1. Ensure Your Site Has High-Quality Information

The cornerstone of any optimization strategy — or just a good Web site strategy, for that matter — is a lot of great, relevant information tailored to those you’d like to attract to your site. A large volume of high-quality content helps with a number of the steps listed below — for instance, you’re more likely to have information that’s useful to any particular person, you’re more likely to include the key phrases for which people are searching, and other sites are more likely to link to yours.

Not to mention, of course, that a terrific site is more likely to engage the people who find you through search engines, and encourage them to become not only repeat visitors, but friends of your organization.

Step #2 next week.

Did you know that one of the biggest missing ingredients we see in Web sites today is a lack of good "emotional content" that helps your readers understand and relate to the benefits of a quality product or service.

Many people miss relating to their readers all together because they are so often only focused on grammar or sentence structure of the technical aspects of SEO.

For most of us, when we were back in public school growing up, we were never taught how to dialog with our writing style or how to communicate by writing naturally.

We talked about how valuable emotional content can be in helping us relate to our Web visitors. We explained how Web sites today can be created with the idea of building genuine relationships and communication excellence.

If you use emotional content that helps you effectively relate and bring understanding to your visitors – that’s great. Accent the benefits and help people understand how your product or service is a cut above the competition.

But what about those instances where people may not really have any legitimate product or service?

What about situations that "exploit" the use of emotional content. Are there ways we can become more aware of these tactics in these instances of misuse?

Tasty new fitness fuelers have hit the market. These are great for replacing lost vitamins and minerals you lose two sweating. In addition, they’ll keep you fueled with energy. Plus, they’re great for those on-the-run. Luna Sport Moons Energy Chews are conveniently sized for a quick-fix. The blueberry flavor contains extra antioxidants. LUNA Sport products are available online and at your local running, bike, and outdoor sports shop. Clif Shot organic chews from Clif (visit their Store Locator), come in a tasty orange flavor that has 25 milligrams of caffeine for an extra jolt. Extreme Sport Beans are available in two new flavors, cherry and watermelon, and they contain 50 milligrams of caffeine (per bag of 14 beans) — about the same as a half-cup of coffee.

epigone • \EP-uh-gohn\ • noun

: follower, disciple; also : an inferior imitator

Example Sentence:
No one can accuse Lara of being an epigone; her artistic style is uniquely her own!

Did you know?
English borrowed "epigone" from German in the 19th century. The Germans themselves had taken the word from the Latin "epigonus," which means "successor." The Latin term followed the Greek "epigonos," which was often used in plural to designate the sons of seven legendary Greek leaders who were defeated at Thebes. "Epigonos" in turn came from the Greek verb "epigignesthai," meaning "to be born after." "Epi-" can mean "after," and "gignesthai" means "to be born."

As the Sky Train departs Beijing West Railway Station at 9:30 p.m., there isn’t an inch of unclaimed real estate in the train’s 16 carriages. Suitcases spill into the aisles, doubling as chairs for passengers without seats. Boxes of scallion-flavored biscuits and cardboard bowls of instant noodles cover the faux-wood tables in each compartment. Farmers with weather-beaten faces keep watch over bulging bags of produce in the overhead racks, while young men smoke cigarettes and play cards as they squat in the tight spaces between carriages.

Read more at www.budgettravel.com.

• Chinese Leader Deng Xiaoping Restored to Power (1977)
  As a supporter of Mao Zedong, Deng was named to several important government posts. However, Mao grew to fear Deng’s popularity and forced him out of office after launching the 1966 Cultural Revolution. After Mao’s death in 1976, Deng reemerged to serve as the de facto ruler of the People’s Republic of China until the early 1990s.

FF3 went from 0.96% global market share for the beta versions prior to D-Day, and in a matter of 13 hours, has already claimed 2.82% market share. With more and more Web 2.0 applications becoming available, the browser is becoming as important as the operating system. And, with the proliferation of mobile devices and the many new ways to access the Internet, the browser becomes ever more critical. Users are demanding more features, better security, complete site rendering compatibility (standards), and now rendering speed is becoming a differentiator.

While both FF3 and Opera 9.5 have improved security, and early tests have shown great rendering compatibility for both, the choice for users will probably come down to comfort level with the ‘other’ features.

FF3 may even help cross that threshold this month. FF3 also has an improved look and feel. Mozilla claims it’s significantly faster. Mozilla updates the location bar to intuitively suggest the site you’re seeking based on your browsing history and preferences. It’s a very nice addition, and worth the time to upgrade by itself.

