Many people search online to download free antivirus and other software applications online. one of the ways people find these downloads are through the search engine. our san diego SEO company helps many out there optimizing their site to make sure it ranks on major search engines. free downloads are on many sites but how you find these site is the problem. some of you might say what is this has to do with the title of your post. this whole thing does not add up, and yes, you are correct. this post is really about how you benefit for something so bad as your site get hacked. about a month ago someone hacked my blog and wrote a post with this title. right after that i find 11 other blogs are linking to me and all of a sudden i am ranked for some crazy keywords. In the beginning, i was really upset but i thought about it and said to myself, how can i turn this to my advantage. after few days, i decided to write this post and tell every one that had his blog hacked to get back at the hacker. the first thing you do is to keep the title of the post because that is what spammer are linking to. the second thing is to change the content of the post and turn it to something really useful but somehow related to your blog or to your business. In your content, have an internal link that will pass the link juice to your page but using a good anchor text such san diego web design company. So although you blog is going to rank for some crap, your actual site will rank for a keyword that you like. this way you  can get back at your spammer or your hacker and tell him, thank you ass whole.

Google is now testing a new function that will show the ranking and reviews of different businesses in place of the old 7 pack. I am not sure yet what is going to happen or what is going to happen to the actual old 7 pack, but here is what I found.

our Orange county seo company typed this phrase on Google

and here is what i found on the top of the search results

The plan is to grow this list even longer and kick all the other search results to the second page. Many out there thinks that this will effect most business directories and IYP’s. Google understands that the future of search will change and more and more people will go to niche sites to look for what they need. for example if you are looking for a home , you will no longer go to Google but you might go to realtor.com or any other real estate website. The same with business, Google right now misses the niche of major IYP, which the user generated contents with votes and reviews. I believe that Google is trying to be pro active and Kill major IYP’s before they take a piece of the market away from it.

What do you think, i would like to hear your opinion.

If you look at our orange county SEO company page, you will find a graph from February 2010 that shows the market share of  the 3 major search engines back then. With Google owning 65% of the market share, while yahoo owned 14 % and bing around 13%.  In June,  according to Hitwise,  Google gained an extra 7% of the market share to become 72% of the search engine market share.   And finally this month, and for the first time Google lost 1% of the market share to Bing. Many may say that this is a sign of the rise of a new search engine, especially now that yahoo will start using the bing engine starting next month. What do you think? Do you think that bing will take over Google in the near future? I would really like to hear your opinions.

If you are a web development company, you must consider trying scrum.
Scrum belongs to the family of Agile methodologies. I am not going to talk about how scrum starts and who started it, but I will talk more about what is Scrum and where to go to learn more about it. Scrum is a PM methodology that is being widely used by many major companies such as Google, yahoo, Nokia, and most of the major Japanese gaming companies.

Scrum is a completely different way from waterfall in terms of managing your project. In scrum every thing is a time box.

Here is how it works.

1) Backlog

The Back log is a complete list of all the functionalities needed for the project.

It starts with a meeting with the product owner and the rest of your team to identify the functionalities that needs to be executed (backlog) for the project.

As you’ve already noticed, there is no functional spec or any kind of paper work that does not add value to the project owner. The team members are all there because they are going to be self managed from the start. They will create the backlog with the product owner.

After the backlog is created , the Scrum master (aka the project manager) needs to ask the product owner about the most important functionalities that he/she would like to see implemented first. These functionalities will be taken to the top of the backlog. The team members will then identify the amount of functionalities that can be completed in three months. Yes, the team members are the ones who are going to decide that, because no one can measure the work load and the amount it takes better than the people that are going to do the actual work.

2) Sprints

The first three months the work load will be divided into sprints. Each sprint is like a two week to a one month time box. At the end of each sprint, there needs to be some completed functionalities. Completed means documented, tested , checked in CVS or SVN, and it is on the server and could even be shippable. After completing all the sprints for the first 3 month Phase, there will be a meeting with the product owner to show him/her the progress and present a demo of what the functionalities look like.

3 ) Daily Scrum meeting

After getting your first sprint in place, the team members will sit together to divide the work into very small tasks. Each task will be between 4 to 16 hours. The team will decide on the length of time needed, and the due date for each task.

There will be a daily meeting for all the team members involved in the project. This meeting will take about 10 to 15 min depending on the size of the team. There will be 3 questions in that meeting.

1) what did each team member accomplish the previous day

2) what each team member will accomplish today

3) what are the red flags.

If one of the team members is not completed with his/her tasks, the Scrum master should stop the meeting and ask to meet again in an hour when every one is done with their tasks. Done means documented, tested , checked in.

The product owner or the client can be in that meeting every day if he or she chooses to. They can be there in person or on the phone.

This is a complete transparency between the different individuals on the project.

