SEOmoz.org has published Search Engine Ranking Factors V.2.

This document represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google’s ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results).

In reviewing each factor and looking through the standard deviation and mean weights for each factor, the following are the 5 factors that many agreed to play important parts in search engine optimization:

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
The keywords you use in the title tag speaks BIG to what your site is all about.

2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
Inbound links to your site from other external sites will certainly contribute to your search engine ranking. On top of that, the texts that these external sites use to link to your sites will tell what your site is all about.

3. Global Link Popularity of Site
While this is controversial, many seem to put this factor as highly importance. The more better / great sites linking to your site, the better your website will show in the search engine results.

4. Age of Site
It is not about when you have purchased the domain of your site but it is about when did your site get indexed by Google the first time. Like wine, the older the better is your site.

5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
This refers to the number of internal links pointing to the target page. More internal links pointing to the target page, the higher the importance the target page is.

Many more factors are still listed in the document. Therefore, it is a good idea to often evaluate your website.

Remember to always check the keywords that you want your site to relate to. Evaluate the importance of these keywords and grade them based on the factors stated in the document.

CNN.com published an article by AP. It says that new computers, iPods, USB media sticks, digital photo frames, and other digital devices can be pre-infected by viruses. Yes, you are reading it right - NEW computers.

Some of these viruses are harmless and some are very harmful. It can just be a program that sends spam emails from your computer to a program that steals your sensitive information (username and password) and email it without you knowing!

So, what can I do? The following are 3 (hopefully) useful steps:

1. DETOXICATE YOUR COMPUTER! Install anti-virus program, update it, and run it. Found a virus? Delete it. This (at least) cleans your computer before you using it. Install anti-spyware and anti-spam program for added protection.

2. GUARD YOUR COMPUTER! Virus spreads only through an executed program? Not really. My pastor had his computer infected with a virus without running any program. The virus travelled to his computer from his USB stick.

He plugged his USB stick to an infected computer, transferred the file from the USB to the computer hard disk, plugged it out, and plugged it in back to his computer. ~voila, the virus had entered his computer.

How? Apparently, a USB stick comes with auto-run / detection program which when it runs in an infected computer, the virus from the infected computer is copied into the USB. So, when a clean computer auto-runs / detects the infected USB stick, the virus from the USB enters into the computer.

Many of us certainly take this for granted as we sometimes use the auto-run features (open folder? copy pictures? play audio? menus). So, use your anti-virus program to scan anything that connects to your computer (USB stick, emails, P2P, any kind of attachment).

3. CLOSE ALL UNNECESSARY COMPUTER DOORS! Doors?! Since when a computer has doors? Yes, it has doors! But, technically, we call them “ports”. When you do a file-sharing in a network, your computer opens up the file-sharing “door”. When you send emails, you open up the SMTP “door”. Like a house, opened doors / windows are target for thieves to enter. So, close all the doors that your computer does not use. If you do not do file-sharing often, close it - uninstall the program and disable the service! Update your computers, they help to close any broken door. Finally, use firewall!

To conclude, I will use a metaphor. If you are given a new working airport (the place where you will fly by riding an airplane ~duh), what will you do to make your airport a safe and clean environment for everybody? Do this the same with your new digital device!

Hubspot, a well-known internet marketing consultant, has created a robust tool that will grade your website on the basis of SEO. Besides basing all the grades on on-page and off-page SEOs (such as headings, meta datas, image alt, and others), the tool also provides report based on blogs and social mediaspheres which definitely play a very important part in today’s Internet market.

To top that of, the report allows you to compare how your website ranks with your other competitors.

So enough of my babbling, we would like to present to you: Website Grader - an SEO tool by Hubspot.

The power of JavaScript and DOM Scripting has certainly made the behavior of a web very much dynamic and easy to implement.

One of the examples that benefit from this technology is in creating an alternating color rows table (so called striped table). Alternating color rows are very helpful in differentiating each row in a table. Therefore, it certainly helps in the presentation of your information in a table.

With a little bit of JavaScript, you can easily create one or more striped tables by simply embedding a class into your table tag.

Please see our example on alternating color rows table and its brief tutorial.

With the fast evolving demands from consumers, industries (especially the web consulting industries) are now faced with greater challenges. Therefore, collaboration is now much more needed compared to competition.

We have bombarded with so much individualism that we think competition is better than collaboration. For instance, if there is an airplane manufacturer seeking for a company that can build one of its parts, and the company realizes that it is the only company that can supply this part to the manufacturer. Competition will say to the company, “why don’t we sell this part at a higher price since we are the only supplier that can produce this part?”.

Doing this indeed will generate an immediate increase in profit but it will not benefit the company in the long run. Competition indicates that one party wins and the other loses (in this case, the winning party is the company - the losing party the manufacturer has to pay higher cost for the parts). However, if it is a collaboration, both parties win (in this case, the company will sell its parts to the manufacturer at the right price). This might bring more benefits to the company in a long run - the manufacturer will be happy with the price and a long-term relationship with the company will be extended even more.

Therefore, in this competitive environment, I think it is good for us to sit back and re-think our business model. Have we been a collaborator or a competitor with our client? Have we been doing our best to meet their budget, deadline, needs, and qualities?

“Our clients success is indeed our success”

My attention was grabbed by an article at copyblogger entitled Catablogging: Blog-Based Ecommerce and Affiliate Marketing. The term catablogging certainly caught my attention and enticed me to learn more about what it is.

Catablogging is blogging by mixing content and commerce deliberately. It is not just a blog that will attract people to buy stuffs from the site but also a blog that will attract people who are interested with the lifestyle surround the products.

For instance, if you are selling fashion products, write an article about the upcoming spring fashion and relate it with your fashion products!

