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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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Business,
creator,
download,
firefox,
hcard,
learning,
live,
opera,
person,
plugin,
tool,
user,
yahoo
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Quick Scroll is a new little tool from Google for Google Chrome. It basically helps to navigate to the part of the document that you saw when clicking on Google search result. After you click on a Google search result, Quick Scroll may appear on the bottom-right corner of the page, showing one or more bits of text from the page that are relevant to your query. Clicking on the text will take you to that part of the page. What it means is the following: (1) The user searches Google to find something and clicks more or less relevant result; (2) Having landed on the page, he sees it seems to be about the topic but he can’t find the exact place that caught his attention when being at SERPs; (3) Here’s where the Chrome extension comes to rescue: it displays a little pop-up below the screen with the quote from the search result snippet; (4) The user may click that quote and he will be taken to the exact place of the document used to create Google search result snippet. Note that the little window won’t appear always: for example you won’t notice the tool when the keywords from your search or the quote from the snippet are on top of the page or quite visible. The tool will only interfere when you are likely to need it. Quick Scroll appears only when it’s likely to be useful, helping make sure it won’t get in your way when it’s not needed. Why I thought that was a cool tool to share? The most important reason why I thought Quickscroll is worth sharing here is that it demonstrates Google’s plans and experiments on introducing further navigation right within the document itself. First that was named anchors as additional page navigation aid , then “Jump to…” links below the clickable page title and now this. I also stumbled across this thread about related Google patent – Artificial Anchor for a Document in the SERPs : With systems and methods described herein, mechanisms are provided to generate or simulate links with artificial named anchors and to allow the browser to recognize the artificial named anchor and navigate directly to the desired specific part of the target webpage even when the author of the webpage has not created a named anchor at the specific part of the webpage. Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Quick Scroll: Google Chrome’s Web Document Navigation
Tags:
attention,
browser,
document,
exact,
quick-scroll,
search,
search-engine,
seo,
tool,
tools
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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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elements,
facebook,
facebook-group,
firefox,
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quite-invisible,
search-engine,
semantic,
tool,
tools,
twitter-profile
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I find it sad that many people are absolutely unaware of Google advanced operators, or even if they do know about the advanced search, they never use it. I for one use Google advanced operators all the time: when doing on-page diagnostics; searching for backlink opportunities, doing competitive research, etc, etc So in this post I decided to share the best tools and tutorials that will help you remember and learn to use the advanced search (if you are not using it already): Advanced search
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ability,
browser,
custom,
google-advanced,
guide,
internet,
search,
search-engine,
search-engines,
seo,
time,
tool,
tools,
windows,
yahoo
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Last time I shared a quick tip on how SEJ tools help to analyze your design . Today I am going to share another feature that allows to quickly collect your off-page stats (I say quickly because that’s actually the best part about the tool: there’s nothing there you can’t do yourself but with it you’ll save much time). Quality analyzer (the feature hides behind RESEARCH tab) is the tool that for any given URL generates the following report : The number of pages indexed by Google (as reported by SITE: operator); The number of pages indexed by Yahoo (as reported by SITE: operator); Backlinks in Google (Google’s link: operator); Backlinks in Yahoo; .EDU links (in Yahoo); .GOV links (in Yahoo); Domain age; Domain expiration; Google PageRank; Alexa Traffic rank; Presence in Dmoz. While I understand there are more similar tools, there are a few things I like about this report: Quick links to details (many similar tools lack this basic feature): click through to detailed results on Google or Yahoo; Easy scoring : I like it that 100 is taken as the maximum score, this makes it easier to understand how much you still need to catch on; Up to a point : only necessary information; it doesn’t list any extra superfluous info. All in all, that’s an easy way to evaluate where your site currently stands. Enjoy! Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . Analyze Your Current Off-Page Stats with SEJ
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alexa-traffic,
current,
design,
feature,
google-page,
makes-it-easier,
search-engine,
seo,
tool,
yahoo
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I have previously looks at a few tools to instantly see which analytics package(s) the current site is using . I have also shared a nice tool called “Wappalyzer” that detects which software the site is using and displays it in the status bar. Additionally, I have once looked at some tools to protect your privacy by using public proxies or a number of FireFox plugins and hacks . Today’s tool takes a bit of all that is mentioned above and combines that in a very convenient and usable manner. Ghostery is a FireFox plugin that is aimed to do the following: (1) It detects “web bugs, ad networks and widgets” on every page on the web; (2) It allows to block any detected web bugs trackers and thus protect your privacy. Let’s take a detailed feature overview and see it in action. Start by installing the tool here . After re-starting your browser you should see the tool icon in the status bar that shows you how many “bugs” the tool managed to detect. Click on the icon to see the details: The name of each tracker; (When you hover over the name) The URL to the tracker host, the script source and the invitation to block it: Additionally, you can instantly see the “Alert bubble” each time you open a page or a tab. The bubble contains the list of the page trackers: Of course, you can disable the bubble from options, which also allow to: Hide the bubble after the set period of time; Enable or disable the ghost count in the status bar; Enable the ghost rank (this one helps the tool build its database. It sends data of the ghosts you come across while browsing). The blocking tab allows to enable blocking of the supported bugs: Supported services include (but are not limited to): Google Analytics MyBlogLog Quantcast IndexTools SiteMeter Lijit Omniture CrazyEgg Snap Omniture Statcounter Piwik Mint Facebook Beacon Typepad Stats Lookery HubSpot Yahoo Analytics Facebook Connect Federated Media OpenAds FeedBurner Google Adsense HitTail FriendFeed Woopra ScribeFire QuickAds Doubleclick WordPress Stats WebTrends OpenAds ShareThis FeedBurner Seesmic AddtoAny, etc. Our verdict : a solid tool that can be used in the following cases: When you need to browse anonymously; When you research competitors’ tactics to see which tracking software they are using; To educate yourself of tracking systems around the web, etc. The tool was reviewed under SEJ policy . Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal . See Which Trackers Other Sites Are Using with
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browser,
bubble,
facebook-beacon,
federated-media,
ghost,
ghosts,
google-adsense,
search-engine,
seo,
tool,
tools
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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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browser,
cookie,
cookies,
cookieswap,
different-fire,
firefox,
manager,
search engine news,
search-engine,
tool,
tools,
yahoo