Back in May 2010, Yahoo and Nokia announced a partnership that included making Nokia the exclusive provider for Yahoo maps and navigation. Now the Nokia-powered Yahoo Maps are here, at least in the U.S. and Canada, but they don’t appear to have any advantage over Google Maps.

Greg Sterling discusses his first impressions of the new maps in Powered By Nokia, The New Yahoo Maps Goes Live. And that impression is, well, unimpressed.

First, the data is spotty outside the U.S. and Canada, although he does point out that they haven’t officially launched in other areas.

Second, the search boxes are confusing. This is largely because there are multiple boxes. On the new Yahoo Maps, you can choose either “Find a location” or “Find a business,” which seems redundant.

Third, accuracy is inconsistent. “Find a location” has only one box, making it appear the easier choice, but it is more error-prone than the “Find a business” option. “Find a business” has two boxes, one for the business name or type, and a second box to narrow down the location. That extra location information is apparently critical to getting an accurate map.

Granted, many of the new Yahoo Maps improvements are behind the scenes, so users aren’t aware of them. Unfortunately, it’s the user experience that users care about, and for now it’s not an improvement over Google Maps. On the other hand, Sterling does consider the user experience on Yahoo to be better than that on Nokia Maps.

Hopefully Nokia will work out the bugs soon, because they’ve also partnered with Microsoft to provide data to Bing Maps.

Information in this post gathered in association with a car accident lawyer New York.

Authoritative inbound links increase the authority of your site and boost your search engine rankings. Great content will earn you some organic links, but most website owners also use link-building strategies to find additional link sources.

In Link Building with OSE and a Host of Other Tools, Rand Fishkin presents a free webinar in which he talks about using a variety of free and low-cost tools to find worthwhile link sources.

Not surprisingly, SEOmoz’s Open Site Explorer (OSE) is one of Rand’s favorites. In this webinar, he discusses how it can help you with the competitive analysis you need to do in order to find link sources.

When you enter your competitor’s URL into OSE, it will return a list of links to the site. You can filter the links however you like. Rand prefers:

• Followed+301
• Only external
• Pages on this root domain
• Group by domain

You can then explore the link profiles of the linking domains to determine if they may be a good target for you. As a tip, you may not want to pursue a site with many inbound links from just a few domains. There are exceptions, but take a closer look before going after it. You can also sort the links by Domain Authority.

A few other link-building tools covered by Rand include:

• Directories and link resources: Make sure you find high-quality ones and avoid the spammy ones.
• Link acquisition assistant: This tool is only available to SEOmoz PRO members, but it finds lists of link acquisition sources based on data that you input about your business.
• Blogscape: Another PRO tool, Blogscape finds all the recent sources of links and mentions pointing at the domain you specify.

Rand offers much more information in the webinar, including resources like FollowerWonk, MoreOfIt, LinkedIn and many more. This free webinar is well worth the time spent watching it.

Information in this post gathered in association with a New York injury attorney,

Large enterprises face unique challenges in managing their SEO strategies; namely that multiple departments may contribute content to the company’s online properties without coordinating their efforts. This makes it easy for SEO best practices to be overlooked.
Stephanie Chang discusses this problem and offers some potential solutions for systematizing procedures to improve overall SEO in 5 Content Management CMS Tips for Large Enterprises.

Create an SEO Score Sheet: 

This is a guideline for ensuring that everything published by the company meets some minimum SEO requirements. Specific requirements will vary, but Chang suggests some basic ones, like:

• Meta description tag under 155 characters
• A minimum amount of unique content
• A unique headline
• Alt tags and captions for all images
• Minimum keyword and link requirements

Use Alerts:

These can suggest appropriate tags or prompt content creators to double check requirements from your SEO Score Sheet. Problems can be fixed before the content goes live.

Add a Help Center:

Help sections can provide more information on how to accomplish the requirements of your SEO Score Sheet or how to use certain sections that are causing trouble.

Canonical and 301 Redirect Fields:

These should not be used by — or even accessible to —most content producers, but they can help make future changes, like site redesigns, go more smoothly and prevent errors.

Provide Keyword Suggestions:

Keywords are one of the most important aspects of your SEO, but choosing the right ones is not always easy. Let someone who understands keyword selection research and approve your keywords, then put them into a tool that can suggest appropriate ones based on the content of the piece.

If you’re trying to manage SEO strategy for a large enterprise, try to get buy-in to implement some of these strategies and see if they don’t increase results for your company.

Information in this post gathered in association with a New York car accident lawyer.

