Photo Galleries are becoming more and more popular these days. Today we are going to create a simple one using some of the new CSS3 features and jQuery. A prominent feature of the gallery is that You will be able to Drag the photos with single click in the gallery we are going to create. Hope you will enjoy this and understand it easily.
Let’s take a look at what we will be building, here is the result :
View The Demo, you can also download the result by clicking here (*.zip archive).
Step 1: Preparing The Files
Let’s start by creating our needed files :
Index.html
style.css ( this file will contain all the styles we need )
script.js ( this one will contain our scripts )
In this tutorial I used some nature photos, but you can select your own:
The Lookout By Chris Gin
Leeds Castle Grounds By Joel Antunes
Driftwood By Macindows
Sunny Highlands By sopex
Grassy Sunset By mattyv8
Here is also the texture I used in this tutorial. Now create a new folder, name it ” images ” then put in your choosed photos.
Step 2: The html file structure
First of all we have to link to our css, javascript files and both of jQuery and jQuery ui, to do this simply paste this code in your head section:
Now we need to show our images. To do this, add the code above into the body section of your html file :
<img src="images/1.jpg" alt="" />
Step 3: Adding some styles !
Now we have our html file ready, we need to add some styles to the body section and to our images:
Explanation:
Here I added a background image. For each image I set it’s background to a light grey and used some paddings to give the traditional Polaroid shape. Also I have used some CSS3 techniques to give each image a simple shadow. Next I used some margins to make some space between the images.
Step 4: Time for some scripts
Now we have our images set up, we need to have some scripts to have a working polaroid.
First add this to your script.js file:
I defined a variable with a name of zindex and assigned to it 1 as a value. Then I used the jQuery ui features to make each image draggable. When an image is dragged the zindex value will increase by 1 then I used $(this).css to change the z-index value of the dragged image.
Let’s continue, ad this to the previous code :
$('img').each(function(){
var rot = Math.random()*30-15+'deg';
var left = Math.random()*50+'px';
var top = Math.random()*150+'px';
$(this).css('-webkit-transform' , 'rotate('+rot+')');
$(this).css('-moz-transform' , 'rotate('+rot+')');
$(this).css('top' , left);
$(this).css('left' , top);
$(this).mouseup(function(){
zindex++;
$(this).css('z-index' , zindex);
});
});
$('img').dblclick(function(){
$(this).css('-webkit-transform' , 'rotate(0)');
$(this).css('-moz-transform' , 'rotate(0)');
});
Here I used the .each() technique, so for each image three variables are created : the rotation degrees, the top position and the left position. For each variable you have to use some math : math.random returns a value between 0 and 1 so we have to control the other values to get the numbers we need. Per example the first variable will always return a value between 15 and -15 degrees. For the left and top position I used the same formulas but I have changed the other values. After preparing the variables we have to use them. To do this we are going to use the same method we have used in the previous code ( this.css) then change the rotation degrees, the top position and the left position of each image so we can get a random appearance.
After all this I used the .mouseup method so when an image is clicked it will be showed up in the front. Also you can add something useful : when the button is double clicked we are going to adjust it with rotate(0).
Now all our script file should look like this :
$(document).ready(function(){
var zindex = 1;
$("img").draggable({
start: function(event, ui) {
zindex++;
var cssObj = { 'z-index' : zindex };
$(this).css(cssObj);
}
});
$('img').each(function(){
var rot = Math.random()*30-15+'deg';
var left = Math.random()*50+'px';
var top = Math.random()*150+'px';
$(this).css('-webkit-transform' , 'rotate('+rot+')');
$(this).css('-moz-transform' , 'rotate('+rot+')');
$(this).css('top' , left);
$(this).css('left' , top);
$(this).mouseup(function(){
zindex++;
$(this).css('z-index' , zindex);
});
});
$('img').dblclick(function(){
$(this).css('-webkit-transform' , 'rotate(0)');
$(this).css('-moz-transform' , 'rotate(0)');
});
});
That’s it !
Thanks for following this tutorial. I hope you liked it and could follow it step by step. If you’ve done everything correctly, you should have ended up with something like this. If you have any problem or you need some help feel free to write your question or request into the comments section.
Want more?
Check also Creating a polaroid photo viewer with CSS3 and jQuery much more advanced tutorial done by Marco Kuiper!
Today we have collected 50 High Quality Funky and Groovy fonts which can be used to make some funny design and on the other hand they can be used in web-designing also! These fonts are very handy when it comes to designing kids websites. We are sure that they will help you in your designs.:)
Author’s comments:
“When I was a little kid, I used to watch some christian scrolls my grandmothers had in their respective homes. I loved the typography they used to make them. Many years later, i searched up and down for that font, but couldn’t find it. So I went to Librería Parroquial (a christian bookstore) and searched for some of those scrolls. In close examination, I realized they didn’t use a ready made font, but instead wrote them by hand. So, I copied the glyphs and made the font out of them.”
This font can be used to design header of some design related website as it provide a very intriractive look and its creativity will attract the visitors .
In the end i request to leave your feedback because it will help us to improve the quality of article. You can also tell me on which category i should write in my next article :)
Hi there Mozzers! My name is Sam Crocker and I work for Distilled. This is my first post here at SEOmoz and I am looking forward to your feedback!
Background
My mother used to scold me for misusing my toys, playing with my food and for having a bit too much energy. She was well within her rights, as I was a bit of a handful, but at the moment one particular phrase really sticks out in my mind
“Is that what that was made for Sam? Use it the right way, please.”
Whether I was riding down the stairs in a sleeping bag, having sword fights with paper towel tubes with my sister, or using my skateboard as a street luge- I’ve always been big on using things for purposes other than their intended design. It should be no surprise that I do the same with some of the fancy and powerful tools upon which we have become quite dependent in the SEO world. Much like when I was little, it seems like by using things the “wrong way” there’s scope to have a bit more fun and to discover some new and different ways of accomplishing the same goals.
Me As a Little Guy. Snow Scraper = Renegade Fighting Stick?
I spoke about my most recent adventures in using things the wrong way at SMX Advanced London. I don’t think too many people who came to the keyphrase research session expecting to hear about how a scraper like Mozenda could be used to save all sorts of time and effort and generate new keyphrase ideas. You may want to have a quick read through that before watching the screencast.*
It's also important to point out that Mozenda is best used as a discover tool in the instance I provide here. If this method were a perfect solution to keyword research you could very easily build a tool that does it better. The beauty of Mozenda, however, is that it can be just about any tool you want. If you need to generate brand new content around a subject area you know nothing about, you can use it to explore tags on delicious or another social media platform.
Given a great deal of interest in this technique that I received from attendees at the presentation and in the twittersphere I decided it was worth providing a full walkthrough to cover some of the nuances I wasn’t able to cover in a 12 minute presentation and to share with the folks who weren't able to attend the conference.
*It’s worth noting that for the sake of consistency I used the same Google Suggest tool in the video as I used for my initial research and discussed at SMX London. Since then Rob Milard built his own keyphrase expander tool based on this work and it is considerably more versatile than the original tool (you can search Google.com or Google.co.uk and export the file as a CSV). The output of this version isn’t in XML and provides the “search volume” data missing from the first tool. So congratulations and a BIG thank you to Rob from me and the search community in general!
