A bin for my favorite articles
Archive for December, 2008
Sahi bukhari hadith no 437
Dec 15th
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| Narrated By Ibn ‘Umar: ‘Umar set out along with the Prophet (p.b.u.h) with a group of people to Ibn Saiyad till they saw him playing with the boys near the hillocks of Bani Mughala. Ibn Saiyad at that time was nearing his puberty and did not notice (us) until the Prophet stroked him with his hand and said to him, “Do you testify that I am Allah’s Apostle?” Ibn Saiyad looked at him and said, “I testify that you are the Messenger of illiterates.” Then Ibn Saiyad asked the Prophet (p.b.u.h), “Do you testify that I am Allah’s Apostle?” The Prophet (p.b.u.h) refuted it and said, “I believe in Allah and His Apostles.” Then he said (to Ibn Saiyad), “What do you think?” Ibn Saiyad answered, “True people and liars visit me.” The Prophet said, “You have been confused as to this matter.” Then the Prophet said to him, “I have kept something (in my mind) for you, (can you tell me that?)” Ibn Saiyad said, “It is Al-Dukh (the smoke).” (2) The Prophet said, “Let you be in ignominy. You cannot cross your limits.” On that ‘Umar, said, “O Allah’s Apostle! Allow me to chop his head off.” The Prophet (p.b.u.h) said, “If he is he (i.e. DAJJAL), then you cannot over-power him, and if he is not, then there is no use of murdering him.” (Ibn ‘Umar added): Later on Allah’s Apostle (p.b.u.h) once again went along with Ubai bin Ka’b to the date-palm trees (garden) where Ibn Saiyad was staying. The Prophet (p.b.u.h) wanted to hear something from Ibn Saiyad before Ibn Saiyad could see him, and the Prophet (p.b.u.h) saw him lying covered with a sheet and from where his murmurs were heard. Ibn Saiyad’s mother saw Allah’s Apostle while he was hiding himself behind the trunks of the date-palm trees. She addressed Ibn Saiyad, “O Saf ! (and this was the name of Ibn Saiyad) Here is Muhammad.” And with that Ibn Saiyad got up. The Prophet said, “Had this woman left him (Had she not disturbed him), then Ibn Saiyad would have revealed the reality of his case. |
Excellent zikr muraqba (meditation)
Dec 13th
Here is an excellent muraqba (meditation) for muslims specially. The word in the meditation is Allah. length is 5 minutes if you want to listen for longer period of time you can use continuous play option in your media player. Listen with your eyes closed. And for improved effect keep rocking your head right and left slightly with the beat of zikr. Tilt your head left for word “ALL” ( feel it hammering your heart) and tilt right for remaining part i.e “AH”. Thus making complete round of “ALLAH”.
One more thing: you must use stereo head phones to listen to this.
>>Click here to download Allah muraqba (meditation)
6 Tips for Long-Term SEO Success
Dec 11th
Anyone who has ever meddled with SEO has asked themselves a ubiquitous question, “How quickly can I rank for [insert keyword phrase here]? More and more, I’m finding the word “quickly” and “SEO” don’t belong in the same sentence.
We want to believe there’s a magic SEO tactic that, if used, will revolutionize our results. On the contrary, a sound, long-term strategy consisting of great content combined with long-term SEO will win out. Below are 6 tips for ensuring long-term SEO success.
- Build links steadily, not suddenly: We’ve known for years that overly aggressive link building can trigger ranking penalties. If Google sees optimization happening too quickly, they may penalize you for what they consider unnatural link building practices. Even successful link-baiting campaigns can sometimes backfire, resulting in too many links in too short of time. In reality, the safest bet is slowly developing high quality links over a longer period of time.
- Focus on long tail keywords first, then broaden your approach: Suppose you were trying to rank for the keyword “ipod”. With the competition you face, its unlikely you rank for this word anytime in the next 5 years, even with aggressive SEO. Rather than shooting for the stars and landing on the moon, consider taking a different approach. By starting out optimizing for your primary keyword in addition to a modifier (e.g. color ipod, ipod 60GB, etc), you’re more likely to rank in a reasonable amount of time. Since this modified keyword phrase contains your primary keyword (ipod), you will also slowly start gaining ground on your original target. In a way, you’re shooting for the moon with the intention of gradually working your way to the stars.
