How to buy hard drive?

How to Buy a Hard Drive
Introduction

Your PC’s internal hard drive is a real workhorse–the most critical component of your system after the CPU and memory. The hard drive is the hub where your operating system, programs, and data are permanently stored and accessed (Dell XPS M1210 Battery) .
If you edit movies, take lots of digital photos, play games, or listen to music files on your PC, a big, fast internal Parallel or Serial ATA hard drive can dramatically improve your overall computing experience. If you need more storage or a means to back up your PC’s internal drives, you can add an external hard drive–available in USB 2.0, FireWire 400 or 800, or external SATA flavors (Dell Studio XPS 1340 Battery) .

And if you want centralized storage, consider buying a network-attached storage device. NAS devices are continually improving, and can be a convenient way to add storage that all of the PCs on your small or home network can share. (Dell Studio XPS 1640 Battery) .

The Big Picture
To enjoy multimedia on your PC, you need a spacious hard drive. Here’s how to shop like a pro for an internal or external drive.
Key Features
Don’t know capacity from rotational speed, or IDE from SATA? We define the terms you’re likely to see when shopping for a hard drive, and we tell you which specs are the most important ones to consider (Dell Vostro 1710 Battery) .

Key Features
Important: Capacity
Even the relatively inexpensive PCs on our Top 10 Value Business Desktop PCs chart typically come with hard drives of at least 250GB, which is far more space than you’ll need for an operating system, applications, and several years’ worth of e-mail messages and typical documents. Capacity matters most to people who archive or edit digital photos, digital audio, or digital video. Video in particular can be a space hog: For example, the contents of a 1-hour MiniDV camcorder tape consume 13GB (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ11S Battery) .
If you want high capacity inside your desktop, remember that you don’t have to get it all in a single package: Most PCs have room for at least two internal hard drives (including your primary drive), and a typical big tower can accept even more. You’ll usually save money by purchasing two 500GB drives instead of a single 1TB model at a premium (Dell RM791 battery) .

But keep an eye out for rebates and advertised specials; for example, with promotions, you may be able to find a 1TB model for the same price as two 500GB models. And of course, make sure that you have available interface ports; if not, you may have to purchase an add-in card (Sony VGP-BPS13 battery) .

External direct-attached drives come in capacities of up to 1TB for single-drive models, some manufacturers achieve the same total capacity with two 500GB drives or four 250GB drives striped together in a RAID 0 or disk-spanning configuration. Portable external drives, which use a notebook-size 2.5-inch or 1.8-inch hard disk, currently max out at 250GB (sony vgp-bpl9 battery) .

Affordable, single-drive NAS boxes range from 160GB to 1TB, while more-sophisticated multiple-drive units can be configured in various ways for capacities of up to 3TB and/or for improved speed. It’s wise to go for as much capacity as you can afford–especially for a shared network drive, since multiple users are likely to fill it relatively quickly (Sony VGP-BPL11 battery) .

Somewhat Important: RAID Setup
High-end desktops and multiple-drive NAS boxes often use RAID configurations. Your motherboard or add-in drive controller must support RAID in order to use this feature (Sony VGP-BPL15 battery) .

RAID 0, the most common setup, delivers faster performance by splitting or striping data across multiple drives. Its drawback is that if one drive fails, the data on all drives is lost–so you’ll need to keep your backups current.

For systems that need to minimize down time, RAID 1–in which data is written redundantly or mirrored across multiple drives–is a popular alternative. If a drive goes bad, the system can continue to run on a good one until you have the opportunity to install a new drive and rebuild the array (Dell Inspiron E1505 battery ) .

The drawback to this approach is that the usable capacity is only as large as the smallest drive being used–two 250GB drive paired in RAID 1 provide 250GB of storage, not 500GB, and a 250GB drive paired with a 200GB drive yields only 200GB of mirrored storage.

Typically, dual-drive RAID boxes offer the choice of RAID 0 or RAID 1. Multiple-drive direct-attached or network-attached boxes–some enclosures support up to five drive bays–generally complement those basic RAID levels with RAID 5 (parity–offering your best bet for data redundancy) or RAID 0+ 1 (Dell Latitude E6400 battery) .
You can also set up a RAID for your internal drives; however, your motherboard or add-in drive controller must support RAID.

Important: Rotational Speed
All 3.5-inch, desktop-size internal SATA hard drives–as well as most current PATA drives–spin their disks at 7200 rpm. A handful of drives spin at 10,000 rpm; they are aimed at enthusiasts and enterprise users. Typically, the faster the disks spin, the faster the data is read and written–but the average buyer won’t want to pay a price premium for a 10,000-rpm model (HP Pavilion dv6000 Battery) .
Portable external drives have the biggest range in rotational speeds. Models are currently available in 4200-rpm, 5400-rpm, and 7200-rpm flavors. The most common of these is 5400 rpm. You’ll see a difference in transfer speeds if you copy a lot of data–say, photos from a full 2GB memory card–to your hard drive, so keep a close eye on these specs, and beware of vendors that don’t identify the drive’s rotational speed (Hp Pavilion dv3-1000 battery) .

Somewhat Important: Seek Speed
Average seek speed, measured in milliseconds, refers to how fast, on average, drives can find a particular piece of data. This is a minor consideration: For most people, the effect of differences on this measure in everyday use is negligible. The exception is when a drive is called upon to assemble many small pieces of data scattered in different areas of the hard drive, such as when copying large folders full of many small files. Jumbo drives tend to have somewhat longer seek times (Dell Precision M70 Battery) .

Important: Interface
Nearly all internal drives in new PCs use the SATA interface, which supports maximum transfer rates of either 150MB or 300MB per second. The drives with a 300MB-per-second maximum transfer rate cannot take advantage of their wider bandwidth in typical desktop use, though they shine in RAID combinations (Acer Aspire One battery) .
PATA drives, which support maximum transfer rates of either 100MB per second or 133MB per second, are still widely available. There’s little advantage to one or the other; hard drives never sustain data-transfer rates approaching either maximum, though drives can sometimes push out of data at rates approaching the high-end speeds for brief bursts (SONY VGP-BPS8 battery) .

Both PATA and SATA interfaces are backward-compatible: For example, you can run an older ATA-33 drive on an ATA-133 bus or a 150MB-per-second SATA drive on a 300MB-per-second bus. But although PATA-to-SATA adapters are available, you should match a PATA drive to a PATA interface whenever possible, to get the best performance from it. SATA drives work with the SATA interface only. Inexpensive PCI Express and PCI add-in cards are available that let you add a SATA interface to a computer that lacks it; PATA and PATA/SATA models are available only for PCI (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ Battery) .