Next Steps
The above screencast is an introduction of a technique we have been experimenting with to broaden the keyphrases targeted on a site (particularly, it can be used to increase the number of longtail keyphrases and provide insights into terminology you may not be targeting in your current list of keyphrases). This can be particularly useful if you work for an agency dealing with clients from a number of different sectors. For the sake of demonstration I have only input 7 terms into the Google Suggest tool in an effort to pull out a workable dataset for the screencast and for my presentation but Mozenda is a pretty powerful tool, so there’s really nothing stopping you from using more keyphrases. As a matter of courtesy, however, I would suggest setting up some delays when running any large scraping task to prevent overwhelming servers or hogging bandwidth. For more information on this, please have a read through Rich Baxter's latest piece on indexation.
One of the questions I was asked (by a number of people) was “what next?” As in: “what on earth am I going to do with these extra 10,000 keyphrases?” And although this presentation was intended as a proof of concept, I don’t want anyone to think we are trying to keep anything secret here so here are a few ideas about what you might consider doing next.
Option 1: Ask For Help!
For the people who find themselves thinking “I’m not really sure what to do with this data” I would suggest enlisting the help of a numbers guy or gal (Excel Wizards or other nerdy warriors). Odds are if you find looking at this sort of data daunting, you’re going to need their help making sense of the numbers later anyways.
Option 2: Outsource
The second option, for those of who know exactly what you want to do with this data, but don’t have the time to go through it all, I strongly suggest enlisting the help of cheap labour. Either find yourself an intern or make use of Amazon’s Mechanical Turks to find someone who can accomplish just what you need. The nice thing about services like this is that it’s a 24/7 workforce and you can get a feel for how helpful someone will be fairly quickly and painlessly.
Option 3: Jump Right In
Finally, the third option for those of you with some Excel skillz and a bit of time. There will definitely still be some manual work to be done and some weeding through for terms that are not at all relevant, the suggestions where you usually say aloud “no, Google I did NOT mean...” will clearly need to go.
The best use of this data will be the general themes or "common words" that you can quite easily sort through or filter for using Excel and that you may have been to oblivious to prior to starting.
Feel Free to Sing Along if You Know The Words! (image via: Kottke)
Step 1: Remove all duplicates. In this example there were no duplicates created though I can only assume that with 10,000 keyphrases run through the tool there will be some duplicate output.
Step 2: Remove URL suggestions. I know we like to think otherwise, but if the user was searching for “gleeepisodes.net” they probably aren’t interested in TV listings from your site. It would also be a fairly cheeky move to try to optimise a page about someone else’s website.
Step 3: Remember your target audience. If you only operate in the UK “Glee schedule Canada” and “Glee schedule Fox” can probably be eliminated as well. Now would be a good time to eliminate any truly irrelevant entries as well (e.g. “Gleevec” – although some of your viewers may have leukemia this probably is not what most visitors to your site are looking for).
Step 4: With the remaining terms and phrases run them through the usual sense checking routines. This is a good time to check global/local search volume for these terms and look at some of the competitiveness metrics as well. Search volume will probably be quite high for most of these terms (at least enough for Google to think someone might be looking for them regularly), though competitiveness probably will be too, so choose wisely.
Identifying the patterns at this stage will be essential to the value of the research you are conducting. You can try to filter for common phrases or suggestions at this stage and if, as in this example you realise "rumors" is a relevant term you've not targeted anywhere on the site, it is high time you consider adding content targeting this area for all of the television shows on the site.
Last Step: Come up with a sensible strategy to attack all this new content. Look at these terms as jumping off points for new content, new blog posts, and new ways of talking about this and other related products/services/subjects on the site.
Conclusions
A lot can be learned through this sort of exercise. In addition to finding some new high volume search terms, it may help you identify trends in search for which you have not been competing and have implications across the whole site rather than on one page. For example, maybe you didn’t think about “spoilers” or “rumors.” For a site dedicated to television programmes this sort of terminology will likely be valuable for a number of other shows as well!
The moral of the story? If you build it they will come.
Sometimes it is worth developing your own tool to make use of existing technology. Whilst I still feel Mozenda is the right tool for the job for handling larger datasets, the tool Rob built is a perfect example of both how a little creativity and building on other’s ideas can lead to benefit for everyone. Rob’s tool effectively rendered my Mozenda workaround unnecessary for most small to medium sites, and that’s awesome.
A final word of warning: I’m not suggesting that you replace all other keyphrase research with this idea. This technique is best utilised either during creation of a site about an area you know very little about (it’s rare, but it happens), or when you’ve run out of ideas and tried some of the more conventional approaches. It’s all about thinking outside of the box and trying new things to save you time. Onpage optimisation, linkbuilding and more traditional keyphrase research needs to be done but sometimes the best results come from trying something a bit experimental and using things for purposes other than that which they were designed.
If you have any questions, comments or concerns feel free to shame me publicly either in the below section or on Twitter.
As some of you likely noticed, Linkscape's index updated today with fresh data crawled over the past 30 days. Rather than simply provide the usual index update statistics, we thought it would be fun to do some whiteboard diagrams of how we make a Linkscape update happen here at the mozplex. We also felt guilty because our camera ate tonight's WB Friday (but Scott's working hard to get it up for tomorrow morning).
Linkscape, like most of the major web indices, starts with a seed set of trusted sites from which we crawl outwards to build our index. Over time, we've developed more sophisticated methods around crawl selection, but we're quite similar to Google, in that we crawl the web primarily in decending order of (in our case) mozRank importance.
For those keeping track, this index's raw data includes:
41,404,250,804 unique URLs/pages
86,691,236 unique root domains
After crawling, we need build indices on which we can process data, metrics and sort orders for our API to access.
When we started building Linkscape in late 2007, early 2008, we quickly realized that the quantity of data would overwhelm nearly every commercial database on the market. Something massive like Oracle may be able to handle the volume, but at an exorbitant price that a startup like SEOmoz couldn't bear. Thus, we created some unique, internal systems around flat file storage that enable us to hold data, process it and serve it without the financial and engineering burdens of a full database application.
Our next step, once the index is in place, is to calculate our key metrics as well as tabulate the standard sort orders for the API
Algorithms like PageRank (and mozRank) are iterative and require a tremendous amount of processing power to compute. We're able to do this in the cloud, scaling up our need for number-crunching, mozRank-calculating goodness for about a week out of every month, but we're pretty convinced that in Google's early days, this was likely a big barrier (and may even have been a big part of the reason the "GoogleDance" only happened once every 30 days).
After processing, we're ready to push our data out into the SEOmoz API, where it can power our tools and those of our many partners, friends and community members.
The API currently serves more than 2 million requests for data each day (and an average request pulls ~10 metrics/pieces of data about a web page or site). That's a lot, but our goal is to more than triple that quantity by 2011, at which point we'll be closer to the request numbers going into a service like Yahoo! Site Explorer.
The SEOmoz API currently powers some very cool stuff:
Open Site Explorer - my personal favorite way to get link information
The mozBar - the SERPs overlay, analyze page feature and the link metrics displayed directly in the bar all come from the API
Classic Linkscape - we're on our way to transitioning all of the features and functionality in Linkscape over to OSE, but in the meantime, PRO members can get access to many more granular metrics through these reports
Each month, we repeat this process, learning big and small lessons along the way. We've gotten tremendously more consistent, redundant and error/problem free in 2010 so far, and our next big goal is to dramatically increase the depth of our crawl into those dark crevices of the web as well as ramping up the value and accuracy of our metrics.
We look forward to your feedback around this latest index update and any of the tools powered by Linkscape. Have a great Memorial Day Weekend!