- Diversify your Target Keyphrases: Sure, your top keywords may be performing well today, but what about a few years from now when your competitors catch up, Google changes their algorithm, or some other external factor pops up? Rather than keeping all your eggs in one basket, begin researching now what you’d like to rank for a year or two down the road.
- Create landing pages before you need them: Ever get an idea for a new keyword, but don’t have time to build a page? You may not have the time to fully create and optimize a page at the time, but why not at least create the page, throw a few internal links at it, and come back and optimize it later? I’ve found that this strategy gets the clock ticking with Google, since they obviously place value on the age of the page itself. Even if you can’t get to it for 3 months, you’re better since the page has now been given time to age in the index.
- Use Reactive vs. Proactive keyword research: Even the best keyword research will never yield perfect results. That keyword phrase that you thought would be easy to rank for sometimes ends up being more work that its worth. Or worse yet, once you are ranking you discover it isn’t converting to sales. A reactive SEO keyword research method would take a different approach. Rather than doing a perfect job of keyword research upfront, you analyze the traffic you are currently getting and re-optimize your pages accordingly. As I analyze the top keywords bringing traffic to my blog, I’ve realized 90% of the keywords I never intended on optimizing for, it just happened. But once I see it happening, I reoptimize the posts, adding some internal links and on-page tweaks.
- Content first, SEO second: Yes, it sounds trite, but if you focus on your content good rankings will follow. Quite frequently, potential clients contact me and ask them to review their website, believing they have an SEO problem. On the contrary, they have a content or usability problem, and SEO is the last thing they should be paying for. It’s important to not get caught in an SEO tunnel vision mindset. SEO will help good companies be better. SEO will do nothing for sites that have nothing to offer in the first place.
Don’t Even Start Link Building Until You…
Dec 11th
Far too often, SEOs spin their wheels obsessing about link building. (I myself included) It’s easy to forget that classic on page and site-wide SEO still works.
I was recently reminded of this. While working on a landing page on one of my sites, I carelessly left a link pointing to a page that was irrelevant to the actual anchor text in the link. In other words, the keywords in the anchor text had nothing to do with the actual text of the page. Despite this, Google quickly picked up the page for the target search phrase, replacing the page I intended to optimize for. Despite having at least a dozen good quality, keyword specific external links pointing to the page I intended to optimize, the other page now replaced it in the SERPs because the weight from the 1 internal link trumped all the external links.
This situation reminded me that good SEO starts on-site. In my opinion, you shouldn’t even start link building until you:
- Build Several Internal Contextual Links: Search engines care immensely how webmasters categorize and label their own content. The best way to do this is with one time occurring links within a body of content. In my opinion, 1 relevant contextual link from your own site can be worth more than 10 good external links. In Sugarrae’s great link building interview, Andy Hagans recommends having at least 5 internal links to every landing page.
- Mold Your PageRank Flow: SEO Fast Start has a great explanation of using the no-follow tag to sculpt your PageRank. Basically, the idea is to cap off the flow of PageRank using the no-follow tag to pages that are unimportant from a search point of view. For example, while your Privacy policy page may be important to customers already on the site, it’s probably getting little to no action from the SERPs. By capping off PageRank to pages like this, you will increase the relative importance of your product pages and product category pages.
- Do On Page Optimization of your Landing Pages: Title tags, H1 tags, keyword rich content, alt tags, and even Meta tags should be optimized before worrying about external links.
Since many experts think effective link building tactics are going underground, I believe on page and site wide SEO will become increasingly important.
3 Effective Link Building Tactics for 2008
Dec 11th
Obtaining good quality backlinks without paying for them is becoming increasingly difficult. In this short post, I thought I’d share 3 link building tactics that have been working for me lately.
- Hubpages: Hubpages is a community of articles, or “hubs” on various topics. Their unique system discourages spammers by slapping no-follow tags on outgoing links if your “hubscore” falls below 75. You can increase your hubscore by participating in forums, commenting on hubs, and most importantly, submitting high quality, completely original articles. It takes some work to maintain your hubscore, but the high quality links are worth the effort. I’ve seen some of my hubs picked up by Google in less than 2 hours.
