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Archive for February, 2011

8 Excellent WordPress SEO Plugins

17 Feb

8 Excellent WordPress SEO Plugins

WordPress is one the most popular tools for publishing content on the web. Everything from e-commerce websites to blogs can be developed using WordPress. Additionally, the WordPress community has built up a huge offering of free themes and plugins to make it easy for newcomers to get content published on the web quickly and easily.

However, just posting content on the web isn’t enough for many; attracting people to your site is part science, part art — and many WordPress plugins help you do just that. This is a listing of top-notch WordPress plugins for SEO to improve your WordPress site’s search engine rankings.

1. SEO Rank Reporter

SEO Rank Reporter

This WordPress SEO plugin allows you to track certain keywords in your site, and then issues you a report every 3 days (with all sorts of pretty graphs to boot). The plugin will also notify you via email whenever certain keywords experience major changes in search engine ranking.

2. All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack

Any basic research on SEO plugins for WordPress will lead you to All in One SEO Pack. It is the most popular solution for your WordPress site’s search engine optimization. This plugin automatically optimizes your WordPress site for search engines by generating meta tags and helping you optimize web page titles. Advanced users are given the ability to customize post titles, descriptions, URL structures and tags for each post.

3. SEO Ultimate

SEO Ultimate

SEO Ultimate is a suite of tools for, well, ultimate SEO. It has a feature called Canonicalizer, which extends WordPress’s native canonical features to ensure that web spiders are pointed to the primary post in the case of web pages with the same content, but different URLs. It has a built-in robot.txt editor (one of the five web files that will enhance your site) that will allow you to easily set up this file for optimal search engine indexing. It works well with All in One SEO Pack, allowing you to import meta-data from it if you wanted to switch to SEO Ultimate.

4. SEO Content Control

SEO Content Control

This nifty plugin helps you identify weak content in your site. For example, many WordPress owners forget to include descriptions of their categories, which is a potential point of improvement for enhancing your search engine rankings. SEO Content Control helps you easily identify these potentially troublesome areas.

5. SEO Friendly Image

SEO Friendly Image

Optimizing images for search engines is often neglected; but when done right, you increase their semantic value, accessibility, and search engine indexability, especially for image searches. This WordPress SEO plugin automatically updates your images with alt and title attributes.

6. SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links is a WordPress SEO plugin that automatically links keywords and phrases in your blog posts based on previous pages and posts. SEO Smart Links gives you the ability to set up your own unique keywords and sets of matching URLs. It also allows you to set nofollow attributes and open links in new browser windows or browser tabs. A very convenient way to save time, learn a bit about SEO best practices and interlink blog posts.

7. Google XML Sitemaps

Google XML Sitemaps

This WordPress plugin is able to generate an XML sitemap that will assist search engine spiders in crawling and indexing your WordPress site. XML Sitemaps reveals the structure of your site’s content in a transparent way for search engines. Google XML Sitemaps also includes support for Bing, Yahoo!, Ask.com, and MSN, notifying them every time you create a post.

8. Platinum SEO Pack

Platinum SEO Pack

This SEO plugin for WordPress is loaded with plenty of features, including automatically generating meta tags, helping you optimize page and post titles for search engines, and aiding you in avoiding duplicate content (one of the ways to improve SEO of sites you design).

Conclusion

These WordPress plugins will give your WordPress site a complete SEO overhaul. Installing them and getting to understand each plugin’s inner workings may take some time, but it is worth it to know how each plugin can benefit your site. When used correctly, your content will be more visible, potentially attracting additional traffic consisting of your target audience.

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About the Author

Matt Krautstrunk is an expert writer on document management software based in San Diego, California. He writes extensively for an online resource that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs such as payroll services at Resource Nation. You can follow him on Twitter @Mattbill.

 
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Watson Jeopardy! computer: Ken Jennings describes what it’s like to play against a machine.

17 Feb
When I was selected as one of the two human players to be pitted against IBM's "Watson" supercomputer in a special man-vs.-machine Jeopardy! exhibition match, I felt honored, even heroic. I envisioned myself as the Great Carbon-Based Hope against a new generation of thinking machines—which, if Hollywood is to believed, will inevitably run amok, build unstoppable robot shells, and destroy us all. But at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Lab, an Eero Saarinen-designed fortress in the snowy wilds of New York's Westchester County, where the shows taped last month, I wasn't the hero at all. I was the villain.

[more ...]

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Calling on RoboCop to Help Detroit

16 Feb
An Internet campaign to raise $50,000 to produce and install a 7-foot-tall iron replica of the crime-fighting cyborg in Detroit reached its goal in a mere six days.

