Google is now testing a flash-based search engine which shows thumbnails of the results in the right part of the SERP. Although I can see the reasons for implementing flash into a search engine, it looks pretty well but some of the users might encounter difficulties while using the technology. I'm not sure that Flash can be faster than AJAX but, as I said, SearchMash works without any lag. However, this special flavor of the search product is compatible with Firefox and Internet Explorer, any other browser such as Opera being incompatible. The thumbnails are provided Snap.com, a service which is already implemented into numerous websites on the web.
"This is where detailed information about the currently selected result appears. For web results this may include an image preview of the website, a brief snippet from the page, and additional links. The links allow you to go straight to the site homepage, perform the same search including results only from that site, and open a cache of the page in case it is no longer available," the SearchMash FAQ describes the result preview.
Besides the search results, SearchMash is now also providing tips which might improve your searching experience with several hidden tricks. "Throughout your search you may see tips appear here. There are context sensitive and give clues how to use advanced features. Any given tip will only appear a few times at most. You may disable tips via the options on the left," the same source adds.
Personally, I don't see the results preview as such an important improvement because some of the users might find them really annoying. Also, I'm not sure there are so many searchers who would like to view the page preview of their results unless they are looking for a website having its appearance in mind.
Source: Flash Based Search Engine
Saturday, October 27, 2007
Monday, October 22, 2007
233 Social Networking Sites
List Of Social Networking sites. i found this valuable list from Vandelay design
TECHNOLOGY:
Slashdot
Dzone - Developers
CSS Globe
DNHour - Domain Name News
Pixel Groovy - Web design
Design Float - Web design
Leet Daily
DevelopersNiche
INTERNET MARKETING:
NEWS:
Digg
Netscape
Reddit
Newsvine
News Heat - Politics
Sk*rt
Shoutwire
Wobblog
Content Pop
Blogg-Buzz
BOOKMARKING:
del.icio.us
Ma.gnolia
Furl
AllMyFavorites
Blinklist
Blogmarks
Blummy
BuddyMarks
BookmarkTracker
Chipmark
Connectedy
De.lirio.us
Dogear
Favoritoo
FeedMeLinks
Foxmarks
Fungow
Linkatopia
Livemarks
Mobilicio.us
Mylinkvault
Socializer
SHOPPING:
AgentB
Dealigg
Yub
BiddingBuddies - For Ebay members
ThisNext
Zebo
Judy’s Book
Deal Comet
MUSIC/POP CULTURE:
Purevolume - Music
Last.fm
Buzznet
MOG
Soundpedia
IM/MOBILE:
Twitter
Pownce
FlickIM
IMified
Radar
Zannel
PHOTO SHARING:
Flickr
Photbucket
Fotolog
Fotki
My Opera
Zoomr
Text America
Picli
VIDEO SHARING:
YouTube
Broadcaster
Panjea
Revver
Viddler
Video Bomb
Video Sift
FASHION/CLOTHING:
Threadless - T-shirts
Stylehive
EDUCATION/BOOKS:
Shelfari
LibraryThing
BookCrossing
Good Reads
Book Tribes
Connect via Books
qoolsqool
ARTS:
Humble Voice - Art, music, video, photography
Virb - Music, art, fashion, film and more
imeem - Music, videos, photos
deviantART
SOCIAL ACTION:
TakingITGlobal
Care2 - Social Issues/Humanities
Hugg - Environmental
Planet Change - Environmental
CULTURES/FOREIGN LANGUAGES:
Amina - Chechen Republic
Wamba - Spanish social network
Black Planet - African American
Hyves - Dutch
IRC Galleria - Finland
iWiW - Hungary
LunarStorm - Sweden
Playahead - Sweden
MiGente - Latino
Mixi - Japan
Nexopia - Canada
ClubGh - Ghana
Acelerame - Spanish (cars)
Scoopeo - French
Yigg - German
StudiVZ - German students
LINK/WEBSITE SHARING:
StumbleUpon
Blue Dot
Trailfire
Ensiting
CARS AND AUTO:
CarDomain
AutoSpies
Boompa
Motorpulse
TRAVEL:
TravBuddy
WAYN
Gusto
Couch Surfing
Travellerspoint
Woophy
EveryTrail - GPS
Trip Advisor
TripUp
REAL ESTATE:
CONSUMER REVIEWS:
RateItAll
Yelp
Cork’d - Wine reviews
Chowhound - Food
Epinions
PROFESSIONAL:
LinkedIn
MeetIn
Ryze
Xing
Biznik
Cofoundr - Entrepreneurial
Fast Pitch
Konnects
StartupNation - Entrepreneurial
Startupping - Internet entrepreneurs
Tapped In - Educational professionals
Ecademy
DATING:
CONNECTING WITH FRIENDS:
Classmates
Friends Reunited
Dodgeball
Graduates
Meetup
MyYearbook
Reunion
ConnectU
HEALTH/MEDICAL:
Sermo - Doctors
Disect Medicine
Walker Tracker
Who is Sick?
TEEN:
eCRUSH
eSpintheBottle
Piczo
Profile Heaven
Sconex
Student.com
Stardoll
KIDS:
PARENTING/FAMILY:
Babbiz
Moxie Moms
GreatSchools - Parents review schools
FAMILIES/GENEALOGY:
RELIGIOUS/CHRISTIAN:
MyChurch
Blogs4God
Xianz
GodTube - Video sharing
SPORTS:
Joga - Soccer (Football)
Sportsvite
Ballhype - Sports
ScoreGuru
SportsCast
SportsFlip
GAMES:
Gaia - Games and anime
Game Diggity
GuildCafe
WeeWorld
PETS:
Dogster - Dog lovers
Catster - Cat lovers
Fuzzster
Pikapet
GENERAL:
MySpace
Facebook
Trig
Friendster
Orkut
Bebo
CyWorld
LiveJournal
Grono
Tribe
Hi5
Jaiku
Multiply
Netlog
Passado
Skyrock
Tagged
AIM Pages
Yahoo! 360
Everyone’s Connected
Windows Live Spaces
Zaadz
MISCELLANEOUS:
9rules
Beautiful Society - List and vote for your favorite things
43 Things - Goal sharing
Consumating
Dandelife - A social biography network
DontStayIn - Clubbing
Experience Project - Share Life Experiences
Faceparty - “The biggest party on Earth”
Gather
Recruiting.com
Ning - Create your own network
Searchles
Vampire Freaks
Faqqly - Community of questions and answers
Ficlets - Collaborative writing
Global Voices
Spout - Films
Prosper - People to people lending
DigStock - Financial
Clipmarks
Listible
Rummble - Texting
Friday, October 19, 2007
Collection Of SEO Tools
Again I found this valuable list from Vandelay design.
Hatsoff to him!!!!!!!!!!
PAGE ANALYSIS:
- SEOmoz Page Strength Tool - A useful tool that gives an overall look at the strength of a page.
- Sitening’s SEO Analyzer - See if your pages are structured to achieve high search engine rankings.
- Self SEO’s Page Speed Checker - Test the load time of your pages and your competitor’s pages.
- GoogleRankings.com - Check the use of keywords and phrases on your site.
- Popuri - See several items such as PageRank and inbound links all at once.
- Keyword Density Analysis - See how frequently you are using certain words and phrases.
- Meta Tag Analyzer - How are search engine spiders seeing your meta tags?
- Code to Text Ratio - Check for code bloat.
- Strongest Subpages Tool - Finds the 30 strongest subpages on your domain.
- Similar Page Checker - Avoid duplicate content.
- SEO Analysis Tool - Measures the ranking potential of a page.
- WebSitePulse - A few different tools to test your sites performance.
- Website Grader - Get a score for your site and even compare it to competitors if you want.
- Watchfire WebXACT - Test for quality, accessibility, and privacy issues.
STATS:
- Google Analytics - The leading free stats program.
- AWStats
- StatCounter
- AddFreeStats
- OneStat
- Smart Tracking
- Alexa - See where your site ranks.
BLOG STATS:
- FeedBurner - Stats on your feed and your subscribers.
