10 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Tips To Get You Started

6. January 2012 by admin.

1.       Monitor your search standings.

2.       Be conscious of placing appropriate keywords throughout every aspect of your site: your titles, content, URLs, and image names.

3.       Integrate internal links into your site (link back to yourself) — it is an easy way to boost traffic to individual pages.

4.       Add a site map — a page listing and linking to all the other major pages on your site — makes it easier for spiders to search your site.

5.       Make your URLs more search-engine-friendly by naming them with clear keywords.

6.       Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page… Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.”

7.       Spiders can only search text, not text in your images — which is why you need to make the words associated with your images as descriptive as possible.

8.       Content needs to be fresh — updating regularly and often is crucial for increasing traffic.

9.       Distribute links to fresh content on your site across appropriate social networking platforms.

10.   Direct more traffic to your site by developing relationships with other sites.

Posted in Strategies, Techniques | Print | No Comments »

Making Simple & Easy Choices to Creating a Secure Password

23. September 2011 by admin.

There is no such thing as a perfect password. A committed hacker can crack any password, given enough time and the right “dictionary” or “brute force” tools. But just like breaking into a car, if the protection is strong enough, the hacker will become discouraged and pursue an easier target.

 

1. Start With a Base Word Phrase.

 

A good password starts with a base word phrase. Choose a memorable catchphrase, quotation, or easy-to-remember saying, and take the first letter from each word. Choose a phrase that is memorable to you.

 

Examples of some base word phrases:

 

    * Can’t See the Forest Through the Trees:  cstfttt

    * Put Up or Shut Up:  puosu

    * If the Shoe Fits, Wear It:  itsfwi

    * You Can Lead a Horse to Water:  yclahtw

    * The Last Mile Is Always Uphill: tlmiau

    * I Think, Therefore I Am:  ittia

    * Oh Say Can You See:  oscys

    * My Dog Quinnie Loves Mystery Suprises: mdqlms

 

Suggestion: try this list of acronym phrases you could use for inspiration

http://netforbeginners.about.com/od/internetglossary/a/glossary-of-internet-jargon-and-abbreviations.htm

 

Suggestion: try this list of famous quotations and catchphrases

http://forum.digital-digest.com/f41/famous-cliches-quotes-1-liners-etc-86123.html

 

2. Lengthen the Phrase

 

Passwords start to become strong at 6 characters long. While a long password can be annoying to type, a long password really helps to slow down brute force hacker attacks.

 

Tip: lengthen your password by adding the website name or computer software name to the base phrase. For example:

 

    * cstftttGmail

    * puosuVista

    * itsfwiEpinions

    * yclahtwWin7

    * tlmiauMac

    * ittiaAboutdotcom

    * oscysPayPal

    * mdqlmsEbay

 

Tech tip: passwords that are 15 characters and more are extremely strong, because Microsoft Windows will not store scrambled passwords in hidden files once they are 15 characters or longer.

 

3. Scramble the Phrase

 

Scrambling does not necessarily mean rearranging the letters. Rather, scrambling your password can effectively be achieved by swapping one or more of the password letters with a non-alphabetic character, and then purposely including uppercase and lowercase letters within the password. Scrambling creatively uses the shift key, punctuation marks, the @ or % symbols, and even semi-colons and periods. Using numbers as substitutes for letters is another strong scrambling technique.

 

Examples of scrambling:

 

    * CstftttGm@il

    * Puo5uVista

    * 1tsfwiEpinions

    * Ycl@htwWin7

    * 7lmiauMac

    * ittiaAboutdotcom

    * o5cysPayPal

    * mdqlm?!Ebay

 

4. Lastly: Rotate/Change Your Password Regularly

 

At work, your network people will require you to change your password every several days. At home, you should rotate your passwords as a matter of good computer hygiene. If you are using different passwords for different websites, rotate portions of your passwords every few weeks. Note that rotating parts of the password, not the entire passwords, will help deter hackers from stealing your phrases. If you can memorize three or more passwords at the same time, then you are in good shape to resist brute force hacker attacks.

 

Examples:

 

    * mdqlm?!Gmail

    * CstftttVista

    * Puo5uEpinions

    * 1tsfwiWin7

    * Ycl@htwMac

    * 7lmiauAboutdotcom

    * ittiaPayPal

    * o5cysEBay

 

5. Advanced Password Tips

 

There are several other resources for building strong passwords.

 

    * See more samples of strong passwords here.

http://netforbeginners.about.com/od/lockdownyourpc/a/examples_of_good_passwords.htm

 

    * See other personal password suggestions.

http://netforbeginners.about.com/u/ua/lockdownyourpc/user_suggestions_creating_strong_passwords.htm

 

    * A FREE online password generator.

http://javascript.about.com/library/blpasswd.htm

 

    * There are multiple drag-and-drop software tools that help you bypass hacker keylogger software.