Most external drives have a USB 2.0 interface or a dual USB/FireWire interface. Other interface configurations are dual USB2.0/FireWire 400; FireWire 800; and eSATA. USB 2.0 and FireWire 400 perform slightly slower than a comparable internal drive, but either is more than acceptable for auxiliary storage or backup. (A USB 2.0 drive will work with a USB 1.1 port, but its performance slows to an unacceptable level.) (Sony VGN-FZ460E battery)

FireWire 800 is quite fast, but this interface is relatively rare on desktop PCs. For high-performance external storage, go with an eSATA direct-attached drive. These drives are becoming increasingly popular; and while they don’t offer the universal connectivity of a USB 2.0-enabled drive, they’re as fast as an internal drive–and sometimes they include a USB connection, for good measure. (Hp 520 battery)

To install an eSATA drive, you’ll need an open external port: Though eSATA drives come with a pass-through connector that provides an external port, you’ll need an open internal SATA port to attach the connector to. If you don’t have an open internal port but do have an available PCI slot, an inexpensive PCI add-in card can provide external SATA, USB 2.0, or FireWire ports for systems that lack them (Toshiba Satellite L305 Battery) .

Likewise, you can find PC Card adapters that add USB 2.0 and FireWire ports to a notebook, if your system is so old that it lacks these interfaces. However, FireWire and FireWire 800 use different connectors, so they are not cross-compatible.

Consumer-level NAS devices generally employ the TCP/IP protocol and a 10/100Base-T or gigabit ethernet connection to hook up to your network. As such, NAS devices are generally pokier than direct-attached external models. Look for NAS devices that provide USB 2.0 ports for accommodating additional hard drives so you can expand capacity or share attached printers across the network (Toshiba Satellite Pro M15 Battery) .

Somewhat Important: Buffer
When a system requests data, a hard drive will fetch what is requested and load its buffer memory with extra information that the processor is likely to ask for next. Theoretically at least, a larger buffer size should help keep the data flowing better, especially in disk-intensive tasks such as file searching. Most desktop drives–and all of the ones on our Top 5 charts–have buffers of either 8MB or 16MB. Value-priced PATA drives may have 2MB buffers (Dell XPS M1530 battery) .

Somewhat Important: Noise
If you are building your own PC to use in your living room as a media center hub, noise may be a significant issue. Many hard-drive makers offer versions of their drives designed for use in personal video recorder or media-streaming environments. Look for these specialty drives if you’re looking to reduce the noise output by your system (Toshiba Tecra M10 Battery) .

Hard-Drive Shopping Tips
If you outgrow your existing storage, it can be easier and cheaper to upgrade a drive than to buy an entirely new PC. When you’re ready to start looking, print out these tips for handy referencewd elements desktop 750GB

Hard-Drive Shopping Tips
Are you ready to take the plunge and buy a big new hard drive for your PC? Here are PC World’s recommendations for what you should consider, both before you buy the drive and when you’re actually shopping (Toshiba NB100 Battery) .

Determine whether your PC can take advantage of a new drive. Newer PCs can make best use of a new drive’s increased performance and capacity. An old PC with a slow CPU and limited RAM won’t be able to fully exploit the performance potential of a new drive. You’ve probably reached the point of diminishing returns if your PC’s interface speed–say, ATA-33–is slower than the interface speed of the cheapest drive available (Toshiba Satellite 1900 Battery) .
If your middle-aged computer is still working acceptably, more storage capacity and speed may be just what the doctor ordered. Installing a new drive as your main drive for running Microsoft Windows and various productivity applications might improve performance appreciably. Older PCs may need both a PCI interface card to get the best drive performance and a vendor-supplied driver or BIOS update to be able to recognize the capacity of large drives; Windows XP’s drivers allow use of a drive’s full capacity as well (HP Pavilion DV5 Battery) .
Make sure your case has space. Most desktop PC cases have at least one, and sometimes several, internal drive bays–places where you can mount extra hard drives. But check your manual or open the case: If you have a smaller, low-profile case, you may not have room for another internal drive, meaning that you may not be able to use the old and new drives simultaneously. (Toshiba Satellite P15 Battery) .

Also, check your power supply to see whether it has a spare plug for an additional internal drive. Another consideration: Will the power supply have enough juice to run an extra drive along with your system’s existing components?
Supersize your purchase. It’s smart to buy a drive with more capacity than you think you’ll need. If you’re absolutely sure that you won’t be using multimedia-intensive applications that eat up huge amounts of space (such as programs that edit video), or storing digital photos or MP3 audio files, you might not need a maximum-capacity drive. But be sure to anticipate your future needs when deciding on the size of your new drive–especially if you plan to keep your existing PC for a couple more years (Ibm ThinkPad X41 Tablet battery) .

Match the drive and interface speed. The ATA-100 and ATA-133 interfaces of current drives are faster than the internal interfaces on many older PCs; check your PC manual or contact your computer vendor to find out for sure. An easy-to-install interface card (about $25) can guarantee that you get maximum performance from your new drive. If you want to add a SATA-300 drive to a system with SATA-150 connectors, however, just do it. The nominally slower interface should not choke the performance of a SATA-300 drive (Toshiba Satellite A200 Battery) .
Use an external drive for backup. External drives are great for backing up your PC, and many models have one-touch backup buttons that make the process even easier. The fastest external hard drives are the new eSATA models. Make sure that you have at least one free internal SATA port for models that come with a pass-through cable, or buy a model that that offers eSATA ports through a PCI interface (Toshiba NB205 Battery) .

Use a portable drive with your notebook. External models that use hard drives intended for laptops tend to be optimized for mobile use. One relevant feature is a ruggedized enclosure with a high shock rating, meaning that it can absorb a typical impact from a desk to the floor, for example. Some drives may also have g-force sensors that can detect when a drive is in motion and park the heads to avoid damage to the disk. Typically, though, that feature is found on internal notebook drives, rather than on add-on drives (Toshiba Satellite M100 Battery) .
Consider a NAS device. They’re a great choice for backup as well as for making photos, videos, music, and other files available to everyone on your network. NAS devices connect to your network via ethernet, which means middling performance, but in most cases they also include USB 2.0 ports to share a printer or to expand storage capacity in case you run short in the future. See our Top 5 Networked-Attached Storage Devices for pricing and specs (Toshiba Satellite P10 Battery) .

Look for bargains. Competition among hard-drive makers is intense, and dealers often run specials that let you pick up a new drive for an amazingly low price. These deals tend to be on smaller-capacity or slower drives, however. Don’t expect specials on the largest-capacity drives, since these may be in short supply and usually sell at close to list price until the next generation of drives appears (Toshiba Satellite P15 Battery) .

Buy a retail kit. Hard-drive kits include mounting hardware, cables, detailed instructions, and (often) software that eases installation. A kit may also include an application for cloning the contents of your old hard drive onto the new one, which then becomes your new main drive. If you buy via mail order, be sure to get the kit. The alternative is a "bare drive," essentially just a drive in a Mylar bag, often without screws, software, or even instructions beyond a technical data sheet. Bare drives are sometimes available online at bargain prices, however, and plenty of online installation help is availablewd book essential 640GB (Toshiba Satellite 3005 Battery) .
Use add-on software. Power users who purchase a bare drive and aren’t running Windows XP may need extra software to ease the process of integrating the new hard drive into their PC. Even if you buy a packaged drive upgrade kit, you might want to use Symantec’s Ghost or Acronis’s True Image to back up and clone a drive. Symantec’s Partition Magic and Acronis’s Disk Director let you fine-tune how your new drive stores data (Toshiba Satellite 1200 Battery) .

