Firefox is an internet web browser created by Mozilla. Firefox has always been particularly popular with web developers and designers due to the way in which it renders HTML, compared to the dual rendering engine of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. The latest version of Firefox available is currently version 3.
Popularity of Firefox has increased over the years, and although Internet Explorer (IE) is still the primary web browser with approximately 76% of all users browsing the web with IE, it’s popularity is on the rise. The latest version of Firefox has seen increased performance, and a whole host of additional functionality to enhance the users experience.
An important aspect of Firefox is also the ability to install and even create your own plugins / tools to help with your day to day tasks. This is great for webmasters, programmers & developers and SEO programmers, helping to make day to day tasks more efficient.
Ethical SEO (search engine optimisation) refers to optimising a website within the guidelines provided by search engines. Ethical SEO techniques are also referred to as ‘white hat SEO’. Any techniques used to optimise a website outside of these guidelines is seen as ‘unethical’ or ‘black hat SEO’. These techniques can lead to your site being penalised by Google, or in the worst case scenario your site can be completely removed from the index altogether!
So if this is the case, why do people use black hat techniques?
Black hat techniques are used to increase your site traffic in a very short amount of time, and normally involve trying to trick a search engine. Google however will normally realise fairly quickly if this is the case, and the Google algorithms are constantly being updated to spot new techniques. Companies should beware of any company that promises or guarantees results, especially in a short amount of time. They are making promises that they cannot possibly keep, as they have no control over the search engines an no-one knows exactly how the search engine algorithms work except the engineers that develop them.
Ultimately SEO is about following best practices within the search engine guidelines. Using unethical techniques can result in a lack of trust and credibility from both your search engine and the end user, which will prevent you from ever ranking well.
DMOZ (dmoz.org) is one of the most famous human edited directories, also known as the Open Directory Project (ODP). It is also still free to be listed in the directory, however the waiting times for inclusion are known to be very long. The DMOZ index is used directly by Google, and they are known to provide lots of other smaller, regional directories with their index.
Human edited sites are always deemed more trustworthy than a directory which accepts automatic submissions, and as such your site needs to meet the requirements or it will not be included. DMOZ has a very high Page Rank (it has a PR of 9!) and their internal pages have an average Page Rank between 4 and 6!
Getting listed on DMOZ can make a huge difference to your site, and is considered a must have link by many. If you have waited a long time and you still haven’t been listed, you can even become the editor of a particular section. There is work involved with this process, but you may be able to get your site included a whole lot faster!
Canonicalization is an internal content duplication issue on a website, and occurs when the same information can be accessed (and indexed by search engines) from different URLs. This occurs when URLs have not be standardised correctly, and the most common form is being able to access sites from both www and non-www headers.
For example, the same content can be accessed using 4 variations of the same homepage:
http://www.domain.com
http://www.domain.com/index.htm
http://domain.com
http://domain.com/index.htm
http://www.domain.com/index.htm?selection=26
Search engines may cache all the versions of the URLs resulting in site-wide duplication, which can lead to content duplication penalties. Surprisingly, canonicalization is a very common problem.
Canonicalization can be prevented by setting your preferred domain in Google webmaster tools, and using 301 re-directs to permanently direct the browser to the preferred URL.
A blog is basically an online journal, usually available within the public domain for other people to view. Blogs are also used in the form of news sections to websites. There are lots of blog platforms available on the web, with the most popular being wordpress, blogger and livejournal.
The activity of updating a blog is called “blogging”, and someone that owns or uses a blog is called a “blogger”.
Blogs are great for creating discussion, and are reasonably easy to setup on your website. Many websites use blogs as news pages in order to get more traffic to websites, as they can be search engine optimised and Google favours news and blog sites as they tend to be regularly updated, with unique content.