 

Free tools like:

 

KeyWallet Password Manager

http://www.keywallet.com/kw_download.php?id=4

 

KeePass - a free open source password manager, which helps you to manage your passwords in a secure way.

http://keepass.info/download.html

 

Roboform

http://www.roboform.com/dist/RoboForm-Setup.exe

 

work well because you can avoiding typing your passwords entirely, and just let your mouse do the data entry.

 

    * You can also employ a digital vault like Password Safe. This kind of software creates personal “lockers” to keep all your passwords locked under a master password.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/passwordsafe/files/passwordsafe/3.26/pwsafe-3.26.exe/download

 

    * Or try phrasing tips for password generation.

http://antivirus.about.com/od/securitytips/a/passwords.htm

Posted in Strategies, Techniques, Tools | Print | No Comments »

How to Design a Mobile Enabled Website

26. July 2010 by admin.

Is your website mobile? Can your customers find you when they need you the most?

 

It is estimated that mobile advertising growth will continue at a rate of 10% each year throughout the next decade. With statistics like this, no business can afford not to jump on board and stay on top of this highly effective marketing method in this stage of the game.

 

Look around your business and note the people using a smart phone. Are some of your clientele mobile warriors? You might be surprised but odds are if you are one yourself, you are already aware of the growing numbers of people of every demographic that are using their mobile devices for much more than making phone calls.

 

Here are few import points to consider when designing a mobile enabled website for your organization.

 

1. Less is better. Plan your information architecture based upon what users typically want first when they go to your web site. Make a list and prioritize each page or function.

 

2. Minimal use of graphics. The on-the-go mobile user is not going to be wowed by images, pictures and graphics. They are browsing because they are looking for specific information. You want them in and out of your site. You’ll wow them with simplicity.

 

3. Button and font size. Eliminate wasting your visitor’s time by make links and buttons a size that is finger-friendly. Tiny text and button will just bring the visitor closer to exiting your web site.

 

4. If you want to sell products or services via your mobile website, think about using PayPal or Google Checkout. This eliminates the visitor from having to type in all contact and credit card information.

 

5. Promote your site through geo-targeted sites like Google Maps, Bing Maps and Yelp.

 

Your website should be able to read easily on a web capable phone or mobile internet device. If you’re equipped and capable enough to make your own mobile theme, the more power to you, for those of you who don’t have a designer’s or coder’s bone in your body, you have several viable options:

 

WPtouch is a hybrid Wordpress theme/plugin. It allows you to pick and choose what content you want to display to mobile browsers, and based on your formatting, plops your data into a beautiful, easy-to-read, mobile Wordpress theme. WPtouch loads lightning fast and shows your content beautifully, without interfering with your regular site theme. WPtouch automatically transforms your WordPress blog into a web-application experience when viewed from an iPhoneTM, iPod touchTM, AndroidTM, or BlackBerry StormTM touch mobile device.

http://www.bravenewcode.com/products/wptouch/

 

Mobify is more of a manual tool, you kind of have to know what you’re doing, or at least have someone who does at your disposal. It has a web editor that allows you to style your mobile them yourself. Just using the default style it has after choosing your content won’t cut it. You have to work some CSS magic.

http://mobify.me

 

Wordpress Mobile Edition will give your website an iPhone-like makeover. Not much room for customization here, but you can add more mobile user-agents via the settings page.

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-mobile-edition/

 

Encouraging communication between yourself and your readers is an endless task, so give them more reason to respond to you by reversing the order of comments, displaying the newest comments on top, right below your post. It’s just a simple setting change, go to your Discussion Settings in the administration area, and choose to display newer comments at the top of each page.

 

Remember, the internet is always changing, and so are the ways we communicate on it. Show your readers you are informed and have an opinion about current events in your niche, and they will be drawn to speak to you.

Posted in Strategies, Techniques | Print | No Comments »

Purples Squirrels Discovered at RecruitDC

25. May 2010 by admin.

A purple squirrel is more than just an oddly colored rodent. In the recruiting vernacular, a “purple squirrel” is a metaphor for that very rare, highly sought after, almost extinct species of candidate, because finding this candidate is about as easy as finding a purple squirrel.