- Work.com: Work.com specializes in business related guides and tutorials. As long your guides are high quality and pass the approval process, they can contain as many followed links as you’d like. In addition, I’ve received decent traffic from the guides I’ve submitted so far.
- Ebay Blogs: Who doesn’t want a link from ebay.com? Ebay blogs are a great way to showcase your ebay products, or just provide useful content to the ebay community. Links posted within your blog are followed, so the potential SEO benefit is huge. My first ebay post was indexed in less than a day.
25 Pay Per Click Survival Tips
Dec 11th
Not many years ago, successful pay per click campaigns could basically run on auto-pilot. As this marketing medium has matured, good ROI has become increasingly difficult to achieve. This post will focus on some tactics to keep your campaigns afloat in these competitive and changing times.
- SEO Your PPC Landing Pages: Recent changes to Google’s quality score now look at on-page text and load time to determine relevancy, and therefore your final click price and ad position. By applying basic on-page SEO tactics and web usability best practices to your landing pages, you can save a bundle and improve your ad position.
- Turn Off Auto-Matching: Apparently, Google doesn’t think PPC marketers are good enough at picking keywords, so they want to do it for us. They’ve done quite a good job at spinning this one, but don’t fall for it. With auto-matching, Google will automatically show your ads for queries that they think are related to words you already bid on.
- Set Cost Per Conversion Goals by Product Category: How much are you willing to pay a customer? Looking at your gross and net operating margins, set a goal on how much you are willing to pay to acquire a customer through Pay per click. Then stick with it, and adjust or cut your ad groups in order to meet this goal. Taking this a step further, determine how much you can afford to pay for each product category. For example, you can obviously pay more to acquire a PPC sale for a 70% margin product vs. a 30% one.
- Calculate Your Lifetime Customer Value: In addition to understanding your customer acquisition cost, it’s crucial to know the long term value of customers you acquire through PPC. For example, on average how many times will your typical customer buy per year? Sometimes marketers are willing to take a hit on the first sale if they know the customer will generate many future sales. Recently, I analyzed an Adwords campaign, and broke it down by LTV for each adgroup. The results were surprising. I discovered that many groups were performing well up-front (low cost per conversion), but weren’t ever generating future orders. In contrast, some groups were generating poor up-front results, but great LTV.
- Recognize Cross-Channel & Untrackable Conversions: Because ROI tracking is so easy, we sometimes think its infallible. Realize that customers who click on your ads will often convert through other channels such as through your call-center, store, or catalog. In addition, its nearly impossible to track sales from customers who use multiple PCs (home, office, laptop). For example, a customer may find your website from work, but make their first purchase at home after typing in your URL directly.
- Dis-Allow Trademark Bidding for Affiliates: If you utilize affiliate marketing, take a close look at your pay per click bidding policy for affiliates. If you’re not careful, affiliates will bid on your brand name terms, (keywords that you likely already rank organically for). This type of affiliate theft adds unnecessary marketing costs, since you’re now paying affiliates for a sale you would have likely received without them.
- Use Appropriate Data Samples for Decisions: One mistake I see frequently is making decisions to cut or increase PPC spending based on an inadequate amount of data. Before making a drastic decision, make sure you view several months worth click and conversion activity. I frequently come across ad groups that perform well one month, and terrible the next.
- Turn Off the Content Network: In my experience, the content network is extremely difficult to generate acceptable ROI with. Even if you’ve had success with the content network, be sure to separate it from your keyword campaigns, as mixing them will blur the ROI between the two.
- Test Your Ad Copy, But Not Too Much: A/B testing your ads is so easy, there’s no reason not to do it. However, don’t stress about changes that are too small to track. Changing insignificant words in your ad copy may show slight changes in click-through rates, but the results are likely random.
- Test Landing Pages: More importantly, test which landing pages result in better conversion. You can accomplish this by creating an identical ad, yet linking to a different destination.
- Make Your Ads Less Appealing: Yes, you read that right. If your goal is good ROI, then you actually don’t want everyone to click on your ad, only qualified customers. This might mean adding the price of your product to your ad, with the intention of filtering out discount shoppers. The key is to qualify your clicks, not to cast a wide net. This is especially important with high volume, broad keywords.