4 ) Retrospective

At the end of each phase, there is the retrospective meeting. In that meeting, the team members will discuss what went right and what went wrong. How can they improve the next sprint and how can they learn from their mistakes in the first phase.

Whatever could not be completed or whatever needs to change from the first phase can be added to the first sprint in the second phase.

5) Management

There are three managers in Scrum

a) the product Owner

b) the scrum master aka the project manager

c) the team members

6) Burn down chart

the burn down chart is a chart between the workload or the tasks of each phase in the y-axes and the time that needs to complete on the x-axes. this will show the team members the velocity and the speed of the work flow, it will also give a clear presentation of weather or not the project can be completed on time.

7) Iteration

Scrum is an iterative methodology. Unlike water fall, you do not have to wait for the design to start the development. All aspects of the project will be worked on at the same time and the team members will be working on it for the whole life cycle of the project.

Here is a graphical representation of the iteration

A great book to read on Scrum is Agile Project Management with Scrum by Ken Schwaber.

Ken is one of the founders of Scrum.

In my next blog I will talk about other Agile methodologies that go hand in hand with Scrum Such as TDD and XP.

I use agile methodology. Scrum is a good methodology to use with a non productive team member.

In Scrum, the work load is divided into small tasks. Each task is between 4 to 16 hours. Each task will have a due date.
The task hours, division and due date are given by the resource itself . This will create a sense of ownership and accountability for each team member since they are the ones who committed o do the work in a given time and date. There is a 10 to 15 min. daily scrum meeting where the PM meets with the team members to discuss 3 questions.
1) what have we accomplished yesterday
2) what are we going to accomplish today
3) what are the red flags or concerns.

In the daily scrum, Non-productive team members not only fail themselves but they also fail the other team members’ hard work. it is very difficult for any one person to keep failing the rest of the team every day in the scrum meeting.

the red flag question is mentioned to make sure that there is no obstacle to carry out the assigned work.

When one of the team members is not done with the workload from the previous date, the PM stops the scrum and asks to meet again in a couple of hours when all the work is completely done by each and every member.

IF the non-productive team member fails the rest of the team more than once, the PM needs to sit with that team member to find out what the problem is and how he can resolve it. If the problem lies in the person’s skills, then the PM needs to find the best work for this resource. Maybe the work tasks are not best suited and other tasks could be more suited to this person.

In final stages and after trying all different methods to help the team member, if all of the above does not work then the PM should ask to change that resource from the team.

Keep in mind that each team member has a different motivation angle, personality and circumstances and you should treat each individual member accordingly.

Does my meta description heavily effect my ranking? This is a question that I get asked all the time, and the answer is absolutely not. Meta description does not help you a bet in Google ranking, but if this is the case, why would anyone write meta description? There are many reasons why you should write meta description. The most important reason to write it is that it really helps your click rate. when users find your site on Google, they first read your meta description to decided if your site is the one they are looking for. If the meta description is not clear they will click on another site. The second thing is that if you do not write meta description, Google will write it for you. Google will choose some random content on your site to display it. These random content will be based on the users search and it might change from one search term to another.

Some asked me that they do not see the meta description that they wrote, instead they see different text on the search engine when it comes to some search terms. this is true, what happen is that google first read your meta description. If your description does not include the keywords the user is looking for, Google will choose some text on your site that does include the search terms and displays that instead. what you need to do in order to avoid such a thing is to change your meta description in order to catch most keywords needed to show your description on major search engine.

About a couple of weeks ago, Google increased the size of the title tags to 70 characters instead of the original 65 characters. This will allow you to add an extra word to your title tags and will help your site to target an extra keyword.

Title tags is on of the important factors in ranking your site. Google uses over 200 factors to rank your site.

I have tried increasing my title tags to 70 characters and it works. I heard some people saying that it even goes beyond 70 characters and that it even rotates to the second line but I have not confirmed that yet.

Matt Cutts and the guys from Google give some really nice tips about search engine optimization by auditing and reviewing some sites. if you are a small business and want to give your site a little bit of a lift in the search engine, watch this video!

A lot of people noticed a 15 to 20 % drop in their traffic in may. this was later called the may day update. many wounder what caused them to lose their traffic. if you are one of these people, you did absolutely nothing wrong. Google simply changed their algorithm for long tail keywords. Matt Cutts from Google already confirmed the news. Google believes that this update is better for the users and it will help in providing the right search for the targeted long tail keywords. you can think of Google as someone who was once 3 years old and can only construct and understand a sentence from 3 to 4 words.
but now that that person grew and can now construct longer sentences, it is also easy for him to understand longer tail sentences and there for can identify it. the same is with google. Google new technology allows him to understand longer tail keywords with out having to guess weather this is what the user is looking for or not. If you optimized you site for long tail keywords, you properly gained some traffic. If you did not , then you have to start optimizing your site for long tail keywords.