Firefox 3 launch a success: 8 million downloads in 24 hours: “Mozilla’s Firefox 3 release event yesterday was an epic success. The servers logged over 8 million downloads during the 24-hour download day, and Mozilla has declared victory after exceeding its initial goal of 5 million downloads.”
(Via digg.)
Four VC firms are betting that LinkedIn, the social network for your business contacts, is worth a cool $1 billion. Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners and Bessemer Venture Partners announced today that they are taking a 5 percent stake in the company for $53 million.
(Via Wired News.)
Is your web site working hard enough for you? Run it through the following 20 point fitness assessment to find out:
- Is your site fully search engine compatible? Are all your pages being indexed by the major search engines?
- Do you track your visitor statistics on a regular basis? Do you use the information provided by your visitor statistics to improve your site?
- Is your web site accessible to visually-impaired visitors? Does it meet the international standards set down by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI)?
- Do you know which sites and search engines provide you with the most traffic? Do you use this information to improve your traffic further?
- Do you track the source of all reported errors in your site statistics and fix them promptly?
- Do you know which keywords your site was found for in the search engines? Have you conducted keyword research to determine what search terms your target markets are looking for so you can optimize for them?
- Does your web site HTML code validate to W3 standards? Do you check for validation regularly?
- Does your site contain zero broken links? Do you check for and fix broken links regularly?
- Has your site been fully search engine optimized to integrate your target search terms into your Page Titles, META Tags and visible page text?
- Have you created and submitted an XML sitemap to Google Sitemaps?
- Have you created and submitted a sitemap to Yahoo Site Explorer?
- Have you checked to see if your site meets Google’s Webmaster Guidelines?
- Do you measure your visitor sign-ups and conversions on a regular basis? Do you tweak your landing page copy to improve the conversion rates?
- Is your site navigation intuitive and are your visitors following the navigation paths you intended?
- Do you encourage feedback from your site visitors and provide an obvious way for them to provide such feedback?
- Are there at least 250 words of text on your home page to satisfy search engines?
- Does your site contain a visible, text-based site map to aid user navigation?
- Do you have an ongoing link building campaign running to secure more incoming links to your site and improve your site’s link popularity score?
- Does your site have a high percentage of repeat visitors? Are the majority of your visitors staying on your site for more than a minute?
- Do your search engine referrals and site traffic figures grow each month?
Unless you can answer yes to all the questions in the above checklist, your web site is not working hard enough for you and needs a workout. Get to it!
By Kalena Jordan
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