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The hCard is a one-to-one representation of the vCard in XHTML format. It is served to turn contact information into a semantically correct HTML, Atom, RSS or any arbitrary XML file. I won’t try to describe why to use it. Quite a few people have done a great job detailing what hCard microformat is and why people should consider using it. One of the best step-by-step guides that any newbie will understand is “The hCard Microformat” tutorial published in 2007 . For those people who won’t learn anything until they are told this will affect rankings, I will only add that hCards are used by Google to create search snippets , (obviously) to rank businesses in local and geo-targeted search and is rumored to use the format more and more extensively. Besides, it helps search (and other) bots to aggregate all the web information about any specific person or business . This post shares some most useful and easy-to0use hCard tools for you to learn how to format n hCard, where to use it and how to take advantage of it. hCard
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Semantic Checker is a new and still experimental Firefox addon (download it here ) highlighting semantic elements in the web page you are currently viewing. The tool should be used for on-page analysis as well for educational purposes (to see which sites are introducing new HTML elements and microformats, for example). Here are the elements the tool supports: Semantic HTML4 elements Shortened words: and (by the way, if you are wondering about the difference, find it here ); Headings : h1-h6; Quoting : blockquote, cite (more info can be found here ) Lists : dl, dir, menu (more information here , the latter two are deprecated) Emphasis tags : , More elements : code, dfn, address, legend, samp Semantic HTML5 elements For all those interested, here’s a cool list of HTML5 tags. The tool supports the following ones: Sections : article, aside, header, footer, nav; Content, media, data etc tags : figure, mark, meter, audio, video, progress, time, command, datagrid, details, datalist, keygen, bb, outpu, ruby Input-attributes : datetime, datetime-local, date, month, week, time, number, range, email, url, search, color Microformats hCard, hCalendar rel-license, rel-nofollow, rel-tag Vote Links Now let’s try to use the tool at a number of popular web pages. Twitter Profile: Facebook Group Page Stumbleupon Favorites Page: My
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Last week Asa Dotzler, Mozilla’s director of community development, put out a link on his personal blog and stated: Here’s how you can easily switch Firefox’s search from Google to Bing. It was a pretty shocking move by a member of a company that has seen most of its revenue come from Google . It was a move brought on by concerns over the search giants view on privacy. The comment was spurred by Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt comments on privacy: If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place,” Schmidt told CNBC. “If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities Why are they watching and storing what we do? Data. The more data they can collect, the more they can personalize search. How does Schmidt feel about personalized search ? From his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal: It’s the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load. Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. I zip through a health story in The Wall Street Journal and a piece about Iraq from Egypt’s Al Gomhuria, translated automatically from Arabic to English. I tap my finger on the screen, telling the computer brains underneath it got this suggestion right… Personalized search can only happen with data collection, this is a reality. How does Google collect data ? Gmail and Google Accounts Adsense Adwords Google Analytics Google Chrome (browser and OS) Google Toolbar Android On and on and on… Their new love? Real Time Search data. This data comes in the form of APIs from places such as Twitter in some cases, and can give the engines much of the information they need to fuel time based elements in the ranking algorithm such as Query Deserves Freshness (QDF). Real time data allows them to pull in trending information, links, and pages linked from conversation without a crawl. Why stop there? Enter Goo.gl, Google’s URL shortener. What kind of information can you pull from a URL shortner? 1. What information people care enough to share – will likely be a huge signal if you are logged in 2. What information people are clicking on 3. Referral sources for differing pages that do not include Google Analytics The really strange component of this addition to Google’s product set is that it goes against what initially made them THE search engine, the interlinking web’s use in ranking. 301 or no, that loss of anchor text and the credit from direct citation are something that seem to be against everything the engine was founded on. However, they are everything the engine is moving towards. Data driven results. Eventually this data will not only mean your results being shaped by what you like, but also your social web. Think about this, if I am logged into Google and share 30 pieces of content and you click on 25 out of the 30, do you think this will begin to shape your SERPs? More involuntary personalization. Less of the web delivered. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Google Answers Privacy Questions with Call for More
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For several years now, Google and Apple have been complimentary partners. Google was expertly integrated with the Apple iPhone, and the company’s engineers work tirelessly to bring many of their services to the Apple platform in addition to the PC and Linux platforms. They’ve been pals for much of the search engine’s lifespan. Google’s chief financial officer, Eric Schmidt, was even a member of Apple’s board of directors since August 2006. And immediately after Schmidt left Apple’s boardroom this year, Google has made much more of a push into areas that have thus far been dominated by Apple and Microsoft: browsers, operating systems, music services, and now, even Google-powered phones and Google netbooks . Schmidt’s resignation from the Apple board in 2009 was a signal to many that Google would be frequently stepping on Apple’s toes and looking to them as more of a competitor than partner. With that in mind, many can’t help but wonder which company will fare better and come out on top. Apple has been around since 1976. Google was established in 1998. In terms of length of time in business, Apple has got Google beat by more than two decades. In terms of brand awareness, however, Google trumps Apple, coming in at No. 7 on Interbrand’s Best Global Brands List for 2009 . Apple comes in at a respectable No. 20. Google is no stranger to going up against more established competitors and coming out on top. Case in point – Microsoft. In terms of search, they’ve been battling it out, and while Microsoft’s latest incarnation of search – Bing – is doing extremely well ( when it’s working ), Google still has more searches, and by quite a lot. While Microsoft has an advantage in the operating system and browser markets, with the majority of computers coming pre-installed with Windows and Internet Explorer, Google’s raising some eyebrows with their Android OS and Chrome browser. Battlefront #1: Music & OnDemand