- Build Custom, Focused Landing Pages: One of the major advantages to PPC vs. organic SEO is the ability to send visitors exactly where you want to. Make sure your landing pages feature the same keywords you bid on in order to reinforce relevance. In addition, ensure that the next step is impossible to miss, featuring a strong call to action.
- Use Negative Keywords Exhaustively: Not bidding on keywords can be as important as bidding on them. Use Google’s ad preview tool to help determine whether your ads are showing up for irrelevant queries. Here’s some great tools to help find negative keywords.
- Avoid Bidding Wars: Focus on ROI, not your ego. The number one spot doesn’t always convert best. In fact, some think spots #2, and #3 outperform #1, since it tends to get clicked automatically.
- Use Phrase Match & Exact Match: More and more, I’m finding it difficult to achieve good results using broad match keywords. Instead of a shot-gun approach, use phrase match or exact match to focus in on specifc phrases.
- Don’t Compete with Your Organic Listings: If you rank in the top 3 organic positions for a keyword, you’re probably better off bidding for the 4 or 5 spot with PPC rather than competing with your natural listing.
- Don’t Worry about Click Fraud: Yes, click fraud happens. It happens in some industries more than others. However, its best just to consider it a cost of doing business with paid search. If you focus too much of your time trying to catch it, or you know its happening and you can’t do anything about it, maybe you shouldn’t be using PPC in the first place.
- Use PPC for Organic SEO Research: Let your paid and natural search campaigns feed off each other. As you analyze your top performing PPC keywords, consider optimizing for them organically. PPC makes great testing ground for SEO, since you can roughly gauge the success of keywords before going into all the trouble of optimizing for them.
- Use Keyword Management Software: Campaign management software such as Google’s adwords editor simplifies repetitive tasks that are mundane in the web-based Adwords admin. Microsoft adCenter is now allowing beta pilot signups for a similar future product.
- Track Secondary Conversions: It goes without saying that sales conversions should be tracked. However, what about that other 97% percent of visitors that don’t buy on the first visit? The next best thing to a purchase is often an opt-in, since a certain percentage of your opt-in list will eventually buy. Consider tracking “mini-conversions” such as email or RSS signups.
- Double Check your Ads and Landing Pages: Over time, links get broken, copy gets out-dated, and products go out of stock. For these reasons, its important to test your ads on a regular basis, removing ads that should not longer be showing.
- Watch your Traffic from Parked Domains: Take a look at your clicks and conversions from parked domains. While there is some debate about this, many marketers find this traffic is lower quality, and converts poorly. See this Adwords help page for how to turn this off.
- Track Branded vs. Non-Branded Keywords: Make sure you separate your branded keyword campaigns from your non-branded ones. Realize that while branded keywords usually boast a much lower cost per conversion, they are often the result of other marketing campaigns.
- Use Your Time Wisely: Whether your paid search program is managed in-house, or by a third party, your time resources are limited. Make sure you spend that time effectively, doing the things that will make the most difference. The Rimm-Kaufman Group suggests a break-down of how to allocate your time between term list management, bid management, landing page/site layout, and ad copy tweaks.
- Make Big Promises; Overdeliver: Seth Godin recently wrote brilliant post on these four words that applies well to PPC. Your ads need to make big promises in order to get clicks. Your landing pages need over deliver on the promise of your ads, then make more big promises to keep visitors engaged. Your product pages need to fulfill the expectations from your landing pages, and so on. Top this off with a product that actually exceeds expectations supported by great service, and you’ve got yourself a winning formula for any type of marketing.
What PPC tactics have worked for you lately? I’d love to see another 25 tips in the comment section 
‘Diesel’ producing fungus found
Dec 10th
A tree-living fungus that produces a substance similar to diesel fuel has been discovered in South America.
Experts believe Gliocladium roseum could potentially be a completely new source of green energy.
Scientists were amazed to find that it was able to convert plant cellulose directly into the biofuel, dubbed “myco-diesel”
The fungus, which lives inside the Ulmo tree in the Patagonian rainforest, naturally produces hydrocarbon fuel similar to the diesel used to power cars and lorries.
Scientists were amazed to find that it was able to convert plant cellulose directly into the biofuel, dubbed “myco-diesel”.
