Devit!

We seem to find this though process to those who are just realizing how influential Google and other search engines can be to their business. “The higher we rank in Google the more hits we will get meaning more sales.” And then, “How can we rank higher in Google?”. After giving a brief insight into how a search engine works, through algorithms, we come to the final question. “Is there a software package than will optimize my site for the search engines to get me a higher ranking?”

The answer of course is a big NO. To answer why we have to delve a little deeper into how a search engine works. Search engines use specific algorithms (mathematical formulas basically) to determine which sites rank higher than others. Keyword frequency and incoming links are examples of criteria that might have an impact on ranking.

With this in mind think of the manipulating power you would have if you could reverse engineer those algorithms. In fact that is what many found they could do in the early days of search engines. But this very fact completely undermines the usefulness of a search engine. Instead of getting results that are most relevant, you are getting search results of the sites who had reverse engineered the search engine and manipulated their content to show up first. This is where you had sites with white text on a white background just to rank higher (just to make it clear, white text on white background will get you blacklisted as an SEO spammer so please don’t do it!).

In fact I believe that the downfall of many of the biggest search engines of that era was because of this very fact. Their users were not able to find what they were looking for because the results were so manipulated.

And now we come to the crux of a successful search engine - absolutely no one can know the algorithm being used to find search results. It is rumored that even at Google, their is no one person who really knows the full extent of how their search algorithm works.

Therefore if someone is advertising a program that can rank your site higher on Google, don’t buy it. If someone guarantees that they can rank your site #1, don’t believe them. All that can be done is a best guess. For advice and help when looking into SEO, find someone with experience. Only after working with many different sites can you even begin to have an idea of what affects search engine ranking.

Here’s a great article on just this from Highrankings.com

I’m not sure we’ll ever get there but HTML 5 promises to add a few extras that web developers have been craving for a while.

One of the main features of the new HTML 5 specification would be to add a number of tags that help to describe the content of web pages. For ages we have been using div tags with specific id tags (<div id=”header”>) to describe various elements. HTML 5 proposes adding header, footer, nav, section, article and aside tags. For design and display purposes the advantages aren’t really tangible, but for semantic data descriptions it is helpful. It becomes more obvious when mobile devices such as cell phones and blackberries are used more frequently to browse the web. Content can be broken down and displayed different in various different contexts. Yes, this is possible now through alternate style sheets but having additional tags will help make this process less painful and more efficient.

Don’t get too excited as the work is far from finished. In fact according to the referenced article, estimates suggest the standard will be finished in 10-15 years! In computer years that is several lifetimes. Who know, by that time the current state of browsers and content may be obsolete.

A Preview of HTML 5 at A List Apart

There are very few instances I can think of where re-installing you entire operating system can be a fun painless process. No matter what it seems you always miss something and lose some data. It seems like Firefox developers had the same gripe and did something about it.

In order backup/save/move all Firefox settings such as bookmarks, extensions, saved passwords - everything that makes using Firefox a good experience - you only need to pay attention to 1 folder. On windows this folder is located in “documents and settings/your username/application data/Mozilla”. For details follow this link on “How To Manage Profiles“.

If you’ve seen this error, you’ve probably already spent some time trying to resolve it. We only encountered this error on our test server and it turned out the missing piece was a web.config setting. Also the following piece of code at the top of a page seems to alleviate some AJAX refresh bugs.

1) Make sure this in is your web.config

   <httpModules>
      <add name=”ScriptModule” type=”System.Web.Handlers.ScriptModule, System.Web.Extensions,               Version=1.0.61025.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35″/>
   </httpModules>

2) Add this to the to the Page declaration if you’re experiencing some page refresh bugs

   enableEventValidation=”false”

If you’ve found alternatives to this problem or our suggested solution isn’t working for you, please feel free to comment below.