High Yield Investment Programs Reloaded

High Yield Investment Program (HYIP) is a investment program that anyone can join online and deposit fund, in return the member will earn high interest in short period of time. There are tons of HYIPs on the Internet and most of them are closely monitored by HYIP rating sites and HYIP forums.

HYIPs have different investment plans. The interest and return offered by HYIPs usually anyway between 0.3% to 100% daily, weekly or monthly. You can make fast and easy money investing HYIPs. However investing in HYIPs involve high degree of risks. HYIPs generally stay online anywhere between 1 day to 1.5 years so if the HYIP you invested closes down, you may lose all or part of your initial capital. One strategy you can use to minimize the risk is diversify your investment into several HYIPs equally and don’t leave any interest in your investment accounts for compounding, withdraw them to your e-gold account or other e-currency accounts immediately. HYIPs rank high on rating and monitor sites tend to last longer than those at lower rank and new HYIPs.

You can find HYIPs from those HYIP rating and monitor sites. HYIPinvestment.com is one of the biggest HYIP rating and monitor sites. They provide a long list of HYIPs with latest comments, rating and payment status on each HYIP. If you plan to join HYIPs, invest only the amount you afford to lose because your principle and profit aren’t guaranteed. Also you will need an e-gold a/c to deposit fund and receive interest & return. Below are steps that can help you get started to invest in HYIP:

Step 1
Open an e-gold a/c at http://www.e-gold.com. You will find detailed instructions on how to fund your e-gold a/c from e-gold.com.

Step 2
Visit HYIPinvestment.com and find the HYIPs that interest you. Read the comments and ratings of each HYIP to make sure they are paying to members before you deposit fund to the HYIPs programs you selected. To lower your risk you must diversify your investments into several HYIPs (you may start off with HYIPs).

Step 3
Most HYIPs pay daily. So you need to login to your HYIPs a/c daily to withdraw interests to your e-gold a/c. If a HYIP's website down, there could be 2 possiblility:
1) They are experiencing technical, IT problems or security issues which wil be back online later usually.
2) They have closed down and you lose money or you still earn some money overall.

Again high return means high risk. So only invest the amount you afford to lose.

Credit goes to blogger blog.

Request to include my PR3 blog to your directory - Interesting Story

I got my blogspot blog to PR3, I have checked it today. I have not submitted to more than some directories. Was feeling sooooo lazy.

If you can please add my blog to your directory with the following information. I can get it to PR5! :) Please do so and get a ..... big thanks from me! ;) and name of your directory in a blog post honouring you as a sponser. As soon as I recieve 20 directory links, I will make a post

Make My Day!


My Blog Details

Blog URL: http://www.workers-place.blogspot.com

Title: Make Money Online with Many Things

Description: Make money online with easy money making strategies for free. Understand the concepts of search engine optimization. Use the latest SEO techniques with tips and tricks. Learn about getting regular traffic from internet. Be a blogger!

Keywords: Make Money Online, Search Engine Optimization, Make Money Fast on Internet

Prefered Categories:
Search Engine Optimization
Home Based Business
Making Money Online
Work at Home
Internet > Business > Blogs

Or Let me know the directory, I will submit and you accept :) - How'z that ;)

My sincere thanks buddy! :) You made my day!

Note: Please make a comment if you have added my blog, add your directory to my blog!

Social Networking: The Next Generation Of SEOptimization

Social optimization is the new hot SEO technique, but is it really white-hat SEO? As usual there is more than one answer to the search engine optimizers question. So I will help clarify each social SEO method and tactic.

Blogs and blogging

Blogs, almost anyone can write blogs. Nearly everyone has a blog. Most use blogs as an extension for their business, an easy way to spread news ideas and updates. Some abuse blogs simply blogging to spam links into the search engines and social networking websites. The absolute worst blog links links and more links. Using automated content and blog writing scripts they pull links from their website and blog them with no other content. With Wordpress blogs this cannot be stopped as each blogs owner has total control of the content. With Google Blogger and Blogspot blogs there is some measure of control. There are many other blogging platforms out available but Blogger and Wordpress make for the mass majority. So I will reference these.

In the event that you are a blatant blackhat SEO blogger or search engine blog spammer you will know this already. For the rest of you I will try to fill you in on what would be whitehat blackhat and in between.

A 100% white hat blog will be full of useful or informative content. The majority of the content for the blog will be associated with its main topic or niche. Linking to your own website will be minimal and only where appropriate. Linking to other blogs and websites will be natural and usually in reference to a specific subject such as articles products or work done by the blog or website being linked to.

Blackhat blogs will be full of links may or may not contain relevant content, are generally automated and more times than not tend to be useless. There are many methods used for this. Some use RSS feeds to automate the posting of their blog. Others use software or server based scripts to do the posting. The only real intent of this type of blog is to get search engines to find the links or generate revenue from the blog reader. Many of these blackhat spam blogs will contain nothing but keyword links.

Now in the middle you will find everyone else. Bloggers link to things all the time. Many companies have staff write blogs specifically to link back to products and information that are on their website. Internet marketers use blogs to help generate traffic for affiliate websites and niche websites. In the eyes of search engines this is actually spam. Yet since it tends to be informative or useful it is given a blind eye. So if you are not sure what kind of blogger you are or what type of blog you are reading this has hopefully helped you know.

Pings and Pinging

Pings are notices send to search engines and Social networking site to inform them of new content news or information on a blog or website. This can be done manually through blog pinging services such as Pingoat, Pingomatic and the like. It can also be automated from sites such as Autopinger or with automated pinging scripts. These scripts are built in with Word press and can be added to Blogger or Blogspot blogs.

Whitehat pings are for real updates and information changes. Generally are only to blogs and RSS feeds.

Blackhat spam pings are sent out for blogs and websites regardless of updates. Many people will ping a blog or website repeatedly in the hope of getting more traffic. There is a process called Blog and ping or blogging and pinging which is very common practice for spammers in the marketing world and blackhat SEO techniques.

So if you make an update to your blog and ping it you have done nothing wrong. This is what the ping services are for and would be considered whitehat. On the other side of the coin pinging just to do it or pings for the same post would be considered spam or blackhat SEO.

Tags and Tagging

Tags are special links used in social networking sites to label things. The act of tagging is done socially to group similar websites ideas and blogs for social informative searching. Search engines use tags to determine relevance to topics and help return better search engine results. Social networking site do this very heavily.

Tagging a blog or website is a normal social act. It helps to share your opinion or thought on what you tagged. Later other people can look for something by a tag and may find what you tagged as the topic. This is all natural and considered whitehat SEO. It provides natural information and data about topics. Websites and blogs may both be tagged as well as videos music or images.

On the blackhat or spammy side of this. The process is to use large amounts of tags and non relevant tags , again for more traffic. The tag and ping method is very popular for this. Spammers will make a blog post then tag it and ping it. This is done hoping to increase search engine ranking for more traffic.

I hope this has been informative and we will go into more detail on our main SEO website. A full Social optimization section is being developed to cover all aspects of blogging pinging and tagging. With data on most of the main social websites. Feel free to post your comments and questions.

Credit goes to http://www.wmtips.com

10 Best Wordpress Spam Blocking Plugins

While the plugins mentioned in Jonathan Clarke’s top ten list are not what I’d chose as my own, I still think the list has merit, and is worth mentioning.

He mentions some little known plugins as well as some heavy hitters. The list is as follows:

• Akismet
• Challenge
• Referrer Bouncer
• WPBayes
• Comment Timeout
• Email Immunizer
• ImgProtectr
• Did You Pass Math?
• AuthImage
• WP-Hardened-Trackback

If you want links to these plugins as well as descriptions, please check out his post at Help Net Security.

Credit goes to http://www.bloggingpro.com

Blogger Blogs: Essential Tools To Rock Your Blogging

So you have decide to create your first blog on Blogger. It has a simple and fine interface that takes care of many things for you. This is my suggestion to you for your first free essential must haves for your blog.

1. Feedburner - It generates an smart feed compatible with all feed readers for free like my feed. It allows you to put easy subscribe buttons for XML, Add to yahoo, Add to Newsgator, Add to MSN etc. Read about how their single feed policy can benefit you.

It can give you a cool feed count chicklet button to show how many readers are using your feed to read your blog. It also gives you a headline animator which you can attach to your blog to display the recent 5 posts in a nice animated fashion. You can get an authentic Creative Common license, get a browser friendly RSS feed, Splice photos and links and more…

2. Haloscan - Trackback is an essential component of blogging these days. Unfortunately Blogger does not have trackback. Haloscan provides you with a seamless way to integrate free trackback in your blog by adding a small code. You can also integrate their comments component if you like to replace the Blogger comments. Read about Haloscan or Blogger comments.

The benefits are that you can edit Haloscan comments, and open them in a pop up and keep them separate from your post (Blogger allows you to only delete comments and not edit them, also on the post page all comments will show whether you like it or not).

The main disadvantage is it will not email you these comments (like Blogger) for free and it is difficult to track where these comments were made. Another major benefit is that it allows you to send pings and trackback to other sites when you mention about them in your posts.

3. Imageshack - Dont you want to fill your blog with images without hassles of registration. Imageshack provides an excellent interface to take care of your free image hosting needs. Maybe it is this the fastest way to host an image on the web. Allows lots of image format, hotlinking, transloading from other sites. Its a good idea to register to keep track of all your images in one place. It is much convenient than the proposed Hello and Picassa options…

Update: Blogger enabled hosting of images on its own webspace making it easier to host images in your posts. But you cannot manage or edit / delete your blogger images in any way

4. Technorati - Create and add a technorati profile. It allows you to claim your blog in this huge blogosphere. It allows you to put an excellent technorati search on your blog. The best part is that whenever someone mentions or links to any page of your blog, technorati knows and a search for your blog on technorati shows exactly how many sites link to which pages of your blog and when they were added with a small description. See why you need a technorati account.

5 - Sitemeter - Just takes 5 minutes to get a free tracker which gives you realtime site traffic statistics to check the quantity and quality of your site traffic with detailed referrer and geographic data. I have checked out several other tracking sites, but this one seems the best. Although you need to keep a counter visible (as a logo, visitor counter) and the statistics can be made private too.

StatCounter gives much more detailed statistics and the counter is totally invisible and free totally till you start getting large traffic, when you need to pay. But the disadvantage is that both of these track the last 100 visitors only, while another free service Extreme Tracking tracks them all… but you statistics cannot be made private. More options I like are Google Analytics for deep traffic statistical analysis and it is hidden too.

6. Feedblitz - It quickly allows your blog visitors to subscribe by email to your new posts. They just have to enter their email. You decide which page opens after they press Subscribe. A quick confirmatory email to them and they get 1 email daily with all your new posts. You can decide if you want to send the full post or short posts with defined number of characters. Very good to keep your subscribers informed of new posts. It allows them to unsubscribe easily also. Example for our blog.

7. My Blog Log - Tracks outgoing links to let you know where your traffic is going. The free limited version data is not in much detail, yet provides a good idea. You can also add a Top 5 Our Links module to your web site. Now they have a MyBlogLog community to get some extra site traffic too.

8 AudioBlogger- Audioblogger allows free unlimited audio posts from any phone to your Blogger blog. You call the number (Currently a US phone number), record a post, then your blog is updated with an audioblogger icon and a link to your recorded audio.

9. w.bloggar - It is a Post and Template editor, with several features and resources that the browser based blog editors do not offer. It enables users to have only one interface to several accounts hosted on several different sites, using different publishing systems. Helps to manage multiple blogs on Blogger very effectively.

10 Blogger Mobile - opens a new concept of Moblogging i.e. blogging by your mobile phone. When you send text or photos from your mobile device to go@blogger.com they’re automatically posted to your new blog page.

11. Blogexplosion - helps you get confirmed traffic to your blog. The principle is simple, you visit other peoples blogs and they visit yours. For every 2 blogs you visit, one visitor comes to you. This is very good if you are new blogger and have hardly any traffic. Definitely try the Rent a Blog advertising swap service.

12. Pingoat - Pinging lets dozens of blogging services know you’ve updated your site and increases traffic to your blog. Just enter your blog name and blog home page, check the blogging services you want to ping, just click ‘Submit Pings’ and in one click it pings all of them. Pingoat offers a wide variety of such services and is fast too. See many more one click pinging services.

13. Creative Commons - It offers a flexible range of protections and freedoms for authors and artists. They have built upon the “all rights reserved” of traditional copyright to create a voluntary “some rights reserved” copyright. They are nonprofit and all tools are free and useful to highlight the way in which you want others to use you content.

14. Google Adsense and Search - When you take all effort to write for a blog, why not optimize it to make some money. Let users search for good posts in your blog. And now it even helps to monetize you feeds.

This is periodically updated. Happy Bloggering!

Credit goes to http://www.quickonlinetips.com

SEO Checklist: Advanced Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is on every webmaster's mind these days. Achieving a favorable ranking for the right keywords can mean a steady stream of targeted traffic to your site, and all for free - that's hard to beat. The key to high search engine rankings is structuring your website correctly, including plenty of content that is relevant to your keywords, and making sure your website is spider-friendly. You can use this checklist to make sure all of your Web pages can be found, indexed and ranked correctly:

Your website is themed. Your site deals with an identifiable theme which is obvious from the text on the home page and reinforced by all the other pages on your site. In other words, all the individual Web pages relate to each other and deal with various aspects of some central theme. The text on your home page should state clearly what that theme is and what your website is about, and the other pages should reinforce that.

Your Web pages have enough high quality, relevant content. Spiders come to your website looking for content. If a page doesn't have much content, or the content doesn't appear closely related to the page's title and your website's theme, the page probably won't be indexed or if it is indexed it won't rank well. Search engines love quality content and lots of it - content is what Web searchers are looking for and search engines try to provide.

