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Yahoo is releasing an upgrade to its Yahoo Widgets platform that accommodates Adobe's Flash multimedia display technology.Widgets are lightweight applications that provide desktop access to various types of content, such as news feeds or reminders. Featured in the upgrade is a new version of the Yahoo Widget Engine, which is a runtime environment that allows the widgets to run on a desktop, and an updated Yahoo Widget Gallery, offering more than 4,000 widgets, Yahoo said.Yahoo Widget Engine 4.5, accessible on Yahoo's widget download page, adds capabilities for developers to write widgets based on Flash; also, HTML support has been extended, said Scott Derringer, director of product management at Yahoo. Specifically, Flex and ActionScript are supported for writing Flash-based applications."What we're seeing is authors are wanting to write movies and video, and that's a new capability that can now add to desktop widgets," Derringer said. A widget can be built that runs assets that already existed in Flash."Video can now be run inside of a widget," said Derringer. Full HTML support, meanwhile, provides capabilities like flow layout and more standard control.While widgets are primarily consumer-focused, there could be business uses, such as running training videos, he said. SAP, for its part, has built enterprise widgets and a plug-in architecture, called SAP Widget Foundation, which could access information like sales data, said Jonathan Strauss, Yahoo senior product manager. SAP's technology extends the Yahoo Widget engine."Using the SAP plug-in, you can query your SAP system to put those sales numbers into your desktop widget," Strauss said. An SAP representative said SAP's platform can use the Yahoo engine but does not rely on it exclusively; other engines, such as Google's, also can be used.Version 4.5 of the Yahoo engine offers an enhanced security model to give users a better understanding of what a widget does. Also new is a reworked document object model so it is compliant with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. "The benefit there is really familiarity form the developer's point of view," said Strauss.The new Yahoo Widget Gallery has been revamped to make it easier for consumers to find widgets they want. Top-rated and heavily downloaded widgets are highlighted. A new categorization is featured based on tags.Other improvements in the gallery include more search functionality and a new ratings and reviews system for users."We find people are quite passionate," about the widgets, said Strauss.Yahoo monetizes the widgets through advertising. Yahoo acquired the widget technology when it bought Pixoria and its Konfabulator technology two years ago. |
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IBM and Yahoo issued a new version of their free enterprise search product on Tuesday, just weeks after rival Microsoft announced a competing product.The latest release of IBM's OmniFind Yahoo Edition contains a number of enhancements, according to IBM. Users can now generate up to five separate indexes of documents, thereby enabling them to search from a particular set instead of the entire repository.Other tweaks include the ability to define additional custom search fields, such as from HTML tags or document metadata. "If you've created a Word document with customer metadata fields, it will be able to extract it," said Aaron Brown, IBM's director of search and content discovery. IBM also said the software is now easier to install as a Windows service.OmniFind Yahoo Edition is based on the open source Lucene project. The update includes the latest version of the Lucene core, according to Brown: "It helps us close the loop with the community, because we've contributed a lot of IBM code back into Lucene."However, the update does not include any scalability improvements, and remains limited to searching 500,000 documents per instance, Brown said.Brown said the updates were primarily guided by feedback from customers. The software has been downloaded about 25,000 times, according to IBM. Yahoo and IBM released the first version of the search engine about one year ago.Microsoft's entry into the stand-alone enterprise search market has been seen as potentially disruptive for certain vendors, such as Coveo, but not for search companies offering high-end, specialized products.Like IBM, Microsoft is adopting a multitier strategy around search. Both companies are giving away an offering in the hopes of attracting customers, who will eventually desire greater capabilities and pay for commercial products.Microsoft's new products, Search Server 2008 and Search Server Express 2008, which is free, will be generally available in the first half of 2008, according to the company.Brown said Microsoft's move was not unexpected: "We obviously didn't have any inside information. I can't say I was entirely surprised, given where the market is moving."He said there is "a lot of traction" in Europe for OmniFind Yahoo Edition right now, adding that a range of organizations are using the product, from a small U.S. public school district to a global electronics company, which he did not name.Burton Group analyst Guy Creese recently told IDG News Service that he expected Microsoft's partner community to build products on top of the company's base search technology, extending its market potential. IBM has a head start in this area, with companies such as Axioma.Brown said of IBM's partners, "They've adopted the base platform and are building richer stuff." |
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The importance of titling every page on your site cannot be stressed enough. This is because if you don't then when people search for content they could end up with a page that says untitled or that seems to contain nonsense. They could also get basic frame descriptions such as "upload photo here" or menu items such as "home, about, contact" etc. |
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In less than one minute, most of us can think of at least eight to ten content assets our company keeps hidden away in files, drawers, and other places where we know they won't be seen by customers. But in an online atmosphere that demands fresh, quality content to achieve high search engine positioning, why not let the search engines (and hopefully users) see what you've kept tucked away? |
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Many dispute seo tactics, but most agree about the importance of formulating your content on your website correctly. Tips for seo beginners. Marketing is one of the most controversial and talked about aspects of business. Search engine optimization, defined as the practice of designing web pages so that they rank as high as possible in search results from search engines. |
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Content weighs heavily both in terms of how users interact with your website as well as how visitors (both human and search spiders) are able to determine what you offer and what each page of your website is about. While solidly optimized content is important for search engine rankings, considering the usability of your content is of paramount importance for attaining good conversion rates. |
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Most of for profit firms based on the internet will need a SEO expert to continually monitor and revise the sites that they currently have. Search engine optimization is one way to marketing the site and expose it Internet users and to help it rank higher in search engine results. So to stay competitive webmasters, businesses and other organizations will need the services of a SEO expert even if they are happy with current rankings.
