FireFox 2 Release Candidate 1 is now available for download. This is not intended for widepsread distribution, but rather it is targeted to developers, testers, and those who’d like a sneak peak at the upcoming full Firefox 2.0 release. RC 1 is much more polished than the last beta release, and is nearly ready for general use. However, if you do use customizations and extensions, it’s quite likely that a good number of them won’t yet be compatible.

If you are looking to try out RC 1, also known by its code name “Bon Echo,” keep in mind that this will replace any existing FireFox installation on your computer. Past version 2 betas would install along side your previously installed version of FireFox. Installing RC 1 won’t erase your bookmarks or extensions, however, as noted previously, many of the extensions might not yet work. But give it a little time, and I’m sure the developers will have the extensions ready for the new version.

Firefox 2.0 does not introduce many major new features, but instead improves upon what has already been added in past versions. FireFox 2.0’s main aim is to fix any bugs left in past versions and improve upon them, which seems to have been done pretty well. A few of the new features include built-in anti-phishing that warns you about known phishing sites, session saving, improved RSS handling, and major tab handling upgrades, amongst other things. It also has a really handy in-line spell checker will indicate words you may have misspelled and make suggestions for replacement words, which is helpful if you frequently post on online forums and message boards. Mozilla has created a complete list of new features in the release notes found here.
The next scheduled release - FireFox Release Candidate 2 - will be available the first week of October. The full public release of FireFox 2.0 is scheduled to occur near the end of October.

There are wild guesses and some informed arguments on whether site-wide or single home page links should be seeked for when you are building backlinks for your site.

These are some of the meats from ongoing discussions:

• If you aim to maximize your PR and direct referral traffic, site-wide links help you better.
• If your primary concern is SERP, obtaining home page links from relevant good sites is a better approach.
• If your site is new, securing site-wide links will help it get indexed quickly and deeply by search engines.
• A site-wide link on a site with thousands of pages may be flagged as keyword spamming by Google; MSN and Yahoo tend to be more tolerant to such linkage.

As a means to avoid being flagged as unnatural linkage patterns by Google, one tactic suggested by several SEO experts is, instead of getting a site-wide link, to place your link on a “pre-sell” page of a related website, which is linked to site-wide on that site. With the site-wide linkage, such a pre-sell page will be considered important within the site by search engines, and your link on that page will also be able to claim high weight from that site.

There are many webmasters who are spending countless hours trying to manually trade and buy legitimate links to help improve their web site’s search engine rankings and page rank. However, there is a much easier way for webmasters to get many more back links for less work in a shorter amount of time. A Press Release is a great way to reach editors and web site owners and will help you get your message out to the general public, both online and offline. If you write an effective press release about something new and interesting about your web site, it will get picked up very quickly by a number of blogs and other online news sources, who in turn will provide your web site with many backlinks. Getting a post about your web site or new company on sites such as Tech Crunch and others could drive thousands of unique visitors to your site and have a significant impact on your ranking in the search engines.

Not only is a press releases great in terms of SEO, it helps spread the word about your company and often times, it is picked up by a number of magazines and newspapers who may print a related article to help get more coverage and generate buzz.

If you are unsure of how a press release works, there are a number of experts who will help you at rates varying from $10 to $500 and often times, and cost does not always determine quality. You just want to get someone who has gotten results in the past and has the experience necessary to launch a successful public relations campaign.

Site of the day:
SEO-friendly phpLD Directory List

The most comprehensive and oldest list of SEO-friendly phpLD directories out there. If you just started a new directory powered by phpLD script, this is the ultimate directory resource site that you do not want to miss. It lists all the phpLD directories for free. So if you run a phpLD directory, this is a chance to get it exposed to search engines, directory submitters and potential customers by listing there at no cost. Note that if your directory is NOT powered by phpLD script, do not bother to submit it as it will be rejected. Again, this offer is only available to phpLD directory owners.

While we were promoting our directory, we came across several directory lists
which show the top ranking directories out there.

Here are some:

ILQ-based directory ranking:
http://www.seocompany.ca/directory/top-web-directories.html

The ranking is based on ILQ (Inbound Link Quality), which is supposed to capture the quality of inbound links from yahoo, dmoz, edu and gov sites. They assign different weights for inbound links from yahoo (1), dmoz (30), edu (45) and gov (67), and then do the weighted sums of all the inbound links. There is some controversy whether we should consider backlinks from edu and gov much more authoritative than others. For example, one can easily obtain backlinks from personal homepages hosted at edu sites.

Seomoz’s page strengh based directory ranking:
http://www.avivadirectory.com/strongest-directories/

The ranking criteria include a mix of backlink counts/quality, traffic-level, pagerank, domain age, search engine ranking, etc. Combining such multi-dimensional data to calculate meaningful “page strength” is by no means easy. Apparently the page strength result shown are rather sensitive to tweaking factors. Also, some of the factors being used are not a good indicator for page strength. For example, Alexa ranking and domain age may assign unwaranted high strength for those sites hosted at popular web sites as their subdomains (e.g., blogspot.com). Although their attempt to come up with an “unbiased” metric for measuring the importance of a web site is well-received, there seems to be room for improvement.

We are happy to announce our new Romow directory to the world. Many directory owners make a common mistake by stopping developing their directories after the grand opening day, and hoping that the value of their directories will continue to grow over time. Creating a directory with some nice custom template/logo and well-laid out categories is only the first step. A “quality” directory needs constant care and development afterwards, in terms of maintaining editorial integrity, keeping directory listings up-to-date, developing backlinks, and making various other marketing and promotional efforts. Having said that, we can assure you that our Romow directory will grow into one of few “quality” directories out there. So stay tuned!