Your website's navigational structure is relatively flat. You don't want important pages to be too "deep" within your website, meaning it takes several clicks to get there from the home page. Search engines typically index the home page first, then gradually index other pages on a site over time. Many spiders are programmed to only go three layers deep - if some of your important content is buried deeper than that, it may never be found and indexed at all.

You've created a unique "Title" tag for each page. The title is one of the most important aspects of any Web page from an SEO standpoint, especially for Google (which is the most important search engine to optimize for). Don't use a generic title for all your pages, use the keywords your targeting for that page and keep it brief but descriptive.

You use the "Description" meta tag. Contains a highly descriptive sentence about the content and purpose of your page, and contains your most important keyword phrase early in the sentence. Not all of the search engines will display this "canned" description when they list the page in search results, but many of them will, so it's worth getting it right.

You use the "Keywords" meta tag. As with the meta tag description, not every search engine will use the keywords meta tag. But some will use it and none will penalize you for having it. Also, having a short list of the keywords you're targeting will help you write appropriate content for each page. The keyword tage should contain your targeted keyword phrase and common variations, common misspellings and related terms. Make sure your keywords relate closely to the page content and tie into the overall theme of your site.

Your keywords are included in the visible page content, preferably high up on the page. You have to achieve a balance here - you want to include keyword phrases (and variations) a number of times within your text, but not so many times that you appear to be guilty of "keyword stuffing". The trick is to work the keywords into the text so that it reads as naturally as possible for your site visitors. Remember, you can incorporate keywords into any Web page element that is potentially viewable by site visitors - header text, link text and titles, table captions, the "Alt" attribute of the image tag, the "title" attribute of the link tag, etc.

Every page of your website can be reached by search engine spiders. This is critical - if your pages can't be found, they can't be indexed and included in search results, let alone rank well. Search engines use spiders to explore your website and index the pages, so every page must be accessible by following text links. If pages require a password to view, are generated by a script in response to a query, or have a long and complicated URL, spiders may not be able to read them. You need to have simple text links to the pages you want indexed.

You've included a site map. Unless your site is very small, it's a good idea to create a site map with text links that you link to the site map from your home page. In addition to a link, include descriptive text for containing the relevant keywords for each page.

You link to your most important pages from other pages on your site. Internal links help determine page rank since they show which pages of your site are most important. The more links you have to have to a page, relative to other pages on your site, the more importance search engines will assign to it.

You use keywords in your link text. When you create a text link to another page on your site, use that page's targeted keywords as the text for the link (inside the anchor tags that create the link). Make it as descriptive as possible. For example, a link that says "Premium Customized Widgets" is much better than one that says simply "Product Page", and indicates to search engine spiders what that linked page is about.

Your site doesn't use frames. If possible, don't use frames on any page you want to get indexed by search engines. If you feel you simply must use frames for a page, then also make use of the "noframes" HTML tags to provide alternative text that spiders can read (and make that text descriptive rather than just a notice that "This site uses frames etc. etc.").

You don't use automatic page redirects. Don't make any pages automatically redirect the visitor to another page (the exception is a page you've deleted for good - in which case you should use a "301 redirect", a permanent redirect which is acceptable to search engines).

Your important content is in plain text and not contained in images. Search engine spiders can't "read" content in JPEG, GIF, or PNG files. If you really feel that using an image rather than text is crucial to your design, at least put the same text in the image's "Alt" tag (or in the "title" tag if you're using the image as a hyperlink).

Your important content is not contained in Flash files. Flash is a wonderful technology, but unfortunately spiders don't have the required "plugin" to view Flash files. As a result, Flash content is mostly inaccessible to search engine spiders. Some can find and follow hyperlinks within the Flash file, but unless those links lead to pages with readable HTML content this won't help you much. Don't create all-Flash pages for any content you want to get indexed - instead, put that content in the HTML portion of the page.

Links and keywords are not hidden inside JavaScript code. If your links use JavaScript to direct the user to the appropriate page (for instance, a drop-down list) or important content is contained within JavaScript code (when it's displayed dynamically using DHTML, for instance) search engine spiders won't be able to "see" it. You can, however, use the "noscript" HTML tags to provide an alternative that can be read by spiders.

You've optimized every important page of your website individually. Don't stop at your home page. Take the trouble to optimize any page which has a reasonable chance of being indexed by the major search engines, targeting appropriate keywords for each. If you face a lot of competition it may be nearly impossible to get a top ranking for your home page, but you can still get a lot of search engine traffic to your site from other pages which are focused on very specific keyword phrases.

You didn't duplicate content. Each page of your site should have unique content that distinguishes it from every other page on your site. Duplicating content or having pages that are only slightly different might be seen as "search engine spamming" (trying to manipulate search engine results).

You provide linking instructions for those who want to link to your site. Somewhere on your site state your policies about other people linking to your site and provide the wording you'd like them to use in their link. You want to encourage other people to link to your site, preferably using link text and a description that reflect the keywords for that page. For their convenience provide the ready-made HTML code for the link - not everyone will use it, but most often they will use your preferred text as a courtesy as long as it is truly descriptive of your site and doesn't contain "marketing hype".

Important hyperlinks are plain text links and not image links or image maps. Text links are better from an SEO standpoint than image links, as spiders can't read text from an image file. If you feel you really must use a graphic as a link, at least include a text description which (including the relevant keywords) by using the "title" attribute of the link tag.

Your website is free of coding errors and broken links. HTML coding errors and non-working links can keep search engine spiders from correctly reading and indexing your pages. For that reason, it's a good idea to use a Web page validation utility to check your HTML code to make sure it's error-free.

Credit goes to http://www.eclaunchsite.com

Making Money With 10 Ways - Out of the Box Thinking

If you're looking at ways to supplement your income, here are some options other than working behind a bar or stacking shelves at a supermarket.

1 Police ID parades
Taking part in identity parades is easy money - you just have to stand there - but work is irregular and may depend on your appearance. Many police forces now use video line-ups but you can still get a one-off fee of £10 for being filmed.

Average pay: £10 for the first hour, £5 for every hour after that.
More info: ask at your local police station.

2 TV/film extra
Production companies need people of all shapes and sizes and if you're over 18 but look younger you'll be especially popular, as you can save them the cost of a chaperone for a child actor. Don't expect to meet the stars, though.

Average pay: £80 a day, with bonuses for things like providing your own costume or doing a 'walk-on'. Overtime is paid at around £11 an hour.
More info: there's a list of extras agencies at UK Screen

3 Campus brand manager
All sorts of companies hire students to promote them on campus, from film distributors to sportswear firms. You'll get plenty of opportunities to demonstrate your business acumen, but the work can be time-consuming.

Average pay: £300 a term, though some firms only pay on a commission basis.
More info: look for notices on student job boards.

4 Trading on eBay
'The World's Online Marketplace' has one million registered users in the UK alone so there's bound to be someone who'll pay for anything you have to sell. Start with stuff you don't want (old CDs, clothes, toys) to get a feel for it.

Average pay: the sky's the limit - but unless you're selling something rare or valuable, don't expect to make a fortune.
More info: go to eBay and click on 'eBay explained'.

5 Pose as a life model
You don't have to be beautiful or in particularly great shape but you do have to patient, able to sit still and perhaps not wince at what an artist makes of you. But good models are in demand.

Average pay: from £6 or so an hour clothed, to £7 or so an hour unclothed outside London; a little more in the capital.
More info: contact art colleges and adult education colleges near you.

6 In-store demonstrator
There's lots of work for confident, personable people in supermarkets and department stores. You might be required to show off your ironing skills, hold a food tasting or demonstrate a new kitchen gadget, for example. Hours are often in the evenings or during weekends so can fit around your studies.

Average pay: varies, but can be up to £10 an hour.
More info: search for 'field marketing agencies' on the Internet.

7 Event stewarding
Concerts and sports fixtures employ a small army to help with organisation. The necessary training will be provided on the day but don't view the job as a free ticket. Stewards at football matches, for example, are expected to face the crowd, not watch the game.

Average pay: rates start at £5 an hour; with training you can earn up to £15 an hour.
More info: try Recruit Event Services.

8 Online surveys
To make money completing surveys, all you need is a computer and some opinions. You'll be asked what you think of various products and services, and sometimes be sent things to try out. However, there are scam survey websites so do some research.

Average pay: £3-£50 for each survey, depending on how long it takes. However, you'll have to pay a registration fee (around £20) up front.
More info: UK Paid Surveys rates and reviews the best sites.

9 Mystery shopping
Some men would pay good money not to go shopping, but 'mystery shoppers', on the other hand, get paid instead. It's not just about going to shops but perhaps to restaurants, bars or to stay in a hotel and report on how the customer's being treated. You'll get all the money for your meals, drinks or bills repaid and you may get to keep the shopping, too - unless, of course, it's diamonds.

Average pay: from £6 a visit, but could be as much as £100 a day.
More info: try the Mystery Shopping Agency on 020 8325 8974 or Retail Eyes

10 Internet researcher
You may have grown up taking the Internet for granted but there are plenty of people who aren't familiar with it or are too busy to spend time on it. So if you're skilled at extracting information from a web search, you can hire yourself out as a researcher for people like lawyers and writers.

Average pay: £10 an hour
More info: look for notices on student job boards or contact likely clients in your area.

Credit goes to http://www.personal.barclays.co.uk

Web 2.0: Top 20 Wordpress Blog Designs For 2007

After stormy discussion CSSBloom team has chosen the best 20 blog designs.

Veerle’s blog 2.0

Avalonstar

Matt Brett

Joshuaink

Whalesalad

The Big Noob

Bloklantis

Jason Santa Maria

Rob Goodlatte

O.L.Design

PR Blogger

Bartelme Design

Cameron Moll

Stopdesign

SimpleBits

ShaunInman

LeliaThomas

If..Else Log

Ordered List

5ThirtyOne

Credit goes to http://silentbits.com

YouTube All The Way - Hold First Video Awards

The video-sharing Web site announced Monday that it will hold the first YouTube Video Awards to recognize the best-user created videos of 2006. The awards will be handed out in seven categories: most creative, most inspirational, best series, best comedy, musician of the year, best commentary and "most adorable video ever."

User Voting

The nominees, picked by YouTube, are compiled in an online gallery. YouTube community members can vote on their favorites beginning Monday and concluding on Friday. The winners, as chosen by the community, will be announced March 25. Each will be prominently featured on YouTube and receive a trophy, the design of which will be revealed later.

Success on the site has previously been defined largely by rankings of the most-viewed or most-discussed videos.

"We wanted to call out some of the most popular videos and let the users choose which ones deserve some additional recognition," said Jamie Byrne, head of product marketing at YouTube.

The vast and varied world of online video has gradually formed styles all its own, which figured into the formation of the categories.

"We looked at the genres of content that were the most popular last year," Byrne said. "We've seen and continue to see exciting new developments in the online video space where genres are being created."

Among the nominees are noted "vloggers" Paul Robinett ("Renetto") and Peter Oakley ("Geriatric1927"). The comedy of Barats and Bereta, and Smosh, is also nominated, as are series such as Lonelygirl15's and "Ask a Ninja." The power pop band OK Go is perhaps the most professional of the nominees; it's nominated for the famous treadmill-choreographed music video, "Here It Goes Again."

Future Plans

Whether the YouTube Video Awards becomes a permanent, annual affair is likely, Byrne said, but it will depend on how the first awards are received.

"We want to see how the community responds to it, but we can see this being something that grows as we continue to grow and becomes a bigger and more exciting event in the future," Byrne said. An in-person ceremony is possible in the future.

Google-owned, San Bruno, Calif.-based YouTube was founded in February 2005. Last week, media conglomerate Viacom (NYSE: VIAb) sued YouTube for $1 billion, claiming the site infringes on copyrights on a "huge scale." Several other media companies have reached agreements to supply YouTube with clips.

According to comScore Media Metrix, YouTube attracted 133.5 million visitors worldwide in January.

Credit goes to http://www.technewsworld.com

What Is a Blog - Blogging - Weblog

According to wikipedia.org, A blog is a user-generated website where entries are made in journal style and displayed in a reverse chronological order.

Blogs often provide commentary or news on a particular subject, such as food, politics, or local news; some function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability for readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of most early blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual although some focus on photographs (photoblog), sketchblog, videos (vlog), or audio (podcasting), and are part of a wider network of social media.

The term "blog" is a portmanteau, or, in other words, a blend of the words web and log (Web log). "Blog" can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

In November 2006, blog search engine Technorati was tracking more than 57 million blogs

The numbers of blogs are increasing daily in thousands and becoming the best trend ever.

Wordpress Plugins - Tried And Tested - Top Ten Loved Plugins

If you run a blog from your own website, most likely you’re using WordPress. While WordPress is great by itself, the majority of WordPress’ usefulness comes from its plugins. Some of the best and most creative features come from plugins, and because plugins are so easy to create and install, there are literally hundreds of WordPress plugins.

If you’re new to WordPress, finding the perfect plugin is often a difficult task. Sometimes there are eight plugins that do the same thing, which makes it difficult to find the plugin which works the best. Or, you just simply don’t know that a plugin exists. That’s why I’m here to help.

I’ve been a WordPress user since the 1.0 days. During that time, I’ve seen my share of WordPress plugins. Some have failed, while others have evolved into essential features. From my experience, I hope that when you’re done reading this list, you’ll have some plugins that will not only make your life as blogger easier, but that your visitors will find your site more useful.