How to Find Polygraph Candidates on Google

The strategy I use is filtering all the things I don’t want to see like job postings, etc. Keep your basic skill set search simple. If you get too many results, you can always add more filters to target a specific location or type of polygraph (”full-scope” OR “fullscope” OR “life style” OR lifestyle).

clearance AND polygraph AND resume -recruiter -job -jobs -submit -apply -”looking for” -recruiting -hiring -send -”email to” -”email resume” -opening -”to resume” -”resume database” -”sample resume” -applicant -examiner -chartrecorder

clearance AND polygraph AND “about me” OR bio OR vitae OR cv OR homepage OR profile OR resume OR resumebook -recruiter -job -jobs -submit -apply -”looking for” -recruiting -hiring -send -”email to” -”email resume” -opening -”to resume” -”resume database” -”sample resume” -applicant -examiner -chartrecorder

Place this hyperlink in your browser. It’s a search for any resume that has the word “polygraph”.  Add more filters or come up with your own key words.

http://www.egrabber.com/resumefinder/widget/keycG9seWdyYXBotypegoogleurlsearch_popup.html

Posted in Strategies, Techniques | Print | No Comments »

Top 10 Technique - Honing In On That Elusive Resume

30. April 2010 by admin.

How many different words can be used to find a resume or candidate profile, only a resume or profile, and not a job announcement? Crafting a search string that returns only useful information about your intended target is not that hard.

Let’s start with the different ways a resume or candidate profile can be found on the Internet. You want to find the following words in either the title of the web page or the within the URL or web address. Hence, the two commands to use will be “intitle:” and “inurl:”. These are generally universal commands among most of the major search and metasearch engines.

Here are some synonyms or alternative names for how resumes or candidate profiles can be found.

About Me
Bio(s)
Curriculum Vitae
CV(s)
Homepage
Profile(s)
Resume(s)
Resumebook
Vitae

You can further refine your search of that elusive resume or candidate profile by adding qualifiers that are generally found within the body of these pages.

Certification
Education
Experience
Objective
Overview
Qualifications
References
Summary of Qualifications
Work Experience
Work History

And finally, you will need to weed out all those JOBS with some choice words or phrases.

apply
benefits
email resume
email to
eoe
hiring
job
jobs
looking for
opening
recruiter
recruiting
requirements
send
submit
to resume

Posted in Strategies, Techniques | Print | No Comments »

Top 10 Tool - More Metasearch Engines

21. April 2010 by admin.

PolyMeta is an advanced Web 2.0 meta-search (federated search) and clustering engine. It enables organizations and individuals to simultaneously search diverse information resources on the Web with a common interface. The search results are merged, ranked and presented in relevance order.
www.polymeta.com

Choose Select Sources and check all the search engines below.

Google
Yahoo
Ask
Exalead
AllTheWeb
GigaBlast
Cuil
Bing

Also, try out the AllPlus Meta Search and Discovery Engine which is based on PolyMeta.
www.allplus.com

With Zuula, it is quick and convenient to get results from all the top search engines. Search engines often return very different results for the same terms. Currently, it offers Web, Image, Video, News, Blog, and Job searches and provides the results from your favorite search engine unaltered, so you can check those first and then get results from other search engines simply by clicking on their tabs.
www.zuula.com

Choose Preferences to pick all the search engines. Set your results to 60 per page

Google
Yahoo
Bing
Gigablast
Exalead
Alexa
Entireweb
Mahalo
Mojeek

Try this sample search string: +”top secret/sci” +clearance resume OR “my resume” OR vitae -recruiter -job -jobs -submit -apply -”looking for” -recruiting -hiring -send -”email to” -”email resume” -opening -”to resume”

Posted in Techniques, Tools | Print | No Comments »

Welcome to 2010

4. January 2010 by admin.

Let’s usher in 2010 with more giving than asking. A recent search of “advanced sourcing tips” revealed that there are a ton of “self-professed” experts, who for a bit of bling will divulge all their secrets to you. Whatever happened to sharing what you’ve learned freely with others. I have found over the years that this method of exchange returns much higher returns that can’t be measured in just dollars and cents. If you have been reading this blog, you have found numerous examples of search string algorithms to better identify both passive and active candidates. Below are just a few more. I challenge you to devise some new and more radical strings and identify more sources and venues to find those ever elusive A-list candidates.

 

site:*.craigslist.org/*/res “software engineer” -”this posting has expired”

intitle:resume or inurl:resume (java or j2ee or weblogic) “software engineer”

intitle:resume or inurl:resume (admin or administrator or administration or administer or administered or maintenance or maintained) (server or servers) (mail or email or messaging) (mcse or “microsoft certified systems engineer”)

site:twellow.com “software engineer” and geeks

Posted in Musings, Techniques | Print | No Comments »

Top 10 Technique - The Power of the Word “Resume”

21. December 2009 by admin.

How many resumes can be found using Google? A bunch! The same is true for most any other search engine. My research revealed that when searching for nothing more than any one of the following versions of the word resume, over 3.6 billion were found. Now, of course, there was no additional filtering to remove jobs or other keywords that would return only true resumes, but the potential results far outstrip anything you could find using all the fee-based resume boards.