This is catablogging.

I remember a McDonald billboard that says “The number that comes after FREE is $1.00″. Together with this text is the tempting and delicious 4 chicken nuggets.

However, this is totally different in the digital world. Chris Andreson, the editor in chief of Wired magazine, wrote an article “Free! Why $0.00 is the Future of Business“. In the digital world, the number that comes after FREE is still F-R-E-E.

The article outlines the reasons why FREE is the future of business:
1. Freemium: provide some free trials with limited functionality just to entice users to subscribe on the paid functionalities. (e.g. Flickr free account vs. Flickr premium account)
2. Advertising: free content and everything but money is generated from advertising.
3. Cross-subsidies: provide one thing free so that you can sell another thing related to this free stuff.
And many more can be found in the article.

What amazes me most is “FREE changes EVERYTHING”. The cost of bandwidth, storage, and processing power in the digital world is falling down to the FREE level because of Moore’s law. This changes how business is conducted in the digital world. We can see that while Google gives so many free (and great) applications they still prosper (through the Advertising). So, FREE is no more an anomaly in the digital world - it starts to become the norm. I guess in the near time, we should be thinking “How can I make my online business FREE?”.

I remember the first carousel ride that I took when I was a small kid. It was totally fun! I would not stop riding on it.

Amazingly, the web has this carousel like widget, too. Fabio Zendhi Nagao has created this widget, iCarousel, using javascript and html that complies to the web standard. When I visited his site and saw the demo (Mac lovers, you should see this demo), I just fell in love with its interactivity.

Therefore, I did an implementation of this iCarousel widget into our portfolio. So, check it out!

But, please do not play too long, mommy is going to be angry! :p

If you are an enthusiast blogger that has one or more blogs with many posts, it is very important for you to protect your blogs! Imagine if all of the posts that you have made were gone because of hard disk crash. Or, someone spams your site with indefinite number of comments or even offensive comments that are not true. This is especially important if you use your blogs to generate some $$$! This can damage your blog!

So, protect your blog.

Many ways you can do that:

1. Back it up
Many blog softwares (WordPress, TypePad, etc) comes with export functionalities where you can use to back up your blogs. If you are backing up your blogs frequently (at least once a week), it’s great - keep doing it! If you have not started and as long as your blog posts are still there, you are not too late. Make this a habit! :)
Or, if you would like to have 3rd party back up softwares the following are some recommendations:

1. Back Up My Blog - http://www.backupmyblog.com/
2. Blog Collector - http://asprise.com/product/blogcollector/

2. Use reliable and dependable web hosting providers
It is good to upgrade the ‘place’ where your blog stays. Having reliable, dependable hosting providers is one of the keys. If you have more money and it seems that more and more traffics are going into your blogs, it is good to upgrade your blog server to a better one to accomodate this. Having a fast loading time and almost 0% down-time will certainly make your readers happier :).

Some people have asked me: Where can I find good web hosting providers? Where can I find good deals on web hosting with reliable customer service?

You can visit webhostingtalk. It is a forum where you can find which web hosting providers that provide reliable services with great deals! Or, you can contact us and we can refer you to one of web hosting partners!

3. Monitor it!
Monitor your blog frequently. Check if there are any spamming or unreliable comments. If you do find, clear them out and devise a way to prevent this in the future. Find what your readers like to read and what entices them. Write your blogs on these.

These three steps do not really take a lot of time. But, certainly, they will bring a great return for you in the future. :)

How many of you have ever gone for a roadtrip? How many times you get lost because there are no clear signs on the road to guide you? This is the same for website design. Without a good navigation, people actually can get lost in a website. This is extremely important if your website is hosting many multi-tier web pages such as e-commerce site, social networking site, web 2.0 sites, and others. So what happen when people get lost in a website?

There are many scenarios of what can happen. The following is what I think I will do:

1. I am adventurous. I will look around the website to figure out where I am and where I can go.
2. I am a try-er. I will go back to the homepage and move from there.
3. I am a give-up. I will just quit the website.

Regardless whether which option I will choose, each of these options might bring a damage to your website reputation. For instance, when someone left an e-commerce site because he/she does not know where he/she is, the site will lose a potential buyer. Or other consequences.

Thus, it is important to have a site with user-friendly navigation. What are the factors that determine if a website design has a user-friendly navigation?

A List Apart identifies 3 important aspects of user-friendly navigation. A website navigation is user-friendly, when the user is able to answer the following 3 questions:

1. Where am I?
2. Where can I go?
3. Where have I been?

If your user is able to answer the above questions without looking at your website URL, congratulation, your website design has a very user-friendly navigation.

However, if you think that you need to improve on your website design navigation, A List Apart provides 3 important tips in designing your website design navigation:

1. Do not link to the page where you are on.

Many web pages actually have a link from its page to itself. This creates a confusion for the user. I am on this page and why I am being directed to the same page again.

This challenge can be overcome if there are appearance differences to let the user know that this is actually the link that goes to this same page. For instance, you can easily change the color of this link to another color using CSS.

2. Tell your users where they are now.

This can easily be achieved by:.

- Using breadcrumbs: home > section 1 > you-are-here-now page.
- Highlighting the proper section / page correctly. Use different CSS styles to signify the section / page that the user is in.

3. Think before you link

Make a thorough thinking before linking a page from your website.

Some important points to consider:

- Is this link needed to be linked in the global navigation? Or is it possible just to keep it in a sectional navigation?
- How many links should I have in the global navigation?
- What sections do the users want to access frequently? (You can create quick links for this)
- Many others.

All of these tips come just to one goal - provide your users a friendly navigation in terms that they can access your website contents easily, know where they are now, know where they can go later, and know where they have been.

Do not let your users lost in your website.