What Twitterers Are Thankful For

Do you want to tell the world what you're thankful for? Will the Twitterverse suffice? How about you followers and the few people that go to TurkeyTwitter? What is TurkeyTwitter you ask? It is a site that was launched yesterday to give those celebrating Thanksgiving a place to see the collective thanks of Twitter users. Sure, you could simply use Twitter Search, and search "thanksgiving," but TurkeyTwitter provides updates and stats about the things people are thankful for. It gathers tweets based on the #turkeytwitter and #thanksgiving hashtag. In actuality, it's going to give you a lot more than just what people are thankful for. If anyone tweets anything remotely related to the holiday and includes a simple #thanksgiving hashtag, it will appear, but it is what it is. It's Thanksgiving, and someone took the time to make a Twitter-based Thanksgiving site, so we're talking about it. Case closed. If you follow @turkeystats on Twitter, you can see the top ten thankful items tweeted out. The creators note that the site is just a quick experiment. They even offer advanced apologies if there's something that doesn't go well. Don't worry guys, I think we'll all sleep tonight if we experience some TurkeyTwitter hiccups. If you have some time to kill, if you don't like football, or you just want to know what strangers are thankful for, check out TurkeyTweets.

Earthquake and Tsunami Searchers Targeted By Malware

You have probably heard about the Indonesian Earthquake that took place last night, claiming the lives of many. Shameless cybercriminals have not wasted anytime exploiting the disaster targeting people around the world who search for information on the subject.

According to Symantec, malware creators have devised malicious software and websites designed to make money from concerned members of the public, by targeting specific web searches so that their sites get listed in results. Such queries include things like "western Samoa," "Earthquake," "Tsunami," etc.

When users go to these sites, they are presented with fake antivirus scan attempts, which offer to clean users' computers. Of course they do just the opposite.

The subject is really just reflective of a larger phenomenon in which cybercriminals are preying on innocent searchers by targeting topics that are highly searched for. There's nothing more heavily searched for than current events, and there are plenty of tools out there that give away this information. Things like Google's Hot Trends, Yahoo's popular searches, and  Twitter's trending topics are generally good indicators of queries that are being heavily searched for.

"These types of attack are becoming increasingly prevalent online," says Hon Lau, Security Response Manager at Symantec. "We recently identified similar attacks following both the Serena Williams outburst and the Twitter based attacks reported last week. The people behind these scams are constantly evolving and adapting their attacks to suit current news events. Unfortunately there is no event, no matter how heartbreaking, which a hacker will not try to profit from."

Symantec warns users to be "vigilant and cautious" of any search results which appear not to link to trusted sources.

SEO Sitemaps Give Websites a Boost

A lot of web pages will find an SEO sitemap useful in improving their performance. SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”, the process that aims to create or revise Internet sites so that it can be better found by search engines. The objective of SEO campaigns is to have websites appear in the top listing or first results page of search engines.

Internet search engines, such as Google and A9, maintain a very large database of Web pages and available files. To do this, they devise a program called a web crawler, or spider. This software automatically and continuously surfs and hunts content in the Web. Pages that the spider finds are retrieved and indexed according to text content, giving more weight to titles and paragraph headers. Spiders never stop navigating the web from page to page, to index the relevant content of the Internet. Besides looking at the text of titles and headers, some programs are able to identify default tags and keep a library of these page keywords or key phrases in the index.

When a user connects to the Internet types a query, which is automatically interpreted as keywords, the search engine scans the saved index and creates a list of web pages that is most appropriate to what the user is searching for.

SEO will use all the combined techniques of keyword analysis, smart code, good content literature, link popularity study and website organization to place the subject web page as high as possible in the list of search results in search engines. Web pages displayed on the top of results pages are assumed to get the most attention, and therefore, opportunity for earnings for web businesses and pages with sponsor links.

Search engines usually return a list of results ranking pages according to the number of Internet sites linked to them. Results can be classified as organic, or sponsored links. Sponsored links are shown prominently because their creators or agents paid the search engine. Sponsored links are the main source of income of search engines. “Organic” search results are the lists of actual results from the engines index and are directly related to the keyword typed in the request.
One of the more effective techniques of SEO is the creation of a well-organized site map in a website. Since the site’s main page and other content are directly linked to a site map, spiders can more easily move through the website, identify the key words of the content, and index these for a search engine. This is where the SEO sitemap helps the website creator or administrator.

Site maps are usually pages filled with links. These are shown as tables or lists, although lists are generally more effective. Writing code for SEO sitemaps is very easy and simple to format and maintain. These are ideally basic HTML pages with default tags, logical titles and keywords scattered in the Meta description. Introduction areas can contain more of the keywords. The site should have a main heading for every directory.

A simple list layout helps reduce unnecessary tags that might “hide” your keywords. Some spiders give more weight to the following, than text in the normal body of the webpage: heading text, content within link elements, text nearer the top of the page and the text written for a link. Therefore, writing the keywords and links in these areas could somehow move up the web page’s ranking. This goes for SEO sitemaps as well.

Web sites should be designed consistently, so navigation models should follow the flow of the site map. Therefore, the first section in the site map should be the first link in the navigation bar.

In an SEO Sitemap, and most pages, the headings contain title attributes where more key phrases in the site map can be added. Keywords are generally well chosen and written in the body of a webpage. However, in an SEO site map with little text, key words should be added as much as possible. As much as possible, web links should follow web page titles, and must undergo SEO during coding. Care must be exercised not to cram the page with keywords and links, or the page will be interpreted as blatant spamming and not receive any traffic at all.

There is no way to guarantee that a website will be shown in the topmost ranking of “organic” search results for an extended period of time. However, smart and responsible SEO sitemap techniques can be used to place the website high up in the search position. Regular monitoring and adjustment of the SEO Sitemap and search results would ensure that a website is kept near the top ranking and receiving lots of web user traffic.