- pMetrics - from Performancing.
- pMetrics Plugin- Extending pMetrics.
- IceRocket - Free stats program for blogs.
- Technorati - See who’s linking to you.
STATS PLUS:
- Crazy Egg - Provides visual data about your visitors.
- Mint - An extensible, self-hosted web site analytics program.
WEBMASTER TOOLS:
- Google Webmaster Tools - Lots of information that shows you how Google sees your site.
- Web CEO - A collection of a number of useful tools. Free and paid editions.
CHECK AND TRACK SEARCH ENGINE RANKINGS:
- Sitening’s SERP Tracker - Test your page’s optimization.
- Search Engine Rankings Checker - From Mike’s Marketing Tools.
- Google Banned Checker - Has the largest search engine in the world banned your website? Find out here.
- Number of Pages Indexed - How many pages do you have indexed by search engines?
- Website SEO Checkup - Make sure you’re ready to get high search engine rankings.
- GeoTargeting Detection Tool from SEOmoz - Determine how well your site is targeted to country specific search engines.
GOOGLE PAGERANK:
- PageRank Prediction - You need a minimum of 100 backlinks.
- Smart PageRank - Check your PR.
REPUTATION AND BUZZ MONITORING:
- Google Alerts - Have preset alerts sent to you by email.
- co.mments - Monitor comments on blogs.
- Conversation Tracker from BlogPulse
- Trend Search from BlogPulse
- Keotag - See if blogs are using your company name in the tags of their blog posts.
- BoardTracker - Watch for mentions of your company in forums.
LINKS:
- Dead Links tool from W3C - Find broken links.
- Link Popularity Checker - From Mike’s Marketing Tools.
- Xenu’s Link Sleuth - Find broken links.
- Backlinks and Anchor Text - See who’s linking to you and what anchor text they are using.
- Reciprocal Links Checker - Do you have agreements with others for reciprocal links? Check them here.
SPIDER SIMULATOR:
CSS ANALYSIS TOOLS:
- Clean CSS - Formatting and Optimizing
- CSS Tidy - Optimizer and parser.
- CSS Redunancy Checker - Redundancy is easy to do with CSS. Fix it with this.
- CSS Analyzer - A validator plus.
VALIDATORS:
WEBSITE PERFORMANCE:
GOOGLE ADSENSE:
- Free Charts and Graphs
- AdSense Notifier - Shows your AdSense stats in the status bar.
BROWSER COMPATIBILITY:
- BrowserShots - See screenshots of your page in a number of different browsers.
- Ready.mobi - Test your site for use with mobile browsers.
OTHER:
- Geotargeting - find the location of your host’s servers
- Find Your Site’s IP Address
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Friday, September 14, 2007
Social Media Marketing | Social Media Optimization
What is Social Media Marketing?
Social media marketing is a relatively new marketing concept which makes use of social networks and social media sites to further online marketing opportunities. It involves publicity, viral marketing and buzz creation. The goal is to create a visitor experience that is unique and generates a desire for guests to:
- Continually revisit the site
- Link to the site
- Virally spread the word about the site
With the development of Web 2.0, the content of a site should create a buzz, be fresh, and be interactive.
What is Social Media Optimization?
Social media optimization makes a site visible within the social media search engines, make content easy to link to and tag, as well as being involved in social media conversations. Once optimized in this way it can bring increased traffic directly from social media search engines. Social media is in a constant state of change. Therefore it is important that developments are constantly observed and incorporated.
Content on the site can include
- Written text
- Photos
- Graphics
- Video
- Podcasts
- Games
- Competitions
- Blogs or Forums
Example of social media platforms include:
- Blogs
- Forums
- Wikis
- Video Casting
- Photo Distribution
- Podcasts
- Social Networking Space
- Social Bookmarking and Tagging Opportunities
The goal is of social media marketing is to publicize all types of web content.
What are the benefits of Social Media Marketing? What can you expect from a social media marketing campaign?
- Increase Brand Awareness
- Understand your Customers
- Generate New Business
Social media marketing and optimization developed from Web 2.0 which refers to a second generation of the web spotlighting online collaboration and sharing among users.