Final Recommendations
General users: If you typically use your PC for Web surfing, working on Microsoft Word documents, handling e-mail, and perfiorming casual digital imaging, a lower-capacity drive may work for you. Opt for an inexpensive 300GB drive, using whichever interface is convenient for your needs (Toshiba Portege 2000 Battery) .
Multimedia hounds: If you store a lot of digital images, audio, or video, consider buying a single 750GB or 1TB drive. If you also edit images and video, go for internal orexternal models on our Top 5 hard-drive charts that show the best test results on related imaging tasks; an eSATA drive will give you the best performance (Toshiba Tecra 8000 Battery) .

Gamers: A popular choice for performance-hungry gamers is a RAID 0 rig with two Western Digital 10,000-rpm WD Raptor drives. This kicks up your performance but limits capacity, since the WD Raptor is available only in 36GB, 74GB, and 150GB sizes (Toshiba Satellite T4900 Battery) .

Shared storage: If you want a NAS device, get one with the largest capacity you can find–gigabytes go fast when several people are backing up their own digital photo and MP3 collections. Also, aim for one that’s easy to upgrade, in case you need to swap out a drive down the roadwd book studio for Mac 1TB (Dell XPS M2010 battery) .

Google is slave to the algorithm

Google is baffled at the charge of search bias – it's all automated. But that is also its great weakness

There will be confusion and pain in Mountain View following the European commission's decision to begin preliminary investigations into whether Google has abused its dominance of internet search by (it is claimed) submerging results from rival sites. Not because Google's executives will think they have done any such thing – and it's entirely possible that they haven't (Dell XPS M1210 Battery) .

But because to them the idea that Google, the company where the algorithm rules above all, should do such a labour intensive thing as suppress particular sites is pretty much unthinkable. It goes against everything Google stands for – which is the machine, not the man (Dell Studio XPS 1340 Battery) .

Google was built on one fantastic rule: the sites that get linked to by other sites are higher up the reputation tree. That is the basis of its world-beating search engine. Once it had also figured out how to make money by selling ads against search results and web pages (done, again, with machines - you bid online to place an ad against a search term, and the computer chooses who wins), it could start piling on the profit. Which it has (Dell Studio XPS 1640 Battery) .

And that has allowed it to expand its ambition "to organise the world's information and make it accessible". That is actually its mission statement. (The stuff about "don't be evil"? Just advisement.)

For all its grand expansion, to video (YouTube), online processing (Google Appspot), books (Google Books), and even online payment systems (Google Checkout)–Google hews to one truth: humans aren't as good at doing things as machines, so you should let the machines do it (Dell Vostro 1710 Battery) .

Does the internet have lots of sites that just refer to themselves (to pretend they have lots of "links", to push themselves up the search results)? Tweak the algorithm to push them down. Are there lots of spam-laden sites that pretend to have whatever search term you're after to get up the results? Tweak them out too. The machine rules; the human tries to stay out of it, because no good can come of people trying to keep up with the scale of the internet (Dell Vostro 1710 Battery) .

If you had to hire people to sift through everything being uploaded to YouTube – more than 20 hours every single minute – you'd need a team of more than 3,600 people working eight-hour shifts every single day.

Google doesn't do that. It has about 20,000 staff worldwide, and it wants as few as possible doing grunt work like video reviews. Let the computer do it: so videos are checked (by a machine) to see if their soundtrack or visual fingerprint matches known copyrighted material. If so, it won't get up (ASUS EEE PC900 battery) .

But this focus on the machine does lead to a blind spot, as we'll see.

It was inevitable that the company's immodest ambition would, as the American media business journalist Ken Auletta describes it in his new book Googled, "wake up the bears" – those organisations and companies which had been comfortable where they were until this upstart came along (ASUS EEE PC900 battery) .

The Chinese government is already roused to anger by Google's electric-shock reaction to the discovery that its systems were hacked by people seeking information about Chinese dissidents. And now there's the European commission, which tends to gnaw and gnaw away until it gets what it wants, as Intel – fined €1bn last May for anticompetitive practices and Microsoft – obliged to allow European users to pick their own web browser on Windows 7, starting this week, because of the way it forced Internet Explorer on Windows users – have discovered (Sony VGP-BPS13 battery) .

So what does the European commission want? Initially, for Google to explain why companies such as Foundem, eJustice and Microsoft-owned Ciao don't seem to rank in its search results. Foundem, a British company, has tried without success to get an explanation since 2006 (sony vgp-bpl9 battery) .

But in the longer term, it may want it to be less aggressive in how it tweaks its algorithms. That might be good for spammers (not that I'm suggesting any of the three complainants is; far more likely they are collateral damage of tweaks by Google). But in the longer term, the warning may be not to do what Microsoft did, and use its power in one field to try to overwhelm another (Sony VGP-BPL11 battery) .

That could be a good thing. Two weeks ago, Google launched "Buzz", its own effort to create a Twitter-style network for the 400 million users of Google Mail. It would immediately create a network of people you had swapped email with, and let you converse, Twitter-style, with them in short text bursts (Sony VGP-BPL15 battery) .

Except it had only been tested internally, among the algorithm-loving engineers. Unleashed on normal people, who exchange emails with people they hate, or want to keep separate the people they swap emails with, it created social collisions all over the place. Buzz outraged many; parents have discovered that it does not secure children from would-be stalkers (Dell Inspiron E1505 battery ) .

It turns out that algorithms can't tell us everything about human nature. It was a moment when Google was suddenly caught in the headlights. And now it risks being mauled by the commission – if not over this, then over related matters. What will count then will be how the company recovers. Microsoft has not yet recovered from the battering it took from the US department of justice and the commission over its browser tactics. Google might – but how well it does will be down to the humans, not the machines (Dell Latitude E6400 battery) .

SoHo Style

Look at Life South of Houston

Like most of Manhattan's neighborhoods, SoHo has gone through multiple incarnations to become the part of town we know today. Long, long before Prada and Bloomingdale's staked their claim along Broadway and exclusive hotels sprang up on the neighborhood's side streets, the area known as SoHo (so named to refer to the area "SOuth of HOuston" Street and above Canal Street, between Lafayette Street and the Hudson River) was a marshy meadow, and the future of New York City was only a far-off dream (Dell XPS M1210 Battery) .

Before New York

Hard as it may be to imagine today, prior to the arrival and proliferation of European settlers in North America, Manhattan was a lush green island sparsely populated by Native American groups who hunted the forests, fished the streams, and cultivated small gardens in their villages (Dell Studio XPS 1340 Battery) . According to

SoHo: A Guide by Helene Zucker Seeman and Alanna Siegfried (Neal-Schuman Publishers, Inc., 1978):

"Manhattan in the 1600s was covered with grassy hills, streams, meadows, forests, and marshes. Trails through this wilderness connected six Indian villages that had settled here: Warpoes, Nahtouk, Ispetenga, Sappokanican, Muscoota, and Sherakopak. Present-day Broadway was then known as the Weckquaesgeck Trail (Dell Studio XPS 1640 Battery) ."

