The Official Atomic Medium Blog

SEOQuake is a great extension for Firefox (now compatible with FireFox3!) that will show you almost anything you would want to know about the indexing of any website on the internet. There are a few ways to use it, you can have it show up as a sidebar-like device, a toolbar, or only shown under each website listing on a number of search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, Technorati and a few others, I am sure.) This little thing will show you the Google Page Rank, Google Index, Google Links, Google Cache Date, Yahoo Index, Yahoo Links, Yahoo Link Domain, Yahoo Directory Links, MSN Index, MSN Links, Alexa Rank, Webarchive age of the domain, the robots.txt file for the website, a link to the WhoIs info, the keyword density of any specific webpage, and a whole lot more if you chose to include SEOQuake’s own little add-ons for this Firefox Add-on. (Would that make the SEOQuake add-ons like sub-add-ons for Firefox? I think we have stumbled onto something here…)

At first it all seems a bit confusing since there is a potential for so much information to be shown at once. If you are a beginner to the whole SEO scene, its best to take it slow and only really concentrate on the Google listings for now. Then you can go and read up on Link Domains, indexing, robots.txt and other META TAG information. If you are already pretty well versed in Search Engine Optimization knowledge, feel free to go ahead and customize the individual options inside of SEOQuake to fit your personal preferences. SEOQuake is not for everyone, and it may confuse and even enrage some users because it tends to slow down your browser a bit if you have it automatically loading on each page-click. The key here is to set all the options to ‘on request’ in the SEOQuake preferences to keep your normal browsing more or less unchanged.

If you do not want the SEOQuake sidebar-device OR the toolbar, you can just choose to turn both off and have SEOQuake only show you Search Engine Optimization information when you are playing around with Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, Technorati, or your search engine of choice. Under every single hit on the search engines will be that little SEOQuake bar that you can click on to view more in-depth information about a particular website. This way you can do some basic checking up on your close competitors and see exact why they are in front of you in the rankings (for example, on the first page of Google for a certain keyword.)

A simple weblog (shortened to Blog nowadays) is one of the easiest ways to both drive traffic to your website, and generate some dynamic content for your website. Both of these things are great for Search Engine Optimization. Anyone can post on a blog, its a fairly simple task. The key is remembering to blog regularly (at least once a week for the best results.) Most blogging systems out on the internet are both free and easy-to-use. Blogger, WordPress, and Serendipity all use WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors that look very similar to Microsoft Word, so many users can easily format blog posts. With functions such as bold, italic, underline, font, size, format, paragraph, strikethrough, and many others, blogging software is not just for power-users or internet geniuses anymore.

With so many free and easy solutions out there, blogging is just a few mouse-clicks away.

When you search on Google or Yahoo, did you ever wonder why some sites show up at the top, and other ones are buried pages deep?  Search sites like Google, Yahoo, msn.com, ask.com are called "Search Engines."  These Search Engines have automatic programs that electronically surf the web and look at web sites to decide the rank based on their secret formula for relevance.  Then they store the information in gigantic databases.  The rankings from this data are called "Natural" listings.  This is in contrast to "sponsored" listings which are paid ads that place your link in special areas on the search results page.  Usually these ads are labeled "Sponsored Links" or are on a blue background.  There are also ad programs such as the "Ads by Google" boxes that you see on many web sites.  Research shows that users are far more likely to click on a natural listing before a paid listing when both are showing.

"Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) service will create or modify a web site to make it naturally relevant to the search engines…thus increasing the natural visibilty for the site on the web, without having to purchases expensive paid listings.

Go to the Atomic Medium Web site for more information on SEO.

Google Analytics is a fairly new and free tool to help you, as a webmaster, keep track of your web domain(s). All you do is browse your way over to www.google-analytics.com and sign up (you can also just sign in with your Gmail account, if you happen to have one.) Once you are in, you can choose from a myriad of options, including add a new domain to track, check out info about Google’s Adwords service, add or edit users, manage your report filters, and much more.

Well let’s get started here. Just add a new domain name to track, then copy and paste the small snippet of javascript code into every page you want google to track for you. Just remember to put the snippet of code RIGHT before the </body> tag. You will see there are two different tracking code snippets, the legacy code and the new version. I recommend the New Tracking Code as the Legacy Code is no longer being updated by Google.

As soon as you have your tracking code in place, check the status to make sure Google sees it, then just sit back and wait for the data to roll in. Once the data is transmitted to Google you can then review it, graph it, organize it into charts and reports to get a good idea of who is viewing your website, when they are viewing it, how they are viewing it, and where they came from to get to your site. Data collection could take some time since you need to wait for people to view your site – its best to take a look at data comparatively each week or so, to get a good sample of data from a good amount of users.

There are MANY, MANY more things you can do with Google Analytics with out having to pay any money. While there are some pay services for marketing research and consulting, there are also a boat-load of free services, too. If you are willing to take some time to read up and implement some of these services from Google, take a look at the following links.

