. A really good Search Engine Optimization company will rarely badmouth a competitor. Even if the competitor is really bad, the worst that a good Search Engine Optimization company will do is objectively point out their strengths and weaknesses.
• Go with the Clear Deal
A good Search Engine Optimization company will always be very clear any work proposal it makes. It clearly spells out the terms of reference, timelines, commercial aspects, guarantees, penalties, any other items that it and you may find relevant towards meeting your expectations. That way, you know what you are getting into and what (and what not) to expect.
These are but a few tips on how to select the expert that will take care of optimizing your website for you. Approach a like you would any other company that you are considering to handle some work for you, and you are covered.
Moe Tamani is a expert with a leading US based firm.
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Michael Rotkin Owner of 10 Internet Marketing Search Engine Optimization
Santa Monica, California – Michael Rotkin Owner of 10 Internet Marketing Search Engine Optimization Firms in 3 countries, just Acquired the oldest Santa Monica Seo Agency, for a undisclosed amount of cash and a domain trade.
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Four Clients Rise Up to Top Search Engine Optimization Results with Cybertegic’s SEO Services
Search Engine Optimization and Internet Marketing Services Company Cybertegic, through its remarkable search engine optimization efforts, has been continuously placing clients at the top of search engine results. Through the first quarter of this year, Cybertegic has successfully placed four more of its clients at the top of SEO results on specific keywords related to each industry.
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SEO Tips – Free Advice on Search Engine Optimization Expands
Fremont, CA – The JM Internet Group, a leader in providing Search Engine Optimization SEO courses online, has announced that its popular ‘SEO Tips’ Question and Answer forum continues its rapid expansion.As part of their Top Ten Free SEO Tools Webinar and Online SEO Training , the JM Internet Group launched their SEO Tips Forum in March. Participants in the free SEO online seminar…
Keyword Research Basics For SEO
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again … there is no more important step in the SEO process than keyword research. One could make a compelling argument for link building or for architecture or for copywriting but at the end of the day – ranking highly for keywords that either don’t convert or which you close up shop waiting to rank for isn’t going to help too terribly much so in my opinion …
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SEO Consult Arrive At Internet World 2010
The UK’s current number one Search Engine Optimisation Agency as voted by uk.TopSEOs.com, SEO Consult, have arrived at the Internet World 2010 expo at Earls Court, London, set up their exhibition stand and are ready to offer their premier SEO services to potential clients and customers.
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Advanced SEO Requires Good Analytics Information
Good quality analytics (such as Google Analytics or another paid analytics software packages) provides good and very useful information. If you pay attention to it you could very quickly increase the overall efficiency of your website. You just have to look at the numbers and list to what they tell you. [...] Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Advanced SEO Requires Good …
Whether it’s a corporate blog, a news-type blog, or even a personal blog, optimizing your blog for the search engines is a must. There are some simple changes that you can make to WordPress and Moveable Type that will make your blog more search engine friendly and make the search engines beg for more (more post and content, that is!).
Optimizing a blog is just like optimizing any other website. The content and pages (posts) must be unique, they must be search engine friendly, and it needs links from other websites. If it’s a new blog, then you first need to make sure the blog software you’re using is set up so that it takes advantage of all of the possible optimization features. Then, announce it to the world, work on getting some links to it, and start making posts.
WordPress Optimization
If you’re using WordPress for your blog software, it’s important to make sure that your site is search engine friendly, meaning that it can easily be spidered by the search engine spiders. Just like optimizing a website, it’s important to have good title tags and meta tags. Keep in mind that blog software usually uses the title of your post as the title tag, so include keywords in your titles as much as possible. It’s important to set up your blog’s software so that the URLs don’t contain a lot of variables. Instead, use URLs that include the post title or post name in them. For example, if you’re using WordPress you’ll need to set the permalinks so that it uses %postname% in the URL. You can also set up a specific category for the post archives, and you might consider using a keyword that’s related to your blog instead of the default, which is typically the word “archive”. Fintan Darragh of www.dech.co.uk has a great blog post called “Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips” (http://www.dech.co.uk/2005/11/ultimate-WordPress-seo-tips/). Mr. Darragh talks about permalink optimization and says, “The goal: stick more keywords up into the URL and remove the faff which nobody uses, to make the URL search engine and people attractive. Having keywords in your URL is an absolute must, especially when it’s as easy as WordPress makes it.” He also goes on to talk about getting rid of useless tags like the month, day, and year, as well as one important detail: whatever you do stick with the site structure you choose—otherwise you might end up with a lot of useless links to your site. Other tips that Mr. Darragh mentions are optimizing your page titles and your post titles–and installing a few plugins that are useful such as the “Related Posts Plugin” and the “Technorati Tag Generator”.
