On May 18, 2009 Wolfram|Alpha was officially launched. Basically, it is a web tool that could be as important as any Search Engine or rather as important as Google (most popular of the breed). It is the brain child of British born physicist Stephen Wolfram and has been developed by Wolfram Research.

Wolfram|Alpha is an online service that computes and provides results to factual queries. In Google when we search for something, it provides us a list of web sites, documents and links while the same when computed at Wolfram|Alpha would provide a web page with statistical data. This should prove to be a boon to college students, researchers and the like. So out of Google, Wikipedia and Wolfram|Alpha, what do we use and when? Technically, while Google’s automated search algorithms crawl tens of millions of web sites to gather data, Wikipedia is a human-driven effort. Meanwhile, Wolfram|Alpha, uses a team of dedicated experts to add, evaluate, judge, and parse data.

I decided to give this new computational knowledge engine a try and choose “distance between Sun and Earth” as my query.

The results from Google were about 2,060,000 links and pages and the first link that it showed me was that to Wikipedia but not the actual figure.

Opening up Wikipedia provided me not only the figures but lot of interesting facts and data as well.

Feeding Wolfram|Alpha with the above query gave me the numbers in astronomical units – something which would not interest a common person. What I needed was either Kilometers or Miles.

The bottom line? Well, Wolfram|Alpha is surely promising as it offers a good amount of organized data along with charts and graphs. Moreover, Wolfram’s legacy application Mathematica has been put to use in Wolfram|Alpha and so this means that the site will shine in parsing mathematic queries. Maybe I’ve just scratched the surface of the knowledge engine here, but the fact is – how many Internet users would be interested in the statistical data.

Website: http://www.wolframalpha.com/

In the first part of this series, we discussed how to Install Exchange Server 2007 SP1 in a coexistence environment with Exchange 2003. For those who missed the article, they can view the same by clicking here.

Now that we have installed the Exchange Server 2007 SP1 in the organization, it’s time to move the user Mailboxes to Exchange 2007. Moving mailboxes is a very easy task and can be accomplished by using the Exchange Management Console or by using the PowerShell commands from command line. In this post I’m going to use the Exchange Management Console.

So, let’s open the Exchange Management Console and in the tree on the left, navigate to the Recipient Configuration and expand it. Under the node, select Mailbox.

Here we can see in the results pane that now we are able to see all the mailboxes that we have on our Exchange 2003 server and they are all marked as Legacy Mailboxes. This means that all the mailboxes are still on the Exchange 2003 Server and need to be moved to Exchange 2007.

In this example, we will move the Administrator mailbox. So we choose the account, right-click it and choose Move Mailbox.

The next screen provides us options as to where we want to move the mailbox and here we need to choose the mailbox database. I assume here that the Storage Groups and Mailbox Database are already created on Exchange Server 2007. If not, then that’s the first thing that you need to do.

In my example, I’m going to move the Administrator mailbox to the General Mailbox Database.

There now that we have selected the Mailbox Database, Exchange 2007 automatically appends it with the Server Name and the Storage Group. Click Next to proceed.

On the next screen we are presented with lot of options as what should be done if the Move Mailbox process encounters any errors or finds any corrupt messages in the mailbox. Either we can Skip the entire mailbox move or we can allow Exchange Server to move the mailbox and simply Skip the corrupted messages. Moreover, if we go ahead with that option, we can even define how many corrupted messages should be skipped before the Move Mailbox stops the process. Since, I would not like to skip any messages, I’ll choose “Skip the Mailbox” and move further.

Next we are presented with the scheduling screen which allows us to schedule the Move Mailbox process. This helps in particular when you are in a production environment with heavy traffic and want to schedule this unattended during off-peak hours. Moving mailboxes does not take much time and is entirely dependent on the number of items in the mailbox. Even in a production environment, while moving mailboxes, the user will hardly notice any issues and after moving the mailbox, the user may simply need to restart Outlook to get everything working again.

In the scheduling option, you can choose to move the mailboxes during off peak hours and also you have a choice to cancel the running task if the move mailbox task runs for certain hours. I’ll chose “Immediately” and move ahead in this example.

That’s the last screen that we see before we actually tell exchange to move the mail box. It allows you to do a quick round up of what we have selected and what options have been set. Once we have reviewed the options, click on “Move”.

While the mailbox is being moved, we can see the progress, the number of items found, the number of items moved, etc. If you select multiple mailboxes, note that by default Exchange 2007 moves only 4 mailboxes at a time. The remaining mailboxes will be shown as “Pending”.  Lot of checks are performed in the background by the Exchange Server during this process.

If all goes well, the final screen that we see is the confirmation showing us the status of the Move Mailbox process. Click on “Finish” to close the wizard. That’s it to Moving Mailboxes from Exchange 2003 to Exchange 2007.

For all those who have a web site but do not have a budget to hire professional SEO/SEM companies, I’ve compiled a list of some basic items which can help to get your sites listed and show up in the search results of search engines. Do remember that Search Engine Optimization and Web Marketing is almost like rocket science and requires lot of efforts and patience  to achieve and maintain good position in search engines.

We all know that the Internet is numero uno when it comes to finding information. People across the globe are using the Internet to get ideas about products, compare prices, perform online banking, make purchases, etc. There are millions of web sites in this virtual world and people basically use keywords to get relevant information. When a search is performed on the search engine and if your web site is not listed in the search, it clearly means that you do not exist on the Internet. Why? Because the search engine results did not list your website and so people do not know about you. If you are still under the impression that once your web site is uploaded, people will find you – you are mistaken and its time to rewind and give this perception a kick.

So what does it take to get popular? How can we assure that people find us? The answer is simple – make search engines fall in love with your website. Here are some basic list of items that you can handle on your own to start with:

Title Tags: The title is what we see in the top left corner of our browser window. The title tag is one of the most important factor in achieving high search engine rankings. Ensure that the title tag provides as much detail as possible about your web site. Do not stuff the title tag with irrelevant information. Instead pick out relevant keywords from the web site content and put those keywords in the title.

URL: The URL is basically your web site address. For example, my website URL is http://www.vishalvasu.com. But if you are reading this post from a link, you will notice a longer URL. See how the URL is seperated by hyphes? It basically has keywords stuffed in there as I’ve planned by page name and directory structure to accomodate that. Again, do not overdo this as there are chances that search engine may penalize your web site.

Relevant Content: Playing around with keywords, title tags, etc. simply does not help until you have relevant content on your website to support the same. Remember – Content is the King. Make use of the right amount of keywords (keyword density), use few images and provide ALT tags for images as search engines cannot read images, make use of H1, H2 and H3 tags in the content. Generally the more useful, interesting and relevant content a website has the more successful it will be.

Periodic Updates: Search engines like fresh and new content. Not adding anything new to the web sites at regular intervals means stale content and search engines will lose all interest in your site. Think up of ideas to share product information, announcement of some weekly specials, news postings, newsletter marketing, blogging, etc. Periodic updates act like a good deo and attract the search engines towards your site.

Link Building: Search engines while indexing your web site look for other web sites which link to your web site. This way they try and build up the importance which in professional terms is called “ranking”. Try trading links with other websites which have similar or supporting content to your web site. For example, if your web site is selling gift articles, trading links with an online flower shop site could be benefical. Also, try and write some unique articles and submit them on the Internet to gain one-way backlinks. There is nothing as valuable as a one-way backlink from a high ranking web site.

Site Submission: Go ahead and submit your web site to search engines and directories like DMOZ, Yahoo, Google, etc. Also, try and submit to lot of relevant business directories on the Internet. There is lot of hidden benefit to this.

That being said, hopefully you should be able to get some good traffic.

Thanks for reading and good luck!

We all know that Search Engines are the primary resource by way of which the users of Internet can find websites and related information. It is by way of Search Engines that business generate inquiries and do business in unexplored markets. Building a web site and putting it on the Internet does not help. It needs to be promoted and marketed such that it get’s a good listing on the Search Engines.

Well, everyone wants their web site in good listing but not many achieve it. This is mainly because many of them fail to consider how search engines work and that’s what Search Engine Optimization is all about. Basically, we have three main things to do after a web site has been designed:

[1] Search Engine Optimization

[2] Search Engine Marketing

[3] Maintaining the Good Listing

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be termed as an active practice of optimizing a web site by improving its aspects such that search engines simply fall in love with it. The majority of web traffic is driven by major search engines – Yahoo!, MSN, Google and AskJeeves. Now, if your site cannot be found by search engines or your content cannot be put into their databases, you miss out on the incredible opportunities available to websites provided via search – people who want what you have visiting your site.

I know what you are thinking. Why can’t the Search Engine index my web site with doing any optimization? Well, let’s answer it this way. Assume that you go to a library and ask the librarian to give you a book on “travel”. Obviously, the librarian is going to come back to you asking for more information on what kind of travel – adventure, holiday’s abroad, wildlife, etc.

Now let’s go back to our electronic age librarian – search engine. The moment we put in a word like travel and hit the search button, the search engine does not ask us questions. It digs out all the information and presents it to us – though it may put in suggestions at the top or bottom of the search results. This is popularly know as “keywords” and the search engines will check to see if the search keywords appear near the top of a web page.

Each keyword has two main aspects – keyword relevancy to the content on the page and the keyword density. If this is not maintained properly and the use of the keywords is not justified, the web site is penelized. In short, now we know that keyword optimization is part of Search Engine Optimization.

Another aspect is the use of Title tags on the web page. A title is the heading that we see on the top of our browser’s left corner window. Changing your page titles is not necessarily going to help the page to do well for your target keywords if the page has nothing to do with the topic. Keywords and Title need to be reflected in the page content and that too at proper density.

Apart, from these, SEO involves web page content writing, sitemap building, HTML link building and rewriting, meta tags generation, description tag generation, valid HTML use, etc. There is lot of work and analysis involved and it takes up lot of time. The worst part is that we cannot actually see what “ACTUAL” results we are going to achieve unless an until the search engines have re-indexed the updated web pages.

Search engine optimization can be vital to a business because 90% of all online traffic is achieved through the various search engines. Therefore, knowing how to properly market your company through search engine optimization is virtually the only way to be found on the expansive Internet.

The next time you are on the Internet, search for your own site or your own name and see the results. Do not perform the search using your own business or persoanl name. You would be knowingthat and not others. Use generic keywords by which you think people should find your web site. See for yourself where and on which page of the search engine are you listed or for that matter, are you listed at all?

To summarize, search engine optimization is the tool that can ensure that your site will be listed within relevant search results, and as close as possible to the top 10 or top 20 listings for specific keywords.

Ignoring SEO is like a shop without any sign board, display window, business name or postal address. Potential customers will walk past your shop, not even realizing you are there. In the next parts I will cover Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and then in the future would be posting tips and articles on my web site on how to perform basic SEO and SEM.