In 1997, Google's founders created an algorithmic method to determine importance and popularity based on several key principles:
Links on the web can be interpreted as votes that are cast by the source for the target
All votes are, initially, considered equal
Over the course of executing the algorithm on a link graph, pages which receive more votes become more important
More important pages cast more important votes
The votes a page can cast are a function of that page's importance, divided by the number of votes/links it casts
That algorithm, of course, was PageRank, and it changed the course of web search, providing tremendous value to Google's early efforts around quality and relevancy in results. As knowledge of PageRank spread, those with a vested interest in influencing the search rankings (SEOs) found ways to leverage this information for their websites and pages.
But, Google didn't stand still or rest on their laurels in the field of link analysis. They innovated, leveraging signals like anchor text, trust, hubs & authorities, topic modeling and even human activity to influence the weight a link might carry. Yet, unfortunately, many in the SEO field are still unaware of these changes and how they impact external marketing and link acquisition best practices.
As you read through the following 10 issues, please note that these are not hard and fast rules. They are, from our perspective, accurate based on our experiences, testing and observation, but as with all things in SEO, this is opinion. We invite and strongly encourage readers to test these themselves. Nothing is better for learning SEO than going out and experimenting in the wild.
#1 - Links Higher Up in HTML Code Cast More Powerful Votes
Whenever we (or many other SEOs we've talked to) conduct tests of page or link features in (hopefully) controlled environments on the web, we/they find that links higher up in the HTML code of a page seem to pass more ranking ability/value than those lower down. This certainly fits with the recently granted Google patent application - Ranking Documents Based on User Behavior and/or Feature Data, which suggested a number of items that may considered in the way that link metrics are passed.
Those who've leveraged testing environments also often struggle against the power of the "higher link wins" phenomenon, and it can take a surprising amount of on-page optimization to overcome the power the higher link carries.
#2 - External Links are More Influential than Internal Links
There's little surprise here, but if you recall, the original PageRank concept makes no mention of external vs. internal links counting differently. It's quite likely that other, more recently created metrics (post-1997) do reward external links over internal links. You can see this in the correlation data from our post a few weeks back noting that external mozRank (the "PageRank" sent from external pages) had a much higher correlation with rankings than standard mozRank (PageRank):
I don't think it's a stretch to imagine Google separately calculating/parsing out external PageRank vs. Internal PageRank and potentially using them in different ways for page valuation in the rankings.
#3 - Links from Unique Domains Matters More than Links from Previously Linking Sites
Speaking of correlation data, no single, simple metric is better correlated with rankings in Google's results than the number of unique domains containing an external link to a given page. This strongly suggests that a diversity component is at play in the ranking systems and that it's better to have 50 links from 50 different domains than to have 500 more links from a site that already links to you. Curiously again, the original PageRank algorithm makes no provision for this, which could be one reason sitewide links from domains with many high-PageRank pages worked so well in those early years after Google's launch.
#4 - Links from Sites Closer to a Trusted Seed Set Pass More Value
#5 - Links from "Inside" Unique Content Pass More Value than Those from Footers/Sidebar/Navigation
Papers like Microsoft's VIPS (Vision Based Page Segmentation), Google's Document Ranking Based on Semantic Distance, and the recent Reasonable Surfer stuff all suggest that valuing links from content more highly than those in sidebars or footers can have net positive impacts on avoiding spam and manipulation. As webmasters and SEOs, we can certainly attest to the fact that a lot of paid links exist in these sections of sites and that getting non-natural links from inside content is much more difficult.
#6 - Keywords in HTML Text Pass More Value than those in Alt Attributes of Linked Images
This one isn't covered in any papers or patents (to my knowledge), but our testing has shown (and testing from others supports) that anchor text carried through HTML is somehow more potent or valued than that from alt attributes in image links. That's not to say we should run out and ditch image links, badges or the alt attributes they carry. It's just good to be aware that Google seems to have this bias (perhaps it will be temporary).
#7 - Links from More Important, Popular, Trusted Sites Pass More Value (even from less important pages)
We've likely all experienced the sinking feeling of seeing a competitor with fewer and what appear to be links from less powerful pages outranking us. This may be somewhat explained by the value of a domain to pass along value via a link that may not be fully reflected in page-level metrics. It can also help search engines to combat spam and provide more trusted results in general. If links from sites that rarely link to junk pass significantly more than those whose link practices and impact on the web overall may be questionable, they can much better control quality.
NOTE: Having trouble digging up the papers/patents on this one; I'll try to revisit and find them tomorrow.
#8 - Links Contained Within NoScript Tags Pass Lower (and Possibly No) Value
Over the years, this phenomenon has been reported and contradicted numerous times. Our testing certainly suggested that noscript links don't pass value, but that may not be true in every case. It is why we included the ability to filter noscript in Linkscape, but the quantity of links overall on the web inside this tag is quite small.
#9 - A Burst of New Links May Enable a Document to Overcome "Stronger" Competition Temporarily (or in Perpetuity)
Apart from even Google's QDF (Query Deserves Freshness) algorithm, which may value more recently created and linked-to content in certain "trending" searches, it appears that the engine also uses temporal signals around linking to both evaluate spam/manipulation and reward pages that earn a large number of references in a short period of time. Google's patent on Information Retrieval Based on Historical Data first suggested the use of temporal data, but the model has likely seen revision and refinement since that time.
#10 - Pages that Link to WebSpam May Devalue the Other Links they Host
I was fascinated to see Richard Baxter's own experiments on this in his post - Google Page Level Penalty for Comment Spam. Since then, I've been keeping an eye on some popular, valuable blog posts that have received similarly overwhelming spam and, low and behold, the pattern seems verifiable. Webmasters would be wise to keep up to date on their spam removal to avoid arousing potential ranking penalties from Google (and the possible loss of link value).
But what about classic "PageRank" - the score of which we get a tiny inkling from the Google toolbar's green pixels? I'd actually surmise that while many (possibly all) of the features about links discussed above make their way into the ranking process, PR has stayed relatively unchanged from its classic concept. My reasoning? SEOmoz's own mozRank, which correlates remarkably well with toolbar PR (off on avg. by 0.42 w/ 0.25 being "perfect" due to the 2 extra significant digits we display) and is calculated with very similar intuition to that of the original PageRank paper. If I had to guess (and I really am guessing), I'd say that Google's maintained classic PR because they find the simple heuristic useful for some tasks (likely including crawling/indexation priority), and have adopted many more metrics to fit into the algorithmic pie.
As always, we're looking forward to your feedback and hope that some of you will take up the challenge to test these on your own sites or inside test environments and report back with your findings.
p.s. I finished this post at nearly 3am (and have a board meeting tomorrow), so please excuse the odd typo or missed link. Hopefully Jen will take a red pen to this in the morning!
As recently as a month ago I was a victim of a state of mind I call Analytics Dismissal Disorder. This mindset is common after hearing about the importance of analytics, installing the tracking code and then getting overwhelmed by all of the graphs and scary numbers. When I suffered from analytics dismissal disorder (which my doctors called A.D.D. for short), I knew Google Analytics was important but avoided the extra effort necessary to learn how to get the most out of the software. This post explains what I needed to learn to get over this.
After learning the basics of Google Analytics, you can learn interesting facts like what search terms people use to find your website. In this case, web searchers are more interested in fat people falling than they are in me.
Here is the problem with Google Analytics:
It is obviously potentially useful but who has the time to study how to use a product. I don’t even read the text-less IKEA manuals so why would I read documentation for software. Sounds boring.
This all changed when SEOmoz offered to pay for me to go to WebShare’s Google Analytics Seminar (Wait, you are paying me to leave the office? Mission Accomplished). This 16 hour class walked me through Google Analytics and pushed me through the massive learning curve.
