I consider myself to be a social media enthusiast: I wrote my first programs at the age of 7, had my first web site in 1996, started a web business in 1998, and have been active in social media since the first chat rooms. And I have to constantly remind myself that there are a lot of people out there who no idea what social media are.

So what are they, really?

Social media are new ways to share, collaborate, and create communities.

The amazing thing is that the principles of social media can be applied to *every* area, as long as two prerequisites are fulfilled:
1.      People are willing to share, collaborate and connect (culture)
2.      People have the tools to interact (technology)
Let’s take a look at what sharing, collaborating and creating communities means:

SHARING means telling what you have heard from someone else voicing your opinion about a topic answering a question showing what you have created, maybe even allowing others to use it

COLLABORATING means creating something with others solving a problem with others reaching a goal with others

BUILDING COMMUNITIES means getting in touch with someone recommending someone to connect with someone else creating opportunities for people can interact defining a group of people as part of something bigger invoking a sense of belonging and common purpose between people

All points on the list above were valid for a stone age hunter/gatherer society too. The only thing that differs from our own time is technology,
and the speed, connections, and reach it brings. We’re all still sitting around the campfire, telling stories, sharing knowledge – only the fire
has only gotten bigger and brighter (yes, there is a Billie Joel reference in here).

Social media helps us do all of the above things in new ways. We can share our news and opinions around the world using blogs, tweets, or videos, and give other people the right to build on it. We can react to other people’s news and opinions by commenting or remixing them. We can collaborate with a global community to gather knowledge, create maps, art, or software, or get answers to difficult questions by just asking them online. And we can create communities on social networking platforms, giving people the opportunity to meet (or reunite with) others who they would have never found otherwise.

I am convinced that social media will become an important part of our work and private lives and fundamentally change the world as we know it - whether we want it or not.

So Bing has been getting a lot of momentum/PR and now reports are showing that market share is increasing for Bing. I know of Google and Yahoo users who are switching.

Lets look at few reasons why:

1. Bing is  “decision engine” rather than traditional search engines. Instead of relying on keywords, Bing organizes data in a way designed to increase relevance.

Lets look at some examples:

Say you are interested in food ingredients and searching for nutrition facts . Both Search Engines show results, but Google clutters with News results, products, and even same website some times 2-3 times. Where as Bing is now more cleaner, simple relevant results.

Lets say you want to buy tickets for Disney in Orlando and you search for Disney Tickets Again both engines return some similar websites but Google shows a lot of un-necessary information.

So whats going on:

1. Google started out simple look. That was one reason why we all fell in love with it. Now they are adding and adding. Experimenting but its getting cluttering.

2. We all love google because it gives us the best and relevant results. But whats happening is that if you are searching for tickets, you maybe searching to buy or research tickets. Some how you results that come up, have to help you do that.  If google starts showing sites that dont sell tickets then its wasting your time. So the results side track you and you waste time.

3. Old outdated sites: showing a craigslist or a forum link from 6 months or 2 years which is no longer relevant is no no.

4. While showing News, Products is great, it should not take away from relevant sites. It looks like Google is experimenting and you will see different results as compared day to day, time to time.

I am not ready to switch to Bing yet, all the hype, keeps bringing me back to check it out.

Caffeine is a internal code name for  secret upgrade to Google’s search algorithms, one the company says is designed to help users scour the Web faster, while returning more results with greater accuracy and comprehensiveness.

According to a post on the Google Webmaster Central blog, the new upgrades sit “under the hood” of the Google search engine, so most users won’t immediately notice a big difference in their search results.

So you are and will be seeing changes to site results.

So of the recent changes seen with search results

• News results
• Product results

While this is good, it can be terrible for sites with ranking of 8,9,10 as it takes their pages to page 2.

So if you are site with products, you need to get them on google index. Contact me on how to do so.

Jazz

Simply put: Search Engines need to know which page/site is better than the other.
They have a mathematical way to do so, which we dont need to get into. Google uses a patented way “PR” to do so.

So each site and its pages have a PR. The higher the better. It starts from 1.
A way to check sites PR is using Google tool bar or websites like prchecker.com

Factors that influence page rank

1. Back links – how many sites back link to the page

Note: any sites such as linkfarms or blackhat sites are discounted. Google understands that you may not be able to control who links to you, but it can remove them from calculation.

2. How many  sites you link to.
So try not to link out to too many sites.

Detailed Explanation – http://www.webworkshop.net/pagerank.html

SEO is an important process driven website optimization technique intended to give maximum visibility in major search engines through high ranking keywords. It enables you to receive more traffic and finally more conversions, thus fulfilling your business objective. Effective SEO implementations require careful and continuous planning and detail up-to-date understanding of the search engine algorithm, including the rules and regulations specific to each search engine.

A typical SEO process consists of the following important on- page and off- page optimization steps:

• Website Analysis: Website analysis is the first step to any strategic SEO approach. This step involves end to end analysis of client’s website performance (past and present, the contents and navigation structure, current keyword rankings if any, and all the factors that directly or indirectly affect the search engines guidelines for SEO friendly websites.

• Keyword Assessment: Keywords form the core part of any SEO plan. The entire SEO process revolves around the targeted keywords. So it is top concern for the SEO team to analyze, and identify the right keywords to ensure successful SEO campaign.

• Copy Writing: Unless the content you are providing is search engine friendly and consist the targeted keywords your SEO goal remains incomplete. While writing contents for SEO one should be very careful in maintaining a clean keyword reach and meaningful copy. The copy should reflect the interest of both the search engine and readers. Search engines should able to index it cleanly, while readers should find the contents interesting and worth reading.

• Meta Tag Writing: Meta Tags help search engine to better understand the intent of the projected page. While creating Meta tags one should be very careful in selecting the right contents and keywords. Also one should strictly adhere to the specifications laid out for Meta Tags by each search engines. Though some search engines stop supporting Meta tags now a days, but Meta tags namely the description tag, keywords tag, robots tag etc still find an important place n major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN.

• HTML code refining: Search engines give more importance to pages with clean HTML codes that comply with the standards set by W3 consortium. While creating the HTML codes one should be very careful about the syntax used, versions, DTD (Document Type Declaration), broken links etc.

• Directory Submission: Submitting your website to relevant, SEO friendly directories is a vital SEO step in enhancing the visibility. A good ethical way to do it is to follow ethical, manual submission process.

• Link Building: Link building is one of the most important, continuous off-page optimization steps. There are various ways to approach a successful link building campaign like one-way linking, two-way linking, and three-way linking.

• Tracking and Maintenance: Tracking SEO performance and improving the same periodically is very important to meet the strategic SEO goals. Comparing performance reports through Google Analytics and other advanced tracking tools will help identify necessary changes and modification for improved performance level.

and it fails, you may be stuck as browser will show a message – The service is unavailable.

If you have ftp access

goto wp-content folder and delete or rename UPGRADE folder upgrade-bak

and your site should be back up

http://speckyboy.com/2009/07/20/50-social-service-and-bookmarking-icon-sets-for-bloggers/

Enjoy!

http://wefunction.com/2008/07/function-free-icon-set/

Free WordPress Theme:

http://wefunction.com/2008/07/free-theme-outdoorsy/

Henri Frederic Amiel

1. Using free service and putting your blog on Blogspot, WordPress, Live or Yahoo blog?
vs
2. Creating a blog on new domain
vs
3. putting blog on blog.yourdomain.com
vs
4.  http://www.yourdomain.com/blog

Putting your blog on free service or another domain is mistake you dont want to do. It maybe a good way to start, but one day when you want to move to a better solution (#4 above) you will be sorry.

Idea to have a blog for SEO is to put fresh content on your website and get additional traffic and higher rankings. The best solution is #4, this way you have new content for search engines keeping them happy, you have long long words and words to show you are traffic matter expert and your ranking gets better for your domain.