Do reciprocal links still work?
Rumor has it that reciprocal links are not as effective as one way links. Some people in online discussion forums claim that one way links from a website to another site work far better than reciprocal links. Is this true and what do you have to do about this?
read more:

Can too many links hurt your website?
Many webmasters are unsure if too many links can hurt their website rankings. Others think that links to a brand-new site might be a spam indicator. How many links are good for a website? Should you wait before getting links to your site?
read more:

Handy Hints for Web Designers
Intermediate, 16th December 2002, Manas Tungare. 14 tips for sucessful Web Design. This article is worth reading for Web Designers of all experience levels.
read more:

Better Links for Better Ranking
The type, authority, quality, and quantity of links that link to your site is critical to great search engine placement. The Internet is based on links....
read more:

Formal accreditation in UK for accessible Web Designers?
The Disability Rights Commissions report on the accessibility of UK websites calls for the development of an accreditation for Web Designers, 'The Government should facilitate the development of best practice guidance for accessible website development and ongoing maintenance and thereafterpromote a formal accreditation process'The Guild of Accessible Web Designers would be the natural home for such an accreditation process.
read more:

The effect of outgoing links on your web site
While most webmasters are aware that incoming links are important to the success of a web site, many site owners don't know that outgoing links also have an impact on their web sites. Learn how outgoing links influence search engines and web site visitors.
read more:

IQ Systems: Get the Most Value from Trade Show Leads
St. Louis based IQ Systems’ widely used sales lead organizational system promises to maximize the benefits of trade show leads (PRWEB Jun 29, 2006)
read more:

Have you removed links after pagerank update?
I was wondering how webmaster’s responded to the recent pagerank update. Did you remove your paid links? Or did you add no follow on your “friends” links?Getting into the topic, on this blog, I still have those links as follow and never responded to that google pagerank decreasing update. As long as I get those [...]
read more:

What Google thinks about hidden and paid links
Some webmasters use hidden or paid links to increase the link popularity of their websites. Google's anti-spam engineer Matt Cutts recently commented on these links. Can you get in trouble?
read more:

Google's new Sitelinks and your web site
Google recently started to include a set of links below some results to pages within the site. These new additional links are called Sitelinks. Read this article to learn how these links might affect your web site.
read more:

Guild of Accessible Web Designers Launch
A new organisation called the Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS) launched today. It is a an organisation designed to promote accessible web design standards and promote designers and developers who put those standards into practice.By seeking to give those organisations and individuals who practice accessible web design a comptetitive edge - accessible web design skills will become more desirable within the 'web design industry' - and therefore be adopted more widely.The Guild also aims to become provide support, education and eventually accreditation to its members - pushing up skill levels; thus making more sites accessible to more people.
read more:

Anchor Links And Their Importance
Anchor links are a very important part of your Page Rank.They serve several purposes and will improve your rank by using popular keywords. Here are a few points to get maximum benefit from them.So what are anchor links? These are links based on one of your keywords or key phrases, which will be based on the keywords and phrases in your content page or article. This will replace the URL or just a command to “click here.”
read more:

Rapid increase of site wide incoming links
I have tested myself the effect of rapid increase of site wide incoming links to a website to check what will be the actual effect on search engines crawling my sites. Note that this is no way a method of rapid incoming links via a script that will auto generate links or any doorway pages [...]
read more:

Reciprocal links are alive and kicking
A while back there was quite a bit of scare mongering going around the SEO industry about how reciprocal links were dead. No, reciprocal links are not dead and now I have the proof.
read more:

Accessible Web Typography, an introduction for web designers - now online
The full text of my short(ish) book, Accessible Web Typography, an introduction for web designers is now online.Please add your comments, disagreements and tips to the bottom of the relevant pages.
read more:

New Online Broker 'SogoInvest' Sets Lowest $3 Per Trade Fee
Announcing the launch of SogoInvest, a new and unique online brokerage, setting the lowest $3 per trade commission fees on the Internet, with no hidden fees or account minimums. (PRWEB Jul 11, 2006) Trackback URL: http://www.prweb.com/chachingpr.php/U3F1YS1aZXRhLUVtcHQtU3F1YS1JbnNlLVplcm8=
read more:

New times two
I haven’t written much here at sooz.com in a while other than the ocassional game night tidbit. I moved into a new shared office/workspace this past weekend. It’s a big building at 119 Braintree in Allston, home to lots of companies: filmmakers, photographers, web designers, artists, piano repair, architects, fashion designers and lots more. I’m [...]
read more:

