Crucial Steps for Building Authority by Vertical Measures

As most SEOs know by now, a strong authoritative website does not need to be owned and operated by a large multimillion dollar corporation with an endless budget. With the strength in social networking, a website with very strong authority might only need to have the trust with the people in a certain niche. Now days, there are authoritative websites in every subject, from hair products to sports training. Understanding how to build authority to your site may require a bit of knowledge in internet marketing, but once you get the ball rolling in the right direction the possibilities are endless for your brand.

A website’s success can be measured by the amount of targeted visitors that it receives which can inevitably determine a site’s strength. To achieve the goal of an authoritative website, the site itself must rank highly for keywords that your targeted group is actually using to search (I know, it’s the chicken or the egg thing). The only way to enjoy a website’s continued triumphs is by maintaining the high number of targeted visitors on a persistent basis.

Aside from creating a visually enticing website, there are many helpful strategies that help keep visitors engaged and interested in coming back to the site. In no particular order, the following is what I would consider a “must have” list for building authority to your website:

Dave Ferguson’s Blog: jQuery Mobile; styling loaded content

With today’s dynamic systems getting them to load properly is always a challenge. Especially if you have content loaded via Ajax after the initial load. This can be the hardest part. Even more so, things like jQuery Mobile make it even harder. This is because jQuery Mobile rewrites the html that is initially loaded to be styled and work properly.

So, lets take a basic example and figure out how to style some ajax loaded content.

Want to really Repair Permissions on your Mac? Try this. | TechBlog | a Chron.com blog

Did you know that, in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, there’s a second, hidden version of the Repair Permissions feature that may be more effective at solving some problems than the better-known one?

It saved my bacon today, and it might be able to solve nagging Home folder problems for you, too. Read on.

Use the jQuery Mobile API for fine-grained custom control

The jQuery Mobile framework is a quick and easy way to create mobile websites. However, you might not know that the framework has a decent API that you can use to extend the basic functionality. This article provides an overview of some of the most useful features in the API and gives you working code examples throughout.

Online Tools To Check Cross-Browser Compatibility Issues | 39Articles

With today’s modern web it’s not uncommon for many visitors to be using a different browser. The options seem almost unlimited with Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Safari, and of course Internet Explorer. There are also many lesser-known browsers and 3rd party software for Mac and Linux Operating Systems.

When it comes to designing websites you must take these specs into consideration. The best developers from around the world hold their websites to the highest standards. Even the professionals are utilizing software and hacks for cross-browser compatibility.

I’ve included a few examples and links below. These are very helpful tools to analyze and critique your websites in many browsing environments. Modern web designers actually have more convenient tools than ever before related to manipulating and testing browser support.

No, You Can’t Pick My Brain. It Costs Too Much – Forbes

I love giving advice. I write blogs, articles and a newsletter. I host a radio show. I tweet, Facebook and share nuggets of advice almost daily. So what is it in all of that, that would make anyone think they can still have the right to “pick my brain”?

I can’t tell you how flattering it is to be approached by representatives from major companies seeking my wisdom and advice. It shows they are listening, and like what I have to say.

But often I find the road ends when they are just on a fact finding mission. That mission is to pick my brain to gather as much free intel and knowledge they need to make their jobs easier.

Not gonna happen, sorry. My brain costs money to maintain. There’s training, classes to attend, reading (I have to buy books), gaining certifications, costs of memberships so I can network, attending conferences and mastering my skills that all cost me money.

(Read the full article)

11 Things every Software Developer should be doing in 2012. – Michael Crump

2011 is winding down and 2012 is upon us. Have you set any goals for 2012 both professionally/personally? Regardless of the answer, I’m sure one or two of the items listed below can help. I usually don’t blog many opinion posts, due to the fact that I like to keep my blog technical. This post is an exception.

11 Things every Software Developer should be doing in 2012… (read complete article)

5 Tricks from a LinkedIn Jedi | Inc.com

David Gowel has made many career transitions: from civilian to military, from military to academic, and finally from academic to entrepreneurship. Along the way, Gowel used LinkedIn to achieve each step; an experience, he says, that has made him into an expert on how to use LinkedIn to become a master networker.

He even wrote a book to prove it. The Power in a Link: Open Doors, Close Deals, and Change the way you Do Business Using LinkedIn, (Wiley, December 2011) is a 159-page opus on becoming a master social networker. Gowel, a West Point graduate who served as a platoon leader in Iraq and has taught leadership classes at MIT, says CEOs and entrepreneurs are generally pretty bad at using LinkedIn. He says they use it as a business card or résumé service when they really should be using it to mine for new clients, new connections, and new employees.

“LinkedIn has very slowly evolved into an incredible force for social business intelligence that is readily available if you know how to use it,” says Gowel, who was once described as a LinkedIn Jedi. “That’s why we don’t think [entrepreneurs] are generally using it as well as they could. When used properly, LinkedIn is very much disrupting other ways we’ve done [networking]. You can reduce the time you spend in those other activities and be much more focused on making connections if you are high-quality and ethical.”