10. Permalink Redirect

One of the fatal flaws of WordPress is that URLs with a trailing slash are the same as URLs without. This is bad for your stats since one page can show up under multiple URLs, and it’s also bad for search engines who may duplicate your pages in their results. That’s why there’s Permalink Redirect. Permalink Redirect will issue a 301, permanently moved, redirection to anyone accessing your page via the non-permalink URL. This insures that it won’t happen again, and that your web stats will remain clean.

9. Time Zone

If you run your blog in a time zone that observes Daylight Savings Time, you’ll quickly learn WordPress doesn’t like DST. While Daylight Savings Time only occurs twice a year, it’s still a pain to remember to set your GMT offset when DST takes effect. Time Zone solves this problem of forgetful DST switching. Instead of basing your blog time off of an offset from GMT, Time Zone enables WordPress to use your actual time zone, thus allowing WordPress to observe Daylight Savings Time. A must for any DST-bound blogger.

8. WordPress Database Backup / WP-Cron

Backing up your WordPress database is just as important as backing up your computer. You never know when you’ll do something stupid to your database. Unfortunately backing up a database can be an annoying task. That’s why WordPress Database Backup was created. It allows for one-click backups via download, server directory, or email, all straight from your WordPress administration interface.

Since WordPress 2.0, the WordPress creators have acknowledged that database backup is important, and now include WordPress Database Backup by default. However, you can still make the plugin more useful. WP-Cron, a plugin by the same author, gives WordPress Database Backup a new option, automatic backups. With WP-Cron installed you can schedule backups of your database to be made every 24 hours; perfect if you have a Gmail account just hungry for something to store.

7. Popularity Contest

Wouldn’t it be great to know just how popular your entries are? Popularity Contest does just that. By tracking page views, feed views, comments, and trackbacks, Popularity Contest assigns each post a rating based off of your most popular post. After it has a post rating, you can display the popularity in a number of ways. You can put the percent popularity in each post, display your top X posts somewhere on your site, or just keep the statistics to yourself by viewing the detailed popularity page which is added to your WordPress administration interface. Popularity Contest is perfect for new visitors, helping them get up to speed by viewing what’s popular on your site.

6. Gravatars

One of the most popular ways to identify users on forums is by avatars. The Gravatars plugin brings that same personalization to WordPress comments. By using the power of the Gravatar service, the Gravatars plugin is able to display an avatar next to users’ comments. Many of your visitors probably already have a Gravatar, so why not make your visitors’ comments a little more personal by letting them display it.

5. WP-ContactForm

Don’t want to give away your email but still want your visitors to contact you? An email form added by WP-ContactForm is the perfect solution. Instead of messing around creating one yourself, WP-ContactForm does all the hard work for you, allowing you to just drop a contact form on any post or page throughout your WordPress site. Your visitors will thank you when then realize how easy is to contact you.

4. Subscribe to Comments

Often on blogs, visitors will leave comments on which they want to track. Unfortunately, they often forget to check back, or choose not to because they don’t have an easy way. Subscribe to Comments solves this problem. By placing a checkbox next to your comment form, visitors can easily check that box to receive email updates as comments are added to the post. This not only makes it easier on your visitors to follow conversations, but increases the chances that the visitor will check back on your site. A win-win situation!

3. Related Posts

When a visitor finds your website via a search engine or other website, they’re often there for a reason. They want to find out about a particular topic of interest. Related Posts makes life easier on your visitors by showing them other posts you’ve written on the subject. This greatly increases the chance that a visitor will stick around browsing your blog, and is perfect for existing visitors to find out your past thoughts on a particular subject.

2. Ultimate Tag Warrior

Web 2.0 has brought a lot of interesting ideas to websites, tags being one of them. Ultimate Tag Warrior allows you to starting following the fad and tag your posts. There are a lot of great reason to tag. It helps narrow down what the post is about, it provides an easy form of navigating your site, and it allows Technorati to do a better job indexing your posts. The Technorati factor alone is a great reason to start tagging because your posts become easier to find at Technorati, thus driving more traffic to your website.

1. Akismet

Spam is a big problem with WordPress based blogs. It seems that as soon as your site is indexed in a search engine, the spam comments start flooding in. Stop the spam now with Akismet. Akismet, is a spam killing plugin created by Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, so you know it’s good. Akismet is tightly integrated with WordPress itself, allowing for easy comment management. Every comment you get is sent through Akismet’s spam-detecting servers for community-based spam analysis. The result? Ridiculously low false-positives, and an almost nonexistent false-negatives.

Don’t like the idea of all your visitors’ comments going through someone else’s server? Check out Spam Karma 2. It’s just as good as Akismet and deserves the rating along side Akismet as the number one WordPress plugin.

Credit goes to http://cavemonkey50.com

Google Adsense Wordpress Plugins - Quantity is 10 - Quality is Best

Google Adsense has become the most popular online contextual advertising program. Wordpress allows bloggers to easily integrate Google Adsense inside wordpress using plugins. Listed below are 10 best Adsense plugins which help you work smarter with wordpress.

• Adsense Deluxe - offers advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts. Adsense Deluxe+ claims to have a an improved ad limiting algorithm.
• Adsense Injection - inserts Adsense code randomly into a pre-existing blog.
• Adsense Inline - inserts Google adsense in blog posts
• Adsense Beautifier - makes your Adsense look beautiful by placing images beside them to increase your clicks (CTR) and subsequent Adsense earnings.
• AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar - Google AdSense widget designed for the new WordPress Sidebar Widgets plug-in.
• MightyAdsense - allows you to host the code in wordpress without having to modify the templates. Ads are displayed in post item and you can specify how many blocks its going to show up in a page.
• AdRotator Wordpress Plugin - rotates your adsense ads with other affiliate programs like Chitika Eminimalls wherever you want. Helps to reduce ad blindness and test different ad formats and affiliate programs.
• Adsense Earnings Wordpress Plugin - displays your adsense earning details within wordpress admin panel.
• WP-AdsenseProfit - shows your profit from the adsense program to the public by adding a simple call to the function in your template.
• AdSense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System - allows you to view your adsense earnings and share your adsense impressions with your friends and co-authors.
• Author Adsense Wordpress Plugin - allows blog authors to enter their Google Adsense Publisher ID and have ads displayed on their own posts generating revenue. Admin can set the ratio of author’s ads to admin ads.

Tips & Tricks For Money Making Tags

I'll keep this post very short and informative.

Most of the users are operating tags for technorati, to get traffic from there. I personally use technorati and may be you are from there!

To make the most money out of tags see the tips & tricks below.

Search technorati top tags and top searches for your blog posts, article or whatever. Make sure the keywords or tags you choose are listed here and it matches your needs.

Just write an article and keep the tags density to around 3-4% in whole of the article, ping the blog and you are on your way to recieve good targetted and fast traffic. Remember that technorati tags also works for other sites as almost the trend is the same.

So that was the Tips & Tricks For Money Making Tags, Hope that helps! :)

Myspace - The Best Website Promoter In Real Life

I am not a fan of MySpace to be perfectly honest with everyone. I think it’s a place where people to go stalk other people, and get spammed out of existence. This being said, I have finally decided to join MySpace:). Yes I just said I don’t like MySpace but just joined. I just cannot deny the fact that it is one of the most popular sites on the Internet and one of the best ways to get free promotion.

I signed up for MySpace for one reason only: because my new site (mygamingspace.com) is built for putting flash games on people’s MySpace page and how can I not have a MySpace page to promote this site? The only way to show people what my new site is all about is to actually demonstrate what can be done with these games. So I created a simple MySpace profile at myspace.com/mygamingspacedotcom. Unfortunately myspace.com/mygamingspace and myspace.com/gamingspace were both already taken.

I have not “pimped” out my MySpace page yet so it’s still the simple original layout. I will eventually need to really customize the MySpace page so more and more people go there and add me to their firends. The larger the network of friends I have, the more chance I will reach a new person to come to my site. There are ways to gain friends on a MySpace page that requires a lot of spamming and annoyances, but that’s not the method I wanted to take. The first thing I had to do was get a few people to my page. To do this I asked all my friends to add my new profile to their friends list and to even put a game on their page to show off what my site is about.

This was not going to be enough to get the MySpace profile off the ground. I added a “add to MySpace friends” button to mygamingspace. Hopefully when the site takes off a little more, people will want to add the profile to their MySpace page.

Yes I know how ugly the button is, I am going to change it soon. I believe that if your site has the right demographic (the MySpace demographic), that adding a MySpace profile for your website is priceless. It’s free, easy, and will promote your site to new audiences. If you have any questions on how to set this up, including setting up the button on your website, please feel free to comment or email me and ill help as best I can.

Credit goes to http://internetbusinessdaily.net/

Smart Google Adsense Around Your Blog Posts

I have often been asked about how to insert Google Adsense inside blog posts. If you see currently I have an adsense between the post title and post body. Read on…

I will stick to Blogger template to describe the procedure.

If you go to the template, look for - this is what creates your post body with all the content. To insert the code above or below the post is simple.
If you insert the Adsense code above this tag, it goes between the blog post title and post body. If you insert the Adsense code below this tag, it goes beneath the post and above the post footer which has the permalink, post comments, email and similar links.

If you want to insert the Adsense code beside the post and wrap the post content around it - I use a table and align it to the right or left as required. This table code goes above the . Then add and it put the Adsense code between the tags. This will displace the post content and align Adsense with the post.

If you want to align the post content beside the post but not wrap it around the post content - either insert the Adsense code in the sidebar, or create a table with 2 columns. In one column put the and in the other column put the Adsense code.

How do you insert Adsense in you posts?

Make money online - See the upper side of left side bar for title "Make Money" -
Sign up for Adsense

Be sure to limit your posts to 3 from setting panel in blogger.

Credit goes to http://www.quickonlinetips.com

Weblog - Nice Access Log Analysis Tool

WebLog is a comprehensive access log analysis tool. It allows you to keep track of activity on your site by month, week, day and hour, to monitor total hits, bytes transferred and page views, and to keep track of your most popular pages. It can also print out secondary reports to track "user sessions," showing the paths taken through your site by your visitors and giving you a rough idea of how long they spent looking at your pages, and to provide you with information on referring sites, the search engine keywords which brought your visitors and the agents and platforms they used while visiting. It can read NCSA common or combined log files, as well as Microsoft extended format log files.

(Version 2.54; April 1, 2006)

Examples:

• WebScripts Access Report
• WebScripts Access Summary Report
• WebScripts Agents/Platforms Report
• WebScripts Referring URLs Report
• WebScripts Keywords Report
• AWSD.com Access Report
• AWSD.com Access Details Report
• AWSD.com Agents/Platforms Report
• AWSD.com Referring URLs Report
• AWSD.com Keywords Report

Files:

• WebLog Documentation
• weblog.pl: This is the main program file. You don't actually need to do anything to it; in fact, you don't even have to execute it.
• config.pl: This is the configuration file. Everything you need to change or modify is contained here. This is also the file that you will execute. (Things are set up this way so that you can effectively maintain multiple versions of the script, for example if you want to run separate log analyses for different sites, just by keeping separate config files for each.)
• bar1.gif, bar2.gif, bar3.gif, bar4.gif, and bar5.gif: These five small graphics files are used to create the bar graphs in the main access report.

• Compressed Archives: All of the above files in one easy download. Take your pick!
  • weblog_files.tar (190K)
  • weblog_files.tar.gz (40K)
  • weblog_files.tar.Z (68K)
  • weblog_files.zip (41K)

Credit goes to http://awsd.com

Super New Google Secrets Uncovered

UK developer Tony Ruscoe has the scoop: while sniffing around a subdomain he found a while ago, sandbox.google.com, he was able to grab a kind of Google tester account. Even though this didn’t seem to give him full testing powers for as of yet unreleased Google products, Tony was still able to add a list of unreleased services to his account... because he found the sub-domains of these services a while ago!

So, here is the list of Google services uncovered:

• Google Events: We already have Calendar, what might this be?
• Google Guess: Tony ponders if this service will guess what you want to search for.
• Google Real Estate Search: Sounds a bit like Google Base... or will this be a web-wide real estate search engine?
• Mobile Marketplace: EBay for mobile phones or...?
• New Service aka Workplace: Microsoft Office... on the web? The handle for this project is “WF”.
• Google Weaver aka M Scrapbook: This service has been uncovered a while ago, actually... but now Tony finds that it redirects to a service named “H9”. Tony takes a guess: if “M” stands for “Medical,” maybe “H” stands for “Health"?
• Google RS2: This one has been previously uncovered as well, but Tony says it’s linked to Google Translate... is it related to Google’s machine translation efforts?
• Google Online Assessment: What could this be?
• More: Other codenames appearing were “CF”, “GMT”, and “Voice”.

[Thanks Tony. Image by Tony.]

Update: The information’s out already, but it looks like Google has fixed this hole – you may not be able to sign up for the unreleased services anymore. [Thanks Sankar Anand.

Credit goes to http://blog.outer-court.com

YouTube, Digg, MySpace: See the non-paying ‘user’ worth?

Kevin Rose questions the propriety of Jason Calacanis putting a price tag on the active contributors at Web 2.0 Social Web properties such as Digg and Netscape (See "Digg vs. Netscape, Kevin vs. Jason, Web 2.0 vs. commercial Internet”)

The bigger question is: How much are the Web 2.0 Social Web legions of non-contributing, and non-paying, users worth?

I put forth the notion of Web 2.0 "Social Freeloaders” last month in “Social freeloaders: Is there a collective wisdom and can the Web obtain it?”:

Wikipedia’s ’small core community’ that does the vast majority of the work reflects the extremely low ratio of contributing users to non-contributing users throughout the new social Web that relies on user contributions for its content.

From Wikipedia to de.licio.us, and from YouTube to Riya, both not-for-profit endeavors and purely commercial enterprises are staking their entire existence on user-generated content that is unreliable, inconsistent and difficult to come by.