This post distills what I learned in those 16 hours of employer-paid-learning into something you can understand and act on in 20 minutes. Nerd High Five! (*Pushes up glasses*)
Overcome the Google Analytics Learning Curve in 20 Minutes:
An actionable guide to learning what you need to know about Google Analytics.
First Things First:
What are Accounts and Profiles and how are they different?
When you first log in to Google Analytics you need to navigate to your desired data set. This is much more confusing than it ought to be.
Accounts are like folders on a computer. They can contain a lot of different files (profiles) and serve mostly just for organization. An example of an account might be Work Websites or Personal Websites. (Be forewarned, this is not intuitive on setup. Don't make the mistake I did and name an account after a website. That naming convention is more appropriate for a profile).
Profiles, on the other hand, are like files on a computer. They can't contain additional profiles or accounts. They represent one view of a website (although not necessarily the only view). An example of a profile might be api.seomoz.org or SEOmoz minus Office IP addresses. You can limit a profile to whatever view of a website you want by using filters.
What are Filters and Segments and how are they different?
This is also more complicated than it ought to be. (grrr)
Filters are attached to website profiles (i.e. "SEOmoz minus office IP addresses") and are permanent. If a profile includes traffic data from all IP addresses except SEOmoz's office computers, there is absolutely no way to reinclude this excluded data in the given profile at a later time. Filters are irreversible and kinda mean (thus the anal in Google Analytics). You can set them up on the profiles page. (See Below)
Segments are similar to filters except they are profile agnostic and their effects are temporary. In addition, they can be compared against each other. The example segments below shows all visitors (blue line), new visitors (orange line), and returning visitors (green line) and their distribution on the top content of the given website.
What are "raw" profiles and why use them? (Ctrl+Z won’t save you here)
Google Analytics is different from other Google products in that it doesn't provide a way to undo certain types of data processing (i.e. filters). In order to give you freedom to explore (and potentially ruin) your profiles, it is important that you create an unfiltered (raw) profile of your website that you can use in case something goes wrong with one of your other profiles. In SEOmoz's case, this profile is literally called "Do Not Touch! Backup Profile". This is the backup profile we will use to get historical data when Joanna Lord screws up our other profiles. (Danny!)
What if I don't trust a specific metric?
Tough beans! The key to getting the most out of Google Analytics is to trust it. This is very similar to how we measure time. We all know that our bedroom clock is probably not exactly synced with our office clock but we trust each time-peice as close enough. You need to make the same leap of faith for Google Analytics. The metrics might not be 100% accurate all of the time, but like a clock, at least they are consistent. This makes Google Analytics metrics good enough. (And quite frankly it is as accurate as all of its competitors)
Navigating Google Analytics:
Google Analytics Navigation
Dashboard (Mostly Useless High-level Metrics)
As you would expect, the dashboard shows you the high-level status of your website. The problem is that these metrics tend not to drastically change very often so if you keep looking at your dashboard, you won't like see any big changes. ZzzzzzzzZZZzzzzz.
Real analytics pros don't let friends rely on the default dashboard stats.
Intelligence is Google's confusing name for automatic alerts. Did traffic to your homepage jump 1000% over last week? Are visits from New Zealand down 80% from yesterday? Intelligence alerts will, with your permission, e-mail you if anything unexpected happens on your website.
Visitors (The type of people that come to your site) - Check Monthly
As the name implies, this section reveals information about your visitors. Want to know what percentage of your users have Flash enabled or how many people viewed your website on an iPad? This section will tell you. (Long live Steve Jobs!)
Traffic Sources (Where people are coming from to reach your site) - Check Weekly
This section shows you different reports on the sources that drove you traffic.
Content (Metrics on your pages) - Check Weekly
Whereas, Traffic Sources shows you information about other people's pages as they relate to yours, the Content section only shows you information about what happens on your pages.
Goals (Metrics on whether or not people are doing what you want them to do) - Check Daily
Goals are predefined actions on your website that you want others to perform. It is important to note that you must configure these manually. Google can't auto detect these. This section shows metrics on how people completed these goals or where they dropped off if they didn't complete them.
Report Interface:
The bread and butter of Google Analytics are the reports. These are the frameworks for learning about how people interact with your website.
Graph:
The graphs/reports in Google Analytics have 6 important options. The first three are detailed below:
Export. This is pretty self explanatory. You can export to PDF, XML, CSV, CSV for Excel or if you are too good for commas you can export to TSV.
E-mail. This is one of Google Analytics more useful features. This tab allows you to schedule reoccurring e-mails or one time reports for your co-workers. As an added bonus, if you set up these auto-reports, the recipeients don't even need to log into Google Analytics to access this data.
Units (in this case Pageviews). This is a report dependent unit that you can change based on the context.
Advanced Segments. This is an extremely powerful feature that allows you to slice and dice your data to your likings.
Date Range (in this case, Apr 24 2010 - May 24 2010).
Graph By. This feature allows you to choose the scope of the graph in relation to time intervals. For some reports you can even break down data to the hour.
Data:
Data is your tool to see specifics and and make quantifiable decisions.
Views. This feature actually affects the graphs and the data. It dictates the type of graph or the format or the data.
?. This is your source for help on any given metric.
Secondary Dimension (in this case, None). This allows you to splice the data table by specific data dimensions (cities, sources, etc...)
Which Reports To Track and When:
I recommend using this as a starting point and tailoring it to your needs as you learn more about the unique needs for your website.
Daily
Goals -> Total Conversions
Content -> Top Content (at the page level)
Traffic Sources -> All Traffic Sources
Traffic Sources -> Campaigns - (Optional)
Weekly (or bi-weekly if you have a content intensive website)
Goals -> Funnel Visualization
Goals -> Goal Abandoned Funnels
Content -> Site Search
Traffic Sources -> Direct Traffic
Traffic Sources -> Referring Sites
Traffic Sources -> Keywords
Monthly
Visitors -> Overview
Intelligence -> Overview
Content -> Content Drilldown (at the folder level)
Content -> Top Landing Pages
Content -> Top Exit Pages
Traffic Sources -> Adwords - (Optional)
Which Reports to Ignore:
Visitors -> Benchmarking
From installation validation tools, it's estimated that as many as 70% of Google Analytics installs are either incomplete or incorrect. This means that the data that these benchmarks rely on, is very likely inaccurate.
Visitors -> Map Overlay
While this feature is one of the most popular features of Google Analytics, it is also one of the least useful. The data these maps present is not normalized so areas with high populations tend to always dominate the screen. They are not completely useless as they show trends but they are not something that can be relied on heavily either. Use your best judgement when viewing this report.
Content -> Site Overlay
This feature seems like a good idea but is not able to be implemented in a way that makes it accurate. Put simply, in order for this tool to work, Google Analytics would need to have more information about the location of a link on a page and a mechanism for tracking which instance of a link gets clicked. Clicktale and Crazy Egg are nice alternatives.
Conclusion:
Tracking the metrics above is only the first step. Imagine Google Analytics as a magical yard stick (For you sissies on the metric system, a yard stick is like a meter stick but better). It is essential for measuring the success or failure of a given online strategy but it is not an online strategy alone. It is best used as a supplement to the your current activities and should be treated as such.
I am surely going to get some flak from some Analytics gurus who know more than me. (You want to go Kaushik?) Remember, this guide is intended to help people get over the GA learning curve, not to be a comprehensive guide. If you are looking for the latter, check out the hundreds of blog posts at the Google Analytics Blog.
One last thing, if you’re interested in taking the Seminars for Success classes, here’s the upcoming schedule.
Phoenix, AZ
June 9-11, 2010
Chicago, IL
June 23-25, 2010
Berkeley, CA
July 28-30, 2010
Los Angeles, CA
Aug 18-20, 2010
San Diego, CA
Sep 1-3, 2010
Salt Lake City, UT
Sep 15-17, 2010
Vancouver, BC
Oct 6-8, 2010
Atlanta, GA
Oct 27-29, 2010
Orlando, FL
Nov 3-5, 2010
Washington, DC
Dec 8-10, 2010
If you have any other advice that you think is worth sharing, feel free to post it in the comments. This post is very much a work in progress. As always, feel free to e-mail me if you have any suggestions on how I can make my posts more useful. All of my contact information is available on my profile: Danny Thanks!
How many times have you had that one client that doesn't listen to anything and wants to take control of the entire design? Recently we encountered another client who has an assistant in this place the entire and SEO project in jeopardy. She has several years within the media marketing industry and as a result leaves that she can dictate to others how to run their business. What she does not understand is SEO.
While working for a client in the past two weeks she contacted us demanding for changes in our marketing strategy. The changes she demanded were due in part to her being removed from the marketing strategy of this company.
Sometimes, the page you're trying to rank - the one that visitors will find relevant and useful to their query - isn't the page the engines have chosen to place first. When this happens, it can be a frustrating experience trying to determine what course of action to take. In this blog post, I'll walk through some of the root causes of this problem, as well as five potential solutions.
When the wrong page from your site appears prominently in the search results, it can spark a maddening conflict of emotion - yes, it's great to be ranking well and capturing that traffic, but it sucks to be delivering a sub-optimal experience to searchers who visit, then leave unfulfilled. The first step should be identifying what's causing this issue and to do that, you'll need a process.
Below, I've listed some of the most common reasons we've seen for search engines to rank a less relevant page above a more relevant one.
Internal Anchor Text
The most common issue we see when digging into these problems is the case of internal anchor text optimization gone awry. Many sites will have the keyword they're targeting on the intended page linking to another URL (or several) on the site in a way that can mislead search engines. If you want to be sure that the URL yoursite.com/frogs ranks for the keyword "frogs," make sure that anchor text that says "frogs" points to that page. See this post on keyword cannibalization for more on this specific problem. _
External Link Bias
The next most common issue we observe is the case of external links preferring a different page than you, the site owner or marketer, might. This often happens when an older page on your site has discussed a topic, but you've more recently produced an updated, more useful version. Unfortunately, links on the web tend to still reference the old URL. The anchor text of these links, the context they're in and the reference to the old page may make it tough for a new page to overcome the prior's rankings. _
Link Authority & Importance Metrics
There are times when a page's raw link metrics - high PageRank, large numbers of links and linking root domains - will simply overpower other relevance signals and cause it to rank well despite barely targeting (and sometimes barely mentioning) a keyword phrase. In these situations, it's less about the sources of links, the anchor text or the relevance and more a case of powerful pages winning out through brute force. On Google, this happens less than it once did (at least in our experience), but can still occur in odd cases. _
On-Page Optimization
In some cases, a webmaster/marketer may not realize that the on-page optimization of a URL for a particular keyword term/phrase is extremely similar to another. To differentiate and help ensure the right page ranks, it's often wise to de-emphasize the target keyword on the undesirable page and target it more effectively (without venturing into keyword stuffing or spam) on the desired page. This post on keyword targeting can likely be of assistance. _
Improper Redirects
We've seen the odd case where an old redirect has pointed a page that heavily targeted a keyword term/phrase (or had earned powerful links around that target) to the wrong URL. These can be very difficult to identify because the content of the 301'ing page no longer exists and it's hard to know (unless you have the history) why the current page might be ranking despite no effort. If you've been through the other scenarios, it's worth looking to see if 301 redirects from other URLs point to the page in question and running a re-pointing test to see if they could be causing the issue. _
Topic Modeling / Content Relevance Issues
This is the toughest to identify and to explain, but that won't stop us from trying :-) Essentially, you can think of the search engines doing a number of things to determine the degree of relevancy of a page to a keyword. Determining topic areas and identifying related terms/phrases and concepts is almost certainly among these (we actually hope to have some proof of Google's use of LDA, in particular, in the next few months to share on the blog). Seeing as this is likely the case, the engine may perceive that the page you're trying to rank isn't particularly "on-topic" for the target keyword while another page that appears less "targeted" from a purely SEO/keyphrase usage standpoint is more relevant.
Once you've gone through this list and determined which issues might be affecting your results, you'll need to take action to address the problem. If it's an on-page or content issue, it's typically pretty easy to fix. However, if you run into external linking imbalances, you may need more dramatic action to solve the mistmatch and get the right page ranking.
Next, we'll tackle some specific, somewhat advanced, tactics to help get the right page on top:
The 301 Redirect (or Rel Canonical) & Rebuild
In stubborn cases or those where a newer page is replacing an old page, it may be wise to simply 301 redirect the new page to the old page (or the other way around) and choose the best-converting/performing content for the page that stays. I generally like the strategy of maintaining the older, ranking URL and redirecting the newer one simply because the metrics for that old page may be very powerful and a 301 does cause some loss of link juice (according to the folks at Google). However, if the URL string itself isn't appropriate, it can make sense to instead 301 to the new page instead.
Be aware that if you're planning to use rel=canonical rather than a 301 (which is perfectly acceptable), you should first ensure that the content is exactly the same on both pages. Trying to maintain two different version of a page with one canonicalizing to another isn't specifically against the engines' guidelines, but it's also not entirely white hat (and it may not work, since the engines do some checking to determine content matches before counting rel=canonical sometimes). _
The Content Rewrite
If you need to maintain the old page and have a suspicion that content focus, topic modeling or on-page optimization may be to blame, a strategy of re-authoring the page from scratch and focusing on both relevance and user experience may be a wise path. It's relatively easy to test and while it will suck away time from other projects, it may be helpful to give the page more focused, relevant, useful and conversion-inducing material. _
The Link Juice Funnel
If you're fairly certain that raw link metrics like PageRank or link quantities are to blame for the issue, you might want to try funnelling some additional internal links to the target page (and possibly away from the currently ranking page). You can use a tool like Open Site Explorer to identify the most important/well-linked-to pages on your site and modify/add links to them to help channel juice into the target page and boost its rankings/prominence. _
The Content Swap
If you strongly suspect that the content of the pages rather than the link profiles may be responsible and want to test, this is the strategy to use. Just swap the on-page and meta data (titles, meta description, etc) between the two pages and see how/if it impacts rankings for the keyword. Just be prepared to potentially lose traffic during the test period (this nearly always happens, but sometimes is worth it to confirm your hypothesis). If the less-well-ranked page rises with the new content while the better-ranked page falls, you're likely onto something. _
The Kill 'Em with External Links
If you can muster a brute force, external link growth strategy, either through widgets/badges, content licensing, a viral campaign to get attention to your page or just a group of friends with websites who want to help you out, go for it. We've often seen this precise strategy lift one page over another and while it can be a lot of work, it's also pretty effective.
While this set of recommendations may not always fix the issue, it can almost always help identify the root cause(s) and give you a framework in which to proceed. If you've got other suggestions, I look forward to hearing about them in the comments!
So here we have the term Web 3.0 coming into common usage. The problem is, what does it actually mean? Many are scratching their heads and asking, "isn't that what Web 2.0 was supposed to be about".
The reference to Web 3.0 was made by members of the W3 to describe the desire for a Semantic Web. This new "Semantic Web" was to be user friendly and interactive... (I know; sounds familiar, right?). In almost all of the laymen terms, it sounds virtually the same as Web 2.0; the difference is when we look at the core problems with Web 2.0 and the theories behind it.
LOL Cats were the greatest gift of Web 2.0
Web 2.0 was to give an interactive world of exchanging ideas in an intelligent way. Many would argue about how intelligent the exchange has actually been, but intelligent communication was the intent. People have built on these principles to pass information accross the internet in a manner that resembled intelligence, but have found one major piece of the equasion was left out....
The Computers didn't know what we were saying..!!!
The main purpose of Web 3.0 is to cooperatively enable the computers to understand the connections being made within the internet. By enableing them to have an understanding of the importance that real people are placing on content, the systems will be able to weed out all of the Black Hat and Scam jobs.(at least for a little while)
Here's the post of wikipedia:
"Purpose
Humans are capable of using the Web to carry out tasks such as finding the Irish word for "directory", reserving a library book, and searching for a low price for a DVD. However, one computer cannot accomplish all of these tasks without human direction, because web pages are designed to be read by people, not machines. The semantic web is a vision of information that is understandable by computers, so computers can perform more of the tedious work involved in finding, combining, and acting upon information on the web.
Tim Berners-Lee originally expressed the vision of the semantic web as follows:[6]
I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize.
– Tim Berners-Lee, 1999
Semantic publishing will benefit greatly from the semantic web. In particular, the semantic web is expected to revolutionize scientific publishing, such as real-time publishing and sharing of experimental data on the Internet. This simple but radical idea is now being explored by W3C HCLS group's Scientific Publishing Task Force.
Semantic Web application areas are experiencing intensified interest due to the rapid growth in the use of the Web, together with the innovation and renovation of information content technologies. The Semantic Web is regarded as an integrator across different content and information applications and systems, and provide mechanisms for the realisation of Enterprise Information Systems. The rapidity of the growth experienced provides the impetus for researchers to focus on the creation and dissemination of innovative Semantic Web technologies, where the envisaged ’Semantic Web’ is long overdue. Often the terms ’Semantics’, ’metadata’, ’ontologies’ and ’Semantic Web’ are used inconsistently. In particular, these terms are used as everyday terminology by researchers and practitioners, spanning a vast landscape of different fields, technologies, concepts and application areas. Furthermore, there is confusion with regards to the current status of the enabling technologies envisioned to realise the Semantic Web. In a paper presented by Gerber, Barnard and Van der Merwe[7] the Semantic Web landscape are charted and a brief summary of related terms and enabling technologies are presented. The architectural model proposed by Tim Berners-Lee is used as basis to present a status model that reflects current and emerging technologies"
What this means for developers?
More work... more education.. longer nights
For those true to the desire of solving the next development or SEO equation, this is more tantalizing than tantrum causing. Those who enjoy doing quality SEO work will only see this as a challenge. This is also seen as a much needed improvement to kill off the scammera that kill the face of our business.
What this means for the "No Talent A$$ Clowns" using Black and Grey Hat Techniques:
You better learn some real SEO, or your days are numbered. Many times before these threats have been issued by the W3, but never before have they issued exact concepts that will be so easily incorporated by both Google and MSN. There will always be those who skirt the system, but most will find their cheep tricks no longer working after these new rules are implemented.
Here is the basic visual guide and reference to the new Semantic Solution. i'll leave links acrross to the entire Wiki article.
We will be evaluating the software available for the changes and should have a review within the next few weeks...
Cheers.
Web 3.0
Tim Berners-Lee has described the semantic web as a component of 'Web 3.0'.[9]
People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you've got an overlay of scalable vector graphics - everything rippling and folding and looking misty — on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you'll have access to an unbelievable data resource..."
Many files on a typical computer can be loosely divided into documents and data. Documents like mail messages, reports, and brochures are read by humans. Data, like calendars, addressbooks, playlists, and spreadsheets are presented using an application program which lets them be viewed, searched and combined in many ways.
Currently, the World Wide Web is based mainly on documents written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a markup convention that is used for coding a body of text interspersed with multimedia objects such as images and interactive forms. Metadata tags, for example
<metaname="keywords"content="computing, computer studies, computer"><metaname="description"content="Cheap widgets for sale"><metaname="author"content="John Doe">
provide a method by which computers can categorise the content of web pages.
With HTML and a tool to render it (perhaps web browser software, perhaps another user agent), one can create and present a page that lists items for sale. The HTML of this catalog page can make simple, document-level assertions such as "this document's title is 'Widget Superstore'", but there is no capability within the HTML itself to assert unambiguously that, for example, item number X586172 is an Acme Gizmo with a retail price of €199, or that it is a consumer product. Rather, HTML can only say that the span of text "X586172" is something that should be positioned near "Acme Gizmo" and "€199", etc. There is no way to say "this is a catalog" or even to establish that "Acme Gizmo" is a kind of title or that "€199" is a price. There is also no way to express that these pieces of information are bound together in describing a discrete item, distinct from other items perhaps listed on the page.
Semantic HTML refers to the traditional HTML practice of markup following intention, rather than specifying layout details directly. For example, the use of <em> denoting "emphasis" rather than <i>, which specifies italics. Layout details are left up to the browser, in combination with Cascading Style Sheets. But this practice falls short of specifying the semantics of objects such as items for sale or prices.
Microformats represent unofficial attempts to extend HTML syntax to create machine-readable semantic markup about objects such as retail stores and items for sale.
Semantic Web solutions
The Semantic Web takes the solution further. It involves publishing in languages specifically designed for data: Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). HTML describes documents and the links between them. RDF, OWL, and XML, by contrast, can describe arbitrary things such as people, meetings, or airplane parts. Tim Berners-Lee calls the resulting network of Linked Data the Giant Global Graph, in contrast to the HTML-based World Wide Web.
These technologies are combined in order to provide descriptions that supplement or replace the content of Web documents. Thus, content may manifest itself as descriptive data stored in Web-accessible databases[10], or as markup within documents (particularly, in Extensible HTML (XHTML) interspersed with XML, or, more often, purely in XML, with layout or rendering cues stored separately). The machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to the content, i.e., to describe the structure of the knowledge we have about that content. In this way, a machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful results and helping computers to perform automated information gathering and research.
An example of a tag that would be used in a non-semantic web page:
<item>cat</item>
Encoding similar information in a semantic web page might look like this:
Tim Berners-Lee has described the semantic web as a component of 'Web 3.0'.[9]
People keep asking what Web 3.0 is. I think maybe when you've got an overlay of scalable vector graphics - everything rippling and folding and looking misty — on Web 2.0 and access to a semantic Web integrated across a huge space of data, you'll have access to an unbelievable data resource..."
Many files on a typical computer can be loosely divided into documents and data. Documents like mail messages, reports, and brochures are read by humans. Data, like calendars, addressbooks, playlists, and spreadsheets are presented using an application program which lets them be viewed, searched and combined in many ways.
Currently, the World Wide Web is based mainly on documents written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), a markup convention that is used for coding a body of text interspersed with multimedia objects such as images and interactive forms. Metadata tags, for example
<metaname="keywords"content="computing, computer studies, computer"><metaname="description"content="Cheap widgets for sale"><metaname="author"content="John Doe">
provide a method by which computers can categorise the content of web pages.
