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Boo-hoo for Yahoo!

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Today at noon, Yahoo CEO, Scott Thompson must leave his position or the hedge fund company, Third Point will begin a power struggle that would hurt an already beleaguered web company. What’s will all the hate? Well, in a letter send to Yahoo’s board of directors, Third Point CEO, Daniel Loeb, said that Thompson lied on his resume. When Thompson took the post at Yahoo, he claimed to have a degree in computer science, but he only has one in accounting. A reply sent from Stonehill College, where Thompson attended, stated that Thompson had only taken introduction to computer science and that they did not award degrees in computer science until four years after Thompson had graduated. The letter goes on to cite another Yahoo employee who have padded her resume. This whole situation calls into question Yahoo’s ethics and their talent pool.

Lying for personal gain is in and of itself wrong, but it would be naive to say that this wouldn’t be a such a large issue if Yahoo wasn’t having such a rough year. Thompson has had an erratic record. He’s filed a lawsuit against Facebook for patent infringement. It’s an expensive suite that Yahoo will have a major uphill battle to win. He also ordered a mass layoff of over 2,000 employees. He claimed that, “are an important next step toward a bold, new Yahoo — smaller, nimbler, more profitable and better equipped to innovate as fast as our customers and our industry require…” Being like Chainsaw Al, doesn’t make him very endearing.

Lying on your resume is nothing new. But everyone from IT consultants to morticians should understand the importance of truth. And if we can’t expect transparency and honesty from those at the top, like Thompson, why should they expect it from us?

Top SEO Rank Factors and What They Mean – Part 1

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I recently came across a relevant blog post and decided this may be an interesting post for some of the visitors of our blog, who may not be SEO experts yet have an interest in making their website rank higher. Disclaimer: I personally am not in the SEO field professionally, but take an avid interest in it and would like to share some of my knowledge with those that may find it interesting. With that, here is the list I compounded from the above blog and other places, of Top SEO Factors:

1. Age of Domain: I feel this, and the second item on this list, are probably the 2 single most important factors, especially for Google SEO. Unfortunately, this factor is often times beyond our control. If an opportunity arises, do purchase a domain name with significant age. Google does penalize you when the domain registration information changes as it knows the ownership changed, but the penalty is not severe.

2 .Inbound links: this is another very important factor. The basic premise behind Google algorithms is still the number of quality inbound links pointing at your domain. Of course, quality, or authority, of the links plays a huge factor – get an inbound link from the whitehouse.gov, which is considered an authority on government matters, and the benefit of this link is much higher then from some unknown site.

3. Title Tags: Title tags are what you see at the top of the browser (see pic), and what shows up as the website title when you do a search in google. Place your most important keyword closest to the beginning of the sentence, those count more.

title tag

4. Keyword on pages: Its only obvious that a search engine reads the text on your page, and sees if there is relevant content to the search query, and takes that into ranking account. Make sure your pages have relevant keywords, but do not overdo – this should come naturally if you have good content. Bolding important keywords makes a difference as well.

5.H1, H2 and alt tags: These HTML Tags are important to Google – you should have your most important keywords in H1 tags, less import in H2, etc..Also, every image should have an alt tag with a description. Please make sure to run your site through W3C markup validion and be sure it is error-free. http://validator.w3.org/

Well, this is it for part 1…to be continued….