Google has officially announced the launch of Double-Click for Publishers (DFP) a new ad management and display system that allows publishers more flexibility in their advertisements. More info should be coming soon from the Search Giant.

You can read more on their blog:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/02/next-generation-of-ad-serving-for.html

Well, in my profession/position, I’m responsible for the Search Engine Optimization for our company’s web presence. Everybody seems to have a position on whats important to boost your ranking in the various search engines (Bing, Google, Yahoo, Ask, etc). I’m here to tell you, it’s not so simple. There’s a number of factors that play a role beyond the factors that Search Engines started using back in the early 2000/late 1990s.

Recently, we have run into an issue with some Magento E-Commerce carts with regard to their shipping and billing addresses. The cart defaults to prompting the customer to enter a billing address and a shipping address. However, under most circumstances, the addresses match. I have updated my clients cart to default the shipping address to match the billing address. If a customer would like to separate the two, they have that option; although, most don’t utilize it. In this article, I explain the simple solution.

Here are the simple instructions to update your Magento Commerce website to default the shipping address to match the billing address:

We have made it a full year since our first post – Introductions, we’ve grown by leaps and bounds and now have many followers. I want to thank all of you that have subscribed to our feeds and those that have reciprocated backlinks. We are still looking for others that would like to contribute via our blog to the online community.

Authors with relevant posts are permitted tracklinks to their site as well. If interested, reply to this post and provide your email address. Congratulations again to all those that have contributed materials as this has been a team effort.

Keep up the great work and let’s keep the momentum rolling.

What can I say, one of the most influential factors to search engine page rank, across virtually every search engine is that of backlinks. To clarify this a bit further, let me overview how these backlinks work. We’ll start with the effect and work our way to the cause.

By now, virtually everyone is a search engine marketer, optimizer, or in one way or another a resident expert on the subject. I mean hey, I’m writing an article about it so what does that say? Search engines look at two primary factors, content and popularity. There are a number of influencing calculations that affect each of these. I’ve discussed content a bit in my article on keyword density. For that reason, this article focuses more on popularity.

For your website to be regarded as reliable and useful to the searcher, the search engines look at how many high-rank topic related wep pages link to you. These are the most influential links. We refer to them as backlinks. These backlinks allow the search engines to consider you as a reliable source as other reliable sources refer to you. The more quality backlinks you have referring to your specific article or page, the higher you will rank in the majority of search engine result pages (SERPs).

Be mindful, although the easy solution may seem to place your link in every possible medium and site possible, this isn’t always productive. If you place your article on non-related or very low popularity sites, it may in fact hinder your rank. Typically, I’ll contact a webmaster and ask to exchange links or I’ll write an article about them and they will reciprocate.

This is merely an overview of how backlinks work, so get out there already and build yourself some popularity. But before you do, check out one or two of our sponsor links/ads to help us to continue to bring this information forward to young and/or newer developers. We are always very appreciative.