There are several other places where you can get specific tips about setting up WordPress in a search engine friendly manner, including: * SEO at Aleeya Dot Net – http://www.aleeya.net/category/WordPress/seo/ * The Best WordPress SEO Possible – http://WordPress.org/support/topic/49168 * Search Engine Optimization for WordPress – http://codex.WordPress.org/Search_Engine_Optimization_for_WordPress * Search Engine Optimization for Blogs – http://www.blog-maniac.com/blog-seo.htm * DYI Search Engine Optimization – http://lorelle.WordPress.com/2006/01/15/dyi-search-engine-optimization/ One of the best tutorials out there is one called “DYI Search Engine Optimization” by Lorelle VanFossen. Specifically, Lorelle (lorelle.WordPress.com) has some great tips, including how to optimize your code, develop strong intrasite links, write with strong keyword usage, use categories and tags, and how to use ping services. Lorelle says that “the goal is to help search engine crawlers move through your website collecting information to be stored in the search engine’s database. The key to your blog’s data making it successfully into a search engine’s database is to: 1) Make sure there are no road blocks in the path of a search engine crawler. 2) Make sure the crawler can move through your blog, examining all your web pages. 3) Provide adequate keywords and key phrases which clearly help categorize your content. 4) Provide clearly labeled tags and categories recognized by tagging service crawlers and many search engines today. 5) Take advantage of pinging services.” There are several WordPress Plugins available that will help you take advantage of internal linking (like the Related Posts Plugin) which will link to other posts in your blog that are on the same topic.
Other plugins that might be helpful are plugins that automatically generate a Google Sitemap file as well as plugins that help you categorize the site such as the WordPress Subdomain Plugin (http://www.webguerrilla.com/WordPress-subdomain-plugin/).
Movable Type Optimization If you’re using Movable Type for your blog software, then it’s also important to make sure that your site is search engine friendly and can be spidered by the search engine spiders. Just like optimizing a website, it’s important to have good title tags and meta tags. Keep in mind that blog software usually uses the title of your post as the title tag, so include keywords in your titles as much as possible. Miles Evans (http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles/expertarticles/wpn-62-20060310Movable TypeSEO.html) says that “Movable Type is optimized quite well out of the box, but there are a few quick tricks to easily providing the spiders with some dynamic content.” He goes on to say that you need to optimize your template. “For my main home page and category index pages I hardcode most of my meta data. Your meta tags will be at the top of the template within the tag. You can get fancy on your index pages but I cannot really see why. Optimize these two templates by hand for whatever keywords you are targeting site wide.” Mr. Evans also has another article titled, “Best Movable Type Plugins” (http://www.webpronews.com/expertarticles/expertarticles/wpn-62-20060310BestMovable TypePlugins.html) that talks about his favorite plugins that help him get great search engine rankings. His favorite Movable Type Plugins for SEO are Dashify, MTPaginate, MT Blogroll, MT InlineEditor, MT-Textile, BigPAPI, as well as Ajaxify (a set of plugins that adds several ajax/javascript widgets into the Movable Type interface), CheckLinks, FormatList v1.0, and Better File Uploader for uploading files. Nicholas Carvan (http://www.nicholascaravan.com) has a great article about Movable Type optimization called “Optimizing your Movable Type blog for Google” (http://www.nicholascarvan.com/blog/optimizing_your_Movable Type_blog_for_google.html). In it he talks about PageRank (and how it relates to your internal linking on your blog), having keywords in your URL (which is important for all blog optimization) and blogrolling. He defines the term blogrolling very well, saying, “Blogrolling: Inbound links are gold, but in Google’s eyes, not all links are equal. In particular, Google isn’t wild about links contained within JavaScript – apparently they can index them, but that doesn’t mean they always want to.”