The average YouTube user is watching the content, not generating it, ‘while more than 35 million videos are viewed daily, only 35,000 are uploaded’ and at Riya photo search, ’searchers outnumber the uploaders…20 to 1.’

Perhaps the social Web will come to be known for its freeloaders, rather than its uploaders.

While traffic and usage numbers have grown at Web 2.0 properties, the very low ratio of contributing users to non-contributing users has not evolved.

From YouTube, to Digg, to MySpace, Social Web stars are touting enormous traffic and usage metrics.

The traffic overwhelmingly involves non-contributing, and non-paying, users, however, and the usage is not well monetized.

Additionally, the Web 2.0 leaders in traffic and usage are incurring greater infrastructure costs to support the growing non-paying users, and under-monetized usage.

In “Social Web or Business Web: where is the money?” I cite The New York Times piece last April, “For MySpace, Making Friends Was Easy. Big Profit Is Tougher”:

MySpace now displays more pages each month than any other Web site except Yahoo. More pages, of course, means more room for ads. And, in theory, those ads can be narrowly focused on each member’s personal passions, which they conveniently display on their profiles. As an added bonus for advertisers, the music, photos and video clips that members place on their profiles constitutes a real-time barometer of what is hot.

For now, MySpace is charging bargain-basement rates to attract enough advertisers for the nearly one billion pages it displays each day. The company will have revenue of about $200 million this year, estimated Richard Greenfield of Pali Capital, a brokerage firm in New York. That is less than one-twentieth of Yahoo’s revenue.

A “The Hollywood Reporter” story on MySpace this week, with a Fox Interactive Media president Ross Levinsohn interview, puts forth vastly different projections than the analyst estimate, as reported by “The New York Times” in April.

As indicated by “The Hollywood Reporter”:

The prospects for generating revenue and profits are just as limitless. Murdoch said FIM will post at least $350 million in revenue this year, up from $47 million last year, and at least $500 million in 2007…

Since acquiring MySpace nine months ago, its user base and revenue have more than tripled, and News Corp. makes a profit on every registered friend.

After putting forth the MySpace positive scenario, “The Hollywood Reporter” story indicates:

News Corp. executives decline to discuss most FIM or MySpace financial particulars, which are still lumped into the "other" line on the company ledger.

The story also indicates News Corp. is providing financial assistance to MySpace:

It received a $20 million infusion from News Corp. to beef up infrastructure and servers and has doubled its annual operating budget to about $40 million, sources said.

A recent eMarketer study gauges MySpace ad revenues at $180 million for this year, as reported by AdAge. MySpace’s estimated ad take would represent about 2/3 of total ad spend projected for the year in the Social Web space. AdAge reports:

the entire area will attract some $280 million during the same period. That means ad spending on social-networking sites will account for just 1.7% of the $16.7 billion spent on U.S. online advertising in 2006…

In 2006, eMarketer expects general social networks excluding MySpace (such as Friendster, Facebook) to earn $35 million in ad revenue, and vertical networks (such as LinkedIn, which targets business types) to draw $20 million.

Networks presently being offered by leading portals such as Yahoo 360 and MSN Spaces will only bring in $45 million in ad revenue this year, eMarketer predicts. Notably, YouTube is lumped into this group, indicating that the most popular video-sharing service online today is not expected to generate much ad revenue in 2006.

So, how much is a non-paying MySpace user worth?

Using very rounded numbers, here is a “quick and dirty” analysis:

• MySpace 2005 acquisition price: $580 million
• MySpace 2006 “friends” user base: 100 million
• MySpace 2006 ad revenues: $200 million

MySpace acquisition price reflects an approximate multiple of $5-$6 per “friend.”

MySpace is currently generating approximately $2 in revenue per “friend.”

The MySpace effort to grow ad revenues since its acquisition by News Corp. last year provides would be bidders for Digg, YouTube…a valuable reference for measuring the financial potential of a large, non-paying base of young Internet users.

Credit goes to http://blogs.zdnet.com

Stumble and Stumblers Are The Best

Let me get this straight to you, I love Stumble and Stumblers!



From all the 200+ social bookmarking sites listed over wikipedia, StumbleUpon is the best for me even Digg and Delicious gets me more traffic.

I really love the "real people" visiting my blog and Stumblers are 99% the real and humble people. I have many stumble friends and they are absolutely great in everyway. It seems like every stumblers have good brains or something that StumbleUpon is targetting great people to signup.

The people who stumbles my blog, thanks to all of them. I really did and am doing hard work in this blog. See my old posts, they are excellent. You can judge it. You can see some recent posts contributed by my best online friends.

Request: Stumble my blog if you like it :)
Thanks A Million!
You Rock!

Recommended Firefox Web 2.0 Add-ons

With all this talk of the Web as a platform, it's worth taking a closer look at what web apps are using Firefox as their platform. Firefox is regarded as the best Web browser in terms of extensions - i.e. small browser add-ons which modify or add to existing functionality. It has hundreds of add-ons, which can be downloaded from here. But which are the best 'web 2.0' add-ons for Firefox? And I'm using the term 'web 2.0' very broadly here, to mean any add-on that has a social Web aspect to it.

Based on Mozilla's list of recommended extensions, AdaptiveBlue's Alex Iskold and I have generated a top 10 list of Firefox Web 2.0 add-ons. As always, let us know your own favorite add-ons in the comments.

Smart Browsing / Personal Productivity

Browster

Browster is a very cool add-on that enhances your browsing experience - for example mousing over a link gives you a preview of the website. It enables you to speed up your browsing experience and can save a lot of clicks in the long run. It does this by automatically pre-fetching links. It's a free add-on for both IE and Firefox - and hopes to make a profit by putting ads in the pop-up previews.

Answers

Answers is an add-on that promises to "instantly deliver the information you are looking for". It comes from answers.com, which is a popular online dictionary and Wikipedia syndication site. Alex says this is a "perfect example of smart integration with a service in the browser". The Answers add-on works like this:

"Just point at any word, hold the Alt key and click. Upon letting go, an AnswerTip in the form of a pop-up "information bubble" appears on the screen explaining the term."

blueorganizer

The blueorganizer smart browsing extension for Firefox is developed by Alex's company adaptiveblue. This extension drives productivity by building smarts and semantics into the browser. The blueorganizer integrates with many popular sites and services - including Amazon, Flickr, YouTube, iTunes, Odeo and Netflix. It utilizes Amazon's S3 storage service, as well as being run from the Firefox browser - so it is using the Web as a platform in many ways. SolutionWatch has a great review of blueorganizer, if you want to find out more.

Bookmarking / Social Bookmarking

delicious

The del.icio.us extension for Firefox allows you to easily bookmark webpages in del.icio.us, from within the Firefox browser. It integrates with the Firefox toolbar and provides extra options such as right-click menu and highlight text to add notes.

StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is an increasingly popular bookmarking tool - indeed in my recent post about the Turkey market, we discovered that StumbleUpon is a very popular app in Turkey. The StumbleUpon add-on is described as "collaborative surfing tool", because you can browse websites according to what other people recommend.

ClipMarks

ClipMarks is an early pioneer in the clipping space. Users clip pieces out of web pages and share these bits with each other. They can also tag and lookup the clips, but not much more can be done since the information is not structured. The Clipmarks Firefox add-on integrates this with the browser.

Google Notebook

Google Notebook is very similar to Clipmarks, but has better Firefox integration. It also works in IE6. As with Clipmarks, the user manually extracts text and images out of the page - but this information is unstructured. Google Notebook has had mixed reviews so far, but we think Google is currently putting in resources to improve it.

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer

FoxMarks Bookmark Synchronizer is an easy way to sync your Firefox bookmarks, if you use Firefox on more than one computer. It is very simple, but does its job nicely and has been well received by Firefox users.

RSS Readers

Unfortunately, we are not aware of a really great RSS Reader for Firefox. If you know of one, please mention it in the comments section. In our opinion the best reader in a Mozilla-based browser is the one which comes with Flock. It would be great if someone got inspired, extracted it and released it for Firefox - since Flock is also open source.

There are however two RSS readers that most Firefox users rely on:

Sage

Sage is a basic and lightweight RSS Reader, although you need to be a techie to use it. It leverages Firefox bookmarks to store feeds - and it does the job pretty well.

Wizz RSS News Reader

Wizz RSS is a fancier reader that works well. It supports OPML import and export, plus has advanced features like filtering news items on words and/or phrases. But it is still not as smooth in terms of usability and options as the Reader that is built into Flock.

Conclusion

Firefox is currently one of the best platforms for building a new breed of web applications, on top of the emerging Web Platform. Given its native support for JavaScript and excellent extension API, we expect to see more complex and more tightly integrated web apps built on Firefox in the near future.

Credit goes to http://www.readwriteweb.com

Web 2.0 - Understand with Logos Visualization

There is no official standard for what makes something “Web 2.0”, but there certainly are a few tell-tale signs. These new sites usually feature modern web technologies like Ajax and often have something to do with building online communities. But even more characteristic among these brands is their appearance. Web 2.0 sites nearly always feel open and friendly and often use small chunks of large type. The colors are bright and cheery — lots of blue, orange, and what we jokingly call the Official Color of Web 2.0: lime green.

You can see some of these striking commonalities in Ludwig Gatzke’s compilation of nearly 400 Web 2.0 logos. Read on for a breakdown of the fonts used in a few of our favorite brands.

The Softies

A clear trend in new identities is the use of soft, rounded typefaces dominated by VAG Rounded (AKA Rundschrift), but also including Helvetica Rounded, Arial Rounded, Bryant, and FF Cocon. All of these lend a modern friendliness to what might otherwise be a cold trademark. Here are a few examples:

	ClipShack — video sharing Font: VAG Rundschrift and Light obliqued
	Zimbra — collaborative calendar Font: VAG Rundschrift Light
	Wayfaring — custom Google Maps Font: VAG Rundschrift (fattened with added stroke)
	Kajeet — mobile phone service Font: VAG Rundschrift (custom ‘j’)
	Zopa — lending exchange Font: similar to Frankfurter Medium or Bryant Bold Alt
	Pando — file sharing Font: similar to Bryant Medium Alt
	MySpace — social networking Font: Arial Rounded Bold and Bell Gothic Black
	TracksLife — personal database Font: Arial Rounded Bold
	Eventful — collaborative calendar Font: Arial Rounded Bold (slightly smooshed)
	Spongecell — collaborative calendar Font: Arial Rounded Extra Bold
	Skype — internet telephony Font: Helvetica Rounded Bold
	ShoZu — photo sharing Font: FF Cocon Bold
	Tabblo and Tabblog — photo sharing Font: FF Cocon Bold

The Futurists

Some sites are reflecting the technological breakthroughs of Web 2.0 with a look that says “tomorrow’s techno”. Pixel faces, hard edges, and ultra simplified forms are not as common as the cozy shapes from the group above, but they represent a good portion of the latest internet startups:

	Last.fm — musical social network Font: ITC Ronda (customized) Alternate: Avernus
	Photobucket — photo hosting Font: Digital Sans Medium
	Plazes — geographical networking Font: Base 9 Regular SC
	NewsGator — RSS aggregator Font: ITC Bauhaus Medium
	ReminderFeed — reminders via RSS Font: FF Dot Matrix Two Regular
	Technorati — weblog search tool Font: Neo Sans Medium
	TagWorld — social networking Font: Handel Gothic Bold
	Shoutwire — news sharing Font: Agency Bold

The Classics

Safe standbys like Trade and News Gothic, Frutiger, Avenir, Interstate, FF Meta, FF DIN, and the always ubiquitous Helvetica continue to see use in new web logos:

	Xanga — weblog community Font: Trade Gothic No. 2 Bold and Light
	FeedBurner — RSS optimization and tracking Font: Trade Gothic Bold
	Newsvine — news sharing Font: FF Meta Bold and Book
	StandPoint — belief sharing Font: FF DIN Medium
	DropSend — file sharing Font: Frutiger Bold
	Flickr — photo sharing Font: Frutiger Black
	PureVolume — music promotion Font: Avenir Book and Medium
	Shutterfly — photo service Font: Avenir Heavy (customized)
	9rules — web design network Font: Helvetica Bold
	Buzznet — photo/video sharing Font: Helvetica Bold (and a familiar bundle of leaves)
	PODZINGER — podcast search Font: Interstate Black
	Campfire — group chat Font: Interstate Regular
	YouTube — video sharing Font: Alternate Gothic No. Two
	Bloglines — news aggregator Font: ITC Officina Bold
	Weblogs, Inc. — blog network Font: Syntax Bold
	Wikipedia — collaborative reference Font: Hoefler Text

Update:

New Classics

Just as there will always be trends, there will also be those designers who break from them. The following logotypes eschew the popular styles mentioned above and use new typefaces that have the potential to become timeless classics. The typeface is then used throughout the site in headers and graphics. It’s a great way to reinforce a brand and set it apart:

	Socialtext — enterprise wiki Font: Lisboa Sans
	Facebook — social networking Font: Klavika (customized) Also: cards with Vista Sans
	Joyent — small business server Font: Proxima Nova (alt ‘a’) Not a logo, but we love Joyent’s use of Proxima — a new face that feels familiar but has its own character.

Credit goes to http://www.fontshop.com

MySpace - Interesting Hacks To Make Great

The social phenomenon that is MySpace is one I don’t fully understand, and yet, one I must fully respect. In fact, with over 50 million unique users, it is something everybody must respect. Any website which rolls up that amount of usership is doing something very, very right, and no matter what your thoughts on it as a vehicle for your own expression are, you must give it its full due for what it is to seemingly everyone else.

