There are many different, highly effective methods that talented web designers have created to increase SEO but there are also a few out there you must avoid at all costs. One of those SEO practices to avoid in cloaking. The term “cloaking” is used to describe an attempt to present a different page to a search engine web crawler than one a regular search engine user would see. This is accomplished when a company’s server recognizes the IP address of a search engine spider. The company then sends a page…

In the early 2000s, when processors became faster at a breakneck pace, computer memory (RAM) had a hard time supplying the CPU in a timely manner. This problem led to CPU caching, where the memory the CPU needed to get quickly to perform necessary functions was more easily accessible. The business owners with their own server infrastructure who upgraded to better and faster computers many times focused too much on processor speed. This can force the company’s IT department to have to arrange a “memory hierarchy” to best serve their…

There has been an ongoing battle in the world of web development – the contest between outsourcing and crowd sourcing. Usually a company will go outside their company for web development chores such as web page design and website updates. If, instead of going to one contractor, they opt for employing a crowd they are “crowd sourcing” the project. Crowd sourcing can be accomplished by advertising on the web to a number of developers that a contest for the best webpage will garner a certain amount of money. When a…

The SEO expert Paddy Moogan has a great new guest article published on the SEOmoz blog. The post is about technical solutions to SEO problems that may affect websites and adversely downgrade their indexing by Google and other search engines. Moogan describes a problem that seems to mainly affect .NET websites but that can happen on other websites as well. A business or personal webpage may have some duplicates that are generated by the platform being used unbeknownst to the either the web developer or the website owner. This problem…

The widget used to be a reference to a nonexistent product – now it is the name for a computer program that can be put on your website or used your personalized home page. Say you want to keep up on current news – you could easily add a widget to your personal homepage called CNN search which allows for quick review the news that has been reported recently. If the stock market is your interest there are widgets you can install that will get you fast updates on the…

What is a web crawler and how can it help your business? A web crawler or spider is a computer program that can search the internet and save copies of the web pages it visits. Search engines then process this information and index the visited pages to enable them to provide web surfers quick search results. Crawlers can also be used for specific tasks such as harvesting email addresses from web pages. If you have been hit by spam chances are fairly high that it came from someone using a…

The World Wide Web Consortium that oversees standards for all web activity has released a sixth version of the “Standards for Web Applications for Mobile”. The fact that it is the sixth version shows just how much has happened in the mobile community in the two years since the first standards were released. A brand new version is also scheduled to be released in August of this year so web developers probably shouldn’t work too hard memorizing this one. The organization recognizes the role of the web in this new…

The web design community has been hearing about the need to develop new technologies that could function with older web browsers since 2004. The World Wide Web consortium has targeted 2014 as the date for full recommendation of HTML 5 and they are developing a test suite to evaluate its operability. Back in 2006 noted software engineer and HTML 5 editor Tim Hickson targeted 2022 as a possible full recommendation date. It seems that 2014, by that standard, is highly optimistic. This may be confusing to those less involved in…

HTML 5 is here and for all intents and purposes it isn’t going anywhere except forward. The target date for full recommendation is in 2014 but many parts of it are already being used by web developers. The newest version of the markup language is given high marks by most for usability. The original HTML was produced in 1990 by Opera software. Its primary purpose was to build and show content on the web. The eventual successor of the original language, HTML 4, has been available since 1997. The development…

Many people who decide to go for a virtual private server (vps) end up disappointed either because their VPS’s resources were not being used efficiently or simply because they ran out of resources! In both cases, VPS was not what they needed. In the following article I am listing the top 5 common questions about VPS Hosting that someone should consider before making the decision to go for it.