David A. Utter | Staff Writer

Even though Google said it is not competing with the SourceForge
project hosting site, it’s difficult to view it otherwise considering
Google’s features and other services that can complement it.

The Project Hosting section of Google Code debuted yesterday during
Greg Stein’s talk at the O’Reilly Open Source Convention. Stein
works for Google as an open source engineer, and is known for his
role as chairman of the Apache Software Foundation.

By Mike Banks Valentine (c) July 12, 2006

Are English speaking websites based in the US simply insular and uncaring about foreign web traffíc or are we actually Xenophobic?
Xenophobia - a phobic attitude toward strangers - comes from the Greek words xenos, meaning “foreigner”, “stranger”.

Trolling through the “referrers” section in my web site traffíc logs routinely shows hundreds of Google foreign language searches. Those foreign language search referrals usually total just slightly more than the combined total of Yahoo and MSN English language search referrals. So doesn’t it make sense to pay more attention to foreign language search in SEO than to fiddle with Yahoo and MSN optimization? My traffíc logs routinely show hundreds of translation tool referrals.

While almost anyone can have a web site these days it’s much harder to have a good website. From design aspects to readable content many sites fall flat. Below I’ve arranged a Top 10 list, because everyone loves a Top 10!

Include a detailed About Us page
The About Us page is a good place for new visitors and target traffic to find out who you are, why they should read your content or buy your products, how valuable your site can be, and also general information about your company, web site, or you.

The skeptic has always been quick to remind that popularity is not necessarily a measure of value. In a report detailing the most influential authorities on blog marketing, Onalytica, a UK-based analytics firm, illustrates that popularity is not always in line with influence, either.

In marketing, there are as many psychological factors as monetary. A car salesman knows a family’s decision maker is often not the one signing the loan papers. She (yes, she, ask any dealership) holds more sway than the celebrity endorser. While the pro football player has popularity, the wife has influence.

By Titus Hoskins (c) 2006

Successful websites extend their reach far and wide! They build links, connections, partnerships, or use whatever means they can to extend the reach of their sites. By extending their reach, these websites create greater exposure, bringing in more targëted traffíc, leads and sales.
You should do the same with your site. It will greatly increase the importance of your site - boosting name recognition and increasing your site’s visibility.

By Jason Lee Miller

For Google, it’s not about how many people you know or how many people seem to like you. It’s about, mostly, who points to you and says “there’s a person worth visiting.” Fortune Interactive’s reverse engineering to decode how search algorithms work suggests that one weighty somebody is worth more than a multitude of nobodies.

The company released the results of a study that determined inbound link (IBL) quality, or the reputation of the referrer, was not only the most influential factor across all three leading search engines Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.

By Kim Roach (c) 2006

Google currently indexes over 8 billion web pages. However, before these pages were placed in the index, they were each crawled by a special spider known as the GoogleBot. Unfortunately, many web masters do not know about the internal workings of this virtual robot.
In fact, Google actually uses a number of spiders to crawl the Web. You can catch these spiders by examining your log files.

This article will attempt to reveal some of the most important Google spiders, their function, and how they affect you as a web master. We’ll start with the well-known GoogleBot.

By Serge Botans

I think that we all know now how important backlinks are for the search engine ranking success of our web site. I also think that we all know now that one way to get these backlinks is by doing link exchanges with other sites. (For the uninitiated, backlinks are links on other web sites that point to ours.)
But do we know that there are various things we need to chëck before agreeing to exchanging links with another web site? After all, the whole point of exchanging links with others is to benefit from the ranking of their web sites. It is therefore imperative that we investigate ahead of time as to whether exchanging links with another site is to our advantage or not.

I was watching the news on TV the other day and I couldn’t help but notice the amount of times the newsreaders and reporters repeated the same things over and over again.

First of all there was the announcement of the main headline accompanied by dramatic music: “Today’s main headline: a dramatic event happened today”. This was followed by one of the newsreaders telling us again that ‘a dramatic event happened today’ and then his fellow newsreader telling us that they would be bringing us all the reaction from five different continents to the ‘dramatic event that happened today’ as well as trying to gauge the ‘mood on the street’ where the ‘actual’ dramatic event ‘actually’ took place.

By Nigel Wilkinson, MD. WNW DEsign Ltd.

So if you have read yesterdays posting you have decided your web strategy and decided what the website is going to do for your business.  The next thing to address is who your customers are and what will appeal to them.  Some prospective clients I visit know exactly who their customers are and where they come from.  Far too many have no real idea of their customer base, more importantly they have no plan as to who they want to attract.