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This is an additional post in my series on managing several online identities . This post looks at the 3 ways to be logged in different account on one site with FireFox. CookiePie CookiePie is a Firefox extension that enables you to maintain different cookies storage in different tabs and windows: Download and install the tool; Use the tab’s context menu to enable CookiePie and login to any site on this tab; Open a new site, go to the same site and login again. There were some problems for me with Gtalk (with the tool being on Gtalk behaved in a strange way) but with other sites it worked pretty well: CookieSwap CookieSwap enables you to easily swap all your cookies so that you can be logged in to multiple web e-mail accounts (like Gmail and Yahoo! mail) as different users at the same time and quickly switch between them. Note: When swapping profiles with CookieSwap, the cookies in all tabs and all browser windows are changed at the same time. This means that your web login to sites like gmail will change in all the tabs at once (so it is not exactly being logged in in two accounts at the same time; it is rather switching between accounts with one click of a mouse). How this extension works: Right click on the CookieSwap area of the Status Bar Panel (lower right corner of the browser) to bring up the CookieSwap menu. Select a profile (let’s say ‘Profile1′) Go to a site requiring a login and login; Bring up the CookieSwap menu again and select a different profile (let’s say ‘Profile2′) Open a new tab and go to the same page page. Note: Don’t click on a link in the current open page. Instead, hand type the URL…like www.gmail.com, or use a bookmarked entry for the site. Notice the site doesn’t recognize you as the previous user. Login with a different username if you want. Use the CookieSwap menu to go back to Profile1 and again surf to the web e-mail’s main page. It recognizes you again as the original user that logged in! Use Different FireFox
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I have already looked at most important factors to take into account when analyzing search engine results page ; this week I am taking a bit more practical approach reviewing (and comparing) tools that will help you to analyze SERPs. They all work as FireFox addons (so you will hardly be abe to install all of them because we need to be very selective when it comes to browser plugins to allow our FireFox to work fast), so I suggest reading through the post to decide which one(s) of them you feel like trying: Tool Major features Most outstanding features Drawbacks / bugs SEOquake Lots of SEO-relevant information for each listing in Google search results Sort Google results by any of the parameters, export search results, create your own parameters May insert its own ads above the search results; got some problems with updating it SEO for FireFox Quick and easy to use, minimum bugs – Search Cloudlet Most frequently ranked domains within one search results page – SERPs Analyzer Estimated number of clicks and PPC revenue per month; Google PR, Yahoo backlinks. etc SERPs stats Beta mode (buggy, non-customizable) 1. SEOquake Inserts lots of data under each listing in Google SERPs: Google pagerank, Google index, Google cache date; Yahoo! index, Yahoo! linkdomain, Yahoo! link; Bing index; Dmoz listing; Webarchive age; Alexa rank; Delicious bookmarks; Technorati index; Digg index; Domain IP; Link to Robots.txt, Sitemap and Page source; SEMrush info (traffic, traffic value, rank); Compete Rank, More! Moreover, you can sort results by any of the parameters and export all the results along with the retrieved data. This is the most customizable addon I am aware of: not only it allows to hide any of the data item but it also enables you to create new parameters by using the following variables: 2. SEO for
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Have you ever heard about microformats? If you still need someone to clearly explain what it is about, check out Joe Hall ’s post on development trends that will impact SEO . Microformats look for a new way to format markup languages. Essentially, they offer a new standard for identifying important information. There’s one really nice FireFox addon that uses Microformats to analyze the page content: “ Operator ” is an extension for Firefox that adds the ability to interact with semantic data on web pages, including microformats, RDFa and eRDF. It can turn really useful for spotting the essential microformats used on the page. Once you install it, you’ll be able to see the toolbar that can be toggled using View > Toolbars > Operator Toolbar . (Useful tip: To make the tool hassle-free, find the checkbox in Options that causes the toolbar to auto-hide when there is no data on the page). The toolbar breaks data found on a page into the following sections: Contacts; Events; Locations; Tagspaces; Bookmarks; Resources. Here are a few examples of what each section stands for: 1. Try visiting your Twitter profile page. The tool will extract your contacts: 2. Now, go to Delicious home page and watch the tool extract all tags (you can search each tag on Flickr, Delicious, Technorati, etc): The tool offers a few really cool features: Its “Highlight” feature allows you to find the tag by choosing it in the drop-down; The operator can be accessed via the status bar icon (the button can be added via the Operator options dialog. Check the box that says “Display icon in status bar”) or the toolbar bar icon (The Operator toolbar button can be added to your Firefox toolbar by selecting View > Toolbars > Customize). You can add or delete data formats to be displayed. In the Operator options panel, there is a Data Formats tab. This tab has a listbox that contains all the data formats that will be displayed. You can use the New button to add data formats and the delete button to remove them. You can also change the order in which the data formats are displayed. You can also add or remove actions taken for each data format. In the Operator options panel, there is an Actions tab. This tab has a listbox that contains all the actions that will be displayed. You can check or uncheck the checkbox to determine what actions are displayed in the Operator menus. You can also install user scripts to add optional functionality. The tool was reviewed under SEJ policy . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Interact with On-Page Semantic Data with Operator FireFox
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