Several weeks ago, I finally signed up for an account, and within seconds I was instantly put-off by what had been created for me: a hastily-designed “profile page” with uninspired colors, misaligned tables, and a mish-mash of extraneous cruft and design elements which made this feel more like a halfway house than a “home”. Now, granted, I am a designer by trade so my tolerance for this stuff is orders of magnitude lower than most of the population, but clearly, this was not a place I even felt comfortable having my name on.

So with the default home page this underwhelming, what is a MySpacer to do? Customize, of course. One of MySpace’s greatest features is its ability to let you skin your own home page. Unfortunately, 99% of the customizations I’ve seen are chalkboard-screechingly awful, but what could a MySpace home page look like if some actual design thought went into it? That is the question I sought to answer.

But first — as Keith Robinson asked me when I first showed him what I was doing — “Ummm, why?” The answer is twofold. First, I love a design challenge. Second, we’ve been building a lot of new social components into Newsvine over the past several weeks and I wanted a good reference point for what is already done well online and what could be improved.

So without further ado, on with the surgery…

Sizing up the beast

The first thing I did was search Google for sites which specialized in MySpace customizations. Turns out MySpace customization is a cottage industry unto itself. Unfortunately, the first twenty sites I found produced nothing but crap. Granted, perhaps it is crap that people want, but I wanted to do better. There were mostly instructions on how to tile Ricky Martin backgrounds behind your Christina Aguilera autoplay music player, but nothing close to the brilliant piece of work Keegan Jones threw together a few months ago.

The problem with Keegan’s hack, however, is twofold: a) it violates MySpace’s Terms of Use by blocking advertisements, and b) it produces essentially a static, non-functional page by replacing all of MySpace’s code with your own.

What we really want to do here is simply decrappify our home page as much as we can without violating the Terms of Use and replace all evil design elements with a cleaner, more professional look. We also want to maintain MySpace’s actual HTML so our page is functional and not just a facade hiding our grotesque underbelly.

Enter the dragon

Like a biologist over a petri dish, I pulled out my copy of XyleScope and began observing the organisms at play within the MySpace profile page. How difficult was this going to be? Was everything coded semantically? Did the company provide enough hooks in the form of CSS classes and IDs for users to easily style most elements on the page? Was anything “off-limits”? Over the next several hours, I slowly identified every element on the page by its programmatic hook. The good news was that a lot could be done here. The bad news was that the CSS was going to be ugly, ugly, ugly.

If Dave Shea built the CSS Zen Garden, this was going to be the CSS Weed Patch; a block of code so semantically twisted that it would turn Joe Clark straight.

It was upon thinking of this analogy, however, that I really started to get psyched about this project. After all, it doesn’t take a genius to make perfect code dance. But it would be a real accomplishment to make a pig do the pachanga.

Step One - Learning the r001z

There are certain things you can’t do on MySpace. Autoplaying “Maneater” is perfectly ok apparently, but these things are not:

• Using the # sign anywhere in your CSS. This is to avoid you messing with ID’ed elements, but its brute force removal also precludes you from properly specifying hex values. Instead, you must do things like color: FFFFFF or color: white. Note also that because the pound sign is missing, you cannot use shorthand like color: FFF.
• Specifying style rules for iframes. Apparently, this is to keep you from hiding MySpace’s banner ad, although it’s easy to do this anyway without touching the iframe. Don’t do it though unless you want your profile deleted.
• Placing comments in your CSS file. If you mark up your CSS file with standard (/*whatever*/) CSS comments, they will get stripped. Other styles of commenting “kind of” work, like double brackets ([[whatever]]) but they end up messing up the CSS code in some browsers. Interestingly though, downlevel-revealed (but not downlevel-hidden) IE conditional comments work just fine. We’ll use these in our hack in fact.
• Using shorthand for border styles. If you try something like border: 1px solid FF0000, it will not work in Firefox. Interesting, it seems to work if you use a keyword like red instead, so this probably has something to do with the hex issue mentioned above. The unfortunate workaround is to always specify your borders in longhand.
• Putting CSS anywhere but right smack dab in the middle of the content. You’d think it would be easy for the MySpace crew to let you specify your style rules in the head element where they belong, but nope, you have to stuff them into the “About Me” module which sits in the middle of the HTML. The result is an unavoidable FOBUC (or “Flash Of Butt-Ugly Content”) before your style rules kick in, but oh well. Such is life in the ghetto.

Step Two - Visualizing The Finished Product

As I saw it, there were mainly four things I could do here: a) clean up all of the margins, padding, spacing, alignment, type, and color issues, b) create a new background image and associated design theme, c) make a branded header, and d) add some extras with the magic of CSS.

I felt a Wicked Worn theme a la Cameron Moll would be pretty killer, so I mocked it up in Photoshop using various weathering techniques until it looked sufficiently unlike any other page I’d seen on MySpace. I then planned out how each piece of the design could be shoehorned into the Weed Patch with the most convoluted of coding schemes.

Step Three - Getting the ducklings in a row

The third order of business was to create CSS entries for everything I needed to style and group them into logical categories so I didn’t have to jump all over the place during the decrappification process. In a normal web design workflow, you have something like this:


.modules {
background-color: #fff;
padding: 15px;
}

.modules p {
color: #aaa;
line-height: 150%;
}

In MySpace’s world, it’s more like this:


table table table table td, table table table table tbody td {
background-color: transparent !important;
padding: 15px !important;
}

table table table table td font, table table table table tbody td font {
color: aaaaaa !important;
line-height: 150% !important;
}

That’s right. Almost everything you can do during the customization process relies on styling various nesting levels and hoping they don’t affect other areas of the page which may be similarly nested. In many cases, you have to go back and override the conflicting nests by specifying additional, more specific rules. And to top things off, the elements on the page which are “properly” classed are given names like lightbluetext8 and orangetext15. These are the sorts of things that give Steve Champeon heart attacks.

By the time your CSS is properly grouped though, you’re all ready to start customizing.

Step Four - Cleaning Up The Mess

Explaining all of the style rules associated with the general janitorial work performed here would take weeks, so since I’m providing my CSS file, just go ahead and examine them there if you’re interested. Everything is clearly commented and explained so you don’t have to go through the same long process I did.

Step Five - Injecting The Design

There are only four images used in the Mike Industries MySpace design layout. The first is the background image: an aged piece of parchment, centered horizontally and tiled vertically in a seamless manner.

The second is the branded header. This header unfortunately only works in non-IE browsers for the stupidest of all possible reasons: there is no doctype provided on any MySpace pages. This doctype problem was probably the single biggest stumbling point in the entire project. There were certain really weird things happening in IE at every turn and I had no idea what was going on. The branded header is positioned absolutely with a width of 100% and for some reason in IE, it was inheriting the width of the table it was in, despite the fact that the table was not even positioned relatively at all. Such weirdness! I was beside myself for hours, until I finally noticed the lack of a doctype. These are things you just don’t think about when you write good code. By the way, if anyone can figure out a way around the IE doctype problem, let me know and I’ll post it. Specifically a way to get the branded header to show in IE. Until then, we have a graceful workaround below. Thanks to a negative margin solution by Daniel Stout, the branded header now works in PC IE!

The third image is the “Contacting Mike D.” table. We’ve gone ahead and replaced MySpace’s default ugly GIF buttons with a background image that sits behind the now transparent button set. I first saw this on Ryan Sims’ MySpace page but have since seen it elsewhere as well.

The final image is my name: “Mike D.”. This was accomplished using a brand new image replacement technique I’m unveiling today: MIMSIR or “Mike Industries My Space Image Replacement”. The technique essentially takes a block level element (a span, in this case, with a display: block property), sets a static height, applies a background image with custom rendered text, turns the browser text the same color as the background, and shrinks it down to 1 pixel (effectively hiding it). The technique is intentionally gritty because this is a gritty place.

Step Six - Coddling IE

Since Internet Explorer (even version 7) is such a pile, we make a few quick hacks in our css to basically chew its food for it and rub its tummy to keep it from puking all over the place. There are two things IE can’t handle about our hacks: a) our newly aligned and nicely padded tables, and b) our branded header. Both are likely due to IE’s rendering behavior in the absence of a doctype and both will be handled by a downlevel IE conditional comment at the end of our CSS code. To hide the fact that the table spacing isn’t quite right, we apply a new background image that is the same color as the tables and turn off the borders. This effectively hides the boundaries of the tables altogether and looks just fine. To get around the branded header issue, we simply don’t show the header and slide the rest of the content up to eliminate the void.Thanks to Daniel’s header solution above, and my own ridiculously hacky solution for getting the tables to align perfectly, we’re now 100% IE compliant! Not sure I’m proud of that, but ok. If you’ve ever set a “strong” tag to display:block and given it a width, you’ll know the extent of this ridiculousness.

Step Seven (The Final Step!) - Add CSS Extras

When I first created my MySpace profile page, I was given one “friend”. Some guy named “Tom” who apparently started MySpace and can now buy and sell my entire family with what he makes in one day. Well done Tom, and I’m happy you’re my friend, but having one friend who isn’t even really my friend is kind of lame, no? Especially when there’s a big headline on my page that says “Mike D. has 1 friends.” How am I going to be one of the l33t d00dz on teh intarweb with only one friend?

Most people would take the obvious step and send e-mails to all of their friends asking them to join their buddy list, but why do that when you have the power of CSS generated content! Using this simple CSS rule, I was able to increase my friend count from “1” to “1 billion” in about ten seconds:


.redbtext:after {
content: " billion";
}


This is really great when you’re just getting off the ground, but it also scales very well. Now that I have 29 meatspace “friends”, my MySpace count shows “29 billion”… a number surely no CSS-ignorant friend-whore can top.

As one last cherry on this project, I thought I’d throw in another bit of CSS generated content. There’s a line at the top of everyone’s profile that says “_____ is in your extended network”. I could never really figure out what that means since everyone in the entire MySpace population appears to be in my “extended network” so I thought I’d at least make it sound a little more dramatic with the exclamation “OMFG!” before it. This can be accomplished with the following CSS rule:


.blacktext12:before {
content: "OMFG! ";
}


Final thoughts

So there you have it. How to hack your way to a more tasteful MySpace profile. Hopefully, my many hours of weeding will save you from having to fully examine the bowels of this beast. I’m providing my CSS file, fully commented, along with image files to use as templates for your own profiles. I do ask that you don’t use my exact theme but hopefully I’m providing you enough so that a few minutes in Photoshop is all you need to produce something you’re proud of.

Additionally, I will say this: after working this thing into a tasteful state, I find myself actually quite taken with it. Many MySpace outsiders knock the service because its garish appearance and overall clunkiness overshadow anything good that may be underneath. But imagine what a service like this could be with a professional makeover. Get a company like Adaptive Path or a few Bryan Velosos in there and you could open up a whole new world of user enjoyment and customization.

I’ve heard people say that the reason MySpace is so successful is because of its garishness, but I don’t buy that for a second. The freedom to be garish is certainly an advantage, but I hold that between garishness and beauty, most people will pick beauty for themselves if given the choice.

This theory will be tested as we roll more social elements and customization into Newsvine in the coming weeks.

Credit goes to http://personalweb.about.com

YouTube - The Video Sharing King Proved

Nathan Weinberg at Inside Google is claiming that YouTube has moved ahead of Google Video in terms of popularity. I totally agree. But it’s not just Google - these guys have moved ahead of everybody! This week, I caught a roundup of the “Flickrs of video” - here’s the list:

-Clipshack
-VSocial
-Grouper
-GoogleVideo
-Metacafe
-Castpost
-Vimeo
-Revver
-OurMedia

YouTube is way ahead of many of these services - YouTube videos are appearing on blogs and websites all over the place. OurMedia is also excellent, but it’s a non-profit and I’m more interested in startups right now. I’m also a fan of Grouper - it’s definitely one to watch.

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but the only video sharing service with a clear business model right now is Revver - they’re putting ads in videos and splitting the revenue with the content creator. Even this seems like a difficult thing to pull off - can they earn enough from the ads to pay for their bandwidth and reward the content creators? I’m not sure - but I’m keen to find out.

Credit goes to http://www.mashable.com

Keyword Tools: Advanced and Deep Introduction

So you want to know what all the hype about keywords and keywords tools is all about? This article will attempt to provide a high level overview of what keywords are and why keyword tools can be very useful for different types of activities.

Keywords are just that, keywords.These words could be used to identify an object, a product, a person, a service or many other things. Coffee and Tea are keywords. A keyphrase is one pair or more keywords together, Coffee + House and Starbucks + Coffee + House are keyphrases. When you need to communicate with another person and you want to speak about something specific, you throw in a keyword or key phrase so that they understand what your talking about.

Keywords are the fuel that keeps Search engines, like Google, Yahoo and MSN Live, running. When you talk to a search engine, by performing a search not speaking into your computer, the search engine uses the keywords that you type in to figure out what you are searching. The search engine will sort through all of its stored information, which could be billions of pages of content, and return what it believes is what you are searching for. These results will be ranked by the most relevant to the least relevant.Now your results will depend on the keywords or keyphrases you used to perform the search. Heres where it becomes interesting.

What you, I and the search engine think are relevant keywords to a specific topic may be very different ideas. For example, someone who quilts could be looking for quilting supplies. This person types quilt into the search engine and receives results totaling more than 15 million. The first result is a website that has used quilts for sale. Not what the user had in mind when searching for quilt supplies. This is where Keyword tools become very helpful and interesting.

