Today, we are only 2 weeks from the the release of the largely anticipated game Grand Theft Auto IV. Many insiders who have had a chance to play the game have nothing negative to say about the game. Many praises were made on multiple multiplayer modes.
I wish purchase GTA 4 as soon as it ships to Canada and cannot wait to see all that GTA MP Madness.
Grand Theft Auto IV will be available in most stores on April 29. Until then, patience…
In the past few days, I’ve had a hard time having time to add posts in my blog. The reason for this is that I’m adding a computing shop section to the website.
I’ve created the shop to help visitors shop on eBay computers without having to go thru hundreds of searches to find what they need.
For now, I only have the Apple products section up but more will follow at a very fast rate.
I hope to be back posting on the blog as soon as possible. In the meantime, back to work!
Being number 1 on search engines isn’t the easiest thing to achieve. Depending on the niche your trying to rank #1 on Google and Yahoo, competition will vary. Here are 10 SEO tips to make sure you achieve your ranking goals.
When choosing the keywords to target in your yahoo and google SEO campaign, instead of targeting words like “shoes”, target keyword phrases such as “sport shoes for men”. Doing so, you will target the following keyword phrases:
This will attract much more traffic than targeting single words that you have almost no chance to even be on the first page of search results.
When you want to create an inbound link from your homepage to your “sport shoes for men” page, create the link with a text anchor that is relevant to the linked page. Here’s an example of a relevant link for your “sport shoes for men” page:Visit our <a href=”shoes/sport-shoes-for-men.html”>sport shoes for men</a> store!
This will tell search engines what the page is about the they will rank it higher because it assures them they will not link to non relevant content. Make full use of this is your whole website to have a better SEO approach.
Be careful to what you put in your <title> tag. Include the main keywords you want to target in your page. If you have a page called that targets the “sport shoes for men” keyword, make sure to insert the keyword as-is in your title.For now, this is the most important SEO technique to use with the main search engines. If the rest of the page is relevant to the title, you have a very good chance at ranking high on google.
While they once were the most important thing to do in SEO, META tags are now less than useless for google. Yahoo still accords some importance to them so you still should insert them. Just don’t overdo it and waste precious hours trying to tweak them to perfection. Instead of doing that, create other quality keyword rich articles or tweak the actual content of your existing articles.
Don’t stuff keywords in your META tags that arent used in the actual content. Some sites have been penalized doing so. According to many SEO experts, google totally ignores the tag but other search engines could see it as spam and penalize you.
When determining what keywords you will target on your new page, don’t assume you know what keywords the users will search for when looking for info related to your page.
To make sure you target the right keywords, use keyword tools provided by Google and Yahoo. You can also use Wordtracker but it ain’t free. Enter a couple keywords and the tools will give you hundreds more that you havn’t though of. They will also give you relative numbers to know how much times the keyword(s) was search for in the last month/year.
After seleting a few keywords that interest you, go on google and type “selected keyword”. This will give you all the pages in the index which contain that exact keyword in their page. This gives you a good idea of the competition for that particular term. Try to find keyword phrases with high demand and low competition. This is called finding “niche” keywords.
By creating quality articles and publishing them to article submission websites, you will gain very good backlinks. Publishers go on article websites and get content to publish to their website with a link to your website as a credit for the free article he just grabbed.
When creating your articles, be sure to include 2-3 links to different parts of your website to gain even more from the exchange.
Google values backlinks as much as the actual content of your website. They think that if other publishers link to your website, it indicated that your content is quality content.
Be sure to vary the anchor text of the links pointing to your website. Google will see them as more natural links and you will gain ranks doing so.
Just like links inside your website, make sure the links you receive from other website have an anchor relevant to the linked page.
If you do this regularly and have quality articles, you will gain a huge amount of backlinks and this will give you the chance to target more competitive keywords on google and yahoo.
Even if it’s true that directory backlinks are no longer as important as they were before, submit to as much as possible. It’s easy, fast and cannot harm you.
Some quality directories like DMOZ and Yahoo are sure to help you ranking high, especially at Yahoo and MSN.
When submitting to the directories, try varying the anchor (often the title of your directory listing) pointing to your website. Some directories will only let you use your company name but some less popular ones will let you put what you want. Keep the anchors relevant but varying them will seem more natural to search engines, especially Google.
Keyword density is not as important as most webmasters think. Don’t overuse keywords in a context where it seems unnatural to your visitors. As long as the keywords appear in strategic places such as your title and headers (see tip bellow), include them wisely in your paragraphs. As long as the phrase appears at least 1 time in your content, search engines will know you targeted it. Don’t repeat the same keywords 2-3 times per paragraph, your content will be of lesser quality to your readers and you will gain less natural backlinks doing so.
One more thing to not do is stuff keywords at the end of your page hoping that search engines will think the page is relevant to them. The search engines will penalize such “blackhat” techniques and your pages will be dropped from the index. Too much blackhat tricks will get your entire site banned from the search engines forever.
Instead of bolding text to create headers in your pages, use the header tags. They vary from <h1> to <h6>, h1 being the biggest and h6 being the smallest. I suggest you use only one h1 tag to put a title at the beginning of your page and then use h2, h3, h4, etc. to create sub divisions. Search engines give allot of credit to headers. Try using keywords that you will target in the following paragraph so search engines trust the header even more and give it more credit.
Search engines take allot of time to master. When changing the content of your page to have a better SEO approach, don’t expect engines to pick up your pages instantly and rank them. It can take several days to several weeks for Google, Yahoo and MSN to update your rankings.
Put up any SEO changes and just forget about them. If you want to know if the search engines updated the content of your page, search for your site by searching for site:yoururl.com and find the page in question. Click on “cached page” and look at it. The cached page is the page they are using to give you your rankings
I hope this small guide will help you have a better SEO approach and give you all the success you are hoping for your business. Good luck and don’t forget to not overdo any SEO techniques. Create pages for viewers and adapt them to search engines, not vice versa.
Many governments will start analyzing conversations going on in World of Warcraft. Terrorist plots are being talked about on WOW. While most of it might just be social rejects fantasizing on blowing up their school, many country’s governments such as USA and Canada will start investigating the conversations going on in the game.
World of Warcraft players can actually perform terrorist acts in game, such as getting infected by a poison that turns you into a bomb then teleporting to markets or other highly populated areas to explode and kill as much people as possible. People will gather in gangs and bomb areas at set intervals.
Taking the online terrorism to real life
While all this is pretty inoffensive and much less violent than things you can do in many other video games, it does encourage talk of terrorist actions that could be done in real life. Some kids (adults too) actually talk about blowing up public places such as Walmarts or schools with precise details of what they would do in real life to kill the most lives possible.
Internet threats about terrorist acts cannot be ignored. Just in Canada, here are 2 examples of terrorist acts that happened which could have been avoided with the right prevention:
Those 2 examples are nothing compared to everything that happens in the world. Prevention is key so I encourage the governments of all countrys to investigate more on what is said on the internet. Thing could save people from being raped or killed everyday like it happens now.
Here’s to hoping they will effectively patrol the internet in the future.
Today, Apple announced the release of their new browser; Safari 3.1. The new Mac and Windows browser can be downloaded from http://www.apple.com/safari or via your standard software upgrade if you are running Mac OS X.
According to Apple, Safari 3.1 run 1.9 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2.
Philip Schiller, senior vice president of product marketing at Apple said:
“Safari 3.1 for Mac and Windows is blazingly fast, easy to use and features an elegant user interface. And best of all, Safari supports the latest audio, video and animation standards for an industry-leading Web 2.0 experience.”