Variations on the word Resume

vitæ, resumé, rèsumé, rèsumè, resume, résumé, résumè, CV, vitae, vita

Going one step further, I further refined the search with this algorithm:

(~resumé|~rèsumé|~rèsumè|~résumé|~resume) -intitle:~job -intitle:~jobs -apply -submit -job -jobs -template -”resume writing” -”resume sample”

This produces over 170 million results. However, this is still much too large to work with. Your challenge is to introduce a variety of keywords to further refine your results. All the best.

Posted in Techniques | Print | No Comments »

Top 10 Technique - Google Does Math

11. December 2009 by admin.

Beyond using keywords and catch phrases to identify candidates with Google, this search engine also employs very powerful computational language that allows you to perform any type of calculation or conversion. Here are some examples.

-  4+3 displays 7
-  9-4 displays 5
-  3*7 displays 21
-  45/9 displays 5
-  5^3 displays 125 (5 raised to power 3)
-  11%5 displays 1 (the remainder after division)
-  sqrt, nth root ofx (sqrt(64) displays 8, if you need non-square roots you can use for example 3th root of 27)
-  sin, cos, arctan, tan…

Google calculator supports various trigonometric functions, expecting a radians value, that can be expressed also using the pi constant: sin(pi/2), tan (2/3*pi)

-  ln: displays natural (base e) logarithm: ln(e^5)
-  log: displays base 10 logarithm: log(100)
-  !: displays n factorial: 3!

Numbers can be entered also in hexadecimal, octal and binary base, using 0x, 0o and 0b prefixes, for example 5 +0xf+0b1001

Conversions

-  in degrees / in radians: convert radians to degrees: pi/2 in degrees or convert degrees into radians: 90 degrees in radians
-  in hex / in binary / in octal / in decimal: convert to each of the given bases: 16 in hex , 16 in octal, 16 in binary, 0×11 in decimal
-  use 2009 (MMIX) in Roman numerals
-  distance conversions: use 100miles in km , 1m in mm, but also 200000 km in light-second etc.

Examples:

-  100mph in kph
-  1 month in seconds
-  280 Kelvin in Celsius
-  50 Fahrenheit in Celsius
-  3 euros in $ or 3 euros in dollars

Posted in Techniques | Print | No Comments »

Top 10 Technique - Basic and Advanced Search Tricks for Google.com

5. December 2009 by admin.

-  A quote/ phrase search can be written with both quotations [”like this”] as well as a minus in-between words, [like-this].

 

-  Google didn’t always understand certain special characters like [#], but now they do; a search for [C#], for example, yields meaningful results (a few years ago, it didn’t). This doesn’t mean you can use just any character; e.g. entering [t.] and [t-] and [t^] will always return the same results.

 

-  Google allows 32 words within the search query (some years ago, only up to 10 were used, and Google ignored subsequent words). You rarely will need so many words in a single query - [just thinking of such a long query is a hard thing to do, as this query with twenty words shows] - however, it can come in handy for advanced searching… especially as a developer using the Google API.

 

-  You can find synonyms of words. i.e., when you search for [house] but you want to find “home” too, search for [~house]. To get to know which synonyms the Google database stores for individual words, simply use the minus operator to exclude synonym after synonym (they will always be shown as bold in the search engine result page (SERP), like this: [~house -house -home -housing -floor].

 

-  To see a really large page-count (possibly, the Google index size, though one can only speculate about that), search for [* *].

 

-  Google has a lesser known “numrange” operator which can be helpful. Using e.g. [2006..2009] (that’s two dots in between two numbers) will find 2006, 2007, and so on until 2009.

 

-  Google’s define-operator allows you to look up word definitions. For example, [define:css] yields “Short for Cascading Style Sheets” and many more explanations. You can trigger a somewhat “softer” version of the define-operator by entering “what is something”, e.g. [what is css].

 

-  Google has some exciting back-end artificial intelligence to allow you to find just the facts upon entering simple questions or phrases like [when was Da Vinci born?] or [da vinci birthday] (the answer to both of these queries is “ Leonardo Da Vinci’s Birthday - April 15, 1452“). This feature is known as Google Answers <http://answers.google.com/answers/>.

