W3C Announces First Draft of Standard for Online Privacy

To address rising concerns about privacy on the Web, W3C publishes today two first drafts for standards that allow users to express preferences about online tracking:

• Tracking Preference Expression (DNT), which defines mechanisms for users to express cross-site tracking preferences and for sites to indicate whether they honor these preferences.
• Tracking Compliance and Scope Specification, which defines the meaning of a "Do Not Track" preference and sets out practices for websites to comply with this preference.

These documents are the early work of a broad set of stakeholders in the W3C Tracking Protection Working Group, including browser vendors, content providers, advertisers, search engines, and experts in policy, privacy, and consumer protection. W3C invites review of these early drafts, expected to become standards by mid-2012. Read the full press release and testimonials and learn more about Privacy.

W3Conf Developer Conference Next Week; Live Video Stream Available

W3C's first developer conference, W3Conf: Practical Standards for Web Professionals takes place next week, 15-16 November in Redmond, Washington. Registration is still open. For those who cannot attend in person, W3C will provide a live video stream of more than 25 presentations, on mobile development, layout, script libraries, graphics, security, and Web gaming, as well as a panel with representatives from most of the major browsers. No registration is required for the video stream. W3C would like to thank Microsoft for making this conference possible, and express our appreciation to Platinum Sponsor ATT, and Gold Sponsors Adobe and Nokia.

Workshop Report: Third Workshop on Web and TV

W3C published the final report of the Third W3C Web and TV Workshop, hosted by Comcast Cable 19-20 September in Hollywood, California. Nearly 150 representatives from key stakeholders participated, including major browser vendors, content providers, video service providers, TV broadcasters, cable operators, and CE manufacturers. Participants in the Workshop focused on addressing gaps between the experiences, perspectives, and expectations of the entertainment industry and the Web community. In addition, the Web and TV Interest Group discussed the issues from the workshop during its first F2F meeting on September 21-22, and decided on next steps for each issue, e.g., submit functional gaps to Working Groups or create new Interest Group Task Forces. The conclusion is included in the group's September Report.

W3C Co-organizes Meeting on Domain Names and Persistence at IDCC11

On 8 December 2011 at the International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC), W3C is co-organizing with the Digital Curation Centre a workshop on Domain Names and Persistence, in Bristol, UK. The vulnerability of any digital material to unexpected or unintended changes in Internet domain name assignment, and hence to the outcome of domain name resolution, is widely recognised. The fact that domain names are not permanently assigned is regularly cited as one of the main reasons why http: URIs cannot be regarded as persistent identifiers over the long term. This workshop is intended to bring together interested parties to explore the dimensions of the problem and possible directions in which to look for solutions. Learn about related work by the W3C Technical Architecture Group (TAG).

SEO - backlinks - continue to be the most important ranking factor

Links from other sites to yours - also called backlinks - continue to be the most important ranking factor that search engines look at when deciding where to rank a web page in search results.  Also, links to a web page are the one and only factor contributing to the page's PageRank (not to be confused with your web page's rank in Google).

Backlinks are the most valuable - and perhaps least easy - way to improve your SEO.  But seriously, they're worth it.

You don't have direct control over over your backlinks the way you do over your title tags or other website content.  So how can you get these magical backlinks to help your SEO?

• First, create great content on your site that people would want to link to.
• Ask. Contact site owners personally - don't use an automated system or send the same email to everyone. Give people a good reason to link to you, like a blog post you think would help their visitors.
• Keep an eye out for sites that mention you without a link, or use not-so-valuable anchor text (like "click here" or your website name).  Then ask them nicely.
• Include your keywords and links in press releases, and submit them to press release sites. They'll be republished, complete with the links to your site.
• Tip: Make sure links you get are DoFollow (not NoFollow) and anchor text.
• If you haven't already, build a nice page for your site on AboutUs.org and ask us to make its links to your site DoFollow.

SEO Updates on keywords meta tag

Even though Google and other search engines do not use the keywords meta tag, many search engines,  still do.   keywords meta tag is a good location to include words that you want indexed where those same words are not included with your content.

Three examples for using the keywords meta tag are:

1. To include synonyms of words that are not included in the content of your page. People search on many variations of words and phrases. Sometimes it is hard to include all of the different variations of those words in the content of your page without making your page sound like a keywords page.

2. To place emphasis on certain words. It is not always easy to place your major keywords at the top of your page or in a <h1> tag. Your major keywords might not be introduced until the middle of your page. Using the keywords meta tag, you can add these keywords to inform the search engines that these words are important. Remember two important rules when using this tag: When emphasizing keywords, do not place the same keyword more than two times in the keywords meta tag. This could be considered keyword spamming and can reduce your ranking value. Also, do not place irrelevant keywords in your meta tag. Using irrelevant keywords could get your site band from many search engines.

3. Another use for the keywords meta tag is to add words from different languages. A multi-language site with one language as its default page might want to add words from other languages to attract people speaking languages that are different than the language of the default page.