 
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CHART OF THE DAY: The Death Of The Music Industry

16 Feb

Here is a stunning visualization of the collapse of the music industry from Bain. As you can see, the growth of digital sales is not doing enough to offset the death of the CD. (Chart via Peter Kafka, who spotted it on Flickr.)

Now Check Out The Amazing Evolution Of The iPod >

chart of the day, music industry 1973-2009, feb 2011

Follow the Chart Of The Day on Twitter: @chartoftheday

Join the conversation about this story »

 
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All the world’s computers equal to one human mind

16 Feb

The time may come when a computer will be able to out-compute a human, but not yet. According to a recent study, adding up all the computation power in every laptop, server, mainframe, cell phone, and digital processors of all kinds, everywhere on the planet will give you approximately the ability to handle approximately 6.4 x 10^18 operations a second. About the same as a human brain.

All the worlds storage – paper, film, hard-drives, etc. would give you same amount of storage as human DNA. In other words, somewhere around 2011 the planet has enough computing power to account for 1 extra person. The vast amount of “thinking” is still done by organic chemistry. Read the article I read on ARS Technica.

 
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Deployed or upgraded to Lotus Connections 3.0? Read this

16 Feb
We have issued a flash for a serious security issue.  We want to ensure that all customers using Connections 3.0 apply this patch - certainly if they are in production, but also if they have pilots where a breach in the security of the logon would be an issue. 

 

https://www-304.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?mynp=OCSSYGQH&mync=E&uid=swg21462435&myns=swglotus 




The issue was found internally by our team.  There are no public disclosures of the vulnerability at this time, and no evidence that anyone has found or exploited the issue yet.  We won't be sharing any information on the nature of the issue, in order to minimize the risk of a public disclosure. 



It is a WAS issue, specific to WAS 7.0.0.x, and the WAS patch completely protects against the issue. 

Whether the customer has seen an issue or not, they are exposed. 

Our own evaluation of the threat level of this specific exposure dictated that the patch be applied immediately to Greenhouse for example. 



We have also created Connections ifixes to make us less exposed to WAS bugs in this area in the future..  They aren't mandatory, just additional defensive code.
Time to get patched - you have been warned.

 
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Twitter Dots: Mapping all Tweets for a specific Keyword

15 Feb

twitter_dots.jpg
Twitter Dots [twitterdots.com] translates individual tweets as simple dots on a geographical world map. It is as simple as that. The actual keyword changes each day.

Still interesting to observe how a timeline animation shows some people still tweet "Good Morning" in the late evening... That or the geographical location might be off for a lot of people (e.g. overseas holidays?).

More information is available here.

 
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Feature: Anonymous speaks: the inside story of the HBGary hack

15 Feb

It has been an embarrassing week for security firm HBGary and its HBGary Federal offshoot. HBGary Federal CEO Aaron Barr thought he had unmasked the hacker hordes of Anonymous and was preparing to name and shame those responsible for co-ordinating the group's actions, including the denial-of-service attacks that hit MasterCard, Visa, and other perceived enemies of WikiLeaks late last year.

When Barr told one of those he believed to be an Anonymous ringleader about his forthcoming exposé, the Anonymous response was swift and humiliating. HBGary's servers were broken into, its e-mails pillaged and published to the world, its data destroyed, and its website defaced. As an added bonus, a second site owned and operated by Greg Hoglund, owner of HBGary, was taken offline and the user registration database published.

Over the last week, I've talked to some of those who participated in the HBGary hack to learn in detail how they penetrated HBGary's defenses and gave the company such a stunning black eye—and what the HBGary example means for the rest of us mere mortals who use the Internet.

Read the rest of this article...

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The truth about why things smell bad: Vibrating molecules [Biology]

15 Feb
For over a century, our sense of smell has been explained with the "lock and key" hypothesis, which holds that each odor molecule has a particular shape that allows it to fit into particular smell receptors in the nose. But now a controversial study involving fruit flies suggests that hypothesis might miss the truth entirely - the secret, they say, is all in the vibrations. More »
 
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Jeopardy -Playing Watson Computer System Could Revolutionize Research

15 Feb

By Nicola Jones

IBM's supercomputer Watson is going up against top players of the US television quiz programme Jeopardy! this week, stirring up excitement in the artificial-intelligence community and prompting computer science departments across the country to gather and watch.

"It is, in my mind, a historic moment," says Oren Etzioni, director of the Turing Center at the University of Washington, Seattle. jeopardy-playing-watson>[More]

 
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