Using subfolders on your website is better for SEO than using subdomains. But when the content resides on multiple servers, the only way to tie it all to the same root domain is with subdomains. However, a reverse proxy can make the subdomain appear to be a subfolder.

What is a reverse proxy? It is a procedure that allows you to create a relative path on your main domain to access the subdomain’s content. The reverse proxy requests the content and serves it up as if it is located in a subfolder.

Implementing a reverse proxy

You can set up a reverse proxy even if you are not particularly technical, because it uses plug-ins that are usually pre-installed on both Microsoft IIS and Apache servers.

• Apache servers use the plug-in mod proxy, which you can use from both the config and .htaccess files
• Microsoft IIS7 and higher uses the plug-in Application Request Routing (ARR)
• Microsoft IIS6 uses third party plug-ins at http://managedfusion.com/products/url-rewriter/ or http://iirf.codeplex.com/—these will also work on IIS7 and higher, if you prefer them over ARR

You will need to set up redirect rules on your content server (where the subdomain content is stored) so that search engines can learn to recognize the correct URL. If you are setting this up for a subdomain that already exists and has been indexed, you might take a short-term SEO hit, but the long-term benefits will be worth it.

You will also need to make sure the links in the content still work; especially if they reference a different subdomain, as those links will likely break and need to be rewritten.

Slingshot SEO has a wonderful infographic on their SEOmoz post, What is a Reverse Proxy and How Can it Help My SEO?; it’s worth reading if you think you’d like to set up a reverse proxy.

Information in this post gathered in association with Atlanta injury attorneys

Are you confused about what Google’s Panda Update really does and how to avoid being penalized by it? If so, you’re not alone. Many sites, large and small, saw traffic plummet after Panda hit, and quite a few haven’t recovered. To avoid the Panda penalty, you need to understand what it really is, what it does and which content sins it penalizes.

First, Panda attempts to view websites the same way humans do, and it was “trained” to do so by tweaking the algorithm until it could replicate rates made by actual human raters. Second, Panda penalizes your whole site for having too many low-quality pages. This means that even if you have a lot of excellent content on your site, you could still doom the site to obscurity by having too many pages with:

• Too much template content: If you use templates to design your site, make sure your unique content makes up the majority of the page.
• Redundant content: Recycling all the same information into many articles with only slight tweaks to target variations on the same keyword phrase is a Panda no-no.
• Too many ads: You probably dislike wading through a flurry of ads to find the real information on the page. Your visitors feel the same, and so does Panda.
• Too much machine-generated content: This is popular with affiliate sites, but not Panda.
• No purpose beyond linking to other pages.

Cyrus Shepard covers these common mistakes in more detail, along with offending screenshots, in Beating Google’s Panda Update — 5 Deadly Content Sins. If you’ve been hit by Panda — and even if you think you haven’t — check out your site, looking for these types of pages. Fixing them can only improve your visitors’ experience and Panda’s view of your site.

Not too long ago, the use of the term SEO met with blank stares. Those whose eyes did not glaze over asked what the initials meant and received the answer that the letters stand for Search Engine Optimization—[bq1] which led to further blank stares or questions.

That is no longer the case. In fact, most people on the web now know that to get attention for their business or enterprise, they need to move up to the first page when someone searches for their type of business. As a Los Angeles automobile accident lawyer, I want my firm to appear at the top of all searches. To do this, I need to optimize my site so it appears at the top of the rankings. But figuring out the way to appear on the first page is not as simple as creating a great website.

Some things that you can do to help with SEO for your site

The web is a vast place filled with millions of people vying for the attention of potential clients. By now everyone knows that most people on the web have short attention spans. So how do you attract and keep their interest?

Some things that help with getting noticed include the following:

Your layout. There are tons of boring places on the web. You need yours to be more than informative. You need it to be attractive to the type of customer you want. Colors and design matter. Pictures and video are arresting.

Use headlines and subheadings. Readers on the net often skim a page. Reading an article or page on the net is not much different from reading a newspaper in the sense that it is the headline that draws you in. The ones that catch your attention lead to reading more. Sub-headings are also important. They break up a page and allow the eye to move downward point by point.

Be honest. Tell the truth about your company and the products or services you offer.  And most important of all, provide valuable content.

A skilled firm can provide the aggressive representation you need for your accident claim

The Larry H. Parker team of attorneys has a record of success in 91 percent of cases, and we will fight for you! We have offices in Long Beach, Riverside, Los Angeles, Fresno, and Bakersfield, California and Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona.