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Security

While no browser is 100% secure Mozilla Firefox has much better security than Internet Explorer.  Firefox does not support Activex which is a tool that can be used with good and bad intentions.  Activex allows web sites to have more access to Windows.  As a result of this, cyber criminals have taken advantage of it.  This means that viruses and spyware (and sometimes other types of malware as well such as adaware) can take advantage of it, resulting in these programs ending up on the visitors computer (if using Windows at the time).  Spyware is any piece of software that silently gathers information about a user while he/she navigates the Internet and transmits the information to an individual or company that uses it for marketing or other purposes.

Spyware and other types of Malware usually do not target Firefox, but there is some out there that will also get Firefox, but it is rather unlikely that a Firefox user would get it.  Unless for example they install loads of extensions from all kinds of web sites.

If a Firefox user has the cache turned on a Trojan can end up in it.  A cache is an amount of space in which Firefox uses to temporarily store images and other files from sites so you can load the page up quicker if you chose to go back and view the page again. You can turn it off by going to “Tools” then “options” click on the “privacy” tag and then the “cache” tag set the amount of MB’s it’s allowed to use to “0″.  However a Trojan just sit their in the catch and will not do anything unless the user actually opens it. If you have a virus scaner (like AVG) it will be able to remove trojans and worms from your computer.

Spyware, viruses, and other things like this are usually only a Windows issue.  In fact viruses aren’t really an issue with other operating systems such as Linux.  Linux is known to be very secure and virus free.  However some viruses were made for Linux, but they were never distributed out of the lab.  Ubuntu is a popular and rather good Linux distribution for beginners.  It is worth checking out and especially if you have had enough of Windows and it’s many problems such as it’s very bad security.  Linux is very stable and does not just crash like Windows does for some users. (Personally my PC never crashes, but I’ve had some problems before.)

With popular free open source programs such as Firefox, or Linux distributions.  Any security issues  are fixed very quickly.  Unlike for example a software company like Microsoft were it can take years before a security issue has been fixed.  That is of course if it ever gets fixed!

Speed

Simply put, Firefox uses less resources, loads pages faster, and can be tweaked to make best use of your computer. There are guides and tools that can help you get the most out of it. Also note that the Gecko Rendering Engine engine is always being updated as new versions of Firefox come out.

Customizations

Because of the Extension/Theme compatibility that is programmed into Firefox you can just about make it able to do or http://www.seo.tryangled.com/aboutus.php, provided someone has made an Extension/Theme to match your tastes.
You can get very nice Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird themes from http://www.spuler.us

Compatibility

It is, because of Internet Explorer’s huge market share and lack of web standards support that it holds the whole web back from becoming a lot better.  Yes lack of web standards support as in lack of being able to support web page coding that standards compliant browsers such as Firefox, and others that also use the Gecko Rendering Engine Rendering Engine to display web pages with can support.  There are also some other standards compliant browsers that do not use the Gecko Rendering Engine Rendering Engine to display web pages with.

So you’ve started a website and now have an abundance of traffic coming in. That’s great! But where are these people coming from? How are they finding your site? And most importantly, how are they behaving when they’re on your site? This is where the importance of web analytics comes into play.

Web analytics is the study of how your site’s visitors behave. This includes the tracking of important statistics such as unique vistis, pageviews, bounce rates and conversion rates. For many small sites, the last two statistics are not as important, but for large sites or online businesses, the last two play a key roll in optimizing your site’s performance.

There are two main web analytics technologies: server logfile analysis and page tagging.

Server logfile analysis involves the reading of log files on a server in order to collect analytics data. During the early days of the Internet, server logfile analysis only tracked the number of requests made by a visitor to the web server. This was commonly know as a “hit” and was logical since many sites only consisted of a single HTML file at the time. As more elements were added to web pages (images, multiple pages, etc.), server logfile analysis became impractical, as it would count every server request on one page as a “hit”.

These complications led to the creation of new web analytic metrics: pageviews and visits. A pageview was defined as a request to the web server for a single page while a visit was defined as a series of requests from a single person that ended after a certain time frame. Eventually, cookies were used to track unique user sessions due to the evolution of proxy and dynamic IP technologies, which made the old “visit” statistic fairly useless.

Some of the most popular software programs for tracking web analytics use the server logfile analysis method. These include Webalizer, Urchin, WebTrends and the open-source AWStats.

Page tagging involves the placement of code on a page in order to track analytics data. The earliest form of page tagging was the website counter. These visible, numeric counters eventually evolved into invisible snippets of JavaScript. The small JavaScript code would be placed on a page and send data back to an analytics program or company for analysis. Just like the server logfile analysis method, page tagging also involves assigning cookies to each user in order to determine unique visitors.

One of the most popular page tagging analytics programs is Google Analytics. The service is free to anyone with a Google account and is the standard in web analytics for any person or company on a tight budget.

So why should you worry about web analytics? So you can increase the performance of your website of course!

Why do people leave your site? A “bounce” is when a visitor leaves your website after only viewing one page. Many analytics programs have a statistic called bounce rate, which measures the percentage of people that commit a “bounce”. This metric allows you to see which pages on your site are performing poorly and then make improvements or adjustments to that page. This statistic is extremely important for e-commerce sites or sites that would like a visitor to commit a certain action.