Two concepts which are closely related to social media marketing and optimization are link baiting and RSS feeds.
Link Bait
Links are important for search engine positioning. Great content can be used as ‘link bait.’ This can attract natural links from a variety of sources back to your site. This means that your links come from a diverse range of sites which is viewed as natural by search engines. This is done by publicizing the content and getting people to talk about the content, discussing it on forums and blogs, tagging it on sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl etc., emailing the information to others, and linking to it from their own sites.
RSS Feeds (Syndication of Content)
RSS is a XML-based system that allows users to subscribe to their favorite websites. They can use RSS to read the latest news, press, articles, etc. Additionally, many sites and blogs are set up to collect and display the RSS feeds. Therefore, content from your site is positioned on these sites, spreading the reach of your brand.
For business owners social networks bring in traffic as well as giving an opportunity to interact with your audience. What does social media marketing need?
- Creativity
- Marketing
- Personality
Elixir Systems have a wealth of experience with social media marketing strategies and have been using these to further their client’s online business goals.
Tuesday, August 21, 2007
28 SEO Steps to Win Search Engine Rankings
Recently I found the collection of information about the On-Page & Off-Page Optimization from http://yourpracticeonline.rediffblogs.com/.
I hope it will be very useful for optimizing a website!
Search Engines are built to help the searchers. Search Engines strive to put the best fit/standard websites on top rankings so that searchers get their required info within few clicks.
How do Search Engines know a website's standard and its relevance with searched keywords? What are the steps you should follow for a complete SEO to improve your website's rankings?
This article covers Search Engine Optimization in two levels - the first is On-page optimization, and the next is Off-Page Optimization. An effective On-page optimization together with good Off-page optimization will improve your Search Engine Rankings.
On-Page Optimization
- Define your Business& Target Audience
- Dont Purchase a New Domain
- Choosing your Domain Name
- Make your Website look Clean & Simple
- Evaluate your Website
- Observe your competitor
- Research on Keywords
- Structure File name
- Search Engine Friendly Sitemap
- Write an Attractive Title
- Meta Description Tag
- Meta Keyword Tag
- Have Robot tags
- Alt Tags for images
- H1 & H2 heading format
- Improve Keyword Prominence, Density & Proximity
- Make Content look rich
- Keyword Rich Anchor Text
- Make Flash files work for you
- Bring your PDF files on SERPs
- Search Engines
- Directories
- Forums
- Blogs
- Articles
- Press Releases
- Bookmarks
- Classifieds
The first step in any business starts with analysis. Determine what kind of services your website is to provide and what kind of audience you want for your website?
If you already have a good domain name don’t try to purchase a new one, as some search engines look for the age of the website as a ranking factor.
If you are planning for a new website, try to get a domain name with keywords included. If you target regional customers, you can have your domain based on the region, say for example .uk or .au or .in
Now you have a domain name and you know whom you want to target. Website design is the key factor which keeps your visitor to stay for a while in your website and navigate your services. Make sure your website design has a good feel & look, clean and simple.
If you have an existing website, and now you want to do SEO for it, then evaluate your website:
Navigation structure - think in a visitor’s point of view - Can someone navigate and reach the product/services they are looking for? Make your navigation user friendly, no visitor should leave your website due to confused navigation.
Check for W3 compatibility of your website.
Check for any broken links in your website and fix if any.
Your website should load fast so that it doesn’t check on your visitors’ patience.
Find your competitor websites. Analyze and gain knowledge on their tactics, the keywords they use, the techniques applied. With the help of this analysis you will learn what is working and what is not working, which will help in your SEO process.
List the Keywords your target audience would search for and the ones used by your competitors. Make use of keyword research tools like Overture to know more on your related search terms. Now refine your list and make your final list of target keywords.
If you have control over your file names - modify file names with your keywords included.