Even after the Europeans arrived, it took some time before they put down roots and began building what could be considered permanent towns. At first, the area now known as SoHo was somewhat north of the Dutch settlement of Niew Amsterdam, confined mostly to the southern tip of Manhattan. By 1639, Dutch settlers had constructed plantations, roads, and buildings, and by the 1660's, a few powerful Dutch farmers had purchased the land to the north; including the area that was to become SoHo (Dell Vostro 1710 Battery) .

According to Seeman and Siegfried, by 1728, the area had been subdivided into sprawling farms. Broome Street between Thompson and Greene Streets was covered with trees, and Beekman's Swamp encompassed Spring, Broome, and Grand Streets. West of Broome Street stood Bayard's Mount, the highest point in Manhattan. True settlement did not occur in the SoHo area until after 1775, when Broadway was extended north of Canal Street by the Dutch. The area then became a country retreat for wealthy Dutch settlers (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ11S Battery) .

SoHo Comes of Age

By the early 1800s, SoHo was entering into the first of its incarnations as an elegant residential neighborhood populated by wealthy and upper-middle-class homeowners. Businesses and transportation soon followed, and a few years' time, shops, theaters, hotels, and entertainment venues proliferated in the neighborhood, especially along Broadway (ASUS EEE PC900 battery) .

Another change that came upon the area between 1840 and 1880 was the innovation of cast iron as an architectural material. The area now called SoHo is home to what's generally regarded as the greatest collection of cast iron structures in the world. There are only about 250 cast iron buildings still standing in New York City, and the vast majority of them are in SoHo (Dell RM791 battery) .

In the late 1800s, iron was cheaper to use for facades than stone or brick, and could easily be molded into ornate shapes and decorative elements. Not only that, but iron buildings were quick and relatively easy to build some going from groundbreaking to completion in just a few months. Iron could even be painted to look like various kinds of architectural stone (Sony VGP-BPS13 battery) .

And, say Seeman and Siegfried, the use of cast iron also made it possible to put enormous windows into dim factory and warehouse buildings and vault ceilings higher overhead than was ever possible before features that would serve the area very well a generation or two after their initial installation. (But more about that later (sony vgp-bpl9 battery) )

Along with all the residential development and architectural innovation came some interesting if somewhat less desirable, depending on your perspective commercial enterprises on the newly-paved side streets; namely, bordellos. In short order, SoHo became one of New York City's first red-light districts, complete with guidebooks to the various houses of ill-repute, descriptions of their architecture and facilities, and reviews of the ladies who plied their trade within (Sony VGP-BPL11 battery) .

One such guidebook was the

Directory to the Seraglios in New York, published in 1859, which contained the following listing for one Miss Clara Gordon, a noted lady of the night who ran a house on Mercer Street (Sony VGP-BPL15 battery) :

"We cannot too highly recommend this house, the lady herself is a perfect Venus: beautiful, entertaining, and supremely seductive. Her aides-de-camp are really charming and irresistible, and altogether honest and honorable. Miss G. is a great belle, and her mansion is patronized by Southern merchants and planters principally (Dell Inspiron E1505 battery ) .

She is highly accomplished, skillful, and prudent, and sees her visitors are well entertained. Good wines of the most elaborate brands [are] constantly on hand, and in all, a finer resort cannot be found in the City."

Of course, not everyone cottoned to the idea of living next door to a brothel regardless of how "honest and honorable" their proprietors may have been and in the years leading up to the Civil War, SoHo cooled as a residential neighborhood and its cobblestoned streets gave way more and more to light industry (Dell Latitude E6400 battery) .

Saving SoHo

By the 1880s, SoHo's population began to drift further uptown, and the gracious homes and mansions south of Houston Street had been torn down and replaced by a multi-million dollar textile industry. According to Seeman and Siegfried, for several decades, sweatshops occupied entire buildings, and small firms, import/export and trucking companies, and wholesale textile houses dominated the neighborhood (HP Pavilion dv6000 Battery) . By the middle of the 20

th century, the area south of Houston Street had deteriorated into what amounted to a large-scale commercial slum, rife with crime and prone to arson, so much so that after World War II, the area was often prosaically referred to as Hell's Hundred Acres (Hp Pavilion dv3-1000 battery).

The intimidating name and deteriorating building stock didn't dissuade one group from turning their eyes toward SoHo, however. Artists and performers, ever on the lookout for large spaces with tall ceilings and lots of light as well as cheap rents began moving into SoHo's old and disused industrial buildings, making use of the skylit, high-ceilinged spaces as studios and performance venues (Dell Precision M70 Battery) .

According to author Glenn O'Brien, in an article he wrote for

New York magazine back in 2003, "I had friends who rented 5,000 square feet [in SoHo] for a few hundred dollars a month, often with leases of 10 or 20 years. My own space was a mere 1,200 square feet, but it had high ceilings, large windows, and a skylight (Acer Aspire One battery) .

"Loft living back then meant a raw space made habitable by any means necessary. The downsides included living with your own plumbing, iffy heat, funky freight elevators or heroic climbs, industrial neighbors and industrial-strength rodents, and spooky streets late at night. The upside: Lofts were big enough to produce museum-size paintings in natural light and to accommodate artists' penchant for wild dance parties and Ping-Pong (SONY VGP-BPS8 battery) ."

Impoverished artists didn't do much to revive the neighborhood commercially, however, and SoHo property values eventually deteriorated to the point that in the 1960s, Highway Commissioner Robert Moses proposed plans for a Lower Manhattan Expressway. The vast highway would have cut directly through SoHo, demolishing many beautiful (if poorly maintained) historic buildings and driving out many of the area's newer artistic tenants (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ Battery) .

The proposal met with strong opposition, however, and (unlike many of Moses' ambitious urban development plans) the Lower Manhattan Expressway was never built. Not long after that, SoHo got permanent protection from developers in the form of a designation as an official historic district (Sony VGN-FZ460E battery) .

By the 1970s, SoHo was the premier address for artists, their admirers, and gallery owners. The neighborhood bristled with galleries, performance spaces, and artists' studios. But that was not to last for long; just as it had attracted the wealthy Dutch landowners of the 1700s, SoHo now became an attractive address for people who had nothing to do with the art world (Hp 520 battery) .

Prices Up, Artists Out

By the early 1990s, more "mainstream" apartment hunters were discovering the joys of SoHo living. The vast loft spaces, with their tall, arched windows, cast iron columns, and exposed brickwork became desirable to those looking for an alternative to uptown living (Toshiba Satellite L305 Battery) .

The tide of new, not-necessarily-artists moving into the area began to change the face of the neighborhood yet again and meant that more changes were afoot for the long-time residents.