With HTML and a tool to render it (perhaps web browser software, perhaps another user agent), one can create and present a page that lists items for sale. The HTML of this catalog page can make simple, document-level assertions such as "this document's title is 'Widget Superstore'", but there is no capability within the HTML itself to assert unambiguously that, for example, item number X586172 is an Acme Gizmo with a retail price of €199, or that it is a consumer product. Rather, HTML can only say that the span of text "X586172" is something that should be positioned near "Acme Gizmo" and "€199", etc. There is no way to say "this is a catalog" or even to establish that "Acme Gizmo" is a kind of title or that "€199" is a price. There is also no way to express that these pieces of information are bound together in describing a discrete item, distinct from other items perhaps listed on the page.
Semantic HTML refers to the traditional HTML practice of markup following intention, rather than specifying layout details directly. For example, the use of <em> denoting "emphasis" rather than <i>, which specifies italics. Layout details are left up to the browser, in combination with Cascading Style Sheets. But this practice falls short of specifying the semantics of objects such as items for sale or prices.
Microformats represent unofficial attempts to extend HTML syntax to create machine-readable semantic markup about objects such as retail stores and items for sale.
The Semantic Web takes the solution further. It involves publishing in languages specifically designed for data: Resource Description Framework (RDF), Web Ontology Language (OWL), and Extensible Markup Language (XML). HTML describes documents and the links between them. RDF, OWL, and XML, by contrast, can describe arbitrary things such as people, meetings, or airplane parts. Tim Berners-Lee calls the resulting network of Linked Data the Giant Global Graph, in contrast to the HTML-based World Wide Web.
These technologies are combined in order to provide descriptions that supplement or replace the content of Web documents. Thus, content may manifest itself as descriptive data stored in Web-accessible databases[10], or as markup within documents (particularly, in Extensible HTML (XHTML) interspersed with XML, or, more often, purely in XML, with layout or rendering cues stored separately). The machine-readable descriptions enable content managers to add meaning to the content, i.e., to describe the structure of the knowledge we have about that content. In this way, a machine can process knowledge itself, instead of text, using processes similar to human deductive reasoning and inference, thereby obtaining more meaningful results and helping computers to perform automated information gathering and research.
An example of a tag that would be used in a non-semantic web page:
<item>cat</item>
Encoding similar information in a semantic web page might look like this:
Critics (e.g. Which Semantic Web?) question the basic feasibility of a complete or even partial fulfillment of the semantic web. Cory Doctorow's critique ("metacrap") is from the perspective of human behavior and personal preferences. For example, people lie: they may include spurious metadata into Web pages in an attempt to mislead Semantic Web engines that naively assume the metadata's veracity. This phenomenon was well-known with metatags that fooled the AltaVista ranking algorithm into elevating the ranking of certain Web pages: the Google indexing engine specifically looks for such attempts at manipulation. Peter Gärdenfors and Timo Honkela point out that logic-based semantic web technologies cover only a fraction of the relevant phenomena related to semantics [15][16].
Where semantic web technologies have found a greater degree of practical adoption, it has tended to be among core specialized communities and organizations for intra-company projects.[17] The practical constraints toward adoption have appeared less challenging where domain and scope is more limited than that of the general public and the World-Wide Web.[17]
The original 2001 Scientific American article by Berners-Lee described an expected evolution of the existing Web to a Semantic Web.[18] A complete evolution as described by Berners-Lee has yet to occur. In 2006, Berners-Lee and colleagues stated that: "This simple idea, however, remains largely unrealized."[19] While the idea is still in the making, it seems to evolve quickly and inspire many. Between 2007-2010 several scholars have already explored first applications and the social potential of the semantic web in the business and health sectors, and for social networking [20] and even for the broader evolution of democracy, specifically, how a society forms its common will in a democratic manner through a semantic web [21]
Enthusiasm about the semantic web could be tempered by concerns regarding censorship and privacy. For instance, text-analyzing techniques can now be easily bypassed by using other words, metaphors for instance, or by using images in place of words. An advanced implementation of the semantic web would make it much easier for governments to control the viewing and creation of online information, as this information would be much easier for an automated content-blocking machine to understand. In addition, the issue has also been raised that, with the use of FOAF files and geo location meta-data, there would be very little anonymity associated with the authorship of articles on things such as a personal blog.
Another criticism of the semantic web is that it would be much more time-consuming to create and publish content because there would need to be two formats for one piece of data: one for human viewing and one for machines. However, many web applications in development are addressing this issue by creating a machine-readable format upon the publishing of data or the request of a machine for such data. The development of microformats has been one reaction to this kind of criticism.
Specifications such as eRDF and RDFa allow arbitrary RDF data to be embedded in HTML pages. The GRDDL (Gleaning Resource Descriptions from Dialects of Language) mechanism allows existing material (including microformats) to be automatically interpreted as RDF, so publishers only need to use a single format, such as HTML.
The idea of a semantic web, able to describe, and associate meaning with data, necessarily involves more than simple XHTML mark-up code. It is based on an assumption that, in order for it to be possible to endow machines with an ability to accurately interpret web homed content, far more than the mere ordered relationships involving letters and words is necessary as underlying infrastructure, (attendant to semantic issues). Otherwise, most of the supportive functionality would have been available in Web 2.0 (and before), and it would have been possible to derive a semantically capable Web with minor, incremental additions.
Additions to the infrastructure to support semantic functionality include latent dynamic network models that can, under certain conditions, be 'trained' to appropriately 'learn' meaning based on order data, in the process 'learning' relationships with order (a kind of rudimentary working grammar). See for example latent semantic analysis
XML provides an elemental syntax for content structure within documents, yet associates no semantics with the meaning of the content contained within.
XML Schema is a language for providing and restricting the structure and content of elements contained within XML documents.
RDF is a simple language for expressing data models, which refer to objects ("resources") and their relationships. An RDF-based model can be represented in XML syntax.
RDF Schema extends RDF and is a vocabulary for describing properties and classes of RDF-based resources, with semantics for generalized-hierarchies of such properties and classes.
OWL adds more vocabulary for describing properties and classes: among others, relations between classes (e.g. disjointness), cardinality (e.g. "exactly one"), equality, richer typing of properties, characteristics of properties (e.g. symmetry), and enumerated classes.
SPARQL is a protocol and query language for semantic web data sources.
Unifying Logic and Proof layers are undergoing active research.
The intent is to enhance the usability and usefulness of the Web and its interconnected resources through:
Servers which expose existing data systems using the RDF and SPARQL standards. Many converters to RDF exist from different applications. Relational databases are an important source. The semantic web server attaches to the existing system without affecting its operation.
Documents "marked up" with semantic information (an extension of the HTML <meta>tags used in today's Web pages to supply information for Web search engines using web crawlers). This could be machine-understandable information about the human-understandable content of the document (such as the creator, title, description, etc., of the document) or it could be purely metadata representing a set of facts (such as resources and services elsewhere in the site). (Note that anything that can be identified with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) can be described, so the semantic web can reason about animals, people, places, ideas, etc.) Semantic markup is often generated automatically, rather than manually.
Common metadata vocabularies (ontologies) and maps between vocabularies that allow document creators to know how to mark up their documents so that agents can use the information in the supplied metadata (so that Author in the sense of 'the Author of the page' won't be confused with Author in the sense of a book that is the subject of a book review).
Automated agents to perform tasks for users of the semantic web using this data
Web-based services (often with agents of their own) to supply information specifically to agents (for example, a Trust service that an agent could ask if some online store has a history of poor service or spamming)
Some of the challenges for the Semantic Web include vastness, vagueness, uncertainty, inconsistency and deceit. Automated reasoning systems will have to deal with all of these issues in order to deliver on the promise of the Semantic Web.