Opera also made news by releasing it’s latest browser version. Opera 9.5, like Firefox seems much faster at rendering pages. Opera greatly improved the look of the browser, and includes several new features worth exploring.

The good: Firefox 3 touts faster rendering, vastly reduced use of system resources, clever new data-mining tools for your bookmarks and browser history, and more security features than any other browser.

The bad: Firefox 3 will no longer support Windows 95, 98, and Me; same with Mac OS X, versions 10.2 and earlier.

The bottom line: If only for the speed, lightness of being, and security alone, Firefox remains our Editors’ Choice for best Internet browser.

Read more at reviews.cnet.com…

Global warming isn’t to blame for the recent jump in hurricanes in the Atlantic, concludes a study by a prominent federal scientist whose position has shifted on the subject.

Not only that, warmer temperatures will actually reduce the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic and those making landfall, research meteorologist Tom Knutson reported in a study released Sunday.

In the past, Knutson has raised concerns about the effects of climate change on storms. His new paper has the potential to heat up a simmering debate among meteorologists about current and future effects of global warming in the Atlantic.

Ever since Hurricane Katrina in 2005, hurricanes have often been seen as a symbol of global warming’s wrath. Many climate change experts have tied the rise of hurricanes in recent years to global warming and hotter waters that fuel them.

Another group of experts, those who study hurricanes and who are more often skeptical about global warming, say there is no link. They attribute the recent increase to a natural multi-decade cycle.

What makes this study different is Knutson, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s fluid dynamics lab in Princeton, N.J.

Read more at news.yahoo.com…

Garlic kills all sorts of fungi-including the one that causes athlete’s foot. Drop a few freshly minced cloves of garlic into a cotton sock, and then wear the sock overnight. (Just be sure to wash your feet in the morning with something that has a more pleasant scent!) Repeat the treatment nightly until the fungus disappears, usually within 7 to 10 days. Garlic can also fight arterial plaque, improve the elasticity of arteries, and reduce blood clotting and slightly lower cholesterol, triglycerides and high blood pressure.

indurate • \IN-duh-rut\ • adjective

: physically or morally hardened

Example Sentence:
The sculpture was so realistic that it seemed that at any moment the indurate marble form would shift position to stare back at the viewer.

Did you know?
"Indurate" is a hard word — in more than one way. Not only is it fairly uncommon in modern usage, but it also can be traced back to Latin "durare," meaning "to harden." ("Durare" can mean "to endure" as well, and appropriately "indurate" is a word that has lasted many years — it has been a part of the English language since the 14th century.) "Durare" is also the root of other durable English words, including "during," "endure," "duration," "durance" (an archaic word meaning "endurance"), and even "durable" itself. In addition, "indurate" can be a verb meaning "to make or grow hard," "to make unfeeling, stubborn, or obdurate," and "to establish firmly."

Google Catalogs helps you browse and search merchant-provided catalogs right on your computer. You can flip through any catalog to find what interests you, or simply type in what you’re looking for, and you’ll find every place that your search term appears in the catalog. If you’re not sure what catalog to look in, just search all of the catalogs in our index.

Read more at catalogs.google.com…

• Football War Breaks Out in Honduras (1969)
  The Football War was a six-day war fought between El Salvador and Honduras. Though political tensions between Hondurans and Salvadorans were the main factors contributing to the war’s outbreak, hostility between the two countries was further inflamed by rioting during the second North American qualifying round for the 1970 FIFA World Cup. Though short-lived, the war claimed thousands of lives and displaced approximately 100,000 people.

After more than two decades of relatively little Atlantic hurricane activity, the past decade saw heightened hurricane activity and more than $150 billion in damage in 2004 and 2005. This paper normalizes mainland U.S. hurricane damage from 1900–2005 to 2005 values using two methodologies. A normalization provides an estimate of the damage that would occur if storms from the past made landfall under another year’s societal conditions…

…The 1970s and 1980s were notable because of the extremely low amounts of damage compared to other decades. The decade 1996–2005 has the second most damage among the past 11 decades, with only the decade 1926–1935 surpassing its costs. Over the 106 years of record, the average annual normalized damage in the continental United States is about $10 billion under both methods.