According to O'Brien, "This transformation seemed to have occurred literally overnight (Toshiba Satellite Pro M15 Battery) .

At first, it came in the form of the alfresco exhibitors of paintings who thought they would peddle their oils, aimed at tourists, a little closer to the real art world. The takeover of the storefronts was more insidious. The galleries brought the rich, and the rich brought the stores, from agnès b. to J.Crew. Soon this neighborhood would be too expensive even for the galleries (Dell XPS M1530 battery) ."

After that, says O'Brien, the march from hip urban wasteland to sanitized tourist mecca was fast and unstoppable. "Probably the biggest lesson of SoHo was learned early by real-estate speculators, that artists are the ideal shock troops of real estate. Find a spacious hellhole, and give them a few years," O'Brien continues (Toshiba Tecra M10 Battery) .

"When you return, they will have transformed a crumbling warehouse into a showplace that reeks of glamour. Then you will be able to evict the artists and sell the lofts to cosmetic dentists."

And those cosmetic dentists (and some of the more successful artists) set about converting many of the old warehouses and loft buildings into luxury condos and co-ops, banking on the area's hip, artsy aesthetic and Downtown sensibility (Toshiba NB100 Battery) .

Throughout the 1980s and "˜90s, SoHo continued to attract a wide-range of co-op and condo residents, from bankers to painters to actors.

The area heated up very quickly, says Steve Kliegerman, director of Downtown sales for Halstead Properties. According to Kliegerman, property values shot up 50 to 65 percent just between 1999 and 2001. "It increased a tremendous amount," Kliegerman says, due in large part to "economic availability, a dearth of housing and the attraction of the SoHo area (Toshiba Satellite 1900 Battery) ."

According to Andrew Gerringer, executive vice president of mega-brokerage Prudential Douglas Elliman, "SoHo always remains a very interesting area," and says that that "The area where the West Village, SoHo, and Tribeca converge (around Spring and Washington Streets) continues to be especially desirable (HP Pavilion DV5 Battery) ."

Gerringer shares O'Brien's view of how gentrification takes place if not his bleak response to the process. "Artists always lead the front, looking for the cheapest places," he says. "Restaurants and bars follow. Then the rental guys come in with market-rate housing, and condo guys come in (Toshiba Satellite P15 Battery) ."

Today, buyers and renters both pay top dollar to live in what used to be called Hell's Hundred Acres. Apartments in the neighborhood's cast-iron buildings and former warehouses rent for thousands and sell for millions. For a "relatively average space," Kliegerman estimates that a buyer could pay between $600 and $800 a square-foot. That price increases for prime space, edging toward $1,000 per square-foot (Ibm ThinkPad X41 Tablet battery) .

Buyers are willing to pony up, says Kliegerman, because SoHo offers "a style of living that's really not available in any other place." A mind-boggling array of fabulous restaurants call the neighborhood home, and the area has become a shopper's paradise, offering everything from ultra-high-end designer clothing and furniture to flea-market bargains and vintage gems (Toshiba Satellite A200 Battery) .

"And," says Kliegerman, "all the subway lines converge in this area. East Side, West Side, Uptown subway trains all lie within easy walking distance of each other."

According to figures in

New York magazine, the average price of a one-bedroom apartment in SoHo last year was between $200,000 and $1 million (Toshiba NB205 Battery) .

A two-bedroom could easily cost as much as $2.5 million, and one of the neighborhood's prized lofts could cost anywhere from $1.5 million to well, to as much as a person can pay, into the multi-millions, depending on the location, amenities, and square footage. Rent prices are similarly high, ranging from $1,500 for a one-bedroom to upwards of $15,000 per month for a loft space (Toshiba Satellite M100 Battery) .

It would have been difficult for the gentleman farmers, or the garment workers, or the artists of the 1950s to imagine what the SoHo of today is like, with the throngs of tourists browsing and buying along Broadway, the exclusive restaurants and uber-hip bars dotting the landscape and occupying spaces that not so long ago were deemed part of a slum of old warehouses and industrial buildings gone to seed (Toshiba Satellite P10 Battery) .

But like so many other New York neighborhoods, SoHo has gone through many incarnations and this is just the newest one.

What Is SEO? Beginner’s Guide to Search Engine Optimisation

What is SEO? For me, search engine optimization (SEO) is the art of getting a website to work better with search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN and ASK.

You don’t pay anything to get into Google, Yahoo or MSN

To get into Google, for instance, you must consider and largely abide by search engine rules and guidelines for inclusion (Dell XPS M1210 Battery) .

It’s thought all search engines rank websites by the quality of incoming links to a site from other websites and hundreds of other metrics. Generally speaking, a link from a page to another page is viewed in Google “eyes” as a vote for that page the link points to (Dell Studio XPS 1340 Battery) .

If you have original quality content on a site, you have a chance of generating quality links. If your content is found on other websites, you will find it hard to get links. If you have decent original content on your site, you can let authority websites, those with online business authority, know about it, and they might link to you – the result being a quality IBL (Dell Studio XPS 1640 Battery) .

Search engines need to understand a link is a link. Links can be designed to be ignored by search engines (the attribute nofollow effectively cancels out a link, for instance)

Search engines find your site by other web sites linking to it. You can also submit your site to search engines direct, but I haven’t submitted my site to a search engine in the last 5 years (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ11S Battery) .

Google spiders this link, finds your site, and indexes the home page of your site, and will come back to spider the rest of your website if all your pages are linked together.

Many think Google will not allow new websites to rank well for competitive terms until the web address “ages” and acquires “trust” in Google. This is the called “the sandbox theory” filters (Dell Vostro 1710 Battery) .

I think this depends on the quality of the incoming links Google finds your website by.

To rank for specific keyword searches, you generally need to have the words on your page (not necessarily altogether, but it helps) or in links pointing to your page/site. Ideally, a mixture of both.

As a result of other sites linking to your site, the site now has a certain amount of “Google Juice” (or what I would call “Google Heat(!)” you can share with all the internal pages that make up your website (ASUS EEE PC900 battery) .

Yes, you need to build links to your site to aquire Google Juice.

When you have Google Juice or Heat, try and spread it throughout your site by linking down.

I think your external links to to other sites should probably be on your single pages, the pages receiving all your Google Juice once it’s been “soaked up” by the higher pages in your site (the home page, your category pages) (Sony Vaio VGN-FZ61B battery) .

It’s not JUST a numbers game. One link from a “trusted authority” site in Google could be all you need. Of course, the more “trusted” links you build, the more trust Google will have in your site.

Try and get links within page text pointing to your site with keywords in it. Try to ensure the links are not obviously “machine generated” ie site-wide links on forums or directories. Get links from pages, that in turn, have a lot of links to them (Sony Vaio VGN-FZ18M battery) .

Internally, always cite your other pages by linking to them within text.

Linking to a page with actual key-phrases in the link help a great deal in all search engines when you want to feature for specific key-terms.