Using a keyword tool could assist both, the person searching for something and the web or web content designer develop content. How, by using actual hard data to bridge the gap between what people are actually searching for everyday and what we think or guess people are searching for. Keyword tools come in many shapes and sizes. Some are web based others are desktop applications. The cost also vary. So are free, some require one time charges and others are subscription based.Please note that using keyword tools will likely yield different results based on the specific tools and techniques that are used. These tools and techniques are beyond the scope of this article, however if you are seeking more of this type of information, visit the website listed at the end of this article.

Now, on the surface having this ability via keyword tools may not seem like much but beneath the surface and with the right know how, it is true power. Using keyword tools one would perform research on what they want to search for and have the keyword tool return results prior to using a search engine. Why not just search with the search engine one time and not this keyword tool thing? One reason is that the keyword tools results will be based on the most commonly searched keywords and key phrases. Some keyword tools will tell you how many times each of these were searched and also provide other variations of the keyword or keyphrase.

The content designer would reap the same rewards by using keyword tools. They would know what people are searching for and in what variations and key phrases they are using. This would prove to be priceless when designing web content and would allow the designer to optimize web content the matches exactly what people are searching for. The perfect marriage.

Keyword tools can be very useful for the web surfer and the web content developer by providing a small view inside of the daily operations of a search engine.

Credit goes to http://www.adwords-articles.com/

Super Solid Work At Home - Money Making Business Idea

If you are looking to start your very own internet home business, you’ve probably run into the brick wall of options. There really isn’t a shortage of programs promising you the moon and the stars and it seems like an impossible task to actually distinguish the garbage from the gems. And there are gems. Many people, from all walks of life and from all over the world, have and are, making a lot of money with their online businesses. If you are looking for a great internet home business idea then you have to realize that it’s not going to just fall unto your lap. The internet can be a tough place and by nature it is very competitive, but the sheer amount of opportunities still makes it the ideal option for starting your very own home business.

Apart from having the comfort of working in your own home, at your own time and determining your own income level, the internet really allows anyone to ‘make it’ with virtually any product or service. If you can’t find your clientele online, then they simply don’t exist. So how do you find that great internet home business idea then? Where do you start looking for the next best thing and how can you know that you are on the right track? After all, you don’t want to spent all that time and effort on something that simply doesn’t work.

Here is one of the best proven internet home business ideas - in very basic terms. Sit down and write down five to ten things you absolutely love – preferably things you know a lot about or things that you are very interested in at least. Next you want to explore which of these ideas would be a potentially profitable market online and you can do this by doing some market and keyword research. By finding out what people are looking for you can determine what to offer them. Your keyword research will give you a pretty good indication of the demand and also the supply in that particular niche.

Next you want to explore the products available in these niches – especially information products in Clickbank and Paydotcom’s marketplaces. There are several more refined strategies for testing the water before you enter, but essentially you want to make sure that you will be rewarded for the work you do. There is nothing worse than spending months developing a website, blog or ezine in a market that won’t spend money on it or a market that is too saturated.

Once you’ve decided on your niche, you can start your own website, blog, newsletter or community forum where you connect people looking for information on your specific subject with vendors selling their products through affiliate networks like Clickbank . You then get paid a commission for every sale that is made through your affiliate links (from your blog or website). Although this is not the most revolutionary internet home business idea, it is still the most fundamental and many of the ‘new strategies’ are only variations and improvements on this basic theme.

Not only does this internet home business idea allow you do and work on something that you love, but it gives you the opportunity to help people with your expert knowledge. There are many internet home business ideas that rely on ‘black hat tactics’ that work only for a while and when the search engines catch on you might find yourself out of a website (and income). This strategy for starting your own internet home business is still the one that’s stood the test of time as it really ads to the total value of the internet as a whole and your success will rely on the quality of your work and the quality of service you provide.

Don’t let this internet home business idea put you off by the perceived amount of work or the technical issues of building websites. These are really very minor issues and in this day and age anyone can do it. Probably the best aspect about this internet home business idea is that the income you generate from it is residual – meaning that you keep earning money from it day after day (even while you sleep) for work done only once. Once your website is up and running it will keep pulling visitors and earning you money forever.

http://www.sincere-advice.com

Super Solid Work At Home - Money Making Business Idea

If you are looking to start your very own internet home business, you’ve probably run into the brick wall of options. There really isn’t a shortage of programs promising you the moon and the stars and it seems like an impossible task to actually distinguish the garbage from the gems. And there are gems. Many people, from all walks of life and from all over the world, have and are, making a lot of money with their online businesses. If you are looking for a great internet home business idea then you have to realize that it’s not going to just fall unto your lap. The internet can be a tough place and by nature it is very competitive, but the sheer amount of opportunities still makes it the ideal option for starting your very own home business.

Apart from having the comfort of working in your own home, at your own time and determining your own income level, the internet really allows anyone to ‘make it’ with virtually any product or service. If you can’t find your clientele online, then they simply don’t exist. So how do you find that great internet home business idea then? Where do you start looking for the next best thing and how can you know that you are on the right track? After all, you don’t want to spent all that time and effort on something that simply doesn’t work.

Here is one of the best proven internet home business ideas - in very basic terms. Sit down and write down five to ten things you absolutely love – preferably things you know a lot about or things that you are very interested in at least. Next you want to explore which of these ideas would be a potentially profitable market online and you can do this by doing some market and keyword research. By finding out what people are looking for you can determine what to offer them. Your keyword research will give you a pretty good indication of the demand and also the supply in that particular niche.

Next you want to explore the products available in these niches – especially information products in Clickbank and Paydotcom’s marketplaces. There are several more refined strategies for testing the water before you enter, but essentially you want to make sure that you will be rewarded for the work you do. There is nothing worse than spending months developing a website, blog or ezine in a market that won’t spend money on it or a market that is too saturated.

Once you’ve decided on your niche, you can start your own website, blog, newsletter or community forum where you connect people looking for information on your specific subject with vendors selling their products through affiliate networks like Clickbank . You then get paid a commission for every sale that is made through your affiliate links (from your blog or website). Although this is not the most revolutionary internet home business idea, it is still the most fundamental and many of the ‘new strategies’ are only variations and improvements on this basic theme.

Not only does this internet home business idea allow you do and work on something that you love, but it gives you the opportunity to help people with your expert knowledge. There are many internet home business ideas that rely on ‘black hat tactics’ that work only for a while and when the search engines catch on you might find yourself out of a website (and income). This strategy for starting your own internet home business is still the one that’s stood the test of time as it really ads to the total value of the internet as a whole and your success will rely on the quality of your work and the quality of service you provide.

Don’t let this internet home business idea put you off by the perceived amount of work or the technical issues of building websites. These are really very minor issues and in this day and age anyone can do it. Probably the best aspect about this internet home business idea is that the income you generate from it is residual – meaning that you keep earning money from it day after day (even while you sleep) for work done only once. Once your website is up and running it will keep pulling visitors and earning you money forever.

http://www.sincere-advice.com

Paid Survey Sites, Searching the best one is EASY

Many people who want to make money with paid online surveys ask these questions: How do you identify and choose the best survey site? Where is it? Who operates it? Take me to the best survey site! I want to know which is the best paid survey site now!

O.K., but hold your horses a moment. Let's go about this in a logical, systematic way.

First off, in order to choose rationally, we need a working definition of what constitutes good, better and best. The "measures of goodness" or indicators of superiority are:

1. Size. All things being equal big sites with lots of clients are better than smaller ones. Why? Because they had to be doing something right to get big in the first place. Then they must have been doing something really right to stay big. A paid survey site that does not deliver, loses clients and they tell others why they left. The word gets out and the paid survey site loses clients, shrinks and is not so big anymore!

2. Increasing size. If a paid survey site is increasing in size, it means that they are gaining clients and growing. This is an indication of general health and client support. Losing size may mean that they were once good but have changed (maybe a management change or ownership change) and are now neglecting the good things that made them big in the first place. So, increasing size is good, decreasing size is bad.

3. Guarantee. A strong guarantee is very important. It means that the paid survey site is willing to stand behind its services and promises and refund your money if you are not satisfied. That is not just so you can get your money back, but so that you will know that they know that they are holding your money on the condition that they perform! It means that the paid survey site is on probation, subject to proving themselves.

The best guarantee is backed up by a third party financial institution like a bank or PayPal or ClickBank. Of course you always have the recourse to ask your bank, the one that issued your credit card, to take the payment back because of non-performance on the part of the recipient of the funds. But this is a hassle and you need to allege fraud, etc., and your bank will look with some suspicion on you if it happens too often.

But when the paid survey site's financial agent makes the guarantee, that's strong! You weren't satisfied; you want your money back. They give it back and look with suspicion on the paid survey site! Now the paid survey site knows that that could happen and they very much don't want it to happen. So they try very hard to keep you happy!

4. Refund rate. Probably the most important indicator of all is the percentage of the paid survey site's clients who demand a refund. These represent the utter failures of the paid survey site to meet their client's expectations. So low refund rates are good, high refund rates are bad. The refund rate should be low, in the 3-5% range. Anything over 10% should be a red flag.

By using these indicators and criteria, all you have to do is screen through the available candidates so you can find the best paid survey site for you.

But be aware that these indicators change over time. Last year's winner can become this year's loser. New, ambitious, hard-working companies emerge and outshine the older, better known ones. So you will need to monitor these indicators over a period of time. Sites like surveysentinel.ya23.com can help. They maintain statistics on the top 20 paid survey sites and update them monthly. ClickBank.com has good info on refund rates for the 70 or so paid survey sites that promote through ClickBank's network. And, ClickBank will enforce their 60-day, no questions money-back guarantee policy.

So there you have it. Now you know how to find the best paid survey site for you.

Credit goes to http://surveysentinel.ya23.com/

Firefox Leaves No Reason to USE Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer, you're fired.

That should have been said a long time ago. After Microsoft cemented a monopoly of the Web-browser market, it let Internet Explorer go stale, parceling out ho-hum updates that neglected vulnerabilities routinely exploited by hostile Web sites. Not until August's Windows XP Service Pack 2 update did (some) users get any real relief.

And yet people found reasons to stick with IE -- alternative browsers cost money, were too slow, too complicated, or didn't work with enough Web sites.

No more. Tuesday, the answer to IE arrived: a safe, free, fast, simple and compatible browser called Mozilla Firefox.

Firefox (available for Win 98 or newer, Mac OS X and Linux at www.mozilla.org) is an unlikely rival, developed by a small nonprofit group with extensive volunteer help. Its code dates to Netscape and its open-source successor, Mozilla, but in the two years since Firefox debuted as a minimal, browser-only offshoot of those sprawling suites, it has grown into a remarkable product.

Firefox displays an elegant simplicity within and without. Its toolbar presents only the basic browsing commands: back, forward, reload, stop, home. Its Options screen consists of five simple categories of settings -- most of which don't need adjusting, since the defaults actually make sense.

One in particular should delight many long-suffering Web users: Firefox blocks pop-up ads automatically.

But Firefox's security goes deeper than that. It doesn't support Microsoft's dangerous ActiveX software, which gives a Web site the run of your computer. It omits IE's extensive hooks into the rest of Windows, which can turn a mishap into a systemwide meltdown.

Firefox resists "phishing" scams, in which con artists lure users into entering personal info on fake Web pages, by making it easier to tell good sites from bad. When you land on an encrypted page -- almost no phishing sites provide this protection -- Firefox advertises that status by highlighting the address bar in yellow. It also lists that page's domain name on the status bar; if that doesn't match what you see in the address bar, you're probably on a phishing site.

To keep Firefox current with any security fixes, the browser is designed to check for updates automatically.

A "Find" bar at the bottom of Firefox's window lets you search for words on a page without blocking your view of the page itself; as you type a query, the first matching item is highlighted in green. "Find Next" and "Find Previous" buttons jump to other matches, and a "Highlight" button paints all of them in yellow.

For searches across the entire Web, a box at the top right provides a shortcut to Google queries, and a menu lists five other sites, including Yahoo, Amazon and eBay. Downloadable plug-ins offer access to such resources as the Internet Movie Database.

What if that Google search yields four interesting sites? Hold down the Control key as you click each link, and they will open behind separate tabs in your existing window. This tabbed browsing -- a feature shared with almost all non-IE browsers -- is far more efficient and far less cluttered than the old one-page-per-window approach.

Busy readers can also use Firefox's built-in RSS (Really Simple Syndication) newsreader to fetch updates from Web sites that publish their content using this standard. This "Live Bookmarks" feature lacks the flexibility of a stand-alone newsreader, but it's also simpler.

Web addicts can customize Firefox to no end with browser extensions that add functions and themes that alter its looks. Find the Options window's settings too limiting? Type "about: config" into the address bar and you'll see about 600 preferences to tweak.

I've used Firefox as my default browser since February, and in that time I've found few Web sites that don't look right in it. Most of the time, it's the Web site's fault: Microsoft's MSN Video blocks all non-IE browsers, while SideStep's airfare-search tool employs ActiveX (an ActiveX-free version is in the works). In these rare cases, I will fire up IE -- it's not like I can uninstall it -- or, more often, vote with my mouse and move on to another site.

Switching from IE to Firefox is nearly painless. Download a 4.7-megabyte installer, run it, and let it import your existing IE data. Your plug-ins, bookmarks, browsing history and even cookies should transfer over (IE's home page and any saved passwords should be imported, but were not in my tests); you can then pick up in Firefox exactly where you left off in IE.

I think anybody using Internet Explorer should switch to Firefox today. Seriously. Even if you've loaded every IE security update, Firefox will give you a faster, more useful view of the Web. If you haven't -- or if you use a pre-XP version of Windows ineligible for Service Pack 2's security fixes -- it would be lunacy to stick with IE.

(If you're using Mac OS X or Linux, there's no such urgency; Apple's Safari, for example, is a fine browser in its own right and offers a few conveniences that Firefox leaves out.)

Firefox's story doesn't end with this 1.0 version. Some upgrades, such as a rewrite of its awkward bookmarks-management interface, are waiting for later releases. But the beauty of an open-source product like this is that you can participate in its evolution. Firefox's code is open for anybody to inspect and improve; you can browse a database of bugs (bugzilla.mozilla.org) and vote on what you want to see changed next.

All of these advantages may still not suffice to knock off IE anytime soon. But Firefox's development won't grind to a halt if it doesn't suit some company's marketing plans. Can you say that about IE?

Credit goes to http://www.washingtonpost.com/

Review of Firefox Recommended Add-ons Worldwide

This week the spotlight is on Firefox as it launches its milestone 2.0 release. We've covered the launch with a Firefox 2.0 product review, an interview with Mozilla exec Chris Beard and a Firefox marketing discussion post. Today we bring you a review of the top twenty add-ons (aka extensions) selected by Mozilla for the Firefox 2 launch. We've categorized the add-ons and analyzed them, to bring you what are hopefully the pick of the crop.

Thriving ecosystem

Since its inception, Firefox has been a great platform on which web developers can build on top of. Recognizing that the core browser must be lean, the Mozilla team put together the infrastructure for creating add-ons. In this single decision, Mozilla created not just a fine browser - but a thriving community and a free marketplace, which links add-on developers directly to browser users. The developers are free to be creative and the users are free to choose the add-ons that they like. Such an ecosystem gives rise to innovation.

Add-ons point to the future of the web browser

Looking at the add-ons that were selected for the Firefox 2 showcase, in some ways they show us what the browser of the future may look like. Indeed that is something that Chris Beard himself alluded to - they view add-ons as a kind of test bed, pulling ideas from the best of them into the core product over time.

The majority of add-ons are focused on integrating web services into the browser, to boost user productivity. In a nutshell, add-ons are about shaving off clicks - but to be fair they do so much more. They create an enhanced, smarter, better browsing experience and ultimately save users' time.

Music, Weather and Maps

The FoxyTunes add-on integrates with your favorite music player and allows you to control the music you are listening to, right from within the Firefox status bar. There are a lot of handy features, my favorite being the ability to change the language and encoding - so that if you are listening to music in a language other than English, the title and the artist are displayed correctly.

Forecastfox brings the weather channel right into Firefox. On the install you select the zip code or city and the add-on does the rest. It relies on AccuWeather.com to bring you the latest current weather conditions, as well as a forecast of the upcoming weather. It is highly customizable and just perfect for the status bar.

Maps+ uses the Yahoo! Maps API to help the user look up addresses. To see it working, highlight any address - we tried a restaurant on this page - then right click and select View map from the context menu. The layered popup with the map appears right next to the address. You can control the zoom level of the map and customize the add-on in various ways.

Bookmarks 2.0

Storing and sharing web content is one of the most fundamental online activities. del.icio.us started the web 2.0 revolution by introducing tagging and social bookmarking. Since then del.icio.us itself and many other companies have enhanced bookmarks in many different ways. Let's look at the latest add-on advancements featured in the top twenty add-ons - and note there are a lot of bookmarking services amongst the add-ons.

Yahoo! released an updated version of the del.icio.us plugin, which replaces browser bookmarks with a view of del.icio.us posts. The StumbleUpon add-on is essential for fans of this service - it features a handy toolbar that lets the users rate and discover web sites. The Clipmarks add-on lets you clip pieces of the page, instead of bookmarking them. This is useful when you are not interested in the entire page but just want to store a paragraph or an image.

The Foxmarks add-on is seemingly simple - it synchronizes your bookmarks between all your Firefox browsers. What's great is that it works in the backround and does not require any input from the user, beyond creating an account. The JetEye addon in some ways is similar to Clipmarks, because it allows the user to collect clips. But it also enables arranging these clips by topic. Yoono is a social recommendation engine for discovering interesting or related sites. The BlueOrganizer add-on, developed by my company AdaptiveBlue, helps users to interact with books, music, movies, restaurants and other everyday things.

The developer add-ons

The showcase also contains three add-ons that help Firefox developers.

GreaseMonkey is an add-on that lets technically savvy users customize the look and feel of web pages. It has been very popular with the community, as it brings impressive possibilities for creativity.

FireBug is an essential debugger which supports JavaScript, CSS, HTML and much more. The Web Developer add-on contains an entire toolset, which is a must have for anyone who is doing web and add-on development for Firefox.

Blogging and RSS

Performancing add-on is a fully fledged blog editor built right into Firefox, which integrates with TypePad, Blogger, WordPress and LiveJournal (amongst others). Sage is a powerful feed reader - with the ability to subscribe to feeds, manage them and import/export via OPML.

Utilities

There are some very nifty utilities that can be integrated into Firefox:

• FireFTP integrates FTP into Firefox
• ChatZilla integrates IRC into Firefox
• Download Statusbar helps you manage downloads right in the status bar
• FlashGot is another download productivity add-on
• Adblock Plus lets you do away with advertisements

Other add-ons in the showcase

• Pronto is comparison shopping add-on which alerts you to potential price savings
• Jaja wires telephony right into the browser
• LinkedIn integrates the popular professional social network into the browser
• Cooliris lets the user preview a page by hovering over links
• Answers is a time saver add-on that lets you lookup information on Answers.com

Fun, useful and exciting

This Firefox showcase is full of interesting and useful add-ons that focus on helping users save time, by integrating web services into the browser. These add-ons point to a future of smarter, better browsers - that will be more aware of the patterns and use cases of interacting with information online.

So that's our take - let us know which of these and other add-ons you use and recommend!

Credit goes to http://www.readwriteweb.com

American Idol Recap: The Top 12. It is going to rock you!

Are you ready to rumble, AI fans!? The real show starts with the Top 12 on the big stage with the screaming fans who give everything a standing ovation and boo every Simon critique, no matter how accurate. Oh, yeah baby!

We're back with the slavish praise of celebrity coaches, the blinding white Simon teeth, the strange gay banter between Simon and Ryan, the stylistic makeovers of contestants...sometimes for the better and sometimes for the much, much worse, and occasionally, when they find the time, some actual talent on display.

This is what I've been waiting for, haven't you?

The Top 12 are tasked with doing Diana Ross songs, and she's on hand to be a loving coach with mostly positive reinforcement and only occasional gentle hints for improvement. Diana has three head's worth of hair, but she really looks quite fabulous.

So here we go:

1. Brandon sang "You Can't Hurry Love"

Brandon is warm and has a warm, pleasant voice, but he has not stepped out to take the spotlight like fellow back-up singer Melinda has. The band was overpowering him sound-wise, and the stage was overpowering him presence-wise. He had a bad night all the way around with a major vocal crack and a major brain-freeze on the words. Actually, although he thought he was doing well until he forgot his words, the converse is true. After he forgot his words the stress and shock gave hima sense of urgency and intensity that he had lacked until that moment.

The verdict: Very much at risk.

2. Melinda sang "Home"

I agree this is a treacly, boring song. I agree that she did more with it than I would have imagined. I continue to find some of the arrangement choices these guys are making to be odd. Starting in some weird middle place of this song didn't help it any. But Melinda has the interpretive skills to make a story out of it anyway. Before Simon compared her to Gladys Knight, I had written that down in my notes. She has a great voice, great heart...and impressively great technique. Note how her chin does not wobble to match the rhythm of her vibrato (one of my pet peeves in singers.) She has staked her claim as the one to beat on pure talent...vocal and interpretive.

The verdict: Oh, so very safe.

3. Chris S. sang "Endless Love"

You could tell that among all the contestants Diana didn't seem to like Chris and his approach that much. She had a slight curled lip of disdain when discussing his choices. And his choices were very bad. For one, trviail thing: wear the glasses (and yes, I wrote that down before Simon said it too.) Chris has a strong, pleasant voice, but that arrangement and his approach to it were robotic, non-emotional and just weird.

The verdict: Well, he did a poor job, but I don't think America's sick of him yet.

4. Gina sang "Love Child"

I hate to tell Miss Ross, but "pronunciate" is not a word. Paul Abdul hates to tell her too, so she just made sure to say it correctly: "enunciate." Because, it's true, you couldn't understand a word Gina said. It actually did sound like the song had more intense lyrics than I really realized, but who knows? Gina has a strong enough voice, but this was a nervous, uncomfortable performance...lots of pacing and bouncing about, lots of yelling.

The verdict: I think Gina may be at risk, at least to be in the bottom 3.

5. Sanajaya sang "Ain't No Mountain High Enough"

Oh. My. God. can someone make this nightmare stop. First, can we talk about the hair. From Farrah Fawcett feather, to an unfortunate run-in with a flat iron, to his scariest choice yet: ringlets. With that curly top, too much make-up and a pair of sparkly earrings I swear he looked like a woman...it was truly strange. But how did he perform, you ask? Well. He started out by exhorting his audience to "come on", trying to coerce a little enthusiasm and energy out of the crowd before he had actually done anything to deserve it. Anoter one of my pet peeves, in case you haven't noticed. The he sang the song like he has sung every other song...like he's only "marking it" vocally, not really singing full-out. If he doesn't go home tonight I will really have lots all idea about what America is thinking. He's a nice boy, good for him and good on his parents, but it's painful to watch him!

The verdict: PLease let him be at risk, please, please!

6. Haley sang "Missing You"

I didn't have high hopes. Haley had on this clown dress that was pretty unflattering, and she started off very quiet and unassuming. But she also started with some real emotion and connection to the song. She has a Katharine McPhee winsome quality (and beauty) and she probably also has some real potential inside her. She's just not nearly polished enough in this crowd to get as far as Katharine did. This performance fell apart, though, I have to say. She forgot her words, she went consistently off-pitch. It was really quite dreadful, but she may just get the sympathy vote because she was genuinely affecting in the beginning of the song, and of course after it was over, and she knew how badly she had failed.

The verdict: Quite at risk, but might pull it out.

7. Phil sang "I'm Gonna Make You Love Me"

His vocal was a bit tight, but it may have been his best overall vocal yet. He really let go; he smiled a bit; he exhibited some energy and enthusiasm. He does have the same blank-eye problem that many of the guys do, but this was far better than his previous week's performance.

The verdict: He's probably safe.

8. Lakisha sang "God Bless the Child"

Great song choice for her, and it's absolutely true that she avoided over-singing it. The vocal was stellar as well. my only critique was going to be that she had sort of a generalized emotion in the beginning, like she understood the overall feeling of the song, but wasn't really telling a specific story. But even that went away about half-way through, and she really started to make specific emotional and interpretative choices. Great job.

The verdict: Obviously safe.

9. Blake sang "You Keep Me Hanging on"

OK, I don't get what all of the hubbub was about him changing the song. it sounded exactly the same to me. They didn't really turn the rhythm section into either a house music or electronica feel. It sounded like, if anything, a slightly disco version of the original. The only thing really modernized about the whole performance were his Justin Timberlake dance moves. And the strings? they make everything sound cheesy so far. It was only an OK vocal, he sounded a little weak, and his falsetto didn't quite make it.

The verdict: Oh, I think he's safe, but he can do a lot better than that.

10. Stephanie sang "Love Hangover"

Again, I don't get what the fuss is about her not doing the uptempo part of this song. To be honest I can't really remember what that is. She did a nice job of toning things down, but keeping her intensity to give us sultry, not sexual. Frankly it wasn't her best vocal either (the theme of the night) but she has an undeniable confidence and presence on stage.

The verdict: I hope she's safe, although she may continue to be outshadowed by Lakisha and Melinda.

11. Chris R. sang "The Boss"

Can I hear another "not his best vocal"? Yeah! He started out pitchy and strangely quiet, but he did manage to power up midway through. For the first time his nerves showed. And it's kind of a werid song choice too.

The verdict: Still safe, don't worry.

12. Jordin sang "If We Hang On Together"

So, the judges and I had a major disconnect here. I did not get their enthusiasm for this performance. She sounded really nervous in the beginning. The vocal was a cominbation of several bad things to me: some pitchiness, some screaming at the top of her range, some shaky use of falsetto. And she looked overly made-up and done up. Let he look young and fresh and not tarty, please, OK? That being said: obviously she's a talnted girl. I really don't feel she's been shown to her best advantage yet, and it's time to start picking songs that will do that!

The verdict: Still safe, mostly on the strength of a charming presence.

Bottom Line:

If I could choose, the Bottom 3 would be:
Sanjaya
Brandon
Haley

And I'm sure you know I'd send Sanjaya home, yet again.

I think America will choose:
Haley
Gina
Sanjaya

And will probbably send Haley home.

Credit goes to http://blogher.org

SEO In Real World: Motivate Your Customers to Link

Yesterday I made a guest blogging post at the V7N Search Marketing Blog on how a local business can motivate its customer base to write about the business and link to the business through promotions and incentives.

Membership driven businesses, like video stores or health clubs, have an advantage over other businesses as they keep detailed records of their customers, their shopping, demographic or psychographic behavior, and their contact information. For an example of mobilizing a customer base to do your organic site linking for you, I used a health club as an example. The gym industry jargon could however be easily replaced with that of a video store, doctor’s office, chiropractic clinic, or coffee shop with a member’s program.

According to Dave Sifry’s State of the Blogosphere, blogging is growing at a phenominal rate, with the blogosphere that Technorati tracks doubling about every 6 months. The rate of active bloggers is also growing, with 55% of all new bloggers still making regular posts after their first 3 months.

Chances are that you have some rather active bloggers as customers and don’t even know it. Heck, you may even have a Jeremy Zawodny, Darren Rowse, Nick Denton or Steve Rubel doing their sipping, shopping or power squatting in one of your franchises or locations… the power that can be harnessed by your customer base is surprising at almost any level.

