The Audio Working Group has published three First Public Working Drafts to provide an advanced audio API for the Web: the Web Audio API and MediaStream Processing API specifications each define a different approach to process and synthesize audio streams directly in script. These APIs can be used for interactive applications, games, 3D environments, musical applications, educational applications, and for the purposes of accessibility. They include the ability to synchronize, visualize, or enhance sound information when used in conjunction with graphics APIs. Audio Processing API introduces and compares two client-side APIs for processing and synthesizing real-time audio streams in the browser. Read the blog post Sounding Out the Audio APIs for more information about the possibilities unlocked by an audio API, and learn more about the Rich Web Clients Activity .

The RDF Web Applications Working Group has published a Working Draft of RDFa Core 1.1 , a specification for attributes to express structured data in any markup language. The group also published an update to XHTML+RDFa 1.1 , a Host Language for RDFa Core 1.1. This document is intended for authors who want to create XHTML Family documents that embed rich semantic markup. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity .

The Provenance Working Group has published a Working Draft of The PROV Data Model and Abstract Syntax Notation . Provenance of information is crucial in deciding whether information is to be trusted, how it should be integrated with other diverse information sources, and how to give credit to its originators when reusing it. In an open and inclusive environment such as the Web, users find information that is often contradictory or questionable: provenance can help those users to make trust judgments. PROV-DM is a data model for provenance for building representations of the entities, people and activities involved in producing a piece of data or thing in the world. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity .

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of CSS 2D Transforms . CSS 2D Transforms allows elements rendered by CSS to be transformed in two-dimensional space. Learn more about the Style Activity .

The Media Fragments Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Media Fragments URI 1.0 . Audio and video resources on the World Wide Web are currently treated as "foreign" objects, which can only be embedded using a plugin that is capable of decoding and interacting with the media resource. Specific media servers are generally required to provide for server-side features such as direct access to time offsets into a video without the need to retrieve the entire resource. Support for such media fragment access varies between different media formats and inhibits standard means of dealing with such content on the Web. This specification provides for a media-format independent, standard means of addressing media fragments on the Web using Uniform Resource Identifiers (URI). The Working Group also published today the first draft of a companion document, Protocol for Media Fragments 1.0 Resolution in HTTP , which describes various recipes for processin...

The Geolocation Working Group has published two Last Call Working Drafts: Geolocation API Specification Level 2 and DeviceOrientation Event Specification . The former defines a high-level interface to location information associated only with the device hosting the implementation, such as latitude and longitude. The API itself is agnostic of the underlying location information sources. Common sources of location information include Global Positioning System (GPS) and location inferred from network signals such as IP address, RFID, WiFi and Bluetooth MAC addresses, and GSM/CDMA cell IDs, as well as user input.

The Web Application Security Working Group has published the First Public Working Draft of Content Security Policy . This document defines Content Security Policy, a mechanism web applications can use to mitigate the broad class of content injection vulnerabilities, such as cross-site scripting (XSS). Content Security Policy is a declarative policy that lets the authors (or server administrators) of a web application restrict from where the application can load resources. Learn more about the Security Activity .

The Web and TV Interest Group published an Interest Group Note of Requirements for Home Networking Scenarios . This document lists the design goals and requirements that potential W3C recommendations should support in order to enable access to services and content provided by home network devices on other devices, including the discovery and playback of content available to those devices, both from services such as traditional broadcast media and internet based services but also from the home network. Learn more about Web and TV .

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 .

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.

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 .

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) .

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 lin...

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: Wh...

The Web Real-Time Communications Working Group has published he First Public Working Draft of WebRTC 1.0: Real-time Communication Between Browsers . This document defines a set of APIs that enable video conferencing from within an Open Web Platform application. These APIs allow local media, including audio and video, to be requested from a platform, media to be sent over the network to another browser or device implementing the appropriate set of real-time protocols, and media received from another browser or device to be processed and displayed locally. This specification is being developed in conjunction with a protocol specification developed by the IETF RTCWEB group. Learn more about the Ubiquitous Web Applications Activity .

W3C announces the launch of a new Web Testing Activity . For years, W3C has been testing technologies independently in a variety of Working Groups. Each specification follows its own methods for testing the underlying technology and there has been minimal coordination between Working Groups on testing methods. Technologies such as HTML, CSS, and APIs must be tested in the same user agents, at times in combination. Therefore, as the number of technologies and the number of devices using them increase, it has become vital to quality on the Web that W3C take a broader view of testing. To this end, W3C has launched two groups. The Browser Testing and Tools Working Group will produce technologies for use in testing, debugging, and troubleshooting of Web applications running in Web browsers. The Web Testing Interest Group will develop and deploy testing mechanisms and collateral materials for testing of Web technologies across different devices (desktops, mobile, TV, etc.).