I think that Internal Navigation is of paramount importance. Google needs links to find your pages. Don’t underestimate the value of a clever internal link keyword-rich architecture and be sure to understand for instance how many words Google counts in a link (Sony VGN-FZ21M battery) .

Search engines like Google “spider” your entire site by following all the links on your site to new pages, much as a human would click on the links of your pages. This spider is also known as a Robot.

After a while, all your pages are in Google’s index. Ideally you will have unique pages, with unique page titles and unique page descriptions. I don’t worry about meta keywords these days (Sony VGN-FZ150E battery) .

Google chews over your site, analysing text content and links

If you have a lot of duplicate crap found on other websites Google knows about, Google will ignore your page.

You don’t need to keyword stuff your text and look dyslexic to beat the competition. Generally it’s good to have keywords in links, page titles and text content. There is no ideal amount of text – no magic keyword density.

If you link out to irrelevant sites, Google may ignore the page, too (Dell RM791 battery) .

Many SEOs think who you actually link out to (and who links to you) helps determine a topical community of sites in any field, or a hub of authority. Quite simply, you want to be in that hub, at the centre if possible (however unlikely), but at least in it. I like to think of this one as a good thing to remember in the future as search engines get even better at determining topical relevancy of pages (Sony VGP-BPS13 battery) .

Original content is king and will attract a “natural link growth” in Google’s eyes. Too many incoming links too fast might devalue your site.

Rumour has it, Google can devalue whole sites, individual pages, template generated links and individual links if Google deems them “unnecessary”.

Now Google knows who links to you, the “quality” of those links, and who you link to (sony vgp-bpl9 battery) .

It decides which pages on your site are important or most relevant. You can help Google by always linking to your important pages.

It is of paramount importance you spread all that Google juice to your sales keyword / phrase rich sales pages, and as much remains to the rest of the site pages, so Google does not”demote” starved pages into it’s reserves, or “supplementals”.

Consider linking to important pages on your site from your home page, and via the template navigation on the site (Sony VGP-BPL11 battery) .

How many products do you sell? We sell two. Web Design and SEO. Hmmm. And we are an SEO Company in Scotland. Yes, we have 200 pages on this website, and good placement in Google for hundreds of terms. We make sure we link to these three pages where possible to help search engines figure out “hey, these pages are the most important pages on this site”. The 200 pages on this site, at the moment, are almost all in Google’s main index, but are just introductory pages to our sales page, if we are targeting the right audience (Sony VGP-BPL15 battery) .

If you have a shopping cart, with thousands of products, you need to get as much “Google Juice” or Google Heat to individual “keyword rich” product pages as possible.

With this information, your website has some sort of relevancy score for specific keywords and appears in serps (search engine results pages) when Google users type something into the search box (Dell Inspiron E1505 battery ) .

In the end, getting a site to the top of Google it all comes down do your content and external and internal link profile. All together, Google uses this analysis to determine whether your no1 in Google or number 32, or de-indexed. There’s no magic bullet

At any one time, your site is under some sort of filters designed to keep spam sites out and deliver relevant results to human visitors. One filter may be kicking in keeping a page down in the serps, while another filter is pushing another page up (Dell Latitude E6400 battery) .

You might have poor content but excellent incoming links, or vice versa. Try and identify the reasons Google doesn’t link a particular page. Too few quality incoming links? Too many incoming links? No keyword rich text? Linking out to irrelevant sites? Whatever, fix it (HP Pavilion dv6000 Battery) .

The key to successful seo, I think, is persuading Google that your page is most relevant to any given search query. You do this by good unique keyword rich text content and getting “quality” links to that page. Next time your developing a page, consider what looks spammy to you is probably spammy to Google. Ask yourself which pages on your site are really necessary. Which links are necessary? Which pages are getting the “juice” or “heat“. Which pages would you ignore (Hp Pavilion dv3-1000 battery) ?

You can help a site along in any number of ways (including making sure your page titles and meta tags are unique, or by including H1 tags (etc) where relevant and by emphasising words on pages through the use of bold text.)

I prefer simple seo techniques, and ones that can be measured in some way. I don’t want to just rank for competitive terms, I want to understand the reason why I rank for these terms (Dell Precision M70 Battery) .

At Hobo we try to build sites for humans AND search engines. Make a site relevant to both for success in organic listings and you won’t ever need to get into the really techy side of SEO like redirects and URL rewriting. Of course, to beat the competition in an industry where it’s difficult to attract quality links, you have to get more “technical” sometimes (Acer Aspire One battery) .

There are no hard and fast rules to seo, other than developing quality websites with quality content and quality links pointing to it. You need to mix it up and learn from experience. Remember there are exceptions to nearly every rule, and you probably have little chance determining exactly why you rank in search engines (SONY VGP-BPS8 battery) .

I’ve been doing it for 8 years and everyday I’m trying to better understand Google, to learn more and learn from others’ experiences. It’s important not to obsess about lesser seo specifics unless you really have the time to do so!

There are some things that are apparent though. Don’t build a site in Flash. Don’t build a site with Website Frames. Don’t go mad generating thousands of back links. Don’t hide text. Be creative. KISS – Keep it simple, stupid (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ Battery) .

There you have it, an article about SEO for Google that doesn’t mention PageRank (darn).

Search engine optimization—SEO(2)

Relationship with search engines

By 1997 search engines recognized that webmasters were making efforts to rank well in their search engines, and that some webmasters were even manipulating their rankings in search results by stuffing pages with excessive or irrelevant keywords. Early search engines, such as Infoseek, adjusted their algorithms in an effort to prevent webmasters from manipulating rankings (Dell XPS M1210 Battery) .

Due to the high marketing value of targeted search results, there is potential for an adversarial relationship between search engines and SEO service providers. In 2005, an annual conference, AIRWeb, Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web, was created to discuss and minimize the damaging effects of aggressive web content providers (Dell Studio XPS 1340 Battery) .

SEO companies that employ overly aggressive techniques can get their client websites banned from the search results. In 2005, the Wall Street Journal reported on a company, Traffic Power, which allegedly used high-risk techniques and failed to disclose those risks to its clients (Dell Studio XPS 1640 Battery) .

Wired magazine reported that the same company sued blogger and SEO Aaron Wall for writing about the ban. Google's Matt Cutts later confirmed that Google did in fact ban Traffic Power and some of its clients (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ11S Battery) .

Some search engines have also reached out to the SEO industry, and are frequent sponsors and guests at SEO conferences, chats, and seminars. In fact, with the advent of paid inclusion, some search engines now have a vested interest in the health of the optimization community. Major search engines provide information and guidelines to help with site optimization (Dell Vostro 1710 Battery) .

Google has aSitemaps program to help webmasters learn if Google is having any problems indexing their website and also provides data on Google traffic to the website. Google guidelines are a list of suggested practices Google has provided as guidance to webmasters. Yahoo! Site Explorer provides a way for webmasters to submit URLs, determine how many pages are in the Yahoo! index and view link information (ASUS EEE PC900 battery) .

Methods

Main article: search engine optimization methods

Getting indexed

The leading search engines, such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo!, use crawlers to find pages for their algorithmic search results. Pages that are linked from other search engine indexed pages do not need to be submitted because they are found automatically (Sony Vaio VGN-FZ61B battery) .

Some search engines, notably Yahoo!, operate a paid submission service that guarantee crawling for either a set fee or cost per click.Such programs usually guarantee inclusion in the database, but do not guarantee specific ranking within the search results. Two major directories, the Yahoo Directory and the Open Directory Project both require manual submission and human editorial review (Sony Vaio VGN-FZ18M battery) .

Google offers Google Webmaster Tools, for which an XML Sitemap feed can be created and submitted for free to ensure that all pages are found, especially pages that aren't discoverable by automatically following links.

Search engine crawlers may look at a number of different factors when crawling a site. Not every page is indexed by the search engines. Distance of pages from the root directory of a site may also be a factor in whether or not pages get crawled (Sony VGN-FZ21M battery) .

Preventing crawling

Main article: Robots Exclusion Standard

To avoid undesirable content in the search indexes, webmasters can instruct spiders not to crawl certain files or directories through the standard robots.txt file in the root directory of the domain. Additionally, a page can be explicitly excluded from a search engine's database by using a meta tag specific to robots (Sony VGN-FZ150E battery) .

When a search engine visits a site, the robots.txt located in the root directory is the first file crawled. The robots.txt file is then parsed, and will instruct the robot as to which pages are not to be crawled. As a search engine crawler may keep a cached copy of this file, it may on occasion crawl pages a webmaster does not wish crawled. Pages typically prevented from being crawled include login specific pages such as shopping carts and user-specific content such as search results from internal searches (Dell RM791 battery) .

In March 2007, Google warned webmasters that they should prevent indexing of internal search results because those pages are considered search spam.

Increasing prominence

A variety of methods can increase the prominence of a webpage within the search results. Cross linking between pages of the same website to provide more links to most important pages may improve its visibility (Sony VGP-BPS13 battery) .

Writing content that includes frequently searched keyword phrase, so as to be relevant to a wide variety of search queries will tend to increase traffic. Adding relevant keywords to a web page's meta data, including the title tag and meta description, will tend to improve the relevancy of a site's search listings, thus increasing traffic. URL normalization of web pages accessible via multiple urls, using the "canonical" meta tag or via 301 redirects can help make sure links to different versions of the url all count towards the page's link popularity score (sony vgp-bpl9 battery) .

White hat versus black hat

Main article: White or black hat

SEO techniques are classified by some into two broad categories: techniques that search engines recommend as part of good design, and those techniques that search engines do not approve of and attempt to minimize the effect of, referred to as spamdexing. Some industry commentators classify these methods, and the practitioners who employ them, as either white hat SEO, or black hat SEO (Sony VGP-BPL11 battery) .

White hats tend to produce results that last a long time, whereas black hats anticipate that their sites will eventually be banned once the search engines discover what they are doing.

A SEO tactic, technique or method is considered white hat if it conforms to the search engines' guidelines and involves no deception. As the search engine guidelines are not written as a series of rules or commandments, this is an important distinction to note. White hat SEO is not just about following guidelines, but is about ensuring that the content a search engine indexes and subsequently ranks is the same content a user will see (Sony VGP-BPL15 battery) .

White hat advice is generally summed up as creating content for users, not for search engines, and then making that content easily accessible to the spiders, rather than attempting to game the algorithm. White hat SEO is in many ways similar to web development that promotes accessibility, although the two are not identical (Dell Inspiron E1505 battery ) .

White Hat SEO is merely effective marketing, making efforts to deliver quality content to an audience that has requested the quality content. Traditional marketing means have allowed this through transparency and exposure. A search engine's algorithm takes this into account, such as Google's PageRank (Dell Latitude E6400 battery) .

Black hat SEO attempts to improve rankings in ways that are disapproved of by the search engines, or involve deception. One black hat technique uses text that is hidden, either as text colored similar to the background, in an invisible div, or positioned off screen. Another method gives a different page depending on whether the page is being requested by a human visitor or a search engine, a technique known as cloaking (HP Pavilion dv6000 Battery) .

Search engines may penalize sites they discover using black hat methods, either by reducing their rankings or eliminating their listings from their databases altogether. Such penalties can be applied either automatically by the search engines' algorithms, or by a manual site review. One infamous example was the February 2006 Google removal of both BMW Germany and Ricoh Germany for use of deceptive practices (Hp Pavilion dv3-1000 battery) .

Both companies, however, quickly apologized, fixed the offending pages, and were restored to Google's list.

As a marketing strategy

SEO is not necessarily an appropriate strategy for every website, and other Internet marketing strategies can be much more effective, depending on the site operator's goals (Dell Precision M70 Battery) .

A successful Internet marketing campaign may drive organic traffic, achieved through optimization techniques and not paid advertising, to web pages, but it also may involve the use of paid advertising on search engines and other pages, building high quality web pages to engage and persuade, addressing technical issues that may keep search engines from crawling and indexing those sites, setting up analytics programs to enable site owners to measure their successes, and improving a site's conversion rate (Acer Aspire One battery) .

SEO may generate a return on investment. However, search engines are not paid for organic search traffic, their algorithms change, and there are no guarantees of continued referrals. (Some trading sites such as eBay can be a special case for this, it will announce how and when the ranking algorithm will change a few months before changing the algorithm). Due to this lack of guarantees and certainty, a business that relies heavily on search engine traffic can suffer major losses if the search engines stop sending visitors (SONY VGP-BPS8 battery) .

It is considered wise business practice for website operators to liberate themselves from dependence on search engine traffic. A top-ranked SEO blog Seomoz.org has suggested, "Search marketers, in a twist of irony, receive a very small share of their traffic from search engines.." Instead, their main sources of traffic are links from other websites (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ Battery) .

International markets

Optimization techniques are highly tuned to the dominant search engines in the target market. The search engines' market shares vary from market to market, as does competition. In 2003, Danny Sullivan stated that Google represented about 75% of all searches.In markets outside the United States, Google's share is often larger, and Google remains the dominant search engine worldwide as of 2007 (Sony VGN-FZ460E battery) .

As of 2006, Google had an 85-90% market share in Germany. While there were hundreds of SEO firms in the US at that time, there were only about five in Germany. As of June 2008, the marketshare of Google in the UK was close to 90% according to Hitwise. That market share is achieved in a number of countries (Hp 520 battery) .

As of 2009, there are only a few large markets where Google is not the leading search engine. In most cases, when Google is not leading in a given market, it is lagging behind a local player. The most notable markets where this is the case are China, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the Czech Republic where respectively Baidu, Yahoo! Japan, Naver, Yandex and Seznam are market leaders (Toshiba Satellite L305 Battery) .

Successful search optimization for international markets may require professional translation of web pages, registration of a domain name with a top level domain in the target market, and web hostingthat provides a local IP address. Otherwise, the fundamental elements of search optimization are essentially the same, regardless of language (Toshiba Satellite Pro M15 Battery) .

