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Build SEO with .EDU Backlinks

May 13th, 2008 | 4 Comments | Posted in Blog, Business, Entrepreneurship, Google, Technology, Tidbits, Web 2.0, Web Apps, websites

If you looked at that headline and went “Huh?” - you’re probably brand new to the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO). There is an entire business industry setup around helping web site owners, blog authors, and online publications optimize every page - make that every word of every page of content - highly optimized to be indexed by search engines like Google or Yahoo!.

Search engines each have their own algorithms for indexing and ranking pages - there are books, seminars and get-rich-quick schemes all surrounding the cult of Google Page Rank. Businesses seem to live and die by their Google PR. The better optimized your site, the higher your page rank will be. A page rank is what determines how high in the results your listing is when customers are searching on certain keywords.

If you want people to find you, you want to be earlier in the search results, right? If your competitors are in front of you, your potential client might go with them first, and that means lost sales or ad revenue. Google and other search engines want their search results to be the most relevant, so they check things like your site’s meta-data and description and match it to keywords.

Back-links are when a site with more credibility or popularity than you links to your site. If it has a higher page rank than yours, it helps your page rank grow. Search engines rate links from sites with .EDU addresses as more relevant, because only educational institutions are allowed to have them. Since school teachers and administrators and professors are likely to be more researched (or so they think), an edu link is worth a lot to growing your site’s relevance within search results.

Also, just a link on a .EDU site isn’t going to help. Search engines look at the content around a link, so a link on the side of a page not surrounded by content is going to be less relevant than a link surrounded by content in an article, for example.

Sponsored by Edu Text Link

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Insurance Checks at Grocery Stores

April 27th, 2008 | No Comments | Posted in Business, Daily Life, Lifestyle, My Life, Technology, Tidbits

This Friday, I received a check in the mail from my insurance company that I had been expecting. This weekend, that money would have been particularly useful. But you see, I get my mail after 5pm nearly every day. All the banks around here either close at 4:30pm, 5:00pm, or 5:30pm, so I had no time to get to a bank by the time I got my mail.

I started to call around and I learned something interesting: most grocery stores will cash payroll checks from anywhere, even if you don’t shop with them. What they won’t do is cash a hand-written check, or a non-payroll computer-generated check. Specifically though, they would say things like “Sorry, we don’t do insurance checks.”

Are insurance companies going around and dropping bad checks? Or more likely, are people going around ripping off stores with fake checks from insurance companies?

I’d like to give special mention to GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411), because I didn’t have to get out of bed to call the stores to see if they would cash the check. I just called, said my city and state, and then the name of the business I wanted, and asked to be connected. Plus, it didn’t cost a dime. Put that number in your cell phone, it’s powered by Google and is pretty useful. So far, they only have business names and not personal addresses.

It’s not a big deal, tomorrow (Monday) I’ll just go to my bank and cash the check. Pay day is Wednesday, and that will be a nice day. I’ve got a date planned for me and Kylara to go out of town and eat at the Olive Garden, maybe go to a movie or something.

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Download High-Quality YouTube Videos

April 14th, 2008 | No Comments | Posted in Entertainment, Google, Hack the Planet, Technology, Tidbits, Videos, Web 2.0, YouTube, software, websites

Did you know that most YouTube videos can be downloaded now as high-quality mp4 (MPEG-4) files? There have been browser and URL hacks to download files previously, and several sites and Firefox extensions would allow you to plug-in an URL to a YouTube video and it would snag the file or give you an URL to download.

Now, you can do the same thing to get the higher-quality videos. Just save the following as a bookmarklet by dragging it up to your bookmarks bar in Firefox or Safari, or right-clicking and making it a Favorite in Internet Explorer:

Download YouTube Video

Clicking on this bookmark creates a new link below the video you are watching that should be to the downloadable video. Instead of left-clicking, you’ll want to right-click and choose “Save As” and name it something with a .mp4 extension.

I ripped-off came upon these instructions from a blog called Google Operating System via a Lifehacker post, and there you can find more information, including a Greasemonkey script for Firefox that takes care of this whole business for you every time you visit YouTube.

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Get Proper Rankings for Your Blog

April 14th, 2008 | No Comments | Posted in Blog, Bloggy Goodness, Err., Google, Technology, Web 2.0, free stuff, software, websites

Google Page Rank has been king of the web for far too long. They use a “mysterious” and “magical” formula whose inner workings is only barely understood by the public. GPR also has a certain amount of manual human adjustment to weed out those that “cheat the system.” How biased or unbiased this system is has been subject of some debate among bloggers.

Now is the time for change - bloggers can take ranking back into their own hands again. Izea Inc., the company behind PayPerPost and SocialSpark and RockStartUp and firm spacebar atheists when it comes to titles, have launched IzeaRanks.com. This RealRank system is based on the actual popularity and traffic to your site, and is reserved specially for bloggers.

It’s fairly simple to install and use - just visit IzeaRanks.com and sign up, then get the code for the ITK tools (a small snippet of Javascript) that you put into your blog’s HTML code. Usually that’s somewhere inside your blog’s template. Their website has instructions on where it should go.

Once installed, the IzeaRanks RealRank system will show you how many site visitors you have per day and on average for the week and show you on a line graph how you do on a month-to-month basis. You’ll then be ranked amongst other RealRank bloggers. There are already thousands of other blogs on this system, so you don’t have to feel like your ranking is artificially inflated because of a low number of initial rankings.

Finally, show off your blog’s ranking using an IzeaRanks badge, another small snippet of code you can put in your blog’s sidebar or other location that displays your rank for bragging rights.

Sponsored by IZEARanks

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Use Google to find MP3s and More

April 13th, 2008 | No Comments | Posted in Entertainment, Technology, Tidbits

Search powerhouse Google has captured millions if not billions of internet users’ attention and replaced the likes of Yahoo, MSN, WebCrawler, and Alta Vista as their search engine of choice. You probably have visited Google at least once today. If you’re like me, you may even use Google as your home page.

Do you cringe when you hear phrases like “search operators”? Well, this nerdy tip may sound intimidating, but you can use search operators with Google to help find web sites with mp3’s of your favorite songs.

Simply search like this:

inurl:(htm|html|php) intitle:”index of” +”last modified” +”parent directory” +description +size +(wma|mp3|aac|m4a|mp4|ogg) “Panic! At the Disco”

Now for an explanation:

  • inurl:(htm|html|php) tells the search to look for URLs that end in htm, html, or php. This eliminates a lot of lyrics sites and gets you to the goods.
  • intitle:”index of” tells the search to look at the title of the page and look for the phrase “index of” - because on most Apache or *nix-based servers, this is in the title of a directory or folder listing when someone forgets that their music files are accessible to their web server. Some file-sharing clients like Limewire also make this available.
  • +(wma|mp3|aac|m4a|mp4|ogg) tells the search to look for these types of files on the pages it searches through. So far, that should mean we are only getting directory or file folders that list music files. If you were looking for software, you might look for ZIP or DMG or ISO or EXE (be careful what you download though, and always do a virus scan!).
  • “Panic! At the Disco” - an excellent band, in my opinion. However, you could search for any band, or any song, or any album, for that matter.

There are a lot of ways to modify these search operators to get the results you want. YMMV (Your Mileage May Vary). And for legal reasons, I need to remind you not to download music you do not own that is copyrighted. Support your favorite artists and buy their albums legitimately. And as always, surf smart - don’t click on anything that looks suspicious and never download any programs or plugins from unknown sources. Run a virus check on all files that you download.

Thanks to Lifehacker, the source of this information.

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