The Web Accessibility Initiative ( WAI ) Education and Outreach Working Group ( EOWG ) has updated the Before and After Demonstration (BAD) . BAD shows an inaccessible website and a retrofitted version of the same website with the accessibility barriers fixed. Read the call for review e-mail , learn about Accessibility , and visit the WAI home page .

Registration is coming to a close for SVG Open 2011 , which takes place 17-20 October 2011. W3C joins other sponsors to help with SVG Open 2011, the 9th international conference on Scalable Vector Graphics, which may now be used in all modern browsers. This year, Microsoft Corporation hosts the conference at their New England Research and Development (NERD) Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts. SVG Open provides an opportunity for designers, developers and implementers to learn about SVG, and share ideas, experiences, products, and strategies. Members of the W3C SVG Working Group , including W3C Team member Doug Schepers, will be attending and presenting at the conference. The SVG Working Group will also brief attendees on recent developments around the SVG specification, including SVG2 and integration with CSS and HTML. The conference includes a day of workshops. Learn more about Graphics at W3C .

W3C is pleased to announce its newest online course dedicated to "Game Development in HTML5" . Developed and taught by Michal Budzynski, who recently ran onGameStart , where W3C/OpenMedia explored standardization needs around games with the Web games community. This course will last 4 weeks from 31 Oct. to 27 Nov. 2011 . Through this course, students will create browser based multiplayer games by using open Web technologies such as HTML5 Canvas, CSS Transitions, Timing control for script-based animations, Web Sockets and other JavaScript APIs. The full price of the course is €225 but we have a limited number of seats available at the early bird rate of €145, open until 22 October 2011. Register today!

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of CSS Fonts Module Level 3 . This specification describes how font properties are specified and how font resources are loaded dynamically. Font resources may be local, installed on the system on which a user agent is running, or downloadable. For local font resources descriptive information can be obtained directly from the font resource. For downloadable font resources (sometimes referred to as web fonts), the descriptive information is included with the reference to the font resource. Families of fonts typically don't contain a single face for each possible variation of font properties. The CSS font selection mechanism describes how to match a given set of CSS font properties to a given font face. Learn more about the Style Activity .

The W3C's Semantic Web Interest Group has recently launched two new task forces to foster open collaboration and innovation in the world of web schemas and structured data. This move marks a significant step forward in enhancing how structured information is represented, shared, and understood across the web. A Shared Language for the Web At the center of this initiative is the growing adoption of schema.org , which provides a rich collection of schemas that webmasters can use to markup their pages in ways recognized by major search providers like Google, Bing, Yahoo, and Yandex. These schemas help search engines better understand content, leading to richer, more accurate search results and a more interconnected web. The widespread support for schema.org underscores the importance of a shared vocabulary for structured data. However, as the ecosystem evolves, so too must the tools and standards that support it. To address the complexities and opportunities ahead, two new task for...

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group published two W3C Recommendations today: CSS Namespaces Module and Selectors Level 3 . The first defines the syntax for using namespaces in CSS. The second defines the patterns that style sheet designers may use to match parts of a document; see the list of changes from CSS2 selectors . The Working Group also published the First Draft of Selectors Level 4 , which introduces powerful new selectors. Learn more about the Style Activity .

W3C announces today its first ever 3-day virtual event, the W3C Social Business Jam , 8-10 November. Participation is free and open to all. Participation in this Jam is intended for individuals and professionals working in businesses or the social business space. If you are passionate about leveraging social capabilities to improve business results or if you want to discuss your ideas on how social technologies offer business value beyond traditional social media approaches, then this Jam is the right place for you. The meeting should produce a better understanding of how businesses are using social technologies and the challenges they face integrating the technologies into their existing environments. We expect the conversation on social business to continue after the Jam in W3C Community or Business Groups . Learn more about the W3C Social Business Jam .

The XML Print and Page Layout Working Group has published an updated Woking Draft of Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL-FO) Version 2.0 . XSL-FO is a powerful template-based language for formatting XML documents. This is the first draft that includes the existing specification as well as new work, although some new features from the previous draft are not yet included. Learn more about XML .

The Web Applications Working Group published a W3C Recommendation today of Widget Packaging and XML Configuration . This specification standardizes a packaging format and metadata for a class of software known as widgets. Unlike traditional user interface widgets (e.g., buttons, input boxes, toolbars, etc.), widgets as specified in this document are full-fledged client-side applications that are authored using technologies such as HTML and then packaged for distribution. The Working Group also published today: a Working Draft of Widget URI scheme , which defines the widget URI scheme and rules for dereferencing a widget URI, which can be used to address resources inside a package. a Note of Requirement For Standardizing Widgets , which lists the design goals and requirements that specifications would need to address in order to standardize various aspects of widgets. a Last Call Working Draft of Web IDL , which can be used to describe interfaces that are intended to be implement...

