Good SEO Ranking

Do I Need a Lot of Content to Achieve a Good SEO Ranking?

Most people seem to think that they need a lot of content to achieve a good search engine ranking. Sure, high quality content is always going to be a crucial SEO ranking factor, but is it really as important as people seem to think?

This is a question that seems to pop up quite often, so I decided to put together this short article to shed some light on the matter. Hopefully, after reading this you should have more of an idea about the way that the amount of content you have relates to your SEO score, and therefore helping boost its SEO ranking.

Without further ado, let’s jump straight into it!

Can I Rank Without Very Much Content

Well, the short answer is that yes, of course you can rank for certain keywords and phrases without pages and pages of written content. I mean, small business websites all over the world sit at the top of the search engine rankings for their relevant local keywords without having too much content.

But, in saying that, it’s important to realise that it’s always going to be easier to achieve a better search engine ranking if you have more content. After all, Google’s new ranking algorithms tend to focus on the user experience and how much value you bring to your readers – and if you have more content, you’re logically going to be offering more information and value.

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Website Design

Why Is It Important To Maintain A Consistent Design Throughout Your Website?

If you’re building or designing a new website – either with WordPress or another platform – then you need to think carefully about your global design features. It’s very important to make sure that you get your UI design right, otherwise you simply won’t be capitalising on your site’s full potential.

Unfortunately, a lot of people fall into the trap of changing their general design features between different pages or sections of their website. Doing this really isn’t a good idea, and in this article I’m going to explain why.

If you’re designing an attractive website, it’s important to maintain a consistent design throughout your website because:

Maintaining A Consistent Design Creates A Professional Appearance

One of the main keys to success in the modern digital world is maintaining a professional, trustworthy appearance. And, one of the easiest ways to do this is to make sure that you maintain a consistent design throughout your Responsive Web Design project.

Think carefully about how the design features that you use are portraying you and your business. Are they showing you as serious professionals who are going to succeed in the online world? Or, is your design inconsistent and flawed?

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Local SEO Tips

Top 5 Local SEO Tips

If you run a small, geographically constrained business, then local SEO is something that’s always going to be crucial to your success. Local SEO basically allows you to rank well for location-based keywords, which is great when you’re trying to source new clients and generate new leads.

Unfortunately, a lot of small business website owners don’t understand the importance of local SEO. With this in mind, I decided to put together a short list of my top five local SEO tips. These include:

  1. Create Location Pages

If you’re serious about ranking well for location based keywords, location pages are a great place to start. Basically, a location page outlines all of your services and the things that you offer in a specific suburb or area, and includes the location or locations that you want to rank for as major keywords.

For example, if you own a small plumbing business in Location X, you might create a location page outlining all of your services in Location X. Your keywords would be things like “Plumbing Location X” and “Location X plumbing services”.

  1. Make Sure Your Address Is Listed On Your Website

If you have a physical address, you need to make sure that it’s listed on your website, and that it’s correct. Similarly, include a phone number and a list of your offices if you have more than one.

This will help Google work out exactly where you’re based, and should help you rank better in your local search rankings.

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Cisco Linux

It’s About Time Cisco Showed Linux Some Heart

Cisco, the name spoken with the most reverential tones in the IT and telecommunications market, has a new push for their hardware’s interoperability with Linux software. The move ties in Yahoo!, who will be working with Digium to deploy Asterisk throughout Yahoo’s global communications net, using Cisco SIP end points on the desktop.

Actually, Cisco has shown plenty of love to Linux in the past, just not in supporting Free and Open Source Software on telecommunications systems. Remember, back in 2005, Cisco internally rolled out Linux desktops to their workforce.

The reason given being, not cost, but because Linux is easier to support! Take that, MSCEs!

And then back in April of 2008, Cisco opened up its ISR routers’ API, with an application extension platform based on Linux. So you might actually compare Cisco more to IBM. They’ve been planning this move for a long time, and they do it like they do anything, in slow, steady steps.

TechCrunch

Disregard TechCrunch; Use Google First. Always.

Controversial as always, TechCrunch gets our attention this month by questioning the ‘Google-it’ mentality. And we’d like to not only refute things like this, but go all the way back to Socrates and lay out our direct, irrefutable line of logical statements which leads us to this path.

Proposition One: Nobody owes you an answer.
When you have a question, you are imposing on another person to do you a favor. There is no law, nor moral obligation, for anyone else to answer your question. That’s at all, whether Google exists or not, whether you can find the answer on Google or not. Both Google and people are going out of their way to help you for free.

Proposition two: The only motivation people have to answer your question is to do something kind.
That’s it. Invisible-hand-of-the-marketplace or not, every time a human answers another human’s question for free, they are practicing altruism. It might have the secondary assumption that you’ll ‘pay it forward’ and help other people, or the feeling of obligation that the answerer is paying it forward, or because helping the questioner helps the answerer indirectly, and so on. But all answers start with a desire to help.

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ACTA

Is It Time To Be Afraid of ACTA Yet?

It only looks to involve the US and UK/EU at this point, but the broad plans of ACTA, the international Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, look like they could eventually become a de-facto standard for the whole wide world of e-commerce.

TechDirt is digging up shovels full of information on ACTA. The agreement is set up to protect against the boom in global media piracy, but the problem is that it’s almost impossible to solve this problem without trampling on multiple human rights at the same time.

That’s why the organizations Consumers International, EDRi, the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, ASIC (a French trade association for web 2.0 companies), and the Free Knowledge Institute have all banded together to protest the agreement and voice their concerns, or at least put on the breaks until cooler heads can have a look at this.

On Australian turf, the Australian Digital Alliance, Australian Library and Information Association, Choice (a non-profit consumer advocate), and the Internet Industry Association have formed a coalition stating much the same thing. In a package, reducing counterfeiting is important where it endangers consumer health or safety or constitutes commercial scale infringement is a good thing; but we shouldn’t have to roll heads to do it.

windows 7

Is An Upgrade Too Much To Ask Of Some People?

Sometimes you have to wonder if we should re-think this whole software design thing. A reminder of just how over-their-heads some people are occurred recently with the story that Microsoft won’t be providing IE 9 for Windows XP. That’s right, if you’re not using Windows 7 by now, you are simply off the radar for browser upgrades.

The trouble, as all web developers know, is getting users to upgrade those browsers. Why is this always such a struggle? Older browsers are buggy, insecure, troublesome, and the hardest of all to develop for. We’ve gone for years like this, with a few hardy users getting the newest edition of everything, most of the crowd shuffling along within a year, and then there’s the die-hard long tail, bringing up the rear. They use IE7, IE6, even IE5.5, and you’ll get that old browser away from them when you pry it from their cold dead fingers. They make web designers pull out their hair.

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Article Marketing

Article Marketing – A Major Internet Marketing Strategy

Article marketing forms the foundation of all effective Internet marketing campaigns these days. Having attained the position to be of the industry standard among web marketing strategies, article marketing is the best way to vastly increase the level of natural search engine rankings of your website. Article marketing depends on a variety of factors, including correct placement of keywords, comprehensive syndication and one-way links to text among several other vital practices that work together to make a site interesting to someone searching the web for specific information.

To be really successful, article marketing should form the core of your regular efforts for tackling competition.

There are several ways in which article marketing can benefit your website. The most potent among them all is by providing greater visibility to the site. In article marketing, you provide the articles you have written to several ezines, websites and blogs free of cost. Your payout is that you are allowed to include a brief bio at the end of the article in the resource box with links to your website.