Crops normally have to be converted to sugar and fermented before they can be turned into useful fuel.
Professor Gary Strobel, from Montana State University in the US, said: “G. roseum can make myco-diesel directly from cellulose, the main compound found in plants and paper. This means if the fungus was used to make fuel, a step in the production process could be skipped.”
Prof Strobel led an investigation into novel fungi in the rainforests of northern Patagonia, which cross the borders of Argentina and Chile.
He found that when the diesel fuel fungus was exposed to potentially toxic antibiotics, it reacted defensively by generating volatile gases.
“Then when we examined the gas composition of G. roseum, we were totally surprised to learn that it was making a plethora of hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon derivatives,” he said.
“The results were totally unexpected and very exciting and almost every hair on my arms stood on end.”
Cellulose provides the fibrous supporting structure of plants. During biofuel production, cellulose from plant waste is first treated with enzymes that turn it into sugar. Microbes then ferment the sugar into inflammable ethanol.
Nearly 430 million tonnes of plant waste is produced from farmland each year around the world.
Prof Strobel said: “We were very excited to discover that G. roseum can digest cellulose. Although the fungus makes less myco-diesel when it feeds on cellulose compared to sugars, new developments in fermentation technology and genetic manipulation could help improve the yield.
“In fact, the genes of the fungus are just as useful as the fungus itself in the development of new biofuels.”
Simple device which uses electrical field to boost gas efficiency developed by Temple University researcher
Dec 10th
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With the high cost of gasoline and diesel fuel impacting costs for automobiles, trucks, buses and the overall economy, a Temple University physics professor has developed a simple device which could dramatically improve fuel efficiency as much as 20 percent. According to Rongjia Tao, chair of Temple’s Physics Department, the small device consists of an electrically charged tube that can be attached to the fuel line of a car’s engine near the fuel injector. With the use of a power supply from the vehicle’s battery, the device creates an electric field that thins fuel, or reduces its viscosity, so that smaller droplets are injected into the engine. That leads to more efficient and cleaner combustion than a standard fuel injector, he says. Six months of road testing in a diesel-powered Mercedes-Benz automobile showed that the device increased highway fuel from 32 miles per gallon to 38 mpg, a 20 percent boost, and a 12-15 percent gain in city driving. The results of the laboratory and road tests verifying that this simple device can boost gas mileage was published in Energy & Fuels, a bi-monthly journal published by the American Chemical Society. |
 Photo by Joseph V. Labolito/Temple University
Rongjia Tao
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“We expect the device will have wide applications on all types of internal combustion engines, present ones and future ones,” Tao wrote in the published study, “Electrorheology Leads to Efficient Combustion.” Further improvements in the device could lead to even better mileage, he suggests, and cited engines powered by gasoline, biodiesel and kerosene as having potential use of the device. Temple has applied for a patent on this technology, which has been licensed to California-based Save The World Air Inc., an environmentally conscientious enterprise focused on the design, development, and commercialization of revolutionary technologies targeted at reducing emissions from internal combustion engines. According to Joe Dell, vice president of marketing for STWA, the company is currently working with a trucking company near Reading, Pa., to test the device on diesel-powered trucks, where he estimates it could increase fuel efficiency as much as 6-12 percent. Dell predicts this type of increased fuel efficiency could save tens of billions of dollars in the trucking industry and have a major impact on the economy through the lowering of costs to deliver goods and services. “Temple University is very excited about the translation of this new important technology from the research laboratory to the marketplace,” said Larry F. Lemanski, senior vice president for research and strategic initiatives at Temple. “This discovery promises to significantly improve fuel efficiency in all types of internal combustion engine powered vehicles and at the same time will have far-reaching effects in reducing pollution of our environment.” NOTE: Copies of this study are available to working journalists and may be obtained by contacting Preston M. Moretz in Temple University’s Office of News Communications at 215-204-4380 or pmoretz@temple.edu. A prototype of the original device is available for photos in Tao’s lab at Temple, while the current device being tested on the diesel trucks can be viewed by contacting STWA. |
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Herpesvirus Kills Cancer Cells, Spares Normal Ones
Dec 10th
NYU School of Medicine researchers report in a new study that they have isolated a new version of a herpesvirus that kills cancer cells but spares normal tissue.
