Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) techniques are very important for websites to hit that coveted number number 1 spot on related keyword searches.

With Drupal there are some specific tools that can assist with this. The major Search Engines, (Yahoo, Bing and Google) provide tools to do this and there are some Drupal modules that work with this.

The following process takes you through the entire process - excluding signing up for the accounts at Yahoo, Google and Bing.

Before starting make accounts (or sign in with your existing accounts) to each of these services:

• Google https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/home
• Yahoo https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites
• Bing http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmasters/#

Then make sure you have a current download of these modules:

• Global Redirect http://drupal.org/project/globalredirect
• Site Verifications http://drupal.org/project/site_verify
• Xmlsitemap http://drupal.org/project/xmlsitemap

I have had a lot of articles, news and other tech information filling up my browser and its time to de-clutter before Christmas.

Microsoft Excel

INDEX -MATCH - a much better lookup function combination than using VLOOKUP or HLOOKUP. Charley Kyd writes a very good instructive post on using this combination. We use this a lot where the failings of VLOOKUP make it impossible to use.

MSDN announces the new developer roadmap for Excel and VBA. Interesting reading and has lots of useful links.

Power Pivot is an amazing AddIn for Excel 2010. I have written about Power Pivot before. Dick Kusleika has written a simple function to determine whether an Excel Workbook contains power pivot data.

Microsoft Outlook

Conditional formatting and highlighting your emails based on content, subject, sender etc.

Roy MacLean asks some interesting questions about storing data in Outlook. I love Outlook and think it is a very good tool, however there are lots of limitations with using it. Mind you I don't see any other email client out there that can do everything that Outlook can do or even half as well in most cases. Still Roy has some good points.

Social media integration - its not just about technology - its also about community.

The biggest buzzword on the web right now and in advertising and marketing is social media integration. I am having more and more meetings each week with clients asking how they do this.

We have a lot of technology that we can throw at this to make it easy to work - and the tech stuff is pretty easy. Most of the major players are now providing "open" or at least partially open access to data.

But none of it is any use if you are not able to make the community part work. Integrating your brand marketing and awareness with social media is not like traditional advertising, where you threw stuff out at people and barely listened to feedback it at all. At most my experience with big brand advertising has been that the feedback loop was filtered through ad campaign managers, 3rd party survey random sample providers and the odd bit of internal email dealing with the one or two very angry customers!

Outlook 2010 has some pretty sweet features. Here are some of the new ones.

Use the Outlook Social Connector with Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and Windows Live

Today, we are announcing that you can use the Outlook Social Connector with Facebook and Windows Live. Our partners LinkedIn and MySpace are also releasing updates for their providers. All of the latest providers appear on the provider page.

Download the social connector software

Download each of the social connectors

Choosing the right communication modality with the contact card