'Google Me' Google's next social experiment?

"Google me" sounds like a lame pickup line delivered near closing time, but it might also be Google's latest attempt at becoming relevant in social media.

Kevin Rose, of Digg fame, got the speculation rolling Sunday with a tweet that Google was working on a social service called Google Me that would compete with Facebook, perhaps Google's biggest rival for attention on the Internet. On Tuesday, former Facebook executive and Quora founder Adam D'Angelo took things a little further by declaring on Quora that "this is not a rumor. This is a real project. There are a large number of people working on it. I am completely confident about this."

So what might Google Me actually be? No one seems to really know. But it does appear to be somehow related to one's Google Profile, a service that got a shot in the arm with the debut of Google Buzz earlier this year. Google Buzz lets users share links, pictures, and thoughts with friends who find them through their Google Profile, but Buzz hasn't exactly put a dent in Facebook's growth.

That could mean something that mimicked Facebook's news feed within a Google Profile, with status updates, new pictures, and ultimately a fair amount of requests for pitchforks or other digital farming equipment could be in the works at Google. A company representative did not immediately return a call seeking further comment.

Social media has been one of Google's most elusive goals. The company just hasn't produced anything that has moved the needle on social media: Orkut is probably having a good month with the Brazilians in the World Cup quarterfinals, but it doesn't resonate anywhere else. Google Buzz caused a huge privacy flap upon its debut and does not appear to have caught on with the general public once Google fixed those issues. Google Latitude has a decent user base but has been eclipsed by a location start-up--Foursquare--that it actually had the blueprints for in-house after acquiring Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley's earlier start-up, Dodgeball.

But Google has attempted to hit reset on its social strategy in 2010, and Google Me could be the first project designed entirely by that new group. If Google Me does come to pass, expect Google to do its homework on the privacy front (finally) and pitch the service as the anti-Facebook, with clear privacy controls and easily exported data.


Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30684_3-20009159-265.html

Current Link Building Updates

   A lot keeps changing in the search engine optimization (SEO) arena. For a link building company to remain relevant in their field, they need to keep themselves updated with the latest information so as to ensure their services remain effective. A lot has changed in SEO link building in the last year or so. The information below sums these changes and should help you a long way in improving the rank of your website.

The Addition of Website Speed as a Ranking Parameter
One of the most recent addition to Google's website ranking algorithm is the addition of the speed parameter. According to Matt Cutts, the SEO and search quality head in Google, speed was added as a parameter early 2010. He said that according to in-house researches in, it was revealed that internet searchers enjoy fast loading websites and spend more time on search sites. They also added tools on the Google tool box to assist web developers to improve on the loading speeds of a website. Matt however remarked that speed was only a minor parameter and their main parameter still remained as quality content. Therefore, the speed of your website and that of the site you are seeking SEO link building from needs to be fast loading.
Removal of Extra Weight of the.GOV and.EDU Websites
Another change to the SEO field was the removal of the extra weight that Google awarded to links from Gov and EDU websites. This was mainly due to the high amount of spam that was received by such sites. Government agents and EDU website owners complained of this and Google reduced the weight from such sites to that of a normal website. Therefore, if you are a linking company seeking to improve website ranking, seeking links from government websites and websites from educational institutions may not help much.
Linking to Low Quality Websites
Google has also tightened its surveillance on low quality websites with many links. This mainly targets the so called landing pages. Many internet marketers made one page websites and linked many inbound links to the website. Today, many of such websites are being penalized. If your a link building company for a website with a low content volume, you may need to build the website content first before aggressively seeking SEO linking.
Unnatural Linking
The other SEO issue that continues to gain weight in Google's ranking parameter is the naturalness of the links to a website. The assumption of Google in link building is that a link to a website is made because the person linking to the site thinks that the site has valuable information. However, SEO linking is more proactive. The link building company seek to build links to their website to convince Google that their clients site is relevant and important. However, this proactive approach means that many low quality websites can find their way to the top of Google search results. Therefore, to curb this, Google seeks for the naturalness of the links.
To look more natural, links need to be coming from diverse sources with different PR ranking. The links should also not all have the same anchor keyword as this is unnatural. Other unnatural SEO link building include having all your links from one type of linkage such as article submission websites, from blog comments or from forums only. To look more natural, link building company need to set links from news websites, product websites, old websites, new websites, Facebook, Twitter, social bookmarking sites, do follow as well as no follow sites.
Link Building Information That Remains Unchanged
Even with these new changes in SEO link building, the old rules still hold. Linking from high ranking PR website will always give you more link juice than linking from a low PR website. link building company need to look for links from a website in the same industry or niche as that of their client website as this will also always give you more ranking juice. When linking, you should also ensure that the page you are linking to does not have many outbound link as this dilutes the juice attributed to the individual links. Links from article submission sites also have less juice especially if the sites are not associated to a specific niche. You should also avoid link farms and bad neighborhood links.