In January 2010, Gowel and his co-founder Mark Rockefeller started RockTech, a Boston-based software company that has built online tools for CEOs, entrepreneurs, sales professionals and job seekers to help leverage their LinkedIn accounts. Their main product, TAP for LinkedIn ($29/year) ties directly into a LinkedIn profile and guides its user through the recommended settings and strategies. According to Gowel, it’s easier than reading a book, and cheaper than online tutorials.

Inc.com decided to tap Gowel’s LinkedIn expertise and his new book for some of its networking inspiration. Here’s five key takeaways… (read full article).

How To Use LinkedIn As A CRM Tool

When it comes to a company’s social media strategy, it’s easy to get wrapped up in Facebook and Twitter. That’s where most of the people are, after all.

But for a more professional edge, LinkedIn is another excellent tool you and your company can use to reach out to current and potential customers.

We spoke to a LinkedIn insider for some tips on how to turn the social network into a handy CRM tool.

Here’s the best stuff…

jsRender, JSON APIs, and jQuery Mobile | Roughly Brilliant Digital Studios

Want to create dynamically pages on the fly? Want to use jsRender? Want to do it without overwhelming the browser? Here’s how….

jsRender is now the stated direction for templating by the jQuery team (as of Oct 2011). It is very powerful and picks up where jQuery Templates left off. Be sure to check out the many jsRender examples ranging from simple (like this one) to more complex implementations.

Don’t Fall Into The Made-For-SEO Website Trap

There are many things that categorize a Made for SEO website. Large scale sites are prone to fall into this trap, because their scale often has them already competing for a large number of search terms across their many pages.

Some of the biggest factors that mark a Made-for -SEO Site are:

1. Thin slicing on search phrases – i.e. pages on the site which are not
   very distinct from each other, but which were created so they could each
   compete for minor variations of similar search phrases. Many large
   sites have this problem.
2. …

Why Your Business Needs a Mobile Website Right Now (read the whole article by clicking on the title)

First, the good news: If you have a website, then you have a site that can be accessed by any mobile device with a browser. Now, the bad: Chances are, that site looks pretty crappy on said mobile device.

If you’re worried about this, you’re not alone. Just as companies realized, circa 1996, that they needed to create a website to remain relevant to consumers, history is repeating itself in mobile. By 2013, more people will use mobile phones than PCs to get online, according to Gartner. In mid-2011, we also reached the point at which consumers were spending more time on their mobile devices than on their PCs.

In such an environment, a site designed to be viewed on a desktop PC comes across as woefully lacking. Say you’re accessing such a site from the Safari browser on your iPhone. The first thing you’re likely to notice is that it takes a relatively long time to load. The second thing is that the type on the page is pretty small. It might take a lot of zooming and pinching to navigate the site as well. If you have Flash on your site, it’s not going to come across at all on an iPhone.

At that point, your potential customer may start looking around. According to a recent survey from Compuware, 40% of users have turned to a competitor’s site after a bad mobile experience.

Yet currently, most businesses haven’t optimized their sites for mobile. Jesse Haines, group marketing manager for Google Mobile Ads, says the company canvassed its large advertisers early in 2011 and found only 21% have launched a mobile site.

If you’re among the other 79% or so, take heart. Optimizing your site for mobile or creating a mobile site from scratch isn’t a big deal.

TeleNav announces free HTML5 browser-based turn-by-turn navigation service | PhoneDog

If you’re a smartphone owner that’s ever gotten lost while out and about, you’re likely aware of the fact that most platforms offer a wide variety of downloadable navigation apps to find your way. TeleNav is responsible for some of those very apps, having released software for Android, BlackBerry and iOS, but today the company announced its plans for a new type of navigation service. Using HTML5, TeleNav has created a new navigation service that works entirely in a browser and provides voice-guided, turn-by-turn GPS navigation. Best of all? It’s free. TeleNav says that it expects the public launch of its new HTML5-based navigation service to go down early next year, but developers can try it out right now by adding the service to a mobile app or website with one line of code.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a company offer up a free navigation service, as Android folk have been enjoying free voice-guided directions for some time now, but the fact that TeleNav’s new solution will work in any HTML5-capable browser is pretty neat. Considering the number of different navigation apps available and the fact that just about everyone uses navigation software from time to time, it should be interesting to see if TeleNav’s HTML5 service performs well enough to serve as a replacement for stand-alone apps. More on this as we get it!

People are the platform: jQuery Mobile Events Diagram

When building jQuery Mobile applications I often find it useful to have a quick reference to all events within the lifecycle. This jQuery Mobile events diagram should be helpful for new developers learning the jQuery Mobile event model or advanced developers that often bind to these events…

55 Tips to Get Retweeted on Twitter | Social Media Today

Retweets, you have heard about them, you know what they are but you aren’t gettin’ them.

For some reason you just can’t seem to get the engagement you are seeking, desiring and yearning for in social media and Twitter.

You may be new to Twitter and simply don’t know what the heck you are doing, how to get a retweet or why the retweets even matter. This post won’t teach you what Twitter is but provides good tips for tweetable content which you need regardless if you know what you’re doing or not (joking).