How much time do people spend on your site? This is known as session duration and is important to know because it allows you to see what pages on your site have content that is compelling your visitors to stay. It will also let you know what pages need additional content added in order for visitors to stay on them longer.

The optimal keyword density doesn’t appear to have changed but rather appears to have declined in value altogether. Sites with low keyword densities are starting to appear more often for phrases based more on their links than their content and also overall site relevancy.

While the importance of a specific keyword density on a page has declined, this has been countered by an increasing importance of relevancy throughout the site. Google is opting to assign relevancy based more on the overall content of the site rather than a single page. General directories will be showing up less and less in exchange for topic-specific directories. Additionally, sites with a central theme carried throughout the majority of pages will tend to rank over sites with a specific page or even section on a topic.

Internal links are carrying a solid weight in attaching relevancy to specific internal pages. Properly worded internal links, preferably built into the content of your site (see note on natural links above) will add weight to those internal pages and increase the likelihood of those pages ranking for specific secondary phrases.

Firefox, for the most part, is a stable browser. However, even the most stable browsers crash. Firefox 2.0 has a great feature built in called “Session Restore”. With older versions of Firefox you had to install the Session Restore extension to gain this functionality. In the event of a browser crash or accidental v, you are given the option to restore all the tabs and pages that you had open before the browser prematurely closed. This feature alone makes Firefox very attractive.

One of the growing theories of SEO is that you are more likely to rank well if you have a substantial amount of pages on a similar theme. ie a niche topic blog will probably rank higher than a general one that covers many topics. Build a blog with over 200 pages of content on the same theme and you’ll increase your chances of ranking well as SEs will see you as an authority on the topic. The take home advice here is to keep to some kind of a topic/niche/theme for your blog. It is also probably another argument for categories and tagging posts that relate together strongly.

Another way to generating inbound links is to submit your links to directories. I know of webmasters who swear by the benefits of such a strategy - the first thing that they do when starting a new site is to do the rounds of directories - submitting links to key pages with appropriate keywords in the links. There are loads of directories out there - many of which offer a free submission. Ari Paparo has compiled a list of blog directories that you might want to start with.

The three major elements of a search engines are: the spider, also called the crawler; the index or catalog; and the search engine which displays the results of your query in your browser.

The spider visits your web page, indexes it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is sometimes referred to as being “spidered” or “crawled.” The spider returns to the site every so often looking for changes.

The index is a giant database that contains a copy of every web page that the spider finds. When a web page is changed, then this database is updated with the new information.

Sometimes it takes a while for pages or changes to be added to the index. Therefore, a web page may have been “spidered” but not yet “indexed.” Until it is added to the index, it is not available to searches by the search engine.

Search engine software sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a query and ranks them in the order of what it believes is most relevant. Different search engines often produce very different results.

Most search engines handle words and simple phrases.  In its simplest form, text search looks for pages with lots of occurrences of each of the words in a query, stopwords aside.  The more common a word is on a page, compared with its frequency in the overall language, the more likely that page will appear among the search results.  Hitting all the words in a query is a lot better than missing some.

Search engines also make some efforts to “understand” what is meant by the query words.  For example, most search engines now offer optional spelling correction.  And increasingly they search not just on the words and phrases actually entered, but the also use stemming to search for alternate forms of the words (e.g., speak, speaker, speaking, spoke).  Teoma-based engines are also offering refinement by category, ala the now-defunct Northern Light.  However, Excite-like concept search has otherwise not made a comeback yet, since the concept categories are too unstable.

When ranking results, search engines give special weight to keywords that appear:

* High up on the page
* In headings
* In BOLDFACE (at least in Inktomi)
* In the URL
* In the title (important)
* In the description
* In the ALT tags for graphics.
* In the generic keywords metatags (only for Inktomi, and only a little bit even for them)
* In the link text for inbound links.

More weight is put on the factors that the site owner would find it awkward to fake, such as inbound link text, page title (which shows up on the SERP — Search Engine Results Page), and description.

Using a special syntax is a way to tell Google that you want to restrict your searches to certain elements or characteristics of Web pages. Google has a fairly complete list of its syntax elements at www.google.com/help/operators.html. Here are some advanced operators that can help narrow down your search results.

Intitle: at the beginning of a query word or phrase (intitle:”Three Blind Mice”) restricts your search results to just the titles of Web pages.

Intext: does the opposite of intitle:, searching only the body text, ignoring titles, links, and so forth. Intext: is perfect when what you’re searching for might commonly appear in URLs. If you’re looking for the term HTML, for example, and you don’t want to get results such as www.mysite.com/index.html, you can enter intext:html.

Link: lets you see which pages are linking to your Web page or to another page you’re interested in.

Try using site: (which restricts results to top-level domains) with intitle: to find certain types of pages. For example, get scholarly pages about Mark Twain by searching for intitle:”Mark Twain”site:edu. Experiment with mixing various elements; you’ll develop several strategies for finding the stuff you want more effectively. The site: command is very helpful as an alternative to the mediocre search engines built into many sites.

Many of us webmasters don’t take time or just don’t think about setting up a custom 404 page but it seems that its much more important to setup your own custom 404 pages to avoid any missed affiliate sales, pages, or products or simply loosing your visitors to Google or someone else. It is also good Search engine Optimization practice to have your own custom 404 page