What is White, Grey and Black Hat SEO?
Many people take SEO courses to learn how to optimise their websites for search engines. The first thing most of these courses will teach you is about white, grey and black hat SEO.
This is the classification of SEO practices as good, bad or questionable. White hat techniques are those methods approved of by the search engines, and while black hat techniques are those that are likely to see your site penalised or banned if discovered.
White hat SEO
These are the so-called ‘ethical’ techniques approved of by the search engines. These include:
Advertising for Mobiles Takes Off
Where technology goes, advertising generally follows. As the mobile market booms across the globe (now more than 4 billion users), so mobile devices have become the new potential cash cow for advertisers.
The number of Australian mobile users has increased by nearly 40 per cent in just the last few months and it is estimated that the mobile advertising market will be worth nearly $9 billion globally by 2014.
SMS texting was first introduced in 1994 and the first mobile text advertisement appeared in 2000. Since then, marketers have been continually experimenting with mobile ads to find ever more eye-catching and interactive ways to engage with consumers.
Currently, the two main forms of mobile advertising are banner ads and SMS text ads.
How Does Hosting Affect Your Website?
If you have a website, you also need a website host. Hosting is the service of providing a physical location on the Internet for your website to exist. It is usually a paid service and is available in a variety of different forms.
The kind of hosting you choose will affect your site’s accessibility, reliability and profitability, so along with investing in web development training to ensure your site looks great, invest some time in researching what form of web hosting will suit it best.
This article looks briefly at each type of hosting and the positive and negative implications each could have for your website.
How to Increase Your SEO Knowledge
Do you know what SERPs are? Have you come across any spiders lately? What about keyword stuffing?
If these are unfamiliar terms, then chances are your knowledge of SEO (search engine optimisation) is probably scant or non-existent, just like the majority of people not directly involved in the industry.
“So what?”, I hear you say. “Why do I need to learn SEO?”
Well, if you just use the internet to surf and shop, you probably don’t. But if you’re:
- A marketing executive responsible for promoting your company’s website
- A small business owner involved in e-commerce and looking to increase traffic
- A webmaster or website designer
The Big Winners on the Web in 2011
There was no shortage of online innovation in 2011, with some exciting new players making their mark for the first time and some well-known entities continuing to go from strength to strength.
In the .net Awards, the Innovation of the Year went to jQuery Mobile for its mobile website development tool. A library of widgets that translates semantic markup into a more user-friendly format, it has become a huge hit with mobile developers.
.net’s Mobile App of the Year was awarded to Reeder, an RSS client for Google Reader users that collects, prioritises and displays your favourite news stories on iPhone or iPad and even lets you post to Twitter.
Website of the Year, the UK’s most important people’s choice award for websites, went to the game site Zylom for its high quality content and design, its ease of navigation and its high popularity among users.
10 Handy Dreamweaver Add-ons Reviewed
There are a lot of excellent add-ons available for Dreamweaver, the industry’s leading website creation and editing software.
If you’ve had any Dreamweaver training , you may be aware of some of these, but here are 10 ways to make your website sparkle that you may not be familiar with.
- DataAssist is a great tool for managing database-driven websites. It allows you to build dynamic catalogue pages for an online store and easily add, edit, search and display data, without needing to hand code.
- E-Cart lets you add a multi-feature, customisable shopping cart to your website from within Dreamweaver. It has an easy-to-use wizard interface that automatically generates all the pages needed for ecommerce transactions.
Epubs vs Kindle: The Top Two Digital Publishing Formats
As new technologies evolve, two competing versions often emerge from the ranks, just as we saw with VHS vs Betamax, plasma vs LCD and HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray.
It’s all part of healthy competition and one version generally ends up dominating the marketplace or in some cases, consigning the other to oblivion.
Digital publishing is a technological environment that is rapidly evolving and, as any good computer course on the subject will tell you, there are two main formats currently in the ring.
Online News: Who Will Pay?
Rupert Murdoch’s decision to charge for the online version of the New York Times could signal the beginning of the end for free online news. While the arguments for and against rage on, News Corp is forging ahead with its plan to make online news pay its way.
The newspaper industry has been in decline for years, with advertising revenue diminishing and costs increasing. The rise of the internet is yet another nail in its coffin and newspapers, after initially giving away online content for free, now want to try to make money from it.
And why wouldn’t they? It costs money to run a newsroom and if advertising revenue isn’t paying for it anymore, then the money has to come from somewhere.