 

-  Google allows you to find backlinks by using the link-operator, e.g. [link:blog.*.com] for this blog. The new Google Blog Search <http://blogsearch.google.com/> supports this operator as well. In fact, when Google’s predecessor started out as Larry Page’s “BackRub” < http://www.smartmoneydaily.com/business/project-backrub-aka-google.aspx> in the 1990s, finding backlinks was its only aim! However, not all backlinks are shown in Google today, at least not in web search. (It’s argued that Google does this on purpose to prevent reverse-engineering of its PageRank algorithm.)

 

-  Often when you enter a question mark at the end of the query, like when you type [why?], Google will advertise its pay-for-answer service Google Answers.

 

-  There is a “sport” called Google Hacking. Basically, curious people try to find unsecured sites by entering specific, revealing phrases. A special web site called the Google Hacking Database <http://code.google.com/p/ghdb/> is dedicated to listing these special queries.

 

-  Google searches for all of your words, whether or not you write a “+” before them (I often see people write queries [+like +this], but it’s not necessary). Unless, of course, you use Google’s or-operator. It’s an upper-case [OR] (lower-case won’t work and is simply searching for occurrences of the word “or”), and you can also use parentheses and the “|” character. [programmer (java | j2ee)] will find pages containing the word (or being linked to with the word) “programmer” and additionally containing at least one of the two other words, “java” or “j2ee”.

 

-  Not all Google services support the same syntax. Some services don’t allow everything Google web search allows you to enter (or at least, it won’t have any effect), and sometimes, you can even enter more than in web search (e.g. [insubject:test] in Google Groups <http://groups.google.com/>). The easiest thing to find out about these operators is to simply use the advanced search and then check what ends up being written in the input box.

 

-  Sometimes, Google seems to understand “natural language” queries and shows you so-called “onebox” results. This happens for example when you enter [goog], [weather washington, dc], [washington dc] or [2012] (for this one, movie times, move rating and other information will show).

 

-  Not all Googling is the same. Depending on your location, Google will forward you to a different country-specific version of Google with potentially different results to the same query. A search for [site:stormfront.org] from the US will yield hundreds of thousands of results, whereas the same search from Germany (at least if you don’t change the default redirect to Google.de) returns… zilch. Yes, Google does at times agree to country-specific censorship, like in Germany, France (Google web search), or China (Google News <http://news.google.com/>).

 

-  Sometimes, Google warns you about its results, especially when they might seem like promoting hate sites (of course, only someone misunderstanding how Google works could think it’s them promoting hate sites). Enter [jew], and you will see a Google-sponsored link titled “Offensive Search Results” leading to this explanation <http://www.google.com/explanation.html>.

 

-  For some search queries, Google uses its own ads to offer jobs. Try entering [work at Google]. Further drilling down revealed a great and current HR position need (Director of People Operations) in New York http://www.google.com/support/jobs/bin/answer.py?answer=141085.

 

-  For some of the more popular “ Googlewashing” <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_bomb> results, like when you enter [failure] and the first hit pertains to heart failure; George W. Bush is now second. Google displays explanatory ads titled “Why these results?”.

 

-  While Google doesn’t do real Natural Language Processing <http://research.google.com/pubs/NaturalLanguageProcessing.html> yet, this is the ultimate goal for them and other search engines.

 

-  Some say that whoever turns up first for the search query [president of the internet] is, well, the President of the internet. (I’m applying as well, and you can feel free to support me with this logo.)

 

-  Google doesn’t have “stop words” anymore. Stop words traditionally are words like [the], [or] and similar which search engines tended to ignore. Sometimes, when you enter e.g. [to be or not to be], Google even decides to show some phrase search results in the middle of the page (separated by a line and information that these are phrase search results).

 

-  There once was an easter-egg in the Google Calculator <http://www.google.com/help/calculator.html> that made Google show “42″ when you entered [The Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker’s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy>. The easter egg only works in lower-case.

 

-  You can use the wildcard operator in phrases. This is helpful for finding song texts - let’s say you forgot a word or two, but you remember the gist, as in [”Science in the home * Maxwell Edison * *”] - and similar tasks.

 

-  You can use the wildcard character without searching for anything specific at all, as in this phrase search: [”* * * * * * *”].

 

-  Even though www.googl.com is nothing but a “typosquatter” <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typosquatting> (someone reserving a domain name containing a popular misspelling) and search queries return very different results than Google, the site is still getting paid by Google - because it uses Google AdSense <https://www.google.com/adsense>.

 

-  If you feel like restricting your search to university servers, you can write e.g. [java-tutorial site:.edu] to only search on the “edu” domain (you can also use Google Scholar <http://scholar.google.com/>). This works for country-domains like “cn” or “de” as well.

Posted in Techniques | Print | No Comments »