14 things to be avoided for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Ok, folks I came across a very informative article related to some basics of search engine optimization at Google Blogoscoped, a blog that covers Google and the tech world since 2003 with 80% focus on Google. The person behind Google Blogoscoped is Philipp Lenssen and his posts are widely read.

(Philipp Lenssen has also interviewed Matt Cutts, Google’s Gadgets Guy back in Nov.2005. If you are interested, read the interview here.)

In this article he gives some basic tips about search engine optimization and somehow what caught my eye was the 14 steps he has mentioned, that should certainly be avoided while trying to optimize your search engine rankings and I thought of sharing it with all the fellow bloggers who have just started setting their sights on the Blogosphere.

Here is the 14 things that are an absolute no no:

• Don’t stuff too many keywords into places where they don’t belong.

• Don’t optimize for search engines at the cost of human visitors; if someone told you adding a dash to the domain name helps your rankings, but you feel that dash might confuse your customers, then don’t add it.

• Don’t trust people who promise you “instant #1 rankings”, “guaranteed top 10 positions” or anything of the sort.

• Don’t link to others from your site just because they promised a link back to you.

• Don’t link to others just because they paid you, unless you know exactly what you’re doing (i.e. you know about “bad neighborhoods,” the “nofollow” attribute, PageRank, JavaScript-ads vs text links, what it means to get googleaxed and so on).

• Don’t create multiple pages with exactly the same content.

• Don’t let others people “litter” URLs on your site; if you have a web forum, keep it spam-free.

• Don’t “litter” your URL on other people’s sites.

• Don’t invest in a cheap server that won’t be able to cope with your traffic; don’t build your whole site on free website tools only – if you want to have a high-quality site & server, you need to pay for it.

• Don’t worry about a page’s meta descriptions, meta keywords and such; your time is better spent creating content.

• Don’t use tools that automatically submit your site’s URL to directories, search engines and such.

• Don’t present different content to search engines than you present to users; for example, don’t hide your text to visitors and show it to search engines.

• Don’t “over-optimize"; relax, if search engines required webmasters to heavily optimize, they’d be doing a very bad job.

• In general, don’t try to outsmart search engines (unless perhaps you intend to dedicate your life to that task); those maintaining search engines are paid to outsmart webmaster tricks, so in the long run, chances for successful tricks are low.

You can read the basics of Search engine Optimization at Google Blogoscoped.

Full movies/Tv shows for free--Simplistic's Movie Links.

Yes, there is a website that puts full length videos and Tv shows from sites like YouTube, Dailymotion, Guba etc:- The site is called Simplistic's Video Links and is updated daily. They get all the movies that are uploaded in parts on sites like YouTube, Dailymotion etc: and join them together and put it on this site. Most of the movies at this site are split into 10 parts. There are over 325 movies available at this site right now and it is updated daily.

According to the site it is legal since the contents are not hosted at the site but is provided through the video hosting sites.

How long each movie will stay at this site remains to be seen since whenever the movies are taken off from the original sites like YouTube because of copyright violations the movies will disappear at this site too.

Phishing sites using Flash.

It has been reported by F-secure that there are some phishing sites that have started appearing on the net using Flash instead of HTML. This technique is now being used to work around the Anti-phishing tool bars and the built in Anti-phishing techniques in the browsers like Firefox 2, Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9.1

Two of the sites that have been found to be using these techniques are www.ppal-form-ssl.com and www.welcome-ppl.com, both targeting Paypal users.

If you right click on the pages you will see the "Zoom in" "show all" "play" options in the menu instead of the normal options you see on an HTML page.

When you type in login information, the SWF file displays a new page, asking for your credit card information.

So now even if your Anti-phishing tool bars does not alert you when you land at a phishing site be careful to check the url and above all use your prudence before giving out informations.

10 ways to use LinkedIn (by Guy Kawasaki)

LinkedIn is a site as most of know is network of professionals. So it certainly is a good platform to advertise your Job expertise and look for jobs and also a site which allows you to connect with professionals and people who are looking for experts and professionals for various aspects thus it is not just about getting jobs but forming partnerships or making sales etc: All 500 of the fortune 500 companies are represented at Linkedin.

However many of the people who join the site is not fully aware of how to make the most use of it and according to Guy Kawasaki it is a tool that is under-utilized. In his blog Guy Kawasaki has posted a top-ten list of ways to increase the value of LinkedIn. And here are the 10 things he has covered:

1.Increasing your visibility.
2.Improving your connectability.
3.Improving your Google PageRank.
4.Enhancing your search engine results.
5.Performing blind, “reverse,” and company reference checks.
6.Increasing the relevancy of your job search.
7.Making your interview go smoother.
8.Gauging the health of a company.
9.Gauging the health of an industry.
10.Tracking startups.

For those who are interested in reading the complete advice go to Guy Kawasaki's blog.