Saudi women get voting right

Saudi King Abdullah announced on 25 Sep 2011 that the nation's women would gain the right to vote and run as candidates in local elections to be held in 2015 in a major advancement for the rights of women in the deeply conservative Muslim Kingdom. In an annual speech before his advisory assembly, or Shura Council, the Saudi monarch said he ordered the step after consulting the nation's top religious clerics, whose advice carries great weight in the Kingdom.

Non-disease Causing Virus Kills Breast Cancer Cells

Virus that does not cause disease kills human breast cancer cells in the laboratory, finds study. This finding would create opportunities for potential new cancer therapies.

Penn State College of Medicine researchers, who tested the virus on three different breast cancer types that represent the multiple stages of breast cancer development, made the findings. Adeno-associated virus type 2 (AAV2) is a virus that regularly infects humans but causes no disease. Past studies by the same researchers show that it promotes tumour cell death in cervical cancer cells infected with human papillomavirus. Researchers used an unaltered, naturally occurring version of AAV2 on human breast cancer cells.

'Tiger' Pataudi, 70, is no more

Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi, one of India's greatest cricket captains ever and whose flair and acumen inspired a generation of cricket players, passed away here on 22 Sep 11 after battling a lung infection for the last few months. The 70 years old cricketer, one of India's early superstars and who was known as "Tiger" n the cricket fraternity, was suffering from interstitial lung disease, a condition in which the passage of oxygen to the two lungs is less than normal.

Somali Children win guns as recital prizes

An Islamist-backed radio station in Somalia has awarded assault rifles and hand grenades to the winners of a children's Koran recital competition. Andalus radio, which is run by the al-Shabaab militia, said on 19 Sep 2011 that the first prize was an AK-47 and 450 pounds. The runner-u received an AK-47 and 320 pounds, while the child who came third received two F1 hand grenades and 250 pounds. The three children also received religious books.

Former Afghan President Rabbani Killed in suicide bomb attack

Burhanuddin Rabbani, former resident of Afghanistan and Chairman of the High Peace Council leading the year old Afghan effort to negotiate with the Taliban was killed in a bomb blast at his residence in the centre of Kabul's high security diplomatic district.

Tips to Improve Your Local Search Rankings in Google

Web is going local – webmasters are working hard to improve their search engine ranking around specific geographical location for better business. Especially, this is a big boon for local service providers like a lawyer or a local grocery shop. The recent hike in oil price has turned people to online shopping in bigger number :-

What You Should Be Focusing On...

Unique, quality content rules. Don't get stressed out about your meta tags, link lists, exchanges etc.

If you want the search engines to love you, build a website with lots of useful themed content. Promote your website in relevant places (social networking sites, forum signatures, blog commenting, etc.)

Once people begin discovering your site, many will link to you voluntarily (assuming they find it valuable) and THAT's how you get the search engines to respect you. It takes time, but it's definitely worth the wait.

Write for humans, not the search engine spiders. Forget about keyword density (the ratio of a keyword phrase to total body content), just write for real people.

Bottom line: Don't take shortcuts. Be ethical and work hard to build the best site you can. You'll be rewarded in the end.

SEO Techniques to Avoid

Useless Link Exchanges

Once upon a time, you could scout out other websites that were related to yours and swap links to help boost your link popularity. The more the better. These days the search engines are frowning on certain link exchange strategies.

The best kind of link exchange is one that offers a contextual link to both parties. So instead of creating a "page-o-links" that no one will even read, offer your potential link partner a contextual link in an article that is related to their site. Ask your partner to do the same for you. The search engines will see this link as a much better quality link than a link from a page chuck-full of other sites.

Let's say you have a website on dieting. Instead of creating a "list-o-links" page titled "Other Diet Resources" where you list 300 different partner links, write some diet-related articles and recommend a few of your link partner's sites within the context of the article.

Don't go hogwild with link exchanges. They are not nearly as valuable as they once were so I wouldn't spend too much time seeking out a bunch. If you can get a few, relevant quality exchanges that's fine

Nowadays, the real value comes in the one-way exchanges where someone links to your site and you do not have to link back. The best way to earn those is to create a site full of value.

Doorway Pages

Doorway pages are small, keyword focused pages that mainly serve the purpose of getting the visitor to your affiliated web site. They usually offer no value to the website as a whole, and often times they are cluttered with several different affiliate links.

Google is smart and can scope those kinds of pages out. You may be penalized if it finds these on your site.

Hidden or Tiny Text

This is an OLD tactic and it amazes me people still use this.

Using white text on a white background or making your text so small it is hardly visible to the human eye is one of the oldest search engine tricks in the book.

Many people would use this technique to hide tons of keyword phrases they wanted to rank high for by hiding the text at the very bottom or top of the page and make it match the background color so they are invisible. Others would use a tiny font to add these keywords in various places all over the site. The human eye may have a difficult time finding them but the search engine spiders would.

So as you can see, the above info is not shocking by any stretch of the imagination. Those are all very bad optimization practices and will never work for the long run. You may get lucky here and there but the engines will eventually find you and penalize you for it.

Too Much Duplicate Content

It's OK to use some of the article directories (ArticleCity.com or EzineArticles.com) and reprint some of their content. That's what they're there for and they are useful if you want to add information on a topic you may not be well versed in.

However, if 90% of your site is from these sites or if you are illegally using copyrighted material without a webmaster's permission then you deserve any penalty that Google gives you.

Google loves unique content. After all, it's what drives their success. They don't want the same articles showing up in the results so they pay close attention to duplicates.

If you don't like to write, try hiring a copyrighter to do the writing for you. Trust me, it will be worth it in the long run.

Oversubmitting to Directories

Submitting to a few relevant, high-quality directories is fine. Spending hours per day seeking out high PageRank directories is not. It's a waste of time.

In the video below, Matt Cutts (Google's lead engineer) tells you what Google thinks of most directories and which ones they value.

Confidential Google Report Disclosed

In early 2006, a Google employee broke a non-disclosure agreement and revealed a report that shouldn't have gotten out to the public. Actually the information wasn't surprising by any means.

In a nutshell, all we learned was that Google is cracking down on spam and sites that offer little content - a.k.a. "thin affiliates".

A thin affiliate is one that offers very little information and the main purpose of their site is to send visitors to the affiliated merchant's site in order to collect a commission.

Often times these sites have more external links than they do actual content. They also may contain several doorway pages (more on those later) that do nothing but link to the merchant's website.

The report even revealed examples of live sites that Google considers "suspect." Trust me...this is NOT a place you'd want to see your site appear. You can bet these sites won't be getting much traffic from Google anytime soon.

This report seemed to indicate that Google has hired humans to evaluate the accuracy of Google's search results. Can you blame them?

Google has always said their main focus is to provide relevant results. The main reason the engine has been so successful is because it gives searchers what they want.

If you've noticed, you don't see lots of ads, banners and other distracting revenue-sucking techniques on their pages. They want their customer, Joe Surfer, to find what he is looking for.

They don't want their index to be turned into a hodge-podge of doorway pages made by those thin affiliates. They want unique quality content that offers valuable information to their customer - the web surfer.

Search engine spiders are not humans. They are programs. They can only do so much when it comes to weeding out the good and bad sites. It only makes sense to me that Google would help protect its reputation by hiring real people to ensure their results are as clean as possible.

Without going into detail over the report (I wouldn't want Google to penalize me!), I've just outlined a few of the topics that were touched upon. You probably won't be shocked by what you read.

In fact, none of this may be new to you. But if you are performing any of these techniques, stop now!