By: Stoney deGeyter | Source: isedb.com

RSS feeds have made it easy to monitor and track news stories, blog posts and certain websites for important updates. But not every site has an RSS feed that you can track, nor does every change made constitute an RSS update.

In the world of online marketing, tracking changes to competitor, client and industry related websites can not only help you stay current on important issues, but can also help you gather additional competitive intelligence data simply and easily. RSS is great, but it’s not everywhere. For tracking what you can’t with RSS, we have developed the CodeMonitor Page Tracking tool.

While your reasons for wanting to track pages may vary, here are a few common reasons that don’t always lend themselves to RSS.

Competitor Tracking

Tracking even minor changes to your competitor websites. You want to know whenever a competitor adds a new product, reduces prices, or even makes changes that are designed to improve their search engine rankings. Changes in their title and meta description tags as well as on-page content can all provide you important business intelligence.

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By: Oleg Ishenko | Source: seoresearcher.com

Despite the documented problems over the years, businesses and web development firms are continuing to use a flash base in site design, without regard of the challenges an all flash site poses for search engine rankings and SEO .

Sure, some hybrids of flash and text work well, with the mutual understanding that flash is embedded within a site.. and not the site itself. But as a whole, this concept seems to be falling on deaf ears.

Flash Is Evil. Five Big Reasons Not to Use Flash.

Building Flash-powered websites is wrong. Storing your content in Flash movies is wrong. Implementing site navigation in Flash is wrong.

Then why are there so many Flash sites? They look pretty with all those neat vector graphics, gradients, animations and cool sound effects. Flash is the favorite toy of big designer studios and numerous amateur graphic artists alike. Flash is visually attractive, and in general attractive websites are more successful than the ugly ones (notable exceptions: craigslist.org and plentyoffish.com). But this is not the case of Flash websites. All the benefits of the nice outlook are overridden by the disadvantages in terms of SEO and usability.

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By: B Hopkins | Source: site-reference.com

The term blogging has recently found its way into the standard Internet terminology. While most people don’t have a blog, or don’t even know the first thing about blogging, they have heard of the term and have at least a vague idea of what it means. If you decide to venture into the world of blogging, there are some things you must do to increase your chances of making your blog more successful. Most of these things are common sense, but some of them may be new to a first-time blogger.

1. Identify the Target Market for Your Blog

You should focus on one topic area, or related topic areas for your blog. If your blog wanders too much in many different directions, it becomes a general discussion blog, and you risk losing the more motivated readers. For example, if your target market of interest is travel, then you would want to focus your blog on topics related to travel. You could broaden your topics to include adventure travel, cruises, all-inclusives, hotels, etc., however the more focused you are in your topics (if you just stick with cruises), the more effective your blog will be in terms of branding you as an expert about cruises, and the more responsive your readers will be to your cruise related posts.

2. Give the Readers to Your Blog What They Want

Unless your blog is set up to just display your random streams of consciousness, the readers to your blog are going to want valuable and timely information that is accurate. If you are making statements about policies or current events, you should back them up with links to the sources you used to make those statements. It is also important to keep the reader interested by giving your own personal insights, or giving a new way to look at current events. Putting your own personality into your blog is essential and will keep your readers interested in what you have to say.

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