Today Craigslist faced heavy turbulence from the Windy City as Cook County sheriff's office filed a federal lawsuit against the online classifieds site for allowing users to prostitute online through its website.
Sheriff Tom Dart accused Craigslist of prostitution by making it extremely easy for users to get and post to its "Erotic Services" section and, in turn, does not remove ads for sex in a timely fashion from the thousands of such ads that continue to pop up.
Dart brought a 19-year old woman to a press conference who he claimed turned to a life of prostitution through Craigslist while searching originally for a modeling job. As a result, he asserted Craigslist had violated laws from the local level all the way up to the federal level and that the "Erotic Services" section of Craigslist must be shut down.
In response, Craigslist spokeswoman Susan Best fiercely disputed Dart's statements, citing stepped up efforts to prevent illegal ads, cooperating with law enforcement, and pulling illegal ads.
Source: http://tech.yahoo.com/news/ap/20090305/ap_on_hi_te/craigslist_prostitution
Thursday, March 5, 2009
Web News: "YouTube Sings, Google Disses, Tweets Are Indeed Sweet"
Popular video website YouTube is singing a happy tune, having reached 100 million viewers monthly in January 2009. Owned by search engine giant Google, YouTube is dominating the online video arena and is a hub for social and business users to post free videos online, on personal websites and on social networks like MySpace. Even President Obama has delivered weekly online presidential addresses to Americans via YouTube on the new White House website!
Speaking of Google, founder and CEO Eric Schmidt was at Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday where, according to PC World, he called social microblogging website Twitter a "poor man's email." Twitter is fast becoming a popular and useful tool itself where users to leave short messages ("tweets"), letting their friends know about what they are doing. As I posted in a previous blog entry, more people are taking to Twitter, including business -- and even Congress.
Schmidt did go on to clarify that he is happy for the success of Twitter. And who wouldn't be, given its value is worth at least $100 million (as of July 2008) and millions of users continue to sign up. This perhaps explains speculation about Google possibly buying out Twitter as it becomes a faster way to search online for real-time content due to people tweeting.
And you know when you've got a good thing going when social networking giant Facebook is watching closely and matching such visible success by unveiling its own set of new features starting next week, including being able to follow public figures and leave more interesting, real-time status messages.
Lots of improvements and innovations continue to appear on the social media front despite the slow economy. My San Jose website design firm is always here to explain the difference in Web 2.0 technologies on websites and how to successfully use them to connect with web visitors. Whether you're looking to increase the visibility of your website through embedding video, using social bookmarks, learning how to blog or tweet, my San Jose website design firm can help connect people online.
Speaking of Google, founder and CEO Eric Schmidt was at Morgan Stanley Technology Conference in San Francisco on Tuesday where, according to PC World, he called social microblogging website Twitter a "poor man's email." Twitter is fast becoming a popular and useful tool itself where users to leave short messages ("tweets"), letting their friends know about what they are doing. As I posted in a previous blog entry, more people are taking to Twitter, including business -- and even Congress.
Schmidt did go on to clarify that he is happy for the success of Twitter. And who wouldn't be, given its value is worth at least $100 million (as of July 2008) and millions of users continue to sign up. This perhaps explains speculation about Google possibly buying out Twitter as it becomes a faster way to search online for real-time content due to people tweeting.
And you know when you've got a good thing going when social networking giant Facebook is watching closely and matching such visible success by unveiling its own set of new features starting next week, including being able to follow public figures and leave more interesting, real-time status messages.
Lots of improvements and innovations continue to appear on the social media front despite the slow economy. My San Jose website design firm is always here to explain the difference in Web 2.0 technologies on websites and how to successfully use them to connect with web visitors. Whether you're looking to increase the visibility of your website through embedding video, using social bookmarks, learning how to blog or tweet, my San Jose website design firm can help connect people online.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Five Tips for Better Search Engine Rankings
With the downturn in our economy and the proliferation of business, social networking and organizational websites, finding your own website listing in major search engines like Google or Yahoo can prove a daunting task. That bodes especially bad for businesses which rely on new customers find them online.
Today we present "Five Tips for Better Search Engine Rankings" to help you boost your search engine rankings and garner more visitors. We won't guarantee you'll be on page 1 of Google or Yahoo!, but if you put the following tips to practice, you may be pleasantly surprised with where you are listed in weeks!
Search Engine Tip #1: You Must Submit!
For some reason, many website owners believe that once they have a web page up and running that their sites are automatically in the indexing systems of the search engines. Although there are many lesser known search engines that crawl everything automatically (and even the major search engines do to some extent), the big players -- especially Google and Yahoo -- cannot find your website if they don't know it exists. And, in case you didn't know, Google and Yahoo get an astronomical number of requests for indexing websites each day.
So, the first and most important thing you can do for your website's search engine ranking is to make sure you are "in the system". Try finding your website through a Google search or searching Yahoo. And if typing www.yourcompany.com yields no results, that's a telltale sign you need to add your URL to Google or submit your site to Yahoo!
Given the sheer number of requests they deal with, Google and Yahoo usually takes a couple weeks after your submit your URL to start indexing your site and ranking it accordingly. That gives you plenty of tip for the next tip.
Search Engine Tip #2: Keywords are Key
"Keywords" are words or sets of words (also known as "keyword phrases") that describe what your website is about. And they are key for a good reason -- search engines like Yahoo and Google use text-readers to read keywords in the content of web pages and categorize websites accordingly.
For example, let's pretend we have a website for a fictional company selling dog toys (which is probably still a good business, given people still spend a lot of money on their pets). Let's call our business Ruff's Dog Stuff and make fluffy dog-bone toys our flagship item. In this case we would want our web page to contain numerous instances of keywords like "stuffed dog toys" or "stuffed toy bones" in the text and paragraphs of the page.
In my experience, I've come across many websites where the website is selling a particular item or service and yet makes hardly any mention of their key item on their site. Cases like these usually exhibit pages adorned with Flash animations or lots of pictures. Not necessarily that those websites are bad, but if Google or Yahoo can't read what your website is about and categorize your site in its listings, your site will be easy to find as a car with its lights on in thick fog seen at 10 miles away!
Be sure not to go crazy and fill up your pages with keywords as if you were putting up wallpaper, as the major search engines (especially Google) will see this as a possible sign of trying to "spam" their results. I usually recommend 7-13 instances of a keyword on the page. Attempting to flood your page with keywords risks your site ranking lower or even being excluded altogether from results. That's one penalty box a website -- especially a business one -- doesn't want.
Search Engine Tip #3: You Betta META
META tags are HTML code tags that are found "under the hood" (i.e. in the HTML) of a web page to provide search engines important information about a website. In particular two tags important to search engine rankings are important -- keywords and description.
Ah, does the first meta tag sound familiar? Not only should you include keywords in the text of your web page as in the first tip above, you'll also want to list those same keywords in your keywords meta tag. The second meta tag -- description -- describes your website to readers in the text listed below your listing when readers find you in search engines.
Any web designer experienced in search engine marketing will tell you ultimately that keywords have to be included in your website but are not the silver bullet that will rise your site to the top of search engine rankings. Think of meta tags as a "necessary evil", or -- to use a sports analogy -- a ticket to a game where you must buy a ticket to at least play and try to win.
Search Engine Tip #4: What's your Title Say About your Site?
Search engines these days look at the title tag of your web page as an indicator of what your site is about and how to classify your site in the rankings. This is also an important area for keywords.
As an example, take a look at the website for San Jose family lawyer Chau Law. Upon loading the home page, you'll see that the title of the home page says "San Jose family lawyer" -- one of the website's keyword phrases. Not only is the keyword in the content of the page (Tip #1) as well as in the meta tags (Tip #2), it's also in the title.
Now let's take an example of the opposite and too common. If keywords are vital to rankings and a search engine comes across a site titled "Home", how do you think the website will be categorized? If the title of our site for Ruff's Dog Stuff is "Home", what does that mean? Would it be "home" as in a home for dogs? Home for people? Home for sale? E.T. go home? With the inordinate number of websites Google and Yahoo must index each day, you can imagine the arduous challenge they would face in trying to categorize and rank thousands of sites titled "Home"!
So, perhaps contrary to our literary intuitiveness, when it comes to getting your website ranked higher, make sure your page title contains your most important keywords.
Search Engine Tip #5: The Missing Link
Another major factor in getting your site ranked higher is having enough links pointing to your website. In the early days of the web, webmasters applied this principle quite liberally (perhaps too much), linking websites back and forth into a confusing array of connections in an effort to make it easier for readers to find websites. Often websites linked weren't even related to each other, making it difficult to find succinct results.
Search engines like Google and Yahoo eventually became privy to over ambitious webmasters and marketers anxious to make a buck by filtering links according to relevance. So what does this all mean?
It's important to have other websites (still) link to your website and the more the better. However, simply make sure those websites linking to you are related to the subject content of your website. If you're a travel website, make sure you've got links pointing to you from perhaps other travel websites, travel magazine websites, travel agents, etc. In the case of Ruff's Dog Stuff, we'd hope to have links from maybe dog or pet store websites, vets, animal societies, or even personal websites of dog owners.
Today we present "Five Tips for Better Search Engine Rankings" to help you boost your search engine rankings and garner more visitors. We won't guarantee you'll be on page 1 of Google or Yahoo!, but if you put the following tips to practice, you may be pleasantly surprised with where you are listed in weeks!
Search Engine Tip #1: You Must Submit!
For some reason, many website owners believe that once they have a web page up and running that their sites are automatically in the indexing systems of the search engines. Although there are many lesser known search engines that crawl everything automatically (and even the major search engines do to some extent), the big players -- especially Google and Yahoo -- cannot find your website if they don't know it exists. And, in case you didn't know, Google and Yahoo get an astronomical number of requests for indexing websites each day.
So, the first and most important thing you can do for your website's search engine ranking is to make sure you are "in the system". Try finding your website through a Google search or searching Yahoo. And if typing www.yourcompany.com yields no results, that's a telltale sign you need to add your URL to Google or submit your site to Yahoo!
Given the sheer number of requests they deal with, Google and Yahoo usually takes a couple weeks after your submit your URL to start indexing your site and ranking it accordingly. That gives you plenty of tip for the next tip.
Search Engine Tip #2: Keywords are Key
"Keywords" are words or sets of words (also known as "keyword phrases") that describe what your website is about. And they are key for a good reason -- search engines like Yahoo and Google use text-readers to read keywords in the content of web pages and categorize websites accordingly.
For example, let's pretend we have a website for a fictional company selling dog toys (which is probably still a good business, given people still spend a lot of money on their pets). Let's call our business Ruff's Dog Stuff and make fluffy dog-bone toys our flagship item. In this case we would want our web page to contain numerous instances of keywords like "stuffed dog toys" or "stuffed toy bones" in the text and paragraphs of the page.
In my experience, I've come across many websites where the website is selling a particular item or service and yet makes hardly any mention of their key item on their site. Cases like these usually exhibit pages adorned with Flash animations or lots of pictures. Not necessarily that those websites are bad, but if Google or Yahoo can't read what your website is about and categorize your site in its listings, your site will be easy to find as a car with its lights on in thick fog seen at 10 miles away!
Be sure not to go crazy and fill up your pages with keywords as if you were putting up wallpaper, as the major search engines (especially Google) will see this as a possible sign of trying to "spam" their results. I usually recommend 7-13 instances of a keyword on the page. Attempting to flood your page with keywords risks your site ranking lower or even being excluded altogether from results. That's one penalty box a website -- especially a business one -- doesn't want.
Search Engine Tip #3: You Betta META
META tags are HTML code tags that are found "under the hood" (i.e. in the HTML) of a web page to provide search engines important information about a website. In particular two tags important to search engine rankings are important -- keywords and description.
Ah, does the first meta tag sound familiar? Not only should you include keywords in the text of your web page as in the first tip above, you'll also want to list those same keywords in your keywords meta tag. The second meta tag -- description -- describes your website to readers in the text listed below your listing when readers find you in search engines.
Any web designer experienced in search engine marketing will tell you ultimately that keywords have to be included in your website but are not the silver bullet that will rise your site to the top of search engine rankings. Think of meta tags as a "necessary evil", or -- to use a sports analogy -- a ticket to a game where you must buy a ticket to at least play and try to win.
Search Engine Tip #4: What's your Title Say About your Site?
Search engines these days look at the title tag of your web page as an indicator of what your site is about and how to classify your site in the rankings. This is also an important area for keywords.
As an example, take a look at the website for San Jose family lawyer Chau Law. Upon loading the home page, you'll see that the title of the home page says "San Jose family lawyer" -- one of the website's keyword phrases. Not only is the keyword in the content of the page (Tip #1) as well as in the meta tags (Tip #2), it's also in the title.
Now let's take an example of the opposite and too common. If keywords are vital to rankings and a search engine comes across a site titled "Home", how do you think the website will be categorized? If the title of our site for Ruff's Dog Stuff is "Home", what does that mean? Would it be "home" as in a home for dogs? Home for people? Home for sale? E.T. go home? With the inordinate number of websites Google and Yahoo must index each day, you can imagine the arduous challenge they would face in trying to categorize and rank thousands of sites titled "Home"!
So, perhaps contrary to our literary intuitiveness, when it comes to getting your website ranked higher, make sure your page title contains your most important keywords.
Search Engine Tip #5: The Missing Link
Another major factor in getting your site ranked higher is having enough links pointing to your website. In the early days of the web, webmasters applied this principle quite liberally (perhaps too much), linking websites back and forth into a confusing array of connections in an effort to make it easier for readers to find websites. Often websites linked weren't even related to each other, making it difficult to find succinct results.
Search engines like Google and Yahoo eventually became privy to over ambitious webmasters and marketers anxious to make a buck by filtering links according to relevance. So what does this all mean?
It's important to have other websites (still) link to your website and the more the better. However, simply make sure those websites linking to you are related to the subject content of your website. If you're a travel website, make sure you've got links pointing to you from perhaps other travel websites, travel magazine websites, travel agents, etc. In the case of Ruff's Dog Stuff, we'd hope to have links from maybe dog or pet store websites, vets, animal societies, or even personal websites of dog owners.
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