Welcome to Land of Tricks

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be at the top of your Web publishing priority list. If Web surfers can’t find your site, they can’t read it, use it or share it with others.

One might think SEO is an arcane science that only a few experts have mastered. There isquite a bit to it, and there are times you might want to employ an SEO firm or expert to help you optimize your site. Often this is a costly solution that’s not feasible for individuals or small businesses.

The good news is Search Engine Optimization doesn’t have to be rocket science. There are quite a few things you can do on your own. I’ve got a few proven, and easy to do tips and techniques that will help people find your content and make it easy for Google (and other engines) to crawl and index your site.

Lead with good content.

My number one tip for SEO? Provide frequently updated content that people want to read. Incoming links are key and if you can provide content that people will read and get something out of, there is a good chance they will link to that content.

Research your keywords.

You can use a Keyword Suggestion Tool or simply put yourself in the mindset of your target audience. Learn which terms people will search with and get those into your content and meta information.

Provide a good, clear title.

If SEO is important to you make sure you don’t get cute with the titles for your pages. Write titles that are clear and contain your keywords. Once you’ve got that title written, make sure it appears in your title tag as well as in your top level heading tags (h1) on your pages.

Don’t use splash pages or Flash.

Search engines like text. A Flash or image intro can block an engine’s crawler right at your homepage. If you do use images, be sure to add keyword laden descriptions to your alt attributes.

Use Robots.txt

Make sure you provide a robots.txt file that will help tell crawlers what to index on your site. There are quite a few neat things you can do with your robots.txt file, so you might want to read up on them.

Code your pages with standard, clean and semantic markup.

The cleaner your code the easier it is to crawl. Use markup as it is intended with the proper tags tied to the proper information. For example, place your headings with in heading tags, paragraphs within paragraph tags, etc. Another good idea is to move all your presentation into a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) file. This makes your code lighter, faster and easier to index.

Don’t get tricky!

Whatever you do, don’t try to “trick” your way into more traffic. Duplicate pages, hidden links and other less-than-honest techniques can get you seriously penalized and ruin any positive work you’ve done.

Be patient and don’t forget the people!

Search engines are constantly updating and re-indexing. It may take awhile after you’ve made some changes to see the results. Hang in there, keep working on your content and keep providing something that people find useful.

It’s easy to forget that the reason you want to optimize for search in the first place is that you want to bring people to your site and your content!

If you look at the list of domains banned by the socially driven news and content behemoth Digg.com, you will find that a majority of them are SEO-related sites. While many people think that Digg has an irrational vendetta against these sites, it’s not entirely irrational, rather it’s simply driven by a mentality of generalizing.

While I’m willing to accept that most SEOs and their websites are completely legitimate and not spammy, there are some that are quite the opposite. Rather than harp on about what differentiates the two kinds of sites, I present to you one YouTube video that covers every reason why Digg and Digg-like hate SEOs and their blogs, and why they are justified in their hate.

The bad advice the video gives you, that is sure to get your site marked as spam and eventually banned:

1. Submitting your content just to get traffic and to take advantage of these sites’ high PageRank, regardless of the quality of your content and without taking into account whether it would interest the community.
2. Making multiple accounts to artificially promote your content.
3. Using software programs to automate the process and spamming as many social sites as you can.
4. Paying him to do the above for you.

Like I mentioned before, the Digg community doesn’t have an irrational vendetta against SEO-related sites, it’s just that people like the gentleman in the video above, cause the community to generalize about SEOs and thus label all of them has having the same mentality and using the same tactics.

US-CERT on Tuesday warned about vulnerability in the new Firefox 3.5 browser that could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code.

Proof-of-concept exploit code was posted Monday on Milw0rm.com, an exploit code aggregation site, so it’s likely that the vulnerability is being actively exploited.

The vulnerability, discovered by Simon Berry-Byrne, is related to the way Firefox 3.5 processes JavaScript code.

Mozilla has acknowledged the vulnerability and has a fix that’s being tested. “The vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker who tricks a victim into viewing a malicious Web page containing the exploit code,”the company said on its security blog. “The vulnerability can be mitigated by disabling the JIT in the JavaScript engine.

To do this:

1) Enter about:config in the browser’s location bar.

2) Type jit in the Filter box at the top of the config editor.

3) Double-click the line containing javascript.options.jit.contentsetting the value to false.

As an alternative, the NoScript plug-in, which disables all JavaScript in the browser, should also offer protection.

Secunia, a computer security company based in Denmark, rates the vulnerability “highly critical” and notes that older versions of Firefox may be affected as well.

F-Secure, a computer security company based in Finland, said in ablog post that its Exploit Shield security software blocks the exploit.

In an interview on Monday about a bug in Google’s Chrome browser, Robert “RSnake” Hansen, CEO of SecTheory, a computer security consulting firm, criticized Firefox’s security process as being less rigorous than Microsoft’s. “For the most part, it’s just a bunch of random dudes who are contributing to it,” he said.

Nevertheless, Hansen said that Firefox, rather than Internet Explorer, was his browser of choice because it was better for hacking.

Johnathan Nightingale, whose business card says “human shield” — he manages the front-end team for Firefox and security issues — says he’s proud of the work Mozilla does and that he can’t compare Mozilla’s efforts to Microsoft’s because Microsoft’s security process isn’t open.

He notes that Mozilla devotes significant resources to security and that the company’s security team has been growing. He welcomes those who want to contribute to Mozilla to make it more secure.