 Article Source:
http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Latest-2010-SEO-Link-Building-Update&id=4650785

An Introduction to Linkbaiting

Linkbaiting (link baiting, linkbait, link bait etc) is a term that has increasingly being used around the blogosphere. 

You can see in the following technorati graph the increase in its use (this one is for the term ‘link bait’) in the blogs that they track over the past 360 days

As the term is used more and more I’ve also noticed an interesting debate emerge among bloggers (and search engine optimization types) over the idea of ‘link baiting’ and whether it’s a good thing or not. Some SEO companies have started to offer link baiting services while others are against the idea and believe that the benefits of link baiting are the same benefits of good web practices. 

As the term’s crept into blogging more and more over the past months I thought it might be a good topic for a series. 

Over the next few days I’ll be writing a series of posts covering:

• What is Link Baiting?
• Is Link Bait bad?
• What are the Benefits of Linkbaiting?
• What types of Linkbait are there?
• Techniques and strategies for Good link baiting

I’m sure I’ll cover more ground as we go along – but lets start with the first couple.

‘What is Link Baiting?’

A lot could (and has been) said about it. So I’ll make just a few basic points to keep things simple. 

The term linkbaiting is a one that seems to have surfaced over the past 12 or so months and that is used by webmasters to describe a variety of practices – all of which seek to generate incoming links to a website or blog from other sites. 

It is actually a difficult term to be definative about as it covers a lot of different practices ranging from running awards or competitions, through to writing attacking posts on high profile bloggers in the hope of them biting back and linking to you, through to providing other bloggers or site owners with tools (with embedded links back to your own site) that they can put on their blogs (we’ll run through more linkbaiting techniques in one of my next posts in this series).

In reality the term ‘linkbaiting’ is a new term for something that webmasters have been doing for many years. From my earliest days of blogging four years ago I know I saw people doing lots of things to get links (even though the term was never used).

Is Linkbaiting Good or Bad?

Linkbaiting is often written about in negative terms. I regularly see people writing off a post that others have written or a comment others have left as ‘just being linkbait’. 

I personally don’t like the term ‘linkbaiting’ on some levels as it does seem to have negative connotations. ‘Baiting’ has a sense of trying to trick or trap an unsuspecting person or thing into doing something that they don’t really want to do. While this is accurate with some forms of linkbaiting it is not true with others. 

There is a lot of debate around both the term ‘linkbaiting’ and some of the practices that people talk about it incorporating. Some argue strongly that it is just a by-product of quality content, others argue that many linkbaiting strategies border on spam, others seem to talk about linkbait as being the answer to all web promotional problems (increasingly SEO companies are offering linkbaiting services). 

My own opinion on whether link bait is good or bad is that it depends upon the type of link baiting that you’re talking about. I think some techniques that people use are just good standard blogging techniques – while other things that people do in the pursuit of links are destructive to the blogging community and I’d argue against them. 

Like almost anything online, people use linkbaiting strategies for good and healthy purposes but also for dubious and ‘evil’. I guess in part we each need to think about our priorities, values and even ethics as we go about our blogging and explore this topic.

Have Your Say

• How would you define link baiting?
• What has been your experience of it?
• Would you consider it to be good, bad or some combination of each?