Once you’ve set up and configured your blog’s software, it’s important to make sure that you leave it alone—if you change your page URLs then any links that you’ve received from other bloggers may not be valid anymore. If you need to change your site’s structure (perhaps you’ve been blogging already and wish to use the tips from this article to optimize your blog), then you might want to take a look at the Objection Redirection WordPress Plugin(http://WordPress-plugins.biggnuts.com/objection-redirection-WordPress-plugin/) if you’re using WordPress. The Objection Redirection Plugin gives you a simple interface to redirect users (and search engine bots) to the proper page, especially if you’ve changed your site’s structure.
Start Blogging The best thing you can do is to start blogging. Go ahead and post to your heart’s content and write, write, write about your topic. The more content you can provide the better—and it seems as if adding content on a regular basis really helps, as well. Feel free to link out to other blog posts that are related to the topic you’re writing about. For example, before you publish a post, go on over to your favorite blog search engine and find another recent post on the same subject—and link to the post. Linking out to other bloggers will get their attention, and hopefully they’ll end up linking to you as well. If other bloggers have trackbacks turned on then their blog will link back to your post. Some trackbacks are moderated, so it might take some time before your link shows up on the other blog. And some bloggers have trackbacks turned off, so a link back to your site might take some manual intervention. Categorize your posts as much as possible, and feel free to add categories as you blog—it will help the internal linking structure of your site, and help the search engines and users find on-topic posts.
Promoting Your Blog Whenever you make a post in your blog, your blog software will attempt to ping certain sites to let them know that you just updated your blog. There are many blog ping services out there, including Ping-O-Matic and Pingoat. Your blog software can be configured to ping sites automatically, and I’ve posted a list for WordPress of ping services on by blog (http://www.corporatewebsitemarketing.info/cwm/WordPress-ping-list). If your blog is new or you would like to get some more links, you can submit your blog to blog directories as well as other sites that will list your blog (don’t forget to submit to DMOZ.org, Yahoo! Directory, and the Best of the Web Blog Directory). About.com has a great article about promoting a blog (http://weblogs.about.com/cs/blogpromotions/a/promoteblog.htm) and even Biz Stone has great tutorial about promoting your blog (http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=1060). Lastly, don’t forget to turn on your blog’s RSS feed. And if you’re looking to promote your RSS feed, try searching your favorite search engine for “promote rss” to find a lot of good tutorials.
Promoting your blog is just like promoting a website—you need good spiderable content, links to your content, and you need to set up your blog software to take advantage of all the great features. There are also plugins that will help make blogging easier for all of us.
Bill Hartzer manages the Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing team at Vizion Interactive, a leading , social media marketing, and web design firm based in the Dallas, Texas area.
Question by shelbell: Top Graduate Programs in Military History?
I’ve been doing research on grad schools that offer military history and have found about 15 programs. Is there a “master list” of schools that offer this program or a ranking system to find out which program is the best? I’e been all over the web and have only found one such site and it’s incomplete, but are there any books or magazines in print that will help with my search? Thanks! (Also, I’m not in the military, so please don’t give me info on military schools because I won’t be able to apply to those.)
Best answer:
Answer by TJ I assume the site you found was the basic compendium at the Society of Military History.
http://www.smh-hq.org/gradguide/index.html
This may be as good as you are going to find.
As it seems you know, military history is a fairly limited field of study/research within civilian universities and institutions. I think that rather than looking for (or at, if you should find any) department rankings (which apply in other more generalized disciplines), you should emphasize the individual faculty with whom you would be working in your graduate studies. That is what is going to define your experience as a graduate student and afterwards in the field.
You obviously want to pay attention to the thematic research and time periods of interest to the faculty. You also want to read their research publications to find out if you are intellectually compatible.
Another aspect to consider is the amount of archival material to which you will be able to have access at a particular institution or with a particular professor – the best historical research is done with original material, of course.
I have a history degree (amongst others) and military history remains an intellectual hobby of mine. Good luck in your research on graduate studies, and future endeavors with the field.