The most damaging single storm is the 1926 Great Miami storm, with $140–157 billion of normalized damage: the most damaging years are 1926 and 2005. Of the total damage, about 85% is accounted for by the intense hurricanes Saffir-Simpson Categories 3, 4, and 5, yet these have comprised only 24% of the U.S. landfalling tropical cyclones. Read more at sciencepolicy.colorado.edu…

When you visit a Web site, do you ever wish that you could find a particular piece of information on that site? Or, are you ever not able to find a specific product or service that the site probably sells?

In such moments, you realize the "gold" that this site is missing. But as a potential customer, you know about it – don’t you?

Okay, now put the shoe on the other foot so you’re now the SEO or Web site owner.

• What do your customers wish they could find on your Web site?
• What bits of information are they looking for?
• What products or services do you sell that are difficult to find?

Talk to your customers! Find out from them what they’re looking for! Make sure you have many ways to navigate your site. Group products together in several different ways. But YOU don’t know how your customers
think.

SECRET: Spend the time to pick up the phone and call a few of your best customers. You won’t be sorry you did.

If you want a lean, flat belly, the absolute worst thing you can do is force yourself to do sit-ups and crunches. Reason: Although sit-ups and crunches strengthen the rectus abdominus muscle, they also lengthen the transverse abdominal’s (girdle) muscles, causing your lower abdominal’s to pouch. But that’s not all. Crunches and sit-ups can push your head out of alignment and cause tension in your shoulders. They can also damage your spine. Try the Abdominal Reverse Curl Exercise or The Bridge Exercise instead.

quixotic • \kwik-SAH-tik\ • adjective

*1 : foolishly impractical especially in the pursuit of ideals; especially : marked by rash lofty romantic ideas or extravagantly chivalrous action

2 : capricious, unpredictable

Example Sentence:
Marta has been desperately trying to convince her friends to give up their cars and computers and return to nature on Earth Day, but it has been a quixotic crusade.
Did you know?
If you guessed that "quixotic" has something to do with Don Quixote, you’re absolutely right. The hero of the 17th-century Spanish novel El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha (by Miguel de Cervantes) didn’t change the world by tilting at windmills, but he did leave a linguistic legacy in English. The adjective "quixotic" is based on his name and has been used to describe unrealistic idealists since at least the early 18th century. The novel has given English other words as well. "Dulcinea," the name of Quixote’s beloved, has come to mean "mistress" or "sweetheart," and "rosinante," which is sometimes used to refer to an old, broken-down horse, comes from the name of the hero’s less-than-gallant steed.

Content rules. It did ten years ago, and it does today. People don’t use things they don’t understand. Writing for the Web is still undervalued, and most sites spend too few resources refining the information they offer to users.

The same goes for photos: On countless sites, product images are too small, fuzzy, or murky, or they’re simply shot from a bad angle, making the product hard to see. These same sites lavish pixels on big glamour illustrations that our eyetracking studies show attract no fixations. Go figure.

Generally, all you need are plainspoken words and clean photos. Nonetheless, these two design elements get almost no coverage in the trade press. Every month, there seems to be a new article in a leading publication about 3D spinning views, even though 3D is nearly useless in most cases. But you never see an article about how to write better headlines or take a clearer product photo.

• Actress Grace Kelly Marries Rainier III of Monaco (1956)
  Grace Kelly was an Oscar-winning American actress who appeared in many films, including Dial M for Murder and Rear Window. In 1956, she married Prince Rainier III of Monaco and became Her Serene Highness Princess Grace, an event that marked her retirement from acting. The couple had three children, one of whom, Albert II of Monaco, is the principality’s reigning Sovereign Prince. Kelly died in a car accident in 1982.

What’s the common theme in all these business-killing usability problems? They all involve simple usability principles that have been the same for ten years. None of them involve advanced "Web 2.0" technology; none would be fixed by implementing any of the fancy stuff that everybody’s talking about.

Indeed, the biggest design flaws destroying business value typically involve:

• Communicating clearly so that users understand you. Users allocate minimal time to initial website visits, so you must quickly convince them that the site’s worthwhile.
• Providing information users want. Users must be able to easily determine whether your services meet their needs and why they should do business with you.
• Offering simple, consistent page design, clear navigation, and an information architecture that puts things where users expect to find them.

Get these three right, and you’ll enhance your site’s credibility, ease a user’s way through the site, and thus do far more for the site’s business value than any JavaScript trick.

Married men do less housework than live-in boyfriends, finds an international survey.

But married women do more housework than their live-in counterparts.