Courtesy :  http://www.problogger.net/archives/2006/09/19/an-introduction-to-linkbaiting/

Thoughts and Facts about Keyword Density

What is the right keyword density? Do all search engines like same keyword density? How to avoid keyword overstuffing penalties? All this questions are answered in this article. Moreover, you will get some additional thoughts and points over keyword theory. Get involved! Keyword density as an optimization unit. Keyword density is a correlation of quantity of all words on your page with quantity of keywords. Keyword density is usually expressed in percents. For instance if you have 100 words and seven of them are keywords – your page’s keyword density is 7%. Keyword density is always measured per-page, never per site, because search engines consider a page to be the smallest independent unit. What keyword density is allowed by search engines? All search engines have a lot of

criteria to measure a web page. Keyword density is one of them and it is one of appreciable ones. Search engine algorithms are complicated mathematical measures and each search engine has it’s own – that is why allowed keyword density can vary for different search engines. If you are targeting one search engine – you can try to find out it’s allowed keyword density and keep it. If you target two or more – keep minimal keyword density allowed by one of them. What are actually keywords and how search engines find out what are keywords on my page? We know that keywords are search terms we seek, but a search engine doesn’t knows what keywords have you actually installed in your web page, unless you list them in META keywords tag (however, it is more like that the majority of search engines ignore this tag). So how do I count keyword density. Count the maximum repeating words! Even if your site is about apples, but there are more “garden” words – search engine will count maximal quantity of similar words. This means that you have a total of 100 words, 10 of which are “apple” and 30 of them are “garden”, you can get penalized for “garden” word. Note that articles, pronouns and other keyword-neutral words are not counted as keywords. The most convenient way to get full keyword analysis of your page is to use appropriate software. There are a lot of free and pay keyword analysis tools online. There are another significant notion in counting keyword density of a page – keyword phrase. You know that some keywords consist of two words – product names, geographical names, etc. Search engine algorithm is also looking keyword phrases, which are defined by finding repeating keyword phrases. Clear? I hope so. How do I count up right keyword density? It is a unique way of research for each webmasters. Yes, there are some commonly known recommendations, but during last two years I’ve heard more than hundred numbers of “right” keyword density. Create a couple of page with different keyword density and optimize ‘em in the same way (this doesn’t means creating a couple of identical pages with different keyword density, because you will trigger duplicate content filter doing so) and see the results. Sometimes it takes many time to find out the right value. Some of my sites are under 10% limit, some have no more than 5% - you will find your best quantity soon, trust me. However, there are some variables which can influence allowed keyword density – position of keywords. I believe that keywords in H1 are considered heavy, just as keywords in links text, keywords in “bold” tag and those, which are placed close to the beginning of the document. That is why there is no definite quantity of keyword density.

source: http://searchenginejournal.org/thoughts-and-facts-about-keyword-density.html

Linkedin for Business USE

 

1. Fill out your profile completely to earn trust.
2. Establish a business account if you don’t already have one.
3. Stay out of trouble by reading the Facebook rules regarding business accounts.
4. Install appropriate applications to integrate feeds from your blog and other social media accounts into your Facebook profile. (Although you should be careful before integrating your Twitter feed into your Faceboook profile, as a stream of tweets can seem overwhelming to your contacts.)
5. Keep any personal parts of your profile private through Settings.
6. Create friends lists such as “Work,” “Family” and “Limited Profile” for finer-grained control over your profile privacy.
7. Post a professional or business casual photos of yourself to reinforce your brand.
8. Limit business contacts’ access to personal photos.
9. Post your newsletter subscription information and archives somewhere in your profile.

Connect and share with others

10. Obtain a Facebook vanity URL so that people can find you easily.
11. Add your Facebok URL to your email signature and any marketing collateral (business cards, etc.) so prospects can learn more about you.
12. Post business updates on your wall. Focus on business activities, such as “Working with ABC Company on web site redesign.”
13. Share useful articles and links to presentation and valuable resources that interest customers and prospects on your wall, to establish credibility.
14. Combine Facebook with other social media tools like Twitter. For example, when someone asks question on Twitter, you can respond in detail in a blog post and link to it from Facebook.
15. Before traveling, check contacts locations so you can meet with those in the city where you’re heading.
16. Research prospects before meeting or contacting them.
17. Upload your contacts from your email client to find more connections.
18. Use Find Friends for suggestions of other people you may know to expand your network even further.
19. Look for mutual contacts on your contacts’ friends lists.
20. Find experts in your field and invite them as a guest blogger on your blog or speaker at your event.
21. Market your products by posting discounts and package deals.
22. Share survey or research data to gain credibility.
23. Use Facebook Connect to add social networking features to your web site.
24. Suggest Friends to clients and colleagues — by helping them, you establish trust.
25. Buy Facebook ads to target your exact audience.
26. Read up on Facebook Beacon to see if it might be useful for you.

Use Network, Group and Fan Pages

27. Start a group or fan page for product, brand or business. Unless you or your business is already a household name, a group is usually the better choice.
28. Add basic information to the group or fan page such as links to company site, newsletter subscription information and newsletter archives.
29. Post upcoming events including webinars, conferences and other programs where you or someone from your company will be present.
30. Update your group or fan page on a regular basis with helpful information and answers to questions.
31. Join network, industry and alumni groups related to your business.
32. Use search to find groups and fan pages related to your business by industry, location and career.
    
    
    source:http://gigaom.com/collaboration/33-ways-to-use-linkedin-for-business/
    

50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business

First Steps

   1. Build an account and immediate start using Twitter Search to listen for your name, your competitor’s names, words that relate to your space. (Listening always comes first.)
   2. Add a picture. ( Shel reminds us of this.) We want to see you.
   3. Talk to people about THEIR interests, too. I know this doesn’t sell more widgets, but it shows us you’re human.
   4. Point out interesting things in your space, not just about you.
   5. Share links to neat things in your community. ( @wholefoods does this well).
   6. Don’t get stuck in the apology loop. Be helpful instead. ( @jetblue gives travel tips.)
   7. Be wary of always pimping your stuff. Your fans will love it. Others will tune out.
   8. Promote your employees’ outside-of-work stories. ( @TheHomeDepot does it well.)
   9. Throw in a few humans, like RichardAtDELL, LionelAtDELL, etc.
  10. Talk about non-business, too, like @aaronstrout and @jimstorer.

Ideas About WHAT to Tweet

  11. Instead of answering the question, “What are you doing?”, answer the question, “What has your attention?”
  12. Have more than one twitterer at the company. People can quit. People take vacations. It’s nice to have a variety.
  13. When promoting a blog post, ask a question or explain what’s coming next, instead of just dumping a link.
  14. Ask questions. Twitter is GREAT for getting opinions.
  15. Follow interesting people. If you find someone who tweets interesting things, see who she follows, and follow her.
  16. Tweet about other people’s stuff. Again, doesn’t directly impact your business, but makes us feel like you’re not “that guy.”
  17. When you DO talk about your stuff, make it useful. Give advice, blog posts, pictures, etc.
  18. Share the human side of your company. If you’re bothering to tweet, it means you believe social media has value for human connections. Point us to pictures and other human things.
  19. Don’t toot your own horn too much. (Man, I can’t believe I’m saying this. I do it all the time. – Side note: I’ve gotta stop tooting my own horn).
  20. Or, if you do, try to balance it out by promoting the heck out of others, too.

Some Wisdom For You

  21.  You don’t have to read every tweet.
  22. You don’t have to reply to every @ tweet directed to you (try to reply to some, but don’t feel guilty).
  23. Use direct messages for 1-to-1 conversations if you feel there’s no value to Twitter at large to hear the conversation ( got this from @pistachio).
  24. Use services like Twitter Search to make sure you see if someone’s talking about you. Try to participate where it makes sense.
  25. 3rd party clients like Tweetdeck and Twhirl make it a lot easier to manage Twitter.
  26. If you tweet all day while your coworkers are busy, you’re going to hear about it.
  27. If you’re representing clients and billing hours, and tweeting all the time, you might hear about it.
  28. Learn quickly to use the URL shortening tools like TinyURL and all the variants. It helps tidy up your tweets.
  29. If someone says you’re using twitter wrong, forget it. It’s an opt out society. They can unfollow if they don’t like how you use it.
  30. Commenting on others’ tweets, and retweeting what others have posted is a great way to build community.

The Negatives People Will Throw At You

  31. Twitter takes up time.
  32. Twitter takes you away from other productive work.
  33. Without a strategy, it’s just typing.
  34. There are other ways to do this.
  35. As Frank hears often, Twitter doesn’t replace customer service (Frank is @comcastcares and is a superhero for what he’s started.)
  36. Twitter is buggy and not enterprise-ready.
  37. Twitter is just for technonerds.
  38. Twitter’s only a few million people. (only)
  39. Twitter doesn’t replace direct email marketing.
  40. Twitter opens the company up to more criticism and griping.

Some Positives to Throw Back

  41. Twitter helps one organize great, instant meetups (tweetups).
  42. Twitter works swell as an opinion poll.
  43. Twitter can help direct people’s attention to good things.
  44. Twitter at events helps people build an instant “backchannel.”
  45. Twitter breaks news faster than other sources, often (especially if the news impacts online denizens).
  46. Twitter gives businesses a glimpse at what status messaging can do for an organization. Remember presence in the 1990s?
  47. Twitter brings great minds together, and gives you daily opportunities to learn (if you look for it, and/or if you follow the right folks).
  48. Twitter gives your critics a forum, but that means you can study them.
  49. Twitter helps with business development, if your prospects are online (mine are).
  50. Twitter can augment customer service. (but see above)

source:http://www.chrisbrogan.com/50-ideas-on-using-twitter-for-business/

Increase Blog Traffic

Simple 10 ways to increase traffic

1.       Get Registered with FreeTrafficSystem.com to get targeted traffic from the search engines. It is great way to increase blog traffic.

2.       Create an account at Trafficswarm.com & start surfing your Trafficswarm page and view only the sites that interest you.

3.       Start submitting your blog URL to as many blog & RSS directories. You may also find some directories at http://earnbonus.com/feed-directories/

4.       Open an account at mybloglog.com. Post your blog then make friends & join the communities. This is a great way to increase blog traffic.

5.       Stumbleupon.com a great social networking website. Get registered & make friends. You can then stubmle your post.

6.       Go to Socialposter.com & Fill all required information like exact URL, title, general summary and tags for your blog. After that submit your blog details as many social sites.

7.       Signup with technorati.com & add your blog them ping it when you update.

8.       Add your blog URL to your forum signature. This is a attractive way to get traffic especially from quality forum posts.

9.        Find one of the top bloggers in your niche then write a good review post of them. Let them know and they will probably link back to you.

10.   Add a link at Squidoo.com by creating a new account an. And make a lens & add your blog link.

  This all are easiest way to Increase your blog Traffic.

Thank you…

Ways To Ensure Good Rankings In Google Instant

Google Instant has kiiled Seo,  are the rumors being spread . But it is not true, it has only changed the way search engine marketers must take in order to get the websites placed in top of search engines. So here, are some of tips for effective ranking in Google Instant

1. Include a Keyword in Your Brand Name:

   Get primary keyword in brand name and you would see yourself half way as the first results of first keyword is entered into searches will affect a lot of visitors with brand domination if its in top results of Google.

2.  Start Thinking Like Searchers Think

  You have to start thinking the way searches think to make sure that the site is optimized for keywords with the potential visitors starting to think.  You need to think that what would be the first word users would think when looking out for you.

3. Include Google Suggest as a Keyword Research Tool:

    Highlighting a Google suggested term is definitely important as it will bring instant results with terms targeting that come up for the most important primary word.

For some cases, taking a tailored keyword would be feasible solution as typing in SEO Google suggest
would come out with various other options like SEO Tips putting SEO at the bottom of searches



4. Get Locally Optimized for Generic Keywords
If the business has local physical locations for one or more regions, it is the time to apply local search marketing techniques to the website & brand which would make 73% of searches for local content so that the business comes up instantly in search engines.

  

5. Make Sure Your Online Reputation Is Good

    One needs to always ensure that online reputation for the brand is good. If someone looking for a brand have some negative entries there might be chances that they get tempted to search for competitiors.

By having positive online presence, with the help of social media profiles, blogs & social bookmarking one would be able to push down negative effects of the site making good impression in top of search results.

6. Domination of  Search Results With MultiMedia:
When someone wants to get popularted in search engines one need to produce variety of content, with assurance that when someone types in your name/brand they may find only you.

source:http://www.searchenginejournal.com/6-ways-to-ensure-better-rankings-in-google-instant/24213/

Build a Facebook Landing Page for Your Business

What is FBML?

 

FBML is Facebook’s version of HTML, This particular application, which was created by Facebook and can be added to your pages, allows you to create a “web page” within a tab or box that you can attach to your page.

How do find the Static FBML application and install it?

Like any other application, Static FBML can be found by using the search on Facebook. Simply type in: Static FBML.

In the results list you will find listings for both Applications and Pages. You are looking for the Application so click on that.

Once you’re on the page for the Static FBML application, you will look for the link to “add application to my page” which should be at the top left of the screen, under the logo for the application.

 Clicking the link brings up a popup window which allows you to select the page you’d like to add it to

After you have added the app, pull up your Facebook fan page. Now you have a new tab called “FBML” on your page but it is blank. To edit FBML click on “Edit Page” of your fan page.

In list of application find the Static-FBML and click on “Edit” to add content to FBML Page.

After getting the Editing mode two boxes will appears “Box Title” & “FBML”. In Box Title give name for your FBML TAB and at FBML add Html Content which will display as a static page at FBML TAB.

Save the changes and go to your fan page.  The FBML TAB will appear with given title to FBML box. To set it as a landing page just click on “Setting” tab at your page wall. You will find drop down box named “Default Landing Tab for Everyone Else”. From the list select FBML tab. That’s all.

After completing this Process the FBML Tab will appear first whenever your fan page will open. See how easy is this!

‘Ways for Improving Google Page Rank’

1) Make sure that at least one link to Google. They need the quality traffic as well. Do not be greedy and hog everything for you. This is not surprising the pages. Remember - Google is about - so that more traffic will send him best.




2) Use invisible text, but its close - such as paints and 00FF33 00FF66 made both secure browser, but as most people can not tell the difference is close. While Google is more than 50 staff doctors - none of them perhaps - it then use it know



3) Dots, Dots, and more points. Place the bottom of your document will look like this:

.............

Then link each of your pages - be sure to link with one of Google and Yahoo for another good measure. Do not link to other sites worldwide (excluding your own), not search engines. Not even link to a page where the previous search engines - like AltaVista.







4) H1 tags used all throughout your site (other than the title and header information). You can use CSS to make them smaller, and Google gives you all for making top bookoo great (even if it does not look great, the user).



5) If all else fails - Almost 10 wrapped in spot number 10 envelope (at least one aluminum layer or foil wrap around it). Enter the URL above, the serial number on the front panel. If not match, then this problem - if Google likes long URLs.



6) Do not copy content from another site. Even if you are copying and republishing your own content of a page or site to another, do not. Google's algorithm can not make a difference and provide either the original site and credit downgrade or other downgrading all sites that publish duplicate content. Google acts harshly towards any type of scraping content, even if you are totally innocent. Once your page rank is demoted, it is nearly impossible to recover again.



7) Use the Meta keyword tag too. With commas mechanism. Make sure the words you more than three times in a row, so be sure not to repeat. Google only document the first 101k indexes - do not use too many.



8) This recommendation is without doubt the most powerful here. Make at least three pages on your site and link as follows:

Page 1 >>>>>> Page 2

>>>>>> Page 2 Page 3

And the kicker

1 page 3 >>>>>> Page



The following pages on Google, that page 3-2 pages 2-1 pages will give you the points - again, if you link to a page - everything will start again. How many points can not count to the end of the week? Just do not abuse it too much - or a site to promote as many of them to complain.

Effective Link Building Tips

These link building techniques are potential to assure that you will receive free links from already established websites. These are different from the content-oriented development strategies and provide one-way organic links.

Case 1

Submit your site to Web Directories - This monotonous process can be helpful to get you several back-links.

Submit Press Releases to PR Sites – A good way to get a free link; several PR websites will distribute your website/product/service/event/much-more….lunching details to various online news outlets.

Reciprocal Links with Similar Websites - Reciprocal linking can be useful from the beginning; it’s important to choose highly relevant websites to bring not only back-links but traffic also.

Web 2.0 Pages - It’s help you to insert a bunch of anchor text links to your website along with your feed content. E.g. Squidoo lens, Hubpages

Article Submissions – Create an article using rich content on your niche topic & submit it to article directories to generate back-link as well as traffic.

Social Media Profiles - There a whole bunch of social websites online which allow you to insert a link to your website on the profile page. Social sites online profile page, that you have a link on its website a whole bunch of permits out there. Sign up for some of them, preferably with a username and an avatar that your company, brand. It comes in handy if you could in the future through social sites to promote your site to decide. E.g. Twitter, Facebook

Social Bookmarking Websites - Social bookmarking websites are often crawled by search engines and their links can help to get a website indexed soon. E.g. Netscape or Digg

Forum Signatures - Sign up for some forums in your niche and start contributing to ongoing discussions & insert the homepage or some inner page’s link of your site as a signature.

CASE 2

Create a Tool, Theme or Widget - Make an add-on application or template related to social networking website or platform & include a credit link that points back to your designated website.

Blogs on Other Blog Platforms – Set up your blog on different blog networks which link to specific WebPages on your website like WordPress.com, Blogger and Xanga.