A well structured search engine friendly sitemap can help Search Engines to index all your pages. With good anchor text for your navigation links you can improve your rankings
Why is your web page title so important? The web page title is displayed in SERPs which in turn help in attracting your visitors. Web searchers do their search with a term and look for titles in the result pages that best fit their search. Hence make your title attractive, with targeted keywords included. Try to incorporate related keywords too. For example you target for Montessori School, you can write title as ‘ Montessori School, the Preschool for your Children’. (in this way you add 2 related terms).
Description tag is also displayed in snippets of any SERPs. This description helps to motivate searchers to visit your website. Make an effective and optimized description tag. Snippets are also taken from surrounding text of the searched keyword. You may need to edit your content a little to make your description look good.
Though there is saying that Search Engines like Google doesn’t look for Meta keyword tag, there are some smaller search engines, which still follow the conventional way and spider the keywords tag. So there is no harm in making of the Meta keyword tags. Your meta keyword should contain keywords that appears in your body text.
If you don’t want any of your files of your website to be indexed, say an image or a text file, you can write your robot file insisting the search engines not to crawl those pages.
As the name infers it acts as an alternate text for any image. This tag is both user friendly and search engine friendly. Search engines cannot read images; instead it indexes the alt tag given for any image and assumes it as the description for the image. This alt tag is not so important by Search Engines, as many spammers try to put irrelevant alt tag for the images to improve their rankings. However for an image link with a proper alt tag (keywords included) will work as great internal anchor link.
Though no one is sure on whether this helps in rankings, try applying the header options, as this practice is good for any web development
Keyword prominence will increase if you have your keyword at the beginning of text part of your webpage. Keyword density refers to the ratio (percentage) of keywords contained within the total text content of the page. Keyword proximity refers to the closeness between two or more keywords. And this is yet another factor which has not much proven records but still exist in SEO practice.
As many SEO experts say content is the king. Optimized content with keywords included, along with other SEO factors working well the website can rank well in Search Engines
Anchor text for both internal links and external links is powerful element for Search Engine rankings. You can notice websites which doesn’t have the keyword in their web pages rank well which is all because of their anchor text of their inbound links.
Here a good article on Link Anchor Text and Search Engine Optimization to understand the importance of anchor text in Search Engine Optimization
Its better to avoid including flash files into your website. But under compelling circumstances, you can try adding keyword rich text somewhere in your file, since Search Engines like Google can index the text part of flash files
PDF file is a good source for keyword rich content. Most Search Engines can read & index PDF files and a few search engines shows PDF files in SERPs too. Make sure you have a good title and file name for your PDF file
Have a look Google guidelines for Webmasters
Off-Page Optimization
Why Search Engines give so much of importance for inbound links?
It is easy for any website owner to optimize their website with good content, navigation, title, etc. But does that mean it’s a good website and people would love to check it out?
Search Engines try to know and evaluate the standard of a website through many factors and the most significant of them is incoming/inbound links. When a website receives inbound links from related & standard websites, it obviously means that it is worth looking at.
Search Engines learn about your website through inbound links and to be precise it’s through anchor text.
So natural linking with different & targeted keyword rich anchor text works great for any website.
Here are a few ways to increase your inbound links/ backlinks.
Submit your website manually to search engines including regional search engines.
There are many directories available online for free submission. Submit your website into the category that best fits your services, most importantly with good anchor text. Try submitting in your own regional directories to improve your local business.
Participate in your industry related forums & discussion boards. Post your comments, thoughts and also provide a link to your website (without spam).
Having your own official blog helps to post your company’s updates, product release, etc., and also inbound links. There are directories for submitting blogs. Submit your blog with proper keyword tags which helps in your blog listing.
Write keyword & content rich articles on your own and post in article junctions available online. There are article junctions which accept articles in HTML format, so you can include your links with good anchor text. Write fresh articles on your topic, post and see your traffic increasing.
You can post Press Releases, which also works like Article junctions & directories; however it should look more like a Press Release and not like an article.
Social book marking - it serves two purposes: It gets you incoming links and it popularizes your website in your community. Make sure you put keyword rich tags for your bookmarks.
You can see some websites displaying free classifieds. You can put your advertisements there with link to your website.
Friday, August 03, 2007
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