The finding may eventually lead to more potent anti-cancer therapies that capitalize on the ability of viruses to reproduce in the body.
In animal studies, the new version dramatically reduced the size of human prostate cancer tumors grown in mice. Moreover, it completely eradicated the tumor mass in some of the animals, and it appears not to harm normal tissue.
“We took a crippled virus and essentially made it into a more effective killer of cancer cells,” says Ian Mohr, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Microbiology at NYU School of Medicine, who led the research and is an author of the study. “But we’ve only demonstrated this in mice. Clearly the next step is to see whether this more potent anti-tumor virus works in other animal models.”
“We think this new virus offers great promise as a therapeutic strategy for the treatment of patients with prostate cancer,” says Samir Taneja, M.D., Assistant Professor of Urology, an author of the study. “Eventually we hope to test this virus in humans but we still have many things to work out,” says Dr. Taneja, whose laboratory is focused on finding new therapeutic strategies for treating prostate cancer.
The new study appears in the July 17 print edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Viruses are usually associated with disease. In recent years, however, scientists have turned a bane into a potential good by taking advantage of the ability of viruses to infiltrate human cells, where they can then reproduce.
Viruses have developed this ability over the course of millions of years of evolution, and they are especially agile pirates, commandeering a cell’s own machinery to churn out more virus, and ultimately destroying the cell. The cell too has evolved its own defense against viral invasion.
Although this kind of viral research is still in its infancy — and it is far too early to say whether it will ever result in new cancer therapies — at least 10 different oncolytic (cancer-killing) viruses are, or are soon to be, in early clinical trials. Most of these viruses have been genetically engineered so that they will not cause disease, but will infect rapidly dividing cancer cells.
One of these viruses is the herpes simplex virus-1, well known as the cause of cold sores, but capable of causing a serious brain infection as well. In the early 1990s, scientists tinkered with two genes in the virus that disarmed its ability to cause the brain infection and its ability to reproduce in non-rapidly dividing cells.
The result was a weakened herpesvirus that didn’t cause disease, but reproduced in rapidly growing cancer cells. This herpesvirus, however, isn’t an ideal destroyer, says Dr. Mohr.
“Although the virus kills cancer cells, the process of weakening it often has a deleterious impact on its ability to replicate inside cells. The result is that the virus doesn’t completely destroy the tumor mass, and the surviving cancer cells can simply grow,” he says.
To get around this problem, Dr. Mohr’s group observed the effect of the genetically engineered herpesvirus on human cancer cells grown in a laboratory dish. Then they isolated the viral strain that was the most effective killer of cells and discovered that it contained an extra genetic mutation that enabled more robust reproduction of the virus.
This extra mutation switches the expression of a protein called Us11 to an earlier time in the infection cycle of the virus, which prevents the cell from mounting a response to stop viral replication.
In the new study, Drs. Mohr and Taneja and their associate Jennifer MacGregor found that the new version of the genetically engineered virus was far more effective in killing prostate cancer cells in an animal model than was the older version of the same virus.
The NYU team injected the new version of the genetically engineered herpesvirus with the added mutation directly into human prostate cancer tumors they had implanted into mice that had no immune systems.
In another group of mice, they injected the older version of the herpesvirus, and in the last group they injected an inert solution that didn’t contain virus.
Thirty-four days after the treatment, the tumors injected with two million virus particles of the new version were, on average, eight times smaller than the tumors injected with the older version of the virus.
Moreover, the tumor mass had completely disappeared in up to 40% of the animals injected with the new version of the virus.
The study was supported by a grant from the Department of Defense and an award from CapCure, the foundation for prostate cancer research established by Michael Milken.
Cancer patient recovers after injection of immune cells
Dec 10th
A cancer patient has made a full recovery after being injected with billions of his own immune cells in the first case of its kind, doctors have disclosed. The 52-year-old, who was suffering from advanced skin cancer, was free from tumours within eight weeks of undergoing the procedure.
Doctors took cells from the man’s own defence system that were found to attack the cancer cells best, cloned them and injected back into his body, in a process known as “immunotherapy”. After two years he is still free from the disease which had spread to his lymph nodes and one of his lungs. Experts said that the case could mark a landmark in the treatment of cancer.