We are pleased to announce the launch of a new W3C online course: HTML5 Audio and Video . Taught by Mark Boas , one of the HTML5 doctors, the course will last 5 weeks, from 17 October to 20 November 2011. Through this course students will learn how to use HTML5 media in Web pages and applications. The full price of the course is €225 but we have a limited number of seats available at the early bird rate of €145, available until 7 October 2011. Register today ! Introduction: Mastering Digital Growth in 2025—From SEO to Social Media and AI In 2025, digital success isn’t just about having an online presence—it’s about strategically connecting the dots between SEO, web design, content creation, and social media. For small businesses and marketers alike, staying ahead means embracing the latest tools and trends that shape how we rank, engage, and grow online. Whether you're aiming to  win local search  with cutting-edge  SEO for Small Business in 2025: How to Win Local Searc...

Link building is anything you do to point hyperlinks back to your website from third party websites. These hyperlinks, or links for short, help to get traffic to your site, allow others to find your valuable site, create awareness for your website, adds credibility, and most importantly assists in having your site found by search engines such as Google. It should be noted that search engines also have other criteria that determine their results, but inbound links are often given the most weight. ·          Deciding objective for a link ·          Natural Link Building – Adding quality content or something that benefits the end user that they would want to link to ·          Submissions of your site to online directories. ·          Reviews – getting influential bloggers write about your site and your products. ...

People are spending hours and hours in front of Facebook, Twitter etc, so URL Shortener services are increasing day by day. Most of people have this question that whether these short URLs are SEO friendly or not Usually shorten URLs will redirect to destination URLs. We need to find out whether these redirections are permanent (301) or temporary (302). We have few free tools on the web to check it. Yes, URL Shorten Services are using permanent 301 redirection which is search engine friendly.

Following are the list of respective factors which needs to be analyzed for a quick review: Domain Extension Page Loading Time Page Rank Alexa Rank Google, Bing & Yahoo Indexed Pages and Back Links Domain Age Canonical Redirection Title & Meta Tags Header Tags Image Tags Xml sitemap Html sitemap Robots.txt Google analytics account Google webmaster tools account

Linked Data technology offers huge potential for enterprise applications such as the integration and the management of data within and across enterprises. The distributed nature of Linked Data enables loose-coupling for data sharing within and between organizations. With Linked Data, enterprises have a unique opportunity to cooperate in their use of shared data without the costs of extensive coordination. W3C is organizing a Workshop on Linked Enterprise Data Patterns: Data-driven Applications on the Web for participants to discuss requirements, share solutions, and develop a healthy and scalable Linked Enterprise Data infrastructure. Anyone may participate; W3C membership is not required. All participants are required to submit a position paper by 25 October. Learn more about the Workshop and the Semantic Web .

The Web Applications Working Group invites implementation of the Candidate Recommendation of Progress Events . The Progress Events specification defines an event interface that can be used for measuring progress; e.g., HTTP entity body transfers. This specification is primarily meant to be used by other specifications. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity .

To strengthen its relations with industry and research activities in France and Europe, W3C announces today the opening of a W3C Office in France , hosted by Inria (French National Computer Science Research Institute). To mark the launch, the Office is organizing a session on Open Data at the Open World Forum on 22 September in Paris, in cooperation with Inria and Paris City Hall. "Inria has a longstanding commitment to the development of free software and open standards," said Prof. Michel Cosnard, Inria Chairman and CEO. "We have supported W3C's mission since the inception of the Consortium in 1994, notably by hosting W3C's European branch". Read the full press release and learn more about the W3C Offices .

W3C announced a new standard for the exchange of "digital ink" on the Web. The Ink Markup Language (InkML) Recommendation can be used to store and exchange the output of an electronic pen or stylus as well as handwriting, gestures, sketches, music, and other notations. InkML is part of W3C's ongoing efforts to build One Web available from any device. A host of new applications are now possible thanks to this open standard, such as: pen-based text messaging; handwritten annotation of documents, photos, or other media; collaborative white boards; archiving of hand-written notes; and more efficient approaches to filling out forms. Read the press release and testimonials and learn more about the Web of Devices .

The RDB2RDF Working Group has published two Last Call Working Drafts for bringing relational database information to the Semantic Web: R2RML: RDB to RDF Mapping Language and A Direct Mapping of Relational Data to RDF . The former describes R2RML, a language for expressing customized mappings from relational databases to RDF datasets. Such mappings provide the ability to view existing relational data in the RDF data model, expressed in a structure and target vocabulary of the mapping author's choice. The latter document defines a direct mapping from relational data to RDF. Comments are welcome through 1 November. Learn more about the Semantic Web Activity .

The first thing you're going to need is a Google Places account.  This is where you will set up and claim your business. It's like creating a listing in a directory, so it's pretty easy to do.  Here are 5 tips: 1.  Fill out the information as detailed as you can. 2.  Make sure the way you list your business on Google Places is exactly the same everywhere else you may have listed it.  Believe it or not, there is a difference between "84 NE Loop 410, Suite 325" and "84 North East Loop 410, Ste. 325".  These are called citations, and they need to be as consistent as possible. 3.  Add photos or video to the page if you have them. 4.  Make sure you select the industries that describe your website the best.  DO NOT just add keywords here - this is considered a spammy tactic, and is easily detectable. 5.  Have your customers review you on your places page, or other sites that Google may be picking up reviews from (yelp.com, yp.com, etc.)...

CSS: The Missing Manual CSS: The Definitive Guide Smashing CSS: Professional Techniques for Modern Layout The World Wide Web Consortium announced a new standardization effort to improve user privacy on the Web. The Tracking Protection Working Group will create standards for "Do Not Track" technology by building consensus among a broad set of stakeholders, including browser vendors, content providers, advertisement networks, search engines, and experts in policy, privacy, and consumer protection. The Working Group, which first meets in two weeks, is charted to publish Do Not Track standards by mid-2012. The standards will let users express their tracking preferences and select which parties can track them online. Learn more about W3C's Privacy Activity and read the April 2011 Report from the W3C Workshop on Web Tracking and User Privacy , which was sponsored by Adobe, Yahoo!, Google, Mozilla, and Microsoft. Learn JavaScript and Ajax with w3Schools

  Search Engine Optimization Secrets: SEO for 2011 (Search Engine Optimization Kindle Bestseller) SEO for 2011: Search Engine Optimization Secrets- Kindle Bestseller Search Engine Optimization: SEO Secrets For 2011 Placing your style sheets (CSS) near the top and JavaScript near the bottom of the coding for each of your web pages can improve the perceived speed of your website for human visitors. When someone directs a web browser to a web page, the browser starts from the top of the code and works its way down. The style sheets are one of the more important pieces for human viewers, because they determine how the site will look. After that, your website's actual content will load pretty quickly. It's as if the style sheets set out a framework, and then the content loads into that framework. The JavaScript - or <script> tags - provide things like interactive features or actions that your viewer won't notice unless they perform an action on a web page. So allo...

CSS: The Missing Manual CSS: The Definitive Guide Smashing CSS: Professional Techniques for Modern Layout The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Working Draft of CSS Image Values and Replaced Content Module Level 3 . This CSS Image Values and Replaced Content module has two parts: First, it defines the syntax for image values in CSS. Second, it defines properties used to control the interaction of replaced content and the CSS layout algorithms. These properties can affect the used image resolution for bitmaps, the replaced object's orientation, and whether and how to preserve the object's aspect ratio. Learn more about the Style Activity .

The Web Performance Working Group has published Last Call Working Drafts of Performance Timeline and User Timing . The former defines an interface for web applications to access timing information related to navigation and elements. The latter defines an interface to help web developers measure the performance of their applications by giving them access to high precision timestamps. Comments are welcome through 22 September. Learn more about the Rich Web Client Activity . Learn JavaScript and Ajax with w3Schools

The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group published three drafts today: a First Public Working Draft of CSS Conditional Rules Module Level 3 , which describes the rendering of structured documents (such as HTML and XML) on screen, on paper, in speech, etc. This module contains the features of CSS for conditional processing of parts of style sheets, conditioned on capabilities of the processor or the document the style sheet is being applied to. a draft of CSS Text Level 3 , which defines properties for text manipulation and specifies their processing model. It covers line breaking, justification and alignment, white space handling, text decoration and text transformation. a draft of CSS Writing Modes Module Level 3 , which defines CSS features to support for various international writing modes, such as left-to-right (e.g. Latin or Indic), right-to-left (e.g. Hebrew or Arabic), bidirectional (e.g. mixed Latin and Arabic) and vertical (e.g. Asian scripts). CSS: The Missing M...

Smashing CSS: Professional Techniques for Modern Layout The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) Working Group has published a Last Call Working Draft of CSS Speech Module . The CSS Speech module defines aural CSS properties that enable authors to declaratively control the rendering of documents via speech synthesis, and using optional audio cues. The feature set exposed by this specification is designed to match the model described by the Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) Version 1.1. Comments are welcome through 30 September. Learn more about the Style Activity . CSS: The Missing Manual CSS: The Definitive Guide Stylin' with CSS: A Designer's Guide (2nd Edition)