SEO Expert Methodologies:
Content ric... |
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Keywords targeted by your competitors are not always what people are searching for. In every industry, you will find a niche keyword - a keyword that has not been explored by your competitors. However, visitors search for such a keyword. Building content around ten such low competition keywords brings you more target traffic than what [...] |
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RightNow Technologies, a SaaS (software as a service) vendor, launched RightNow November 07, the newest release of its enterprise CRM service, this week.Highlighting the release is what company executives call a knowledge syndication widget. The widget will allow online retailers to offer their customers access to product catalogs and specific product information with a single mouse click.Leveraging RSS capability, the Web widget will, in essence, feed answers to a customer from the manufacturer?s knowledge base about a product, according to Sandy Erickson, director of the RightNow Service product line.The RightNow CRM solution allows companies to create a repository for all corporate information about products and services. The technology also monitors the most frequently asked questions and displays topics as links on the widget to the repository. The system can also index content not found in the repository and bring it forward to the customer if appropriate.The latest release also features an updated look and feel that includes a redesign of the UI for search results, making it look more like a standard search results page.Twelve additional languages have also been added, for a total of 33 native languages supported."This is more than any other on-demand CRM vendor," said Erickson.RightNow November 07 release is available now. |
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AOL launched a new mobile Web portal for the U.K. on Wednesday, part of an effort to reinvent itself from an Internet service provider into an advertising and content company.AOL hopes to persuade the 6.7 million people who visit its U.K. portal from a PC each month to also view it on their mobile phone, where AOL will serve "unobtrusive" advertisements, said Ariel Eckstein, an AOL vice president, during a launch event in London.The portal offers the same content as AOL's main Web site, including sports, weather, and e-mail, but optimized for the smaller screen on mobile devices.AOL tried to make the portal uncluttered to make it attractive to visitors, said Tim Hussain, head of mobile for AOL U.K. It features lots of white space and a three-tab navigation bar. Web pages returned from a search are transcoded using AOL technology to fit into a mobile browser.But AOL officials acknowleged that the mobile Web faces big barriers. So far, not many people use their phones to access the Internet regularly, and browsing capabilities vary greatly from device to device.The new U.K. portal can be viewed on phones with the most basic browsing capabilities, according to Hussain, including even version 1 of WAP (Wireless Application Protocol).AOL is competing against Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft to stake out a piece of the mobile advertising business, where revenue from the U.K. alone is expected to increase from around £64 million this year to £100 million next year, according to Eckstein.Online advertising has become key to AOL's growth since it sold off its ISP businesses in Europe, although it still depends on selling Internet access for some of its revenue in the U.S. AOL calls its ad sales division "Platform A."The company is trying to be careful about how it displays ads. For example, it found that it's better to put banner ads at the end of a news story rather than at the beginning, since users immediately scroll down past them, Hussain said.The company will introduce other features to the mobile portal over the next year, such as video and premium content. People in the U.K. can't yet use MyAOL, which is currently available in the U.S. and allows people to customize their portal, but it will come to the U.K. eventually.To coordinate its mobile advertising, AOL is starting with technology from Adtech, a German company it bought in May. It plans to integrate technology from another company it acquired, Third Screen Media, into its platform by early next year,AOL is using Google's search engine. It isn't displaying sponsored links yet, although that will likely change next year, said Chris Locke, head of mobile for AOL Europe. |
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