So, back to SEO and linking : Here’s how a business can get its customer base motivated to get linking and blogging:

1. When collecting information from new club members, along with phone numbers and email addresses, be sure to ask them if they have a blog (web log, or online diary) or personal web site. Add their blogs to your database.

2. Email the blog owning list with a coupon for a $20 membership fee credit (or a free t-shirt - which should be free anyway, or a free bottle of protein drink or whatever) if they blog a review about the club and link to the gym’s web site.

3. Mirror the promotion in the gym : put up signs on the front door, in the locker room, near the car key basket and above the urinals and water cooler. Anywhere from 10% to 50% of your members could be blogging. If you have 3,000 active members, the promo could easily result in links to your site and reviews of your gym on the blogs of 500 members.

4. Set up a user PC in the gym. When members see that they can save $20 by spending 5 minutes to access their blog and write about the gym, they won’t think twice about blogging then and there. The PC will also be a way to view member sites to make sure that the links are live and active.

5. As an extra bonus, include the blog promotion in the current print advertising campaigns which are going out to local newspapers and mailbox flyers. New members who blog about the fitness club get the discount or free item, make sure to add that this promo is also open for current members.

6. The new member promo will attract active older and younger blogging potential members to the club, possibly being a deciding factor during their decision making process.

7. The more people blog about your club, the more citations and links you receive, the higher your rankings will become in normal and LOCAL search results = which are the Yellow Pages of the very near future.

Better yet, these bloggers are using natural language to describe your business, its location and your products or services. The end result is a semantics goldmine of long tail content and diverse anchor text driving users to your business.

8. The end result will be more traffic to your site and more importantly, through your front door. Now, just get started addressing your site’s usability and overall image.

Credit goes to http://www.searchenginejournal.com

8 Super Steps For Making Your Page 'LOCAL'

You know that local search is poised for big growth, and hopefully you’re taking advantage of local search marketing options.

But local search is still in its infancy and is a “mess,” as Greg Sterling described it at SES San Jose. Little is known about the local search algorithms in use at Google, Yahoo!, and MSN. We do know that local SERPs use a different algorithm than the main SERPs.

And with local results creeping further into regular SERPs, now is the time to make sure search engine crawlers have a good sense of where you’re located.

Here are some thoughts on how to make your web site and web pages more local search-friendly:

1. Have your physical location on every page of your site. So obvious, but not all small businesses do it. If you choose to hide your address because you work from home, then get a mailbox at the UPS Store or your local equivalent and put that street address on your site.

2. Have your local phone number on every page of your site. It’s great that you offer customers an 800 number for customer service, but how do you expect a search algorithm to learn anything about your location from finding 800-555-1212 on your web site? You have to list your local phone number, with the area code, to help the engines connect you to your location.

3. Give your physical address extra prominence on your “Contact Us” page. In other words, before you show the actual contact form, have your street address, city, state, ZIP, local phone, etc. at the top of the page.

4. Create a page on your site called “Directions / Location”. This helps customers and search engine crawlers. Don’t just use a MapQuest or Google Maps image, write out where you are and how to get there.

When you write this page be as detailed as possible, including as many location descriptors as you can. Something like this would be great:

XYZ Widgets is located in the Shadow Trails Shopping Center on 4th Avenue in the North Hills area of Happyville, Washington. Our address is 425 4th Avenue, Suite 201, Happyville, WA, 99999.

(Notice the two different descriptors for Washington in there?) And then write out driving directions to your location from all possible directions, again making sure to use plenty of well-known location descriptors.

5. Link to Google Maps and Yahoo Maps on your Location/Directions page. Both offer a “Link to this page/map” URL that you can use on your web page. (Here’s a look at Google’s link.)

The reason these might be beneficial — and this is pure speculation on my part — is that both Google Maps and Yahoo Maps include the latitude and longitude of the location in the URL, and that can help a crawler learn more about where you are. (MapQuest generates an incredibly long URL which doesn’t appear to have latitude and longitude information.)

6. When possible, include your location in your page Titles. It’s one of the most important signals your page offers to a crawler, so why not include a local signal?

7. Somewhere on your site, list all the cities / towns your business covers. If your business is located in Happyville, but you also serve 10 other outlying towns/cities, list those on your home page, About page, or Contact page. You can also use the long lost “Keywords” meta tag for this purpose.

8. Take advantage of internal linking opportunities with smart anchor text. When linking to your Location / Directions page, saying click here for directions isn’t good enough. Better: “click here for directions to our Happyville location.

Credit goes to http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/

Tips for Super Search Engine Optimization for Your Site

Increasingly, businesses are becoming aware of Local Search, and how optimizing for this channel is vital those that have local outlets. Each of the main search engines has focussed effort on their local search tools as the best strategy for continuing growth in online advertising, and the subject has become sufficiently important enough to merit a special Search Engine Strategies Conference devoted to the subject tomorrow in Denver. The importance of Local Search is further underscored by stats issued in a press release today by comScore, showing that Local Search continues to gain in marketshare.

So, how exactly could one optimize towards Local Search?

Read on and I’ll outline a few key tips.
First of all, what are the primary sites and engines which people go to for finding local information? As Justin Sanger of LocalLaunch (recently purchased by yellow pages publishing company, RH Donnelley) has stated when speaking at conferences on the subject, the local search sector is fairly fractured, so there are numerous sites which can be considered to be the authorities for local info. With users going to such a diverse array of sites to obtain local info, it can be confusing and overwhelming to figure out where to focus efforts for greatest ROI.Not to worry — I’m proposing a rational approach that should work well for both large companies with chains of local stores as well as small businesses focussed on local or regional markets.

There are four general groupings of sites that online users go to for local information:

1. Primary Web Search Engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.
2. Top Local Search Engines, such as Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, and MSN’s Live Local.
3. Top online Yellow Pages, such as Superpages.com, YellowPages.com, and Switchboard.com.
4. Diverse other local sites or sites with local components.

(I should disclose at this point that I am an employee of Verizon Superpages.com.)

It’s suspected that the majority of users trying to locate local information are now likely going to the traditional web search engines first, as a matter of habit. From there, they may pass directly into destination sites which have the info they’re looking for, or they may pass into the local search engines and online yellow pages links found in the search results pages found in their web search. A secondary group of users may have bookmarked their favorite local info sites, and just go directly to them for local info.

When a user commits a search for local info through the regular web search engine, there is a chance that they may find your web site if you have content which matches their keyword search. So, our first step is optimizing the content of your site in order to give you a chance to match these keyword searches. (There are many sites out there which outline how to perform general search engine optimization for your site, so I won’t detail all of those general requirements here. The tips I’m outlining assume that your site is indexable with spider-friendly links to all your content pages.)

User’s local info searches typically may include a subject matter keyword coupled with a locality parameter. For instance, a user might search for “pizza 10019″ — seeking pizza parlors in their New York’s ZIP code of 10019. Or, “Boston Car Parts”, seeking auto parts in Boston. Some may even perform searches with your business name, such as “Sally’s Waffle Shop in Avalon, California”. For this reason, your business’s website needs to contain text that would match the locality parameters. So, if you’re a small business, have your full business address clearly displayed on your site’s homepage, in the HTML text. If you’re a nationwide company, there should be a page for each of your local outlets on your site, and each outlet’s full address should be clearly displayed in the HTML text.

Likewise, include the business phone number on the same page. In many cases the search engines and yellow pages are trying to use their spidered information to collect and aggregate data, and the phone number often helps insure that your website may get associated with directory listing information.

When adding the address and phone number to a web page, it is helpful to use Microformats hCard code for the address. This open data format may allow search engines to properly interpret the address info and easily indentify that it is an address, while still displaying the address legibly for humans. Jesse Skinner has a good, brief explanation of this at his blog.

Here’s an example of the Microformat hCard code for an example business:

Example Company, Inc.

1000 Main Street
Springfield,
MO
56087-0000
USA


N 37° 23.0000,
W 93° 38.0000

Email: people>people


Telephone
123-456-7890



Fax
123-456-7891



Business Categories:
Internet Service Providers (ISP),
Web Hosting,
Marketing Consulting Services,
Public Relations Agencies

I’m not a fan of placing bare email addresses on webpages due to spammers harvesting them, but I displayed hCard formatting for it in the example. I see some folx using it in hCard, though they’re trying to obfuscate the address by heavily encoding it, so that could be another option to allow it to display.

Note the GEO tag — this is for your geographic latitude and longitude coordinates. If you don’t know how to get these values, don’t worry about them — leave them out. But, if you do have them for your business location, using these could help you show up in more accurate positions in online mapping utilities. For each “category” I recommend using a business type name verbatim from NAICS.

Ideally, only use one or two categories per business, though you could use up to a maximum of five. Clearly declaring your business’s category on your webpage, using standardized category names, should help insure that your business is properly classified. I know many businesses would prefer to use a category name that may not be provided in NAICS, but if you don’t use a cat name that virtually everyone recognizes and can associate with other businesses of like types, you’ll be shooting yourself in the foot. If there isn’t a business type matching your exact category (”Martian Restaurants”), use a more generic type that you’d fit within (”Restaurants”).

Don’t forget to mention your location in your homepage title tags! I suggest you put your business name with the city and state. Ex: “Acme Hotel in Springfield, MO”

Now, for optimizations that must be accomplished external to your site:

Check how your business is presented in each of the top Local Search Engines (Google Maps, Yahoo! Local, and MSN Live Local) and top Online Yellow Pages (Superpages.com, Yellowpages.com, Switchboard.com). Each of these obtain their business directory data from a variety of sources, so unless you’re a fairly new company, it’s likely that they already may have listings for you. Perform searches on these sites using your business name with the apropriate locality. If your data is incomplete, erroneous, or not present, register/login with each of these sites and correct it. Also, take the opportunity to add in as much information as you can about your business.

Just as with the directory site I work with, Superpages.com, most internet local directories allow you to add/edit your listings for free. [begin shameless hype] Superpages is tops in internet yellow pages sites based on overall usage traffic (according to independent research such as comScore’s audience share reports), and Superpages allows businesses to add on more extensive info (beyond just an address and phone number) for your business into the free portions of their Business Profiles. Purchasing advertising on top of the free treatments can sometimes bring you more elements to grab consumers’ attention, and to bring you up higher in search results where stats show more users are inclined to click. [end shameless hype] Is your business reviewed at any of these sites? If so, are the reviews fair/accurate? If not, you may be able to get the review removed or suppressed. At the very least, consider offering discount coupons to your happier customers in return for reviewing your company on these sites. Don’t pay for positive reviews, but you likely already know which customers are happiest, and you can hand them a discount coupon and ask them to rate or review you at the online sites. Listings with higher user ratings are more likely to be selected out of the pack when a user is deciding what business to pick. Part of your optimization strategy needs to pay attention to how you are rated online. Where possible and in-reason, keep your ratings higher and you’ll get more conversions.After you’ve made sure your listing info is cool with all the major Local Search Engines and Online Yellow Pages, where else should you expend some time?

There are many lesser yellow pages and other local info sites which do not have a big nationwide profile online, but which could be highly advantageous to promoting your local business. Here’s how to choose such sites out of the crowd of local info sites out there:

• Who is the dominant print yellow pages provider in your area? This might not be the same as the previously-mentioned top online YPs. Sometimes it’s the local phone company who also may publish yellow pages directories, and sometimes it’s a separate phone book publisher for the area. For instance, Dex Media is not part of a phone company, nor are they the top nationwide online yellow pages (as counted by traffic/users), but they are tops for the users within the 14-state region where they publish directories, including the Denver area. Chances are, the website of the top print YP publisher in your area would be one of the better places for your listing to appear, since they may have greater online market share in that area due to years of promoting themselves through their phonebook covers. So, make sure you’re represented in the top online YP for your area.

• Check to see what sites come up highest in the web search results on major search engines for your business type in your area. Typically, any of these which are guides of your type(s) of buisness may be perfect for you to be listed within. If you are a Restaurant in Springfield, try searching on “Springfield restaurants”, and “restaurants 56087″, and “dining in Springfield”. It’s likely that some or all of the sites which come to the top of the SERPs might be guides — click into those, and if you’re not listed, contact them to see if you could become listed.

• Check out the local newspaper sites for your area — more and more people have switched from reading print newspapers for online sources, and the newspapers have noticed. Some local news sites include guides or yellow pages of businesses on the site, so be sure you can be found there as well.

• Consider joining your local chamber of commerce, if you are not already a member, so you can be listed in their online directory. Being a member of the local chamber can provide you with a bit more promotion sometimes, and you should be found in the chamber’s directory.

• Look also to be associated with websites devoted to local events, if your business can conceivably derive customers from them. This is particularly critical for businesses which make money off of travel and visitors in some way. Restaurants and hotels, for instance, may be able to get more customers as people come into the local area to participate in: charity fundraising events, races, conventions, visiting days at universities, town fairs and festivals, rodeos, etc. Often, you can help sponsor such events and get your logo listed on those event’s websites. Don’t be afraid to ask them to link over to your website!

The key thing to remember is that there are a variety of online sites from which users are obtaining local information. Ideally, you should be findable in any site where users may look for info about your area. But, with limited time to devote to this, concentrate on the types of sites I’ve outlined here and you’ll already be ahead of about 90% of the pack, and you’ll have covered the areas which would bring you the greatest return on your time investment.

Make sure your business information is represented in the online directories, make sure your address info is present on your website for the sake of search engine bots, make sure you’re listed with the secondary local info sites most likely to bring you eyes, and monitor your info ongoing to insure you’re represented well.

These simple practices will insure that you’ve go the basic optimizations covered for local search.

Credit goes to http://www.naturalsearchblog.com