Legal precedents

On October 17, 2002, SearchKing filed suit in the United States District Court, Western District of Oklahoma, against the search engine Google. SearchKing's claim was that Google's tactics to preventspamdexing constituted a tortious interference with contractual relations. On May 27, 2003, the court granted Google's motion to dismiss the complaint because SearchKing "failed to state a claim upon which relief may be granted (Dell XPS M1530 battery) ."

In March 2006, KinderStart filed a lawsuit against Google over search engine rankings. Kinderstart's web site was removed from Google's index prior to the lawsuit and the amount of traffic to the site dropped by 70%. On March 16, 2007 the United States District Court for the Northern District of California (San Jose Division) dismissed KinderStart's complaint without leave to amend, and partially granted Google's motion for Rule 11 sanctions against KinderStart's attorney, requiring him to pay part of Google's legal expenses (Toshiba Tecra M10 Battery) .

Search engine optimization--SEO

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a web site or a web page in search engines via the "natural" or un-paid ("organic" or "algorithmic") search results. Other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) target paid listings. In general, the earlier (or higher on the page), and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine (Dell XPS M1210 Battery) .

SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website may involve editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines (Dell Studio XPS 1340 Battery) .

Promoting a site to increase the number of backlinks, or inbound links, is another SEO tactic.

The acronym "SEO" can refer to "search engine optimizers," a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign (Dell Studio XPS 1640 Battery) .

Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term "search engine friendly" may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure (Dell Vostro 1710 Battery) .

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, uses methods such as link farms, keyword stuffing and article spinning that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ11S Battery) .

History

Webmasters and content providers began optimizing sites for search engines in the mid-1990s, as the first search engines were cataloging the early Web. Initially, all webmasters needed to do was submit the address of a page, or URL, to the various engines which would send a "spider" to "crawl" that page, extract links to other pages from it, and return information found on the page to be indexed (ASUS EEE PC900 battery) .

The process involves a search engine spider downloading a page and storing it on the search engine's own server, where a second program, known as an indexer, extracts various information about the page, such as the words it contains and where these are located, as well as any weight for specific words, and all links the page contains, which are then placed into a scheduler for crawling at a later date (Dell RM791 battery) .

Site owners started to recognize the value of having their sites highly ranked and visible in search engine results, creating an opportunity for both white hat and black hat SEO practitioners. According to industry analyst Danny Sullivan, the phrase "search engine optimization" probably came into use in 1997 (Sony VGP-BPS13 battery) .

Early versions of search algorithms relied on webmaster-provided information such as the keyword meta tag, or index files in engines like ALIWEB. Meta tags provide a guide to each page's content. Using meta data to index pages was found to be less than reliable, however, because the webmaster's choice of keywords in the meta tag could potentially be an inaccurate representation of the site's actual content. Inaccurate, incomplete, and inconsistent data in meta tags could and did cause pages to rank for irrelevant searches (sony vgp-bpl9 battery) .

Web content providers also manipulated a number of attributes within the HTML source of a page in an attempt to rank well in search engines.

By relying so much on factors such as keyword density which were exclusively within a webmaster's control, early search engines suffered from abuse and ranking manipulation. To provide better results to their users, search engines had to adapt to ensure their results pages showed the most relevant search results, rather than unrelated pages stuffed with numerous keywords by unscrupulous webmasters (Sony VGP-BPL11 battery) .

Since the success and popularity of a search engine is determined by its ability to produce the most relevant results to any given search, allowing those results to be false would turn users to find other search sources. Search engines responded by developing more complex ranking algorithms, taking into account additional factors that were more difficult for webmasters to manipulate (Sony VGP-BPL15 battery) .

Graduate students at Stanford University, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, developed "backrub," a search engine that relied on a mathematical algorithm to rate the prominence of web pages. The number calculated by the algorithm, PageRank, is a function of the quantity and strength of inbound links (Dell Inspiron E1505 battery ) .

PageRank estimates the likelihood that a given page will be reached by a web user who randomly surfs the web, and follows links from one page to another. In effect, this means that some links are stronger than others, as a higher PageRank page is more likely to be reached by the random surfer.

Page and Brin founded Google in 1998. Google attracted a loyal following among the growing number of Internet users, who liked its simple design (Dell Latitude E6400 battery) .

Off-page factors (such as PageRank and hyperlink analysis) were considered as well as on-page factors (such as keyword frequency, meta tags, headings, links and site structure) to enable Google to avoid the kind of manipulation seen in search engines that only considered on-page factors for their rankings (HP Pavilion dv6000 Battery) .

Although PageRank was more difficult to game, webmasters had already developed link building tools and schemes to influence the Inktomi search engine, and these methods proved similarly applicable to gaming PageRank. Many sites focused on exchanging, buying, and selling links, often on a massive scale. Some of these schemes, or link farms, involved the creation of thousands of sites for the sole purpose of link spamming (Hp Pavilion dv3-1000 battery) .

By 2004, search engines had incorporated a wide range of undisclosed factors in their ranking algorithms to reduce the impact of link manipulation. Google says it ranks sites using more than 200 different signals.[8] The leading search engines, Google and Yahoo, do not disclose the algorithms they use to rank pages (Dell Precision M70 Battery) .

Notable SEO service providers, such as Rand Fishkin, Barry Schwartz, Aaron Wall and Jill Whalen, have studied different approaches to search engine optimization, and have published their opinions in online forums and blogs. SEO practitioners may also study patents held by various search engines to gain insight into the algorithms (Acer Aspire One battery) .

In 2005 Google began personalizing search results for each user. Depending on their history of previous searches, Google crafted results for logged in users. In 2008, Bruce Clay said that "ranking is dead" because of personalized search. It would become meaningless to discuss how a website ranked, because its rank would potentially be different for each user and each search (SONY VGP-BPS8 battery) .

In 2007 Google announced a campaign against paid links that transfer PageRank.[14] On June 15, 2009, Google disclosed that they had taken measures to mitigate the effects of PageRank sculpting by use of the nofollow attribute on links. Matt Cutts, a well-known software engineer at Google, announced that Google Bot would no longer treat nofollowed links in the same way, in order to prevent SEO service providers from using nofollow for PageRank sculpting (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ Battery) .

As a result of this change the usage of nofollow leads to evaporation of pagerank. In order to avoid the above, SEO engineers developed alternative techniques that replace nofollowed tags with obfuscated Javascript and thus permit PageRank sculpting. Additionally several solutions have been suggested that include the usage of iframes, Flash and Javascript (Sony VGN-FZ460E battery) .

In December 2009 Google announced it would be using the web search history of all its users in order to populate search results .

Real-time-search was introduced in late 2009 in an attempt to make search results more timely and relevant. Historically site administrators have spent months or even years optimizing a website to increase search rankings. With the growth in popularity of social media sites and blogs the leading engines made changes to their algorithms to allow fresh content to rank quickly within the search results (Hp 520 battery) .

This new approach to search places importance on current, fresh and unique content.