Comment on Other Blogs - Start commenting on relevant and popular sites in your niche and try to avoid keyword names or signature links.

Guest posting on other blogs – Send your article and press releases to certain blogs in your niche which will help you to get relevant links and traffic.

Hold Contests - Some websites often offer contests in a bid to attract anchor text links from bloggers. The contests allow you to establish the specific anchor text.

Collaborative Projects - Originate an article specifically for a writing project, or blog carnival; and depends on the number and generousness of the participants involved; it will give you a couple of back-links.

Offer your Expertise – Use your specific skill such as web design, copywriting, translation or SEO and offers excellent branding and take credit link for your Webpage.

Top 10 Internet Marketing Strategies

Internet marketing can attract more people to your website, increase customers for your business, and enhance branding of your company and products. If you are just beginning your online marketing strategy the top 10 list below will get you started on a plan that has worked for many.

1. Start with a web promotion plan and an effective web design and development strategy.
2. Get ranked at the top in major search engines, and practice good Search Optimization Techniques.
3. Learn to use Email Marketing Effectively.
4. Dominate your marketing niche with affiliate, reseller, and associate programs.
5. Request an analysis from an Internet marketing coach or Internet marketing consultant.
6. Build a responsive opt-in email list.
7. Publish articles or get listed in news stories.
8. Write and publish online press releases.
9. Facilitate and run contests and giveaways via your web site.
10. Blog and interact with your visitors.

By following the above tips you'll be on your way to creating a concrete internet marketing strategy that could boost your business substantially.

source: http://marketing.about.com/od/internetmarketingstrategy/a/internettips.htm

11 Free Tools for Social Media Optimization

Plenty of bloggers are talking about the inevitable intersection of social media marketing and search engine optimization. Heck, we’ve beenblogging about SMO since 2006! Keyword optimized social content and channels of promotion provide abundant signals to search engines for improved visibility on standard, social and real-time search.

The changing nature of social media marketing and optimization create the need for tools whether for research, marketing and promotion or analytics. Here are 11 social media and SEO tools you might find useful:

• howsociable.com – Social visibility score
• knowem.com – Profile building tool
• Social Media for Firefox – Build a powerful social profile on social news & bookmarking sites
• semrush.com – Find competitor organic search rankings
• Google Insights – Keyword demand trends
• Page Inlink Analyzer – Analyze inbound links, their Delicious bookmarks & keyword tags
• majesticseo.com – Historical back-link tracking
• trackur.com – Social media monitoring
• socialmention.com – Real-time social search & scoring, social keyword research
• bit.ly – Search friendly URL shortening with analytics
• analytics.postrank.com – Track social engagement with combined Google & social analytics

Below are screen shots of each tool with a more detailed description of how you might use them.

HowSociable is a useful tool to quickly gauge the social presence of a particular keyword or brand name. Agencies like TopRank Marketing will use this kind of tool (customized) to take snapshots of customer social presence metrics for social media optimization programs. For each social site polled, you can clickthrough to see specific mentions.  This is a characteristic of more advanced social media monitoring tools, but for those that want a quick glimpse, HowSocialble is easy to use and the price is right, just like these free social media monitoring tools. However, if you want more comprehensive brand search and monitoring, then a paid social media measurement tool is worth the investment.

KnowEm is both a free and a paid service that will help you easily and quickly check whether your brand terms or other keywords have been registered as social profiles on a wide variety of social media web sites. Everything from blogging platforms to social news and bookmarking services are included. If you don’t want to complete all those profiles yourself, you can pay knowem to do it for you.  Companies invest a lot in building their brand, so this tool is helpful both for creating off site promotion channels as well as guarding against brand name squatters.

Social Media for Firefox is the only browser addon in our list and can be a handy tool to identify upcoming news items that are gaining popularity on certain social news and bookmarking services. A big part of building a more influential user profile is to be a consistent source of submissions for articles that become popular. This addon helps identify articles that are becoming popular on services like Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon giving you a heads up to submit to other services.  The logic is that if a news item becomes popular on one service it has a good chance of becoming popular on others.  Relevance, timing and focus are key as is patience for this kind of tactic.

SEMRush is an interesting tool for identifying the keyword visibility, both organic and PPC, on Google for pretty much any domain name you might be curious about. Your own or competitors for example. A common question for marketers is, “What are my competitors optimizing for?”. This tool helps uncover that insight and in combination with other standard and social keyword research, can be very helpful insight in a social media optimization program.

