Spot instances a double-edged sword for EC2 customers
In late 2009, Amazon introduced a new way for AWS customers to purchase its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service: spot instances.
Instead of buying an instance outright at a fixed price, the price of a spot instance is determined by supply and demand.
So long as your bid for the instance is above the current spot price, you have a fully functional Amazon EC2 instance at your disposal.
What are the most important search ranking factors?
The biennial search ranking factors report from SEOmoz was released today, which surveyed 134 SEO professionals on what has the most effect on search rankings, and their views on the future of search.
Here's a few highlights from the report...
Q&A: Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz
Every two years, SEO consultancy and publisher SEOmoz publishes a Search Engine Ranking Factors report that details which ranking factors some of the world's top SEOs think are hot and not. The latest Search Engine Ranking Factors report was published in August.
I spoke with Rand Fishkin, CEO of SEOmoz, about the 2009 Ranking Factors report, the dilemma of paid links and how social media is changing SEO.
What are the most important SEO factors today?
When engaging in efforts to boost your search engine rankings, there is a seemingly unlimited number of things you can do. What's worth focusing on? What provides the most bang for the buck?
Every two years, SEOmoz publishes a Search Engine Ranking Factors report based on a survey of 100 prominent SEOs. Yesterday, the 2009 report was released. Here's a summary of the results.
Tips on getting into Google's product search results
Thanks to universal search, more product search terms on Google, especially when they include words such as 'buy' or 'cheap' are now returning shopping results, often above the organic results.
In this example for a search for 'buy Sony Vaio' on Google UK shown below, shopping results take the top spot, ahead of those from Sony. With such a prominent position in the SERPS at stake, getting your products listed there is clearly a good idea, so how does Google determine which products appear there?
Tom Critchlow of Distilled provides some excellent tips in a guest post on SEOmoz today, here are some of his suggestions:
Subdomains or subfolders for SEO?
The devil is in the details when it comes to maximizing SEO. How you structure your website can have a very real impact on the type of results you see from your SEO efforts.
One area that probably doesn't get as much attention as it should is the debate over whether to use subdomains or subfolders to segment your website's content.