Guild of Accessible Web Designers opens for business
The Guild of Accessible Web Designers (GAWDS.org) - a membership organisation set up to promote the practice of acccessible web design, and the interests of accessible web designers - went public for the first time today. The official launch of the Guild will not be until early in 2004, but todays 'soft launch' is intended to attract new members who have the time, enthusiasm and skills and motivation to contribute to the development and growth of the organisation in its early stages. Already the list of members and supporters includes well known 'names' from the world of accessible web design - adding credibility to the venture. More news is promised soon from the founders of the Guild. Do yourself a favour, support the cause, and become a member now.
read more:

Should you buy text links?
Many text link broker websites have appeared on the Internet. These websites allow you to rent links from other websites on a monthly basis. Is this something you should consider for your website? What can you expect from these text links?
read more:

Professional Surfboard Builder Reveals Trade Secrets
The surfboard industry has long kept its methods of production hidden from the public, handing down tecniques from master to apprentice in a highly secretive fashion. In his tell-all book,"Shaping and Glassing", professional shaper Steven Miller stirs up controversy by revealing trade secrets to ameteurs. (PRWEB Jul 6, 2006)
read more:

The perfect incoming link for high search engine rankings
It's important that you get the right kind of links if you want to get high rankings on Google. If you have 20 good incoming links then you'll get better rankings than with 100 bad incoming links. So what makes a good incoming link? There are several points that can make a link better than other links.
read more:

Do no-follow links count for search engine rankings?
Actually, the rel=nofollow attribute should prevent search engines from following special links. Some webmasters might have found out that nofollow links will help your search engine rankings though.
read more:

Trade Web Design For Content Writing
Web - Design: Trade Web Design For Content Writing. Website Promotion By Dell from Philippines 3 comments. Is there anyone care for a trading content writing for web design Ill design your website then youll help me with the content writing.[1] Website development are also possible depending on how much help you will offer.[2] This offer was good for those who want to start up a content writing services.[3] The contents will be like outsourcing in the philippines as an alternative to outsourcing to india. ...
---Last comment Thu Dec 21 16:03:56 2006 by Dell from Philippines:
i want to design or develop website for content ... Tags: content_writing web_design help trade outsourcing
read more:

How many links on each page
Directory - Free: How many links on each page . Directory - Free By Nancy from Los Angeles I am building a new directory and was curious how many links should be placed on each page 10 50 or ...
read more:

Official Google Stand on Link selling
Google officially announced its stand on buying and selling links via their google webmaster blog,If, however, a webmaster chooses to buy or sell links for the purpose of manipulating search engine rankings, we reserve the right to protect the quality of our index. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank violates our webmaster guidelines. Such [...]
read more:

MCU: Accessible Web Design Tip: How to make printable characters between adjacent links invisible.
Some older screen readers are unable to distinguish between adjacent links if there is no printable character between them. The W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 1.0 provides a priority 3 checkpoint to deal with this unfortunate behaviour of older screen readers:10.5 Until user agents (including assistive technologies) render adjacent links distinctly, include non-link, printable characters (surrounded by spaces) between adjacent links. The obvious place on a page where you can find several adjacent links to is on a horizontal navigation bar at the top or bottom of a web page. So how do you adhere to this guideline in situations where displaying a printed character in your navigation bar would upset your beautifully crafted design?This weeks tips shows a technique I have used on the Glasgow West End website (http://www.glasgowwestend.co.uk) to make the printable characters separating links invisible, by making them the same colour as the navigation bar background, postcards
read more:

Link Harvester
Find all your inbound links (via the Yahoo API) with this free tool. Search an entire domain, or a particular URI. Handy links to whois, Internet Archive, and Google cache from each discovery. Includes source code so anyone can mirror the service.
read more:

Accessible Web Typography, an introduction for web designers, by Jim Byrne
ScotConnect have published my eBook, Accessible Web Typography, an introduction for web designers. As I say on the ScotConnect site, 'This eBook contains all the important 'stuff' I ever wanted to know about creating accessible text on my own web pages; and now that I have figured it out myself, I am happy to pass it on to others.'In my humble opionion - this is a 'must have' book if you want to learn how to create accessible text on your web pages. It is written in my usual informal style, so it is easy to understand, even for the accessible web design novice.Please get in touch if you would like a copy for a review: jim@mcu.org.uk.
read more:

Holiday & misc links 060807
Generator.x has been on extended (and unannounced) one-month holiday, but now summer is ending and blogging will slowly resume. To warm up, here are a few random links that have accumulated:AOL reSearch has just managed to release a substantial data set containing 20 million search queries from over 650 000 users. What was probably an [...]
read more:

Web Site Designers Business Website Page Design and hosting pac
Web Site Designers Business Website Page Design and hosting pac. web design: provides small businesses and self-employed people with web site design and hosting packages , custom , affordable , ecommerce, WebSite Design . . .
read more:

Back to the Opening New Windows Issue?
Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents is Jakob Nielsen's latest Alertbox article, dated August 29, 2005. Although he'd previously stated not to force links to open new windows, he now feels that you should indeed set links to open in new windows for PDF and other non-Web documents. Even after reading this new article, I still feel strongly about considering the website's target audience, letting the user choose, and avoiding accessibility problems. Today's post goes into why I feel that way and even includes an informal test to check out Nielsen's latest recommendation for yourself. (1195 words, 9 links)
read more:

How to make client-side image maps accessible.
Although client-side images are preferred over server-side image maps - as equivelent text can be provided for each image map 'hot-spot' - server-side image maps are sometimes necessary, e.g. when the active regions of a client-side image map cannot be easily defined using an available geographic shape. In such cases the answer is to provide redundant text links relating to each link provided by the server side image map.The following markup example is typical of the code used to reference a server side image map.The web pages accessed by the clicking the mage map in the above example would completely hidden to someone using a screen reader or a text-only web browser, as there is no alternative way of accessing the links provided.An example of the server side image with alt attribute added and an alternative set of links to the same content:You then make the following links available at the foot of the page,

About Us
read more:

Search engine insiders talk about links
On a recent search engine conference, Tim Mayer from Yahoo, Matt Cutts from Google and Kaushal Kurapti from Ask Jeeves revealed information on how these three search engines analyze links to determine the ranking of web pages in a public discussion.
read more:

Israel, Hezbollah trade attacks
MSNBC Jul 16 2006 11:41PM GMT
read more:

Israel, Lebanon trade attacks
MSNBC Jul 16 2006 6:27PM GMT
read more:

Helping Those Impacted by Hurricane Katrina
Like many of us, I've been glued to the TV watching the latest news on Hurricane Katrina. The devastation is heart-wrenching. There's news all over the Web, of course, about what's going on, including weblogs popping up. Today's post includes a selection of helpful links of how to help and how to follow the coverage of this horrendous disaster. (314 words, 12 links)
read more:

Google's Matt Cutts talks about buying links
Being one of the main software engineers on Google, Matt Cutts knows best about Google indexing and quality control issues. Find out what he thinks about buying links.
read more:

Inbound links and optimized content for your web site
The contents of a web page are important for the search engine rankings of a web page. Inbound links are even more important if you want to get high rankings on Google, Yahoo and MSN.
read more:

Structure your menus by marking them up as lists.
A navigation menu is - if we are speaking structurally - a list; but it is rare to find a developer/designer who marks them up as such. I guess the reason for this is that designers don't want to have ugly big bullet points littering their menu's, or seemingly uncontrollable margins throwing out their carefully crafted layouts.So, is it possible to use the correct structural markup, and still make your menus look the way you want them to?A recent rash of articles and tools have appeared to demonstrate that the answer is a resounding yes; you can use CSS to style lists to look more-or-less any way you want.First, undermine your previous assumptions by visiting the Listamatic website to see examples of different list styles (with the CSS used for each): Then visit Mark Newhouse's Taming Lists tutorial to learn how to make your own: And finally - if you can't be bothered learning how to do it yourself - have a look at Accessify's new List-o-matic - where you fill in a few forms, and the List-o-matic tool does all the hard work for you: Why is this relevant to accessible web design?Using the appropriate markup for all the structures in your web documents is the first step towards making them accessible; web pages need to be accessible to the tools, i.e. the 'user agents' people use first, before they can be accessible to the people themselves. Using valid standards based markup means you have the best chance of your pages being understood by those intermediate 'user agents' (usually that means computers and web browsers to you and me).The tips archive is at: Weekly accessible Web Design Tips.Register for your weekly accessible web design tip.Feedback from Andrew Arch Andrew Arch, the Manager Online Accessibility Consulting, National Information and Library Service has been in touch with some valuable feedback in relation to some of my recent accessible web design tips.Re: How to make printable characters between adjacent links invisible:'I used this tip with many clients in the past - a good one for thedesigners who can get very precious about their 'masterpiece'.'Andrew sent the following comments for consideration: even some new speaking browsers (eg HPR) can't distinguish links clearlywhile reading (HPR is fine when you bring up a link list) unless there is a character between them what we have found people doing is using a graphic between links for design purposes - this is ok, but the alt text needs to be set to '
read more:

Build Search Engine "Authority Links" with Press Releases
Are you looking for more website traffic or more 'quality and authoritative' links? Search engine optimization gurus agree that well-crafted press releases are another way to build traffic, quality industry authoritative links, and authority for your website. You can tell the world your news! There are many services that can send your international and local press release out on the Web. One of the largest and best known services is PRWeb. But sending out your press release is the last step in the process, how do you write a press release and when should you do one?
read more:

How many link partners are there? How many are enough for a link campaign?
Exchanging links with other sites is a promising way to increase your Google PageRank and to draw visitors to your site. Good incoming links have a positive effect on your search engine rankings and they also bring targeted visitors to your website. But how many potential link partners are there, and what is a realistic goal for your linking campaigns? How many link partners should you have?
read more:

My Upcoming Book on Essentials for Web Sites
I've posted information about my upcoming book at my business site's new section, New Book on Web Site Essentials. I'll update information there, especially when I can finally discuss it further, including referencing the title (hopefully soon!).[1] You can also sign up to be notified about when it will be available. It's currently in production via the publisher, SitePoint Books. You'll find more details and links in the complete post. (178 words, 11 links)
read more:

How to get links from an authority site
Webmasters are always looking for ways to get inbound links from authority web sites. For improving search engine rankings, an incoming link from an authority site is worth more than an incoming link from an average site.
read more:

Links Building Company in India offer Link Building Services.
Links Building Company in India offer Link Building Services.. seo services: internet marketing Links Building Service programs offer building link popularity with reciprocal link services, Link exchange campaign and manual Link building Program, Link popularity building with SEO. . .
read more:

Essential Firefox extensions
These are the Firefox extensions I can’t do without:Everybody needs…CustomizeGoogle lets you turn on Google Suggest by default, adds lots of other links to many types of search results, and more.DownThemAll! is a fast replacement for Firefox’s built-in downloader, and lets you quickly download multiple links and images from a page.Forecastfox gives you at-a-glance weather.Google [...]
read more:

When a link falls at the end of a sentence always put the full stop outside the anchor tag
Consider the World Wide Web Consortium Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), Checkpoint 10.5:'Until user agents (including assistive technologies) render adjacent links distinctly, include non-link, printable characters (surrounded by spaces) between adjacent links. 'Generally when trying to ensure that my web pages meet this particular requirement I'm thinking about navigation bars; I'm either marking them up as lists, or putting printable characters between adjacent links (if necessary I make them invisible via CSS). Unfortunately that isn't always enough to ensure a clean bill of health with regard to this particular checkpoint. It is easy - particularly on a page that gets updated often - to violate this rule in the bodytext of the page, e.g., when a sentence that ends with a link, is followed by one that begins with a link.The solution is to get into the habit of adding the full stop after the anchor tag; simple but effective. As web accessibility tips go - it's not the most significant one I've ever published. However, having adjacent links without a printable character between them, means your well crafted page won't pass WCAG Priority 1; and someone is bound to get in touch to alert you to that fact.LinksWCAG Checkpoint 10.5.
read more:

Usability and Design News: Screen Resolution, Page Layout, Hot Spots
Jakob Nielsen and Andy King both have new articles at their sites that cover window resolution, user-friendly website design, and related issues. This important topic is also regularly discussed and debated in Web design and development discussion lists. Below I've highlighted their articles, but be sure to check them out in full, too (links below). (658 words, 9 links, 2 images)
read more:

Aftermath of London Attacks
First, Brainstorms and Raves is not and doesn't plan to be a weblog covering current events or politics. I'm compelled to write about Thursday's terror attacks in London, but my writings here cover how people are using the Internet, especially weblogs, to stay in touch, share stories, and write their thoughts about what happened. Read the complete post for links to quite a few interesting weblogs, photoblogs, and BBC pages with personal accounts. (872 words, 43 links)
read more: