Social Networking for Your Website

With a couple of new tools, anyone (yes, even you) can add social networking features to their website! If you're not sold on the idea, imagine going to a Starbucks in the morning and everyone being invisible. No talking, no meeting someone new just empty silence. THIS is the standard world of visiting a website today. What if you could create an atmosphere of community by allowing your visitors to see who else is there? Allowing them to interact in a similar way that they would in the real world gives people the opportunity to feel connected to others, your site, AND YOU! Let's touch on three of the primary options you have for integrating some social activity into your site. For each method, I'll also discuss how I use it and why: Your Options

Google Friend Connect

My current favorite, Google Friend Connect allows easy copy-paste code for you to integrate social modules right into your site. Recently, they added an option to have a "social bar" instead of using a standard box that might go in your sidebar. Although it seems the colors can't be customized yet (social bar only), I prefer this bar over a box because of how it seems more integrated into the site. Now, if you haven't yet, look down and join us!

Comments can be left between users and people can see who else has become a member of the site's community. Google allows you choose whether you have comments exist for each page, or the entire site. I've opted to have comments carry through the entire site simply because on a blog, people are used to commenting on a post the old fashioned way.

Google Friend Connect is also integrated with your Twitter friends. If someone you follow on Twitter is a member of the site you're on you'll see them listed as a friend in Google Friend Connect.

If you go the sidebar/box method, you have an option to also display a rating box. This box allows the user to rate the page or site (again, your choice). I'm not using this, but considered it for post ratings.

Facebook Connect

Facebook Connect is a little more complicated right now. There are some plugins to make parts of integrating this into your site, but for some people it might just be too much. Essentially, you can allow user's to log into your site, post comments, and have those comments sent to their Facebook stream. This is a very in-depth integration and it becomes obvious why it can get more complicated.

The plugin Good Plum is using for this is by Sociable. The WordPress Facebook integration plugin provides a sidebar that displays all the members that have connected to your site through Facebook (we're not using this part anymore), allows users to leave a comment using their Facebook login, and then optionally sends that comment into their Facebook stream (great for virality).

The bottom line with the Facebook Connect system is that until they make it easier for people without coding experience to implement, it's not going to be taking leaps and bounds into the average person's site.

MyBlogLog by Yahoo!

The easiest of the easy, MyBlogLog is the oldest and easiest way to add basic social networking features to your site. After creating an account, you grab a widget to post into your site. Then, other logged-in MyBlogLog members who come across your site will be listed, as well as people who choose to "join" your site.

You likely see these boxes on many blogs across the internet (including one here to the right). The reason it's become so popular is because it's very easy on the author to implement, as well as the user to use. Simply log-in if you're not already and click "join." Instant community!

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How to Appear on the First Page of a Search Engine

A keyword is simply this: a word or words that is typed in a search engine and as a result of pressing enter, a result of relevant information appears. When people type a keyword into a search engine, they are simply looking for some answers or maybe even doing some research on a particular topic.

Let's face it, when individuals do a search on a search engine, some of us only view the first or second page, so our goal is for our content to appear on that first page. This is possible, but you must have the right tools to assist with your research.

When I first started writing articles, I remember writing an article, then submitting it to an article directory and I thought, OK, here comes the traffic! Boy was I wrong! After weeks of the article being submitted, I would see how many views I had received and it wasn't many. I had heard of keyword research, but was unfamiliar with exactly what it was.

Life is a life long journey of learning, so I took a step out of my comfort zone and decided get educated on exactly what keyword research was. Not only did I want to know what it was, but, I wanted to master it! You know what? I did! I can create content and have it show on Google within one day.

I remember brainstorming about keywords I wanted to target, but using tools, helped me to conclude if it was a good keyword or not. Most of the keywords that we think are good may not turn out be, simply because the keyword may not be searched enough or the keyword could be too competitive. There is no point in wasting time creating content for it to never be seen. So, we must find what is called, the money keywords.

One free tool that people use to assist in doing keyword research is the Google Keyword Tool. This is a great tool to allow you to find other appropriate keywords pertaining to the keyword that want to use, if the keyword you initially chose is too competitive. While the information that this tool provides is nice, people need more information to determine if the keyword preferred is one that will get the content on the first page of Google.

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Quick Tips to Make Your Website User Friendly for Search Engines

1. Design your website to be compatible with the largest number of viewers. Have the resolution set to 800x600.

2. Avoid large graphic files, pictures, and fancy applets that make pages load slowly.

3. Be creative with your design but keep your hyperlinks in the normal blue color which means they have not been selected and purple which means they have been.

4. Optimize your graphics so they load fast.

5. Use bullets, descriptive headlines, and sub texts to make your page easy to read and find information.

6. Red and yellow should not be used on your website, these bright colors cause the human eye to strain and it will be tiring to look at your page.

7. Make your hyperlinks short; select one or two words to use in the hyperlink.

8. Make sure to put your contact info on the bottom of each page. Your website address, email, name, and physical address this makes visitors to your site much more comfortable. It lends credibility.

9. If you are selling something it should take less than three clicks to get to the order form.

10. Don't use frames on websites. They are confusing for visitors to navigate and search engines won't look past your front page, so you will have poor search engine ranking because of it.

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Submit your website to 4500+ directories, 500+ article directories and 200 feed sites!

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It can be a difficult and time-consuming process to rank higher in the search engines for your targeted keyword phrases. Unless you are an expert in the field of Search Engine Optimization, you may very well fail at competing with older, better-established, and better-optimized competitors.

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Search engine submission can be confusing, especially when you have a lot of sites to manage. Make sure that they are all listed by using Website Submitter. It makes listing all of your sites with search engines quick and easy.

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One of the most important tools for increasing your ranking in search engines is backlinks. Website Submitter helps you gain these important links by automatically submitting you to Web directories as well as search engines. Each directory you are listed in provides you with a backlink.

To submit your own sites to every search engine and directory provided by Website Submitter would take you weeks of work. Now you can submit all