Set up Goals
Tag links
And even a Help Group

The semiconductor industry seems to have responded to this latest economic uncertainly with extreme caution.  The general view of the manufacturers, at least in the U.S., is to hunker down and spend as little money as possible.   The huge downturn in the semiconductor industry that began in the very late 1990s is fresh enough in the industry’s memory that any economic or market uncertainty is met with skepticism and caution.  The freewheeling days of the early and mid 90s are probably gone forever.

Within the more cautious economic attitude of the semiconductor industry is a silver lining for those OEMs and service companies that have made a commitment to servicing older capital equipment.  Much capital equipment is mechanically solid and requires only diligent maintenance, and perhaps some peripheral upgrades to extend the life of the equipment.  Fabs can delay replacement of equipment which not only saves the capital cost of the tool, but also the cost of facilitization and process development. 

Mechanical upgrades could revolve around improvements in materials.   For example, bearings could be replaced with more reliable versions, or tubing or seals could be replaced with versions that are less reactive with chemistry.  In some cases, process is affected by the consistency of facilities and is not controlled within the tool.  If the OEM isn’t available for controls upgrades, better control can be applied to facilities either with upgraded sub-fab control systems, or with per-tool or per-cluster control systems such as Atomic Medium’s RIOC™ system combined with added or better flow controllers and meters.  Add-on systems such as the RIOC™ can report their results through SECS/GEM interfaces and more sophisticated MES systems can multiplex the data to track per-tool data, or to even shut down the tool if serious errors occur.

When you are working with SEO it is important to not only take note on what is going on in the website’s content and code, but you also need to look at the URLs. People often do special tricks to get things listed (especially with blogs and other dynamic sites) but what about regular old static web pages on information site? Well, word separation of course! You will see tons of optimized sites across the internet using hyphens and underscores to separate the names of their individual pages. Both are used prevalently, but which ones should you be using to help with your site?

To answer that question head over to Google and type in “sleep therapy”. Now open a new window and search “sleep_therapy” with an underscore and in a third one search for “sleep-therapy” hyphenated. Notice the difference? Google sure does! While in the search with the underscore (_) we find results that only contain our search term as it is, the search with the hyphen (-) returned results as if the hyphen wasn’t even there.

So how does this help with SEO, you ask? It has a wide range of possibilities mostly with keyword-rich URLs in your links like “http://mydomain.com/small-business-internet-solutions.html”. Everyone knows more keywords within your website = more relevant content = better overall ranking.

So the next time you are making a new_page.html, consider making it a new-page.html.

In this day and age it is obvious to even the smallest business that the internet is a broad medium of interaction between yourself and prospective customers. Yet with the hundred of millions of people who are online at any given moment you still have to be found by those people before they can be considered a customer (or even a possible one!). Everyone knows that when you want to find something on the internet you need to go to a search engine like Google, Ask, or Yahoo, but understanding how to make your site show up when someone is looking for your services is the hard part. This is where SEO comes in.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the concept of using tried, true methods to improve your standing (often referred to as Rank) on those popular search engines. The higher your rank, the more likely you are to show up for the search terms that you want to.

Of course, it is never that simple. While there are some general standards that go across every search engine (such as keywords and the amount of content you have) that can help your ranking, there are also some that only help you on certain search engines or that could help your ranking one month and the next not help it at all. Google, for example, has their own set of rules that they apply to the websites they list, and if you break the rules there can be consequences (lower rankings, not being listed for searches, and in the worst case scenario ‘black-listing’ of your pages!). While the search engines don’t just have all of their standards publicly released with all the specifics for everyone to follow exactly, SEO specialists take the time to figure out what works best on websites to get you to come on the first page for any given search. These methods are utilized in Search Engine Optimization to help get your website to search engines faster and closer to the first page.

The changing standards and endless competition between your website and your competitors makes the method to getting yourself ranked in search engines far from an exact science. Companies and SEO specialists out there that can help you with getting your website seen often have plenty of experience in experimenting with techniques that get websites ranked quickly and the knowledge to know how to keep them there for long periods of time, regardless of an influx of new competition the difficulty of getting a keyword ranked. However, there are some basic tips and tricks you can follow to get your website on the right track:

1. Use relevant keywords. Even though you want your company to show up when people search for “cell phones” does the term show up anywhere on any of your web pages? Picking keywords that also appear in your website lets a search engine know that your website actually contains something relevant.
   
2. The more (relevant) text the better. If your website has 3 lines of text on each page, your competitor with 4 lines will always look better to the search engines. The more (relevant!) content on a page, the better experience for your visitors and the more the search engines want to refer people to it.
   
3. And finally, always spell check. Bad spelling just looks bad, and the search engines know when you typo (and so will your visitors). Make sure you double check your spelling and grammar before posting something to the internet. A few mistakes here or there won’t hurt, but bad grammar through the whole website is bad for your ranking and your reputation to those possible customers.