Vastness: The World Wide Web contains at least 48 billion pages as of this writing (August 2, 2009). The SNOMED CT medical terminology ontology contains 370,000 class names, and existing technology has not yet been able to eliminate all semantically duplicated terms. Any automated reasoning system will have to deal with truly huge inputs.
Vagueness: These are imprecise concepts like "young" or "tall". This arises from the vagueness of user queries, of concepts represented by content providers, of matching query terms to provider terms and of trying to combine different knowledge bases with overlapping but subtly different concepts. Fuzzy logic is the most common technique for dealing with vagueness.
Uncertainty: These are precise concepts with uncertain values. For example, a patient might present a set of symptoms which correspond to a number of different distinct diagnoses each with a different probability. Probabilistic reasoning techniques are generally employed to address uncertainty.
Inconsistency: These are logical contradictions which will inevitably arise during the development of large ontologies, and when ontologies from separate sources are combined. Deductive reasoning fails catastrophically when faced with inconsistency, because "anything follows from a contradiction". Defeasible reasoning and paraconsistent reasoning are two techniques which can be employed to deal with inconsistency.
Deceit: This is when the producer of the information is intentionally misleading the consumer of the information. Cryptography techniques are currently utilized to alleviate this threat.
This list of challenges is illustrative rather than exhaustive, and it focuses on the challenges to the "unifying logic" and "proof" layers of the Semantic Web. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Incubator Group for Uncertainty Reasoning for the World Wide Web (URW3-XG) final report lumps these problems together under the single heading of "uncertainty". Many of the techniques mentioned here will require extensions to the Web Ontology Language (OWL) for example to annotate conditional probabilities. This is an area of active research.
Another feed..... This one from Marketing Tech Blog
Categorizing, filtering, tagging, collecting, querying, indexing, structuring, formatting, highlighting, networking, following, aggregating, liking, tweeting, searching, sharing, bookmarking, digging, stumbling, sorting… it’s downright painful.
In December, I predicted that 2010 would be the year of filtering, personalization and optimization. I’m not sure we’re even close yet – we might be years off. The bottom line is that we need it now, though. The noise is already deafening.
If you don’t see the video, watch Web 3.0 on the blog.
Google is still just a search engine, only providing you dumb data indexed on keywords that match your queries. I’d really like someone to build a find engine next… I’m tired of searching, aren’t you?
Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of DK New Media, an online marketing company specializing in social media, blogging and search engine optimization. Their clients include Webtrends, ChaCha and many more.
Thanks for subscribing! download Doug's eBook on Blogging for SEO on us!
By Nousheen Aquil
Seeing a waterfall would be the most beautiful scene on this world, its natural beauty and soothing effect is always exceptionally terrific for almost everyone. The beauty and charisma of these waterfalls is so immense that no one can resist saying ‘wow’! Here we have gathered some breathtaking waterfalls photos around the globe — for your inspiration. Enjoy!
Last week Jen and I attended the Search & Social Summit here in my backyard of Tampa Bay. This isn't your typical conference recap post, though. I wanted to focus on the action items that still stand out for me a week later, the things will make a difference in what I do or how I do it. Perhaps you'll rethink the way you do a thing or two as well.
Outsource, Seriously.
Kevin Henrikson is a low key guy, and one that I hadn’t met until the Search & Social Summit. You won’t see him spouting off on Twitter or elaborating on his accomplishments on LinkedIn. He beats even me in the blog neglect category. Personally, I wish he’d publish more. He has a strong business acumen and seems to find his comfort zone well outside the boundaries that most of us create in our own DIY vs. outsource struggles.
Kevin’s presentation was about outsourcing. I expected the standard cliché we’ve all heard 100 times, “Do what you do best. Outsource the rest.” Good advice, absolutely, but now what? Kevin's presentation was different. It outlined real, actionable strategies for outsourcing the things you’d expect - like copywriting and development - but he also spoke about his experience delegating some pretty unusual stuff like the hiring of a housekeeper for his parents out-of-state.
Kevin covered more than a dozen solid online sources for building your outsourced empire including craigslist (for local need), Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and the old standby Elance. None of those excited me like oDesk and 99designs.
oDesk describes themselves as a marketplace for online workstreams. Don’t have time to sift through your email to identify the important ones that require a response? Hire a personal assistant to do the drudge work for you. Need a new site design converted to work with your WordPress blog? You'll be surprised by the rates. I created my account while listening to Kevin’s presentation and can’t wait to get started.
99designs provides a platform and 192K strong community to facilitate your own ‘design contest’. Open an account, outline your project in seven simple fields, pay a few hundred dollars and within a week you’ll have dozens of designs to choose from that were created by the 99designs community. I did a hack job of my own blog logo design a few years ago. I figured there was no time like the present, so jumped onto 99designs and kicked off my own contest. For a few hundred dollars I’ve received around 200 logo designs. You can check out the contest entries and maybe even help me choose a winner from the frontrunners.
If you want more information on how to leverage the outsourcing vehicles like the ones mentioned above, check out Rand's recent post on the topic here.
Targeted Promotion on Niche Social News Sites
If you're like me, when you think 'social news', examples like Digg and Reddit stand out. Though the traffic from these sites is astounding - IF you can get your story to the front page - obtaining traction is hit or miss and the competition is intense. Brent Csutoras is a wiz in the world of social marketing, and another speaker that presented some refreshing content at the Search & Social Summit last week.
Brent highlighted Kirtsy.com as a great place to post content that would appeal to a female audience, for example. This isn't the kind of place to post the latest puss video from PopThatZit (view at your own risk. eww) but if you take a look at the current list of most popular content on the Kirtsy homepage, you'll get the idea of what is possible there. I was surprised to see a few listings from small personal blogs on topics like crafts and parenting.
Despite being more than a year old, Brent says that this list of niche social media sites from Chris Winfield over at 10e20 is still the best out there. Think about the opportunities for sites you represent. No doubt a few more niche social news sites have cropped up since then. If you have another one that works for you, I'd love to hear about it in the comments.
Get New Content Indexed Faster
Michael Gray recommends creating small sitemaps of <100 pages, in addition to your regular sitemap(s), to help get new content indexed faster.
Michael has found that for sites that add a lot of new pages, or want to get the pages they do add indexed quickly, using a dedicated sitemap for fresh content is the key. In his testing, deep pages on large sites that would sometimes take weeks or months to make it into the index took just 1-3 days with the dedicated fresh content XML sitemap. He suggests playing with the '100' number. That is what the need has been for his clients, but if you are working with a site that has a larger fresh content output you may achieve the same affect by including more.
I'll be testing this one out for sure! Let us know how it goes for you, too.
Action Items
Are you making the most of your time? Think about the things that someone else could do for you and outsource it. Check out 99designs for graphics work and oDesk for nearly everything else.
Look through Chris Winfield's list of niche social news sites. Maybe your content can 'make popular' on social news afte rall.
Try creating a supplemental fresh content XML sitemap to see if it helps you get your content indexed faster.
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Goals -> Total Conversions
Douglas Karr is the founder of The Marketing Technology Blog. Doug is President and CEO of 
Kevin Henrikson is a low key guy, and one that I hadn’t met until the Search & Social Summit. You won’t see him spouting off on .jpg)
If you're like me, when you think 'social news', examples like Digg and Reddit stand out. Though the traffic from these sites is astounding - IF you can get your story to the front page - obtaining traction is hit or miss and the competition is intense. 