Or you may be a Twitter and social media veteran who just wants to boost your ego, increase your Klout score or simply show off for Grandpa this weekend how popular you are on the social waves?

Retweets are good in that they help spread your message, can increase brand awareness, visits to your blog, and help you meet business and marketing objectives if you have properly integrated social media into your business.

Whatever your motivation may be to increase the retweet love, below are a few tips (55 of them) to increase those retweets. No promises. No guarantees. But heck, what do you have to lose?

What’s in Foundation?

So much good stuff, girl. We’ve built Foundation to help you quickly get a site off the ground and to a state where you can easily adapt and modify it into a release. Here’s the highlights:

Global
Foundation’s global styles include Eric Meyer’s rock-solid reset, tested styles for typography, links, lists, tables and more.

The Grid
You’re gonna like this. Within global.css you’ll find The Grid (not the one from Tron), a layout framework that works on mobile devices, small screens and full-on modern desktops. It’s a twelve column, semi-liquid, mobile-scaling grid of awesomeness that you’re gonna love. It even supports arbitrary nesting.

Buttons
We love buttons at ZURB. Foundation includes two base styles, three sizes, and several colors that are preconfigured and super easy to modify.

Forms
Hate forms? So do we. They’re a pain. Well, we’re simplifying that by creating two base styles for forms that are tested, include validation styles, have proper spacing…all the good stuff. We even included custom radio buttons, checkboxes and select lists so you can style up every form element. They’re easy to modify, like everything else.

Orbit
That’s right – Orbit, the awesome way to put image or content sliders on your page, is packaged in with Foundation. It even works on mobile.

Reveal
Finally, we’ve created a whole new plugin for modal dialogs in Foundation. Reveal is easy to call, supports several intro animations right out of the box, and is completely stylable. It also works on mobile.

8 Ways to Increase Website Speed > 10 Pound Gorilla Website Design and Development

If your site is painfully slow, nobody is going to stick around. Studies and common sense say the longer a site takes to load, the more likely users will leave. Sites with poor load times can have higher operating costs. Site load times even affect your performance in search engines. Google states: “We’ve decided to take site speed into account in our search rankings”.

Maintaining current visitors, reducing costs, and attracting additional visitors are a few reasons to consider optimizing your site’s performance. Below are 8 great tips to help you bring down the load time. The two major factors that determine your sites speed are file sizes and the number of HTTP requests. Below covers how to reduce both of these for the best results.

Charles Darwin’s 12 Rules of Blogging Survival

Blog readers have a myriad of reading options for almost every topic you can think of. In fact, within your niche, potential customers may be enjoying blog posts written by your competitors while they ignore your blog like the plague.

So what do you do about this dire situation? Do you hire ghost writers to create more content? Do you promote your content more via social media? Do you get better at SEO so you can attract more search traffic?

Well. These may work to a degree. You may see some minor bumps with more Tweeting, Facebooking and catching more long tail keywords in Google. But, it’s a long and slow process if you’re using these brute-force tactics.

There has to be a better way. And there is.

Like Darwin’s finches, which evolved different beak sizes over the generations to better suit their differing environmental conditions and to survive, your blog has to become better suited for your audience’s needs over time. You need to develop more “evolved” blogging strategies that are more effective at differentiating your blog and attracting and keeping the readers that you target.

You don’t want your blog to end up on the wrong end of Natural Selection, do you?

Here are 12 ways for your blog to survive and thrive.

The 10 Secrets to Making a Spellbinding Video Trailer for Your Next Blog, Book, or Product Launch

Okay, so not everybody is a natural-born Steven Spielberg.

You might like the idea of creating a trailer for your next launch. You might even believe it’s doable after reading this guide to creating movie trailers. But is it reasonable to think you can be “spellbinding?”

Can little old you really make a trailer that connects with visitors on such a primal level it throws them into a frenzy to subscribe? Are you really capable of making a video so jaw-dropping they want to tell their friends, creating a tidal wave of viral traffic for your new project?

Well … I won’t make any promises. For one, you probably wouldn’t believe me, and for two, spellbinding millions of people isn’t something anyone can do at the drop of a hat.

It takes work. It takes thought. It even takes (gasp!) a little bit of talent. But it’s probably easier than you think.

Here are ten little strategies for making it happen.

Site builder shootout: Drupal vs. Joomla vs. WordPress – Computerworld

Building a website has never been easier. Gone — mostly — are the days of having to hand-code HTML and PHP scripts in order to get a slick, fully functional website, thanks to the capabilities of content management systems that do most or all of the heavy lifting for site creators.

There are boatloads of content management systems (CMSs) for serious site creators, but the most common for websites today are three open-source tools: Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Actually, to call them “tools” is an understatement — these are full-fledged platforms, with tens of thousands of add-on tools created by very active developer communities.

These applications have a lot of similarities. For example, all three are written in the PHP programming language, all three are licensed under the free GNU General Public License (GPL), and all three depend on the MySQL database to hold and manage the actual content within a website.