“Marriage as an institution seems to have a traditionalizing effect on couples—even couples who see men and women as equal,” said co-researcher Shannon Davis, a sociologist at George Mason University in Virginia.

Understanding the dynamics of couples who live together but are not married has become more important as cohabitation around the globe increases. More than 5 million unmarried partner households (more than 10 million individuals) currently exist in the United States, according to a 2006 report by the U.S. Census Bureau.

"I do," just not housework

The scientists analyzed surveys gathered in 2002 from 28 nations, from 17,636 respondents (8,119 males and 9,517 females) as part of the Family and Changing Gender Roles III Survey. All respondents were either married or cohabiting with a significant other.

Overall, they found men spent about 9 hours a week on housework compared with women, who spent more than 20 hours weekly.

"There’s still a gender norm, since women do more housework than men regardless of union type," said study team member Jennifer Gerteisen Marks, who is working on a doctorate degree at North Carolina State University.

Regardless of the couples’ relative earnings or work hours, cohabiting males reported more household hours than did their married counterparts, while the opposite was true for women, with wives picking up the broom more often than live-in girlfriends.

Equal partners

Other factors also came into play. Men who raked in more earnings than their partners did fewer hours of housework than men with lower relative incomes. "Those in the household with greater resources will leverage those resources to bargain their way out of housework," the authors write in the September issue of the Journal of Family Issues.

Couples who viewed men and women as equals were more likely to divvy up chores equally. But even in "egalitarian households," married men still contributed less to household chores than did their wives.

"It’s consistent with prior research, which has shown that the roles of wives and husbands are very powerful," Marks told LiveScience. "In a cohabiting relationship there aren’t such strongly prescribed social norms, which trickle down to things like housework."

Gout can cause excruciating pain. Here is a very effective folk remedy… It dates back to the 1950′s, to a Texas doctor who was so crippled by a gouty big toe, he was forced to use a wheelchair. he reported in a Texas medical journal that a diet including six cherries a day soon had him up and walking. He added that his physician tried the cherry diet on 12 patients and had equally spectacular results. A survey done by Prevention magazine found that 67 percent of readers who tried cherries for gout enjoyed good results. Also, a top kinesiologist in Louisville, Kentucky, enthusiastically recommends them. He advises people with gout to quiet eating red meats and organ meats and also to drink two to three glasses of cherry juice a day. He recommends using pure black-cherry juice diluted with an equal amount of water.

alley-oop • \al-ee-OOP\ • noun

: a basketball play in which a leaping player catches a pass above the basket and immediately dunks the ball; also : the usually looping pass thrown on such a play

Example Sentence:
"With alley-oops, slam dunks and big smiles, the West [All-Stars] showed why Friday night’s contest was called an all-star game . . ." (Peter Pupello, St. Petersburg Times [Florida], March 29, 2008)

Did you know?
"Alley-oop" was first heard by English ears under the big tops of early 20th-century circuses. When acrobats were about to leap to their trapezes, they would often cry the similarly sounding French word "allez-oop" — an interjection meaning roughly "go up." Both "acrobat" and "trapeze" are also French derivatives, leaping into the English language in the 19th century, so the French parentage of "alley-oop" is not surprising. By the 1950s, the word was also being used on the gridiron and the hardwood for show-stopping arcing passes and leaping dunks. Its latest venue is the half-pipe, where skateboarders and snowboarders pull "alley-oop" spinning tricks.

When your search engine rankings fluctuate, or even if your site drops from the rankings, don’t panic. Understand that these things happen in this industry, and they WILL happen to you.

They happen to all of us.

What you DON’T want to do is make any changes to your Web pages because of fluctuations in the rankings or because your site drops out of the rankings. Step back and wait to see what happens.

Monitor your rankings. Watch the industry. Read the news.

In all likelihood, your pages will reappear right back where they should be (or close to those rankings), if you haven’t done anything wrong (such as using spam). Fluctuations in rankings are normal.

Far too many people PANIC in the short term, when they would be wiser to just take it easy and not start making changes so quickly. Just a word to the wise!

• Brixton Riot (1981)
  In the early 1980s, south London’s Brixton neighborhood was plagued by deep social and economic problems, including high rates of unemployment and crime and poor housing conditions. In 1981, in an effort to reduce street crime, police began stopping and searching anyone they deemed suspicious, a policy that many residents of the predominantly black community found discriminatory and heavy-handed.