All About Internet » e commerce

The Evolution of RSS

Alex Bhaswara — Wed, 06 May 2009 02:37:30 +0000

What is RSS? It is a feed or a web feed that is used to publish frequently updated pages like blogs, news, audio web pages etc. The data format used here is XML. It has been evolving since March 2009. It is in the recent days that it is widely used.
RSS came in three versions. RSS 0.91 was called Rich Site Summary. RSS 0.9 and 1.0 was called RDF Site Summary. RSS 2.0 was called Really Simple Syndication.

As far the evolution goes, there were several attempts before RSS that was not widespread. Meta Content Framework was developed by Ramanathan. V. Guha et al in Apple Computer’s Advanced Technology group, by restructuring information.
The RSS 0.9 version was created by Guha at Netscape in March 1999 to be used in My.Netscape.Com portal. The version RSS 0.91 was created by Dan Libby simplifying the format by removing the RDF elements. IT incorporated News Syndication format by Dave Winer. Dan Libby renamed RSS to “Rich Site Summary”.

For eight years, Netscape did not participate in the evolution of RSS as it dropped RSS support to My.Netscape.Com in April 2001. AOL was the new owners of the company and they were restructuring it. There were a couple of entities called the RSS-DEV working group and Winer whose UserLand Software published tools outside Netscape that could read and write RSS. UserLand filed for a trademark registration inside U.S. It failed to satisfy USPTO request of the examiner and hence the proposal was rejected.

Guha and the representatives of O’Reilly Media started working on a project called the RSS-DEV working group. It produced RSS 1.0 in December 2000. It took the name RDF site summary and supported RDF and XML name spaces from metadata such as Dublin Corel

Winer released RSS0.9 which involved audio to be introduced in the feeds. It sparked on Pod casting. Really Simple Syndication (RSS 2.0) was released by Winer in September 2002, which was a totally new format. It removed the “type’ attribute and added namespace support/

Meanwhile due to the controversies of creation a new product called Alternative Syndication format (Atom) was formed. It is the proposed RFC 1287 format. RSS 2.0’s copyright specification was given to Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Winer, with Brent Simmons and Jon Udel started an RSS advisory board to answer questions bout the format.
In December 2005, The Microsoft Internet Explorer and Outlook team adopted the feed icon followed by Opera software. Thus, the commonly used symbol of an Orange box with white Radio waves came in to existence as the industry standard.

Rogers Cadenhead relaunched the RSS Advisory Board without Dave Winer in January 2006.It was done so that the development of RSS format was continued resolving ambiguities. In June 2007, board confirmed that the core elements with name space attributes were to be extended

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SEO secrets for E-commerce Websites

Alex Bhaswara — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 01:02:47 +0000

As the industry is changing as rapidly as Google tweaks their algorithm, it is hard to decide what the most important factors are. The On-site and off-site are the two major factors in SEO which is necessary for every type of website. Normally, most of the webmasters starts with the on-site SEO, because your aim is to get your website recognize by Google. If they don’t, then how are you ever going to rank for a keyword?

The search engine spiders that crawl your E-commerce website will be looking at several different attributes on every page to determine where it needs to go and how relevant it is to specific searches done at Google search engine.

Another factor worth mentioning is a Keyword. What is a Keyword?

A keyword is basically an elaborate name for what people might search for when trying to find your E-commerce website. I am using a Bodhost.co.uk website as an example. People could search for “Web Hosting”, but they might also search for “Cheap Web Hosting”, “VPS Web Hosting” and “UK Web Hosting Service”. All of these would be keywords, or probably more properly could be said to be key phrases.

However, they are generally all referred to simply as keywords. Note that almost all On-site SEO has to do with is placing high-quality keywords throughout your E-commerce website content where search engine robots, spiders, or software might be able to decide what your website is about.
6 On-Site SEO Factors That Can Influence Your SERP Ranking:

* The Title of the Page
* The keywords used in the text on your website
* The keywords are used in H1 Tags
* Keywords used in your domain name
* Keywords used in the URL of a webpage
* Meta Keywords
3 Major Off-Site SEO Factors That Can Improve Your Search Engine Ranking:

Backlinks to Your E-commerce Website

This is without a doubt one of the keys to having your website listed in the search engines results page for specific keywords. Google likes to look at what others are saying about your website to determine what it is about. For example, if someone is a huge fan of a UK Web Hosting, and you provide that service, they may link to your website with “UK Web Hosting” as the text that people would click on to get to your website. This text is called anchor text and Google will see that link as a simple “vote” for your website to appear higher than others for that keyword. In short, these are commonly referred to as backlinks.

Quality of the Websites linking to your Website

Those linking to your website should also have some form of importance. For example, there are many websites with loads of outgoing links to many websites. Google does not want to give these websites as much weight in their “vote” in comparison to a link from Bodhost’s official website or something along those lines.

The Age of Your E-commerce Website

The reason I listed this as an off-site related issue, because it really doesn’t fit in either category. This is a simple issue that the search engines will evaluate. This is not to say that it is the most important factor, but many older websites will naturally rank higher than new websites that have more backlinks.

I am not sure why this occurs, but many would say that it does. As compare to Google, Yahoo definitely puts more weight on this.

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Social Marketing: The Key to Success for Any Business

Alex Bhaswara — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 09:02:19 +0000

Social marketing is the use of marketing strategies to promote a certain product or service to the society using their ideas, behavior and attitude. For example, you can put a sign “Drink in Moderation” right below a beer ad. In a way, you are promoting the product and at the same time giving a sound advice to the consumer. Social Marketing was created in the 1970s as a means to gain more merits by seeking the society’s approval through identifying their wants and needs. There are many concepts involved in social marketing. They will help us get a better understanding of why it is instrumental to the success of any business. • Its main function is to influence people. By being able to find out what the customers want from the product or service you are offering, it will be easier to adapt to that and be able to manipulate the way they think in a positive way. • The focus is not the marketer but the target customers. Reach out and talk to them, or hire someone who will do that for you. You base your marketing strategy on their wants and needs, and nothing else. It should be from the customers’ point of view and not from the marketer’s point of view because these two things can be entirely different. When you get a better understanding of the wants and needs of the customers are, put them into action right away. It should be applied in the product or service by highlighting the benefits. It can also have something to do with the price. You can ask yourself if the price is reasonable or competitive after putting into consideration the level of quality your products have. • Promote products in places where people can actually find out about what you have to offer. Aside from promotion, your product or service should also be made available to people at any given time. You may have very good “influence” on the target market but the products are out of stock most of the time so, what good will that do? • Monitor the market and be wary of competitors who may give you negative publicity. You have to be prepared to counteract such problems for your social marketing to be effective. • The marketplace is constantly changing and so programs must be regularly monitored and management must be prepared to rapidly alter strategies and tactics. Many sites offer social marketing opportunities for businesses such as Flickr, Wiki, Bebo and MySpace. With these sites, individuals and organizations can seek better ways to talk to people, understand their needs and at the same time market their products and services. Sometimes businesses hesitate to accept the social marketing concepts for various reasons. But people should be aware that since the birth of this concept, many have succeeded in their businesses by simply using social marketing as a tool to gain more sales. The reason is simple- social marketing gives people what they want and need.

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