Google Insights for Search is a handy tool to research trends in popularity of various keywords on their own or in combination.  Filters for search type, geographic location, industry or topical category and timeframe allow you to refine some pretty useful information about what’s in demand.

Eric Miraglia ‘s Inlink Analyzer is a back link analysis tool based on Yahoo’s Site Explorer that not only counts and displays source links to a particular URL, but it also shows if the source links were bookmarked on Delicious and what keyword tags were used. This kind of insight can be quite useful for understanding the relationship between social keywords and link popularity. It would be nice if there was a CSV export option.

Majestic SEO is easily one of the most powerful and useful link analysis tools available. There is a free version that gives you link acquisition counts over time and if you are a site owner, you can get full reporting for your site once you validate it.  If you use the paid service, you can get the juicy link details on your competition.  This tools is useful for finding high impact links for standard SEO but it’s also useful for finding out which social media sites your site or competitors’ site are getting  the most links from.  Also, which of your own social destinations (blog, Facebook, Twitter, etc) are getting inbound links and from where.

Andy Beal’s Trackur service is a very easy to use social media monitoring tool that offers a free version that will satisfy many beginners in the social media optimization space.  Social media monitoring services are keyword based, (queries and negative or exclusionary) and that means some very useful information about how popular certain keyword concepts are on the social web. Of course you can use it to monitor what people are saying about your brand, identify a certain measure of influence and where they’re saying it. But seeing social keyword popularity trends can be quite useful for taking advantage of real-time marketing opportunities.

SocialMention is a free real time and social search tool that offers an array of search options (just blogs, just forums, just bookmarks or all) and output in the search results. You can get an indication of basic sentiment and the top social keywords associated with your query. As a free service, you don’t setup an account and save your search results, but you can easily download them into a spreadsheet. This is probably one of the most useful, free social search tools online.

Bit.ly URL shortening is very handy since they’re included as a default service on Twitter and many other Twitter applications. Bit.ly is rock solid reliable with uptime, which is pretty critical when you’re relying on their URL redirect to send traffic to whatever it is you’re promoting. You can also get basic statistics for each URL that your shorten to show how productive the site is where it was shared.  In today’s succinct social web with Twitter, status updates and micro-content, being able to conserve space with a reliable URL shortener is very helpful. Stats on top of that make this a “go to” URL shortening service.

PostRank offers a nice measure of engagement at the individual document level and if you pay attention, you can get that data on any web site in their database, not just your own. You can easily see what content on your competitors blogs are getting popular and where.  If you sign up for the PostRank Analytics service, you can incorporate Google Analytics data with social engagement metrics. These are essential comparisons in a social media optimization program and can help you understand where to plan your time on the social web.

This is really just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to SEO and Social Media Marketing tools. What low cost or free tools have you found to be effective for social media optimization tasks?

source: http://www.toprankblog.com/2010/03/11-free-tools-for-social-media-optimization/

Social Networking and Blog Sites More Popular – 75% of online users

Social Networking and Blog Sites getting even more poular, social

network or blog sites are visited by 75% of online users, reports Nielson.

Despite a fast-growing net population, India due to its present

low numbers, fails to appear in the list of top 10 socially networked countries.
A comparable developing country Brazil has highest percentage (86%) of Internet consumers visiting a social network. The popularity of social networking in Brazil is due to the Orkut phenomenon, which continues to be strong there. In India, Orkut is steadily losing ground to Facebook.

Social networking usage by country

Country
% Reach of Active Users

• Brazil - 86%
• Italy – 78%
• Spain - 77%
• Japan – 75%
• United States – 74%
• United Kingdom – 74%
• France – 73%
• Australia – 72%
• Germany – 63%
• Switzerland – 59%

Facebook has captured two-thirds of the active unique audience in Italy, making the site relatively more popular in Italy than in the three major English-speaking markets, Australia, the U.S. and the UK.

In contrast, Japanese people have the least appetite for Facebook, with reach and time spent markedly lower than in any of the other countries measured.

Facebook reach and usage by country

Country
% Reach of Active Users

• Italy - 66%
• Australia - 63%
• United States - 62%
• United Kingdom - 62%
• Spain - 57%
• France - 57%
• Switzerland - 45%
• Germany - 27%
• Brazil - 26%
• Japan - 3%

Thanks to Business Technology.in for this Information