Since the release of Mac OS X Leopard, I love the new Safari. They got the tabs just right and I have much less crashes (I can alsmost say it never crashes now) than with OS X Tiger and older versions of Safari.
The Spanish equivalent of the Official Playstation Magazine talked about never before seen Grand Theft Auto 4 multiplayer info. First, they comfirmed that the game will support up-to 16 players depending on the game mode. “PlayStation Revista Oficial” also stated that GTA will have 15 different Multiplayer modes, 14 known and 1 unknown.
Here are details on the Grand Theft Auto 4 Multiplayer modes:
All the good news surrounding Grand Theft Auto IV make people realize that waiting for this awesome game will have been worth it. With a huge single experience and a very heavy multiplayer mode, GTA IV sounds like it will be the sandbox game every console owner has been dreaming of since the release of this generation of consoles.
Since it’s been official that the HD-DVD player was dead, rumors were floating arround the internet that Microsoft would release a Xbox 360 external Blu-ray player.
Microsoft’s Group Marketing Manager Aaron Greenbern stated in a Reuters interview:
“Xbox is not currently in talks with Sony or the Blu-ray Association to integrate Blu-ray into the Xbox experience”
After being questioned on their plan for HD movies, he states:
“We’re the only console offering digital distribution of entertainment content”
This pretty much means that Microsoft abandoned having HD movies on disc being played on the Xbox 360 console. They will concentrate their efforts into digital distribution thru the Xbox Live Marketplace.
After being released for only 4 days, the iPhone SDK, a set of tools for developers of iPhone applications has been downloaded over 100 000 times.
This toolset will let developers created and legally sell their mobile applications created for the iPhone. In june, we should start seeing iphone applications and games with the release of the iTunes app store. The developers will choose a price and split profits 70/30 with apple.
Apple’s senior vice presedent of product marketing Philip Schiller stated:
“Developer reaction to the iPhone SDK has been incredible with more than 100,000 downloads in the first four days. Also, over one million people have watched the launch video on Apple.com, further demonstrating the incredible interest developers have in creating applications for the iPhone.”
Let’s hope big corporations will see this as a profitable source or revenue and start creating games for the iPhone. EA is already at it so others will probably follow sooner or later.
The creators of the popular 2007 Xbox 360 action/rpg Mass Effect have now released their new DLC (downloadable content available on the Xbox 360 Marketplace) called “Bring down the sky”. Sold for 400 MS points, “Bring down the sky” adds almost 2 hours to the existing storyline.
The action in Mass Effect: “Bring down the sky” is on a new “uncharted world” (You know what I mean if you played Mass Effect). You will meet a new race: the Batarians. They are the “bad guys”
Having their minds set on destroying an innocent colony on the world of Terra Nova, only you X Shepard can save the world from certain death.
At 400 MS points, it sure is cheap (5$) but it’s also very short at a 90 minute average. I will buy “Bring down the sky” when/if I have time to play it with the new games coming out / working on my website.
According to many websites, Microsoft will soon abandon the 20GB hard-drive in the Xbox 360 Premium consoles. It would be replaced by a larger 60GB hard-drive.
With the recent release of the Video Marketplace and Xbox Classics, full Xbox 1 games available to download on Xbox live and taking up to 5GB per game, the 20GB hard-drive can’t keep up.
Microsoft released last year an Elite Xbox 360 console which is black and sports a 120GB Hard-drive.
A couple questions remain:
Will the 60GB hard-drive be sold for the same price as the 20GB hard-drive so the allready owners can upgrade “cheaply” or will Microsoft shoot itself in the foot and sell the thing even more than the actual overpriced 20GB model?
Will the 120GB drop in price if the 60GB one sells for the same price as the 20GB? Many people weren’t happy when Microsoft released the 120$ with such a high price tag. They had no choice to do so if they still had any hope of selling 20GB drive.
With the crappy Xbox 360 video marketplace we have in Canada, I see no reason to upgrade my 20GB hard-drive anyways.