#advertising online

[websitedesignpretoria]

SEO Expert Can Improve Your Website Visibility & Ranking in Search Engine

Do you ever feel like your website is a hidden gem, lost in the vastness of the internet? Well, fret no more! In the realm of SEO, visibility is everything, and it all starts with two crucial factors: crawlability and indexing.

Think of your website as a bustling marketplace. Search engines like Google are the curious explorers, eager to discover your unique offerings. But if they can’t navigate your streets (crawlability) or understand your wares (indexing), your precious treasures will remain unseen.

So, how do we open our online doors and invite the SEO gods in? Let’s explore some key strategies:

Crawling Champs:

Site Structure Smackdown: Ensure your website has a clear hierarchy, like a well-organized map. Pages should be logically connected, with easy access from the main hub. Avoid confusing dead ends and hidden alleys.

Link Like a Master: Internal linking is your secret weapon. Think of it as bridges connecting your pages, guiding crawlers and users deeper into your content. Use relevant keywords naturally and avoid broken links (those dead ends again!).

Robots.txt Respect: This file tells search engines which pages to avoid. Make sure it’s accurate and up-to-date, not accidentally blocking valuable content.

Indexing Experts:

Content is King (and Queen!): Fresh, high-quality content is irresistible to search engines. Regularly update your website with informative and engaging material, showcasing your expertise and attracting both crawlers and readers.

Keyword Harmony: Weave relevant keywords throughout your content organically, but avoid keyword stuffing. Think of them as signposts, helping search engines understand your topic and connect you with the right audience.

Sitemap Symphony: An XML sitemap is like a blueprint for your website, giving search engines a clear overview of your pages. Submit it to Google Search Console for efficient crawling and indexing.

Bonus Tip: Tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog SEO Spider can be your allies in identifying crawl errors and indexing issues. Regularly check for and fix these roadblocks to ensure your website’s smooth SEO journey.

Remember, optimizing your website for crawlability and indexing is an ongoing process. These strategies are your compass, but stay curious, experiment, and keep an eye on search engine updates. With dedication and a touch of SEO magic, you’ll soon see your website rise from obscurity to the top of the search results, ready to shine!

So, go forth, website warriors, and unleash your SEO beasts! The internet awaits your treasures.

[uncanny-tranny]

This might seem like an "old man yells at cloud" situation, but it's just wild growing up and being told how dangerous distracted driving is - how, at highway speeds, you can traverse the length of a football field (100 yards, 91 meters) in a matter of seconds - how one split second sending a text while driving could result in a potential fatal crash, and then getting on the road as a driver and being surrounded by billboards. Their entire purpose is to catch one's attention, so they're lining major roads, which tend to be highways. How is it that you're told how important it is to never be distracted while driving, but still being advertised to?

At best, this type of advertising is an eyesore to pedestrians and motorists and a general waste of electricity to light it, and at worst, it is an active danger considering they are there to advertise and therefore, must catch people's attention.

I'm not even against advertising in theory, but this particular mode bothers me so much and I hate how pervasive it is - especially in large cities or highways.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Privacy first

The internet is embroiled in a vicious polycrisis: child safety, surveillance, discrimination, disinformation, polarization, monopoly, journalism collapse – not only have we failed to agree on what to do about these, there's not even a consensus that all of these are problems.

But in a new whitepaper, my EFF colleagues Corynne McSherry, Mario Trujillo, Cindy Cohn and Thorin Klosowski advance an exciting proposal that slices cleanly through this Gordian knot, which they call "Privacy First":

https://www.eff.org/wp/privacy-first-better-way-address-online-harms

Here's the "Privacy First" pitch: whatever is going on with all of the problems of the internet, all of these problems are made worse by commercial surveillance.

Worried your kid is being made miserable through targeted ads? No surveillance, no targeting.

Worried your uncle was turned into a Qanon by targeted disinformation? No surveillance, no targeting. Worried that racialized people are being targeted for discriminatory hiring or lending by algorithms? No surveillance, no targeting.

Worried that nation-state actors are exploiting surveillance data to attack elections, politicians, or civil servants? No surveillance, no surveillance data.

Worried that AI is being trained on your personal data? No surveillance, no training data.

Worried that the news is being killed by monopolists who exploit the advantage conferred by surveillance ads to cream 51% off every ad-dollar? No surveillance, no surveillance ads.

Worried that social media giants maintain their monopolies by filling up commercial moats with surveillance data? No surveillance, no surveillance moat.

The fact that commercial surveillance hurts so many groups of people in so many ways is terrible, of course, but it's also an amazing opportunity. Thus far, the individual constituencies for, say, saving the news or protecting kids have not been sufficient to change the way these big platforms work. But when you add up all the groups whose most urgent cause would be significantly improved by comprehensive federal privacy law, vigorously enforced, you get an unstoppable coalition.

America is decades behind on privacy. The last really big, broadly applicable privacy law we passed was a law banning video-store clerks from leaking your porn-rental habits to the press (Congress was worried about their own rental histories after a Supreme Court nominee's movie habits were published in the Washington City Paper):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

In the decades since, we've gotten laws that poke around the edges of privacy, like HIPAA (for health) and COPPA (data on under-13s). Both laws are riddled with loopholes and neither is vigorously enforced:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/09/how-to-make-a-child-safe-tiktok/

Privacy First starts with the idea of passing a fit-for-purpose, 21st century privacy law with real enforcement teeth (a private right of action, which lets contingency lawyers sue on your behalf for a share of the winnings):

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/americans-deserve-more-current-american-data-privacy-protection-act

Here's what should be in that law:

A ban on surveillance advertising:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/03/ban-online-behavioral-advertising

Data minimization: a prohibition on collecting or processing your data beyond what is strictly necessary to deliver the service you're seeking.

Strong opt-in: None of the consent theater click-throughs we suffer through today. If you don't give informed, voluntary, specific opt-in consent, the service can't collect your data. Ignoring a cookie click-through is not consent, so you can just bypass popups and know you won't be spied on.

No preemption. The commercial surveillance industry hates strong state privacy laws like the Illinois biometrics law, and they are hoping that a federal law will pre-empt all those state laws. Federal privacy law should be the floor on privacy nationwide – not the ceiling:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/07/federal-preemption-state-privacy-law-hurts-everyone

No arbitration. Your right to sue for violations of your privacy shouldn't be waivable in a clickthrough agreement:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/stop-forced-arbitration-data-privacy-legislation

No "pay for privacy." Privacy is not a luxury good. Everyone deserves privacy, and the people who can least afford to buy private alternatives are most vulnerable to privacy abuses:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/10/why-getting-paid-your-data-bad-deal

No tricks. Getting "consent" with confusing UIs and tiny fine print doesn't count:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/02/designing-welcome-mats-invite-user-privacy-0

A Privacy First approach doesn't merely help all the people harmed by surveillance, it also prevents the collateral damage that today's leading proposals create. For example, laws requiring services to force their users to prove their age ("to protect the kids") are a privacy nightmare. They're also unconstitutional and keep getting struck down.

A better way to improve the kid safety of the internet is to ban surveillance. A surveillance ban doesn't have the foreseeable abuses of a law like KOSA (the Kids Online Safety Act), like bans on information about trans healthcare, medication abortions, or banned books:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/kids-online-safety-act-still-huge-danger-our-rights-online

When it comes to the news, banning surveillance advertising would pave the way for a shift to contextual ads (ads based on what you're looking at, not who you are). That switch would change the balance of power between news organizations and tech platforms – no media company will ever know as much about their readers as Google or Facebook do, but no tech company will ever know as much about a news outlet's content as the publisher does:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/save-news-we-must-ban-surveillance-advertising

This is a much better approach than the profit-sharing arrangements that are being trialed in Australia, Canada and France (these are sometimes called "News Bargaining Codes" or "Link Taxes"). Funding the news by guaranteeing it a share of Big Tech's profits makes the news into partisans for that profit – not the Big Tech watchdogs we need them to be. When Torstar, Canada's largest news publisher, struck a profit-sharing deal with Google, they killed their longrunning, excellent investigative "Defanging Big Tech" series.

A privacy law would also protect access to healthcare, especially in the post-Roe era, when Big Tech surveillance data is being used to target people who visit abortion clinics or secure medication abortions. It would end the practice of employers forcing workers to wear health-monitoring gadget. This is characterized as a "voluntary" way to get a "discount" on health insurance – but in practice, it's a way of punishing workers who refuse to let their bosses know about their sleep, fertility, and movements.

A privacy law would protect marginalized people from all kinds of digital discrimination, from unfair hiring to unfair lending to unfair renting. The commercial surveillance industry shovels endless quantities of our personal information into the furnaces that fuel these practices. A privacy law shuts off the fuel supply:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/digital-privacy-legislation-civil-rights-legislation

There are plenty of ways that AI will make our lives worse, but copyright won't fix it. For issues of labor exploitation (especially by creative workers), the answer lies in labor law:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/01/how-the-writers-guild-sunk-ais-ship/

And for many of AI's other harms, a muscular privacy law would starve AI of some of its most potentially toxic training data:

https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-updated-terms-to-use-customer-data-to-train-ai-2023-9

Meanwhile, if you're worried about foreign governments targeting Americans – officials, military, or just plain folks – a privacy law would cut off one of their most prolific and damaging source of information. All those lawmakers trying to ban Tiktok because it's a surveillance tool? What about banning surveillance, instead?

Monopolies and surveillance go together like peanut butter and chocolate. Some of the biggest tech empires were built on mountains of nonconsensually harvested private data – and they use that data to defend their monopolies. Legal privacy guarantees are a necessary precursor to data portability and interoperability:

https://www.eff.org/wp/interoperability-and-privacy

Once we are guaranteed a right to privacy, lawmakers and regulators can order tech giants to tear down their walled gardens, rather than relying on tech companies to (selectively) defend our privacy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/14/luxury-surveillance/#liar-liar

The point here isn't that privacy fixes all the internet's woes. The policy is "privacy first," not "just privacy." When it comes to making a new, good internet, there's plenty of room for labor law, civil rights legislation, antitrust, and other legal regimes. But privacy has the biggest constituency, gets us the most bang for the buck, and has the fewest harmful side-effects. It's a policy we can all agree on, even if we don't agree on much else. It's a coalition in potentia that would be unstoppable in reality. Privacy first! Then – everything else!

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/06/privacy-first/#but-not-just-privacy

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[goobersplat]

CHECK OUT MY PRINTABLE ZINES

(Available on my KO-FI and Etsy)

LIBRARY ADVENTURES - This is an 8 page, black and white mini zine about things I have found in library books.

FROG ADVICE - This is an 8 page, black and white mini zine about frogs giving general advice

BEARY SAD - This is an 8 page, black and white mini zine featuring art and collage of bears.

+ Many more!

[jakeperalta]

wicked is proof that a movie can in fact be promoted too much. it's been out like two days and I'm already sick of hearing about this damn thing

[dennisboobs]

Complete DVD rips of Always Sunny seasons 1-10 are up on the Internet Archive, as well as Blu-ray rips of Season 6's bonus features. Everything is included; episode commentaries, bonus features, bloopers, deleted scenes, etc etc. all episodes soft-subbed in English, French and Spanish. Go nuts.

I'll continue adding to this archive when I can, I plan on archiving various commercials and internet exclusive content from FX's YouTube channel as well, since they've been taking various videos down lately.

[gladewood]

star stable ad on tumblr⁉️

[esteemed-excellency]

Fashion ads compilation from the Mele Brothers department stores (1890s - 1900s)

[world-of-advice]

[nellasbookplanet]

The funniest kind of critical role "critique" is always going to be the 'they present themselves as if they aren’t rich/a company no I will not give any examples' crowd. Like what does this even mean. They start literally every single episode with informing you they are professional voice actors. They have clearly advertised sponsors. They have an entire line of merch and an animated show. The production value of the set is bonkers. They run a charity foundation. Do you want them to start every episode with a blaring siren and a warning saying 'beware! company run content! we make money!!' Are you just angry that they are friends having fun as they make a living. Do you have any understanding of how money works.

[icewindandboringhorror]

me every morning: I need to post online today.. i have to post online.. to be a successful artist person one MUST have an "online presence".. i have to be online.. i have to post things to the internet... the internet world, i need to post upon it.. i hafe to post On Line now

me 5 minutes later:

[j-esbian]

idk if this is a post-amazon-prime or specifically post-covid thing, but i hate how it seems like stores don’t really care about their physical stock anymore because “you can just buy it online”

[cinnastray]

SPARKLY LITTLE SPRITE KEYCHAIN!! <3

The "normal type" sprite from the 1st and 2nd gen Pokémon games was my absolute favourite. Maybe because of its roundness... Or maybe because of its incredibly... 'enthusiastic' little expression... heh

So, maaaaaaaany years later, I finally decided to make my own little merch based on the sprite from these super nostalgic games.

This one is based on Clefairy, hence the colour, holographic stars, and moon clasp :] I thought it was cute...

I currently have a limited number of them in my shop. Thank you for stopping by <333

[nando161mando]

Literally this

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Misleading or false online reviews written by employees about their own company or competitors could result in penalties, Canada’s Competition Bureau has warned. The federal agency is also urging employees to be transparent about whom they work for when post these reviews online. In a news release Thursday, Competitions Bureau said businesses should watch out for all types of reviews, including testimonials on social media, posted by their employees that don’t properly identify themselves. “When posting online reviews about their company or its competitors, employees must disclose all connections they have with the business, product or service they promote, even if they’re providing their honest opinion,” the bureau said in the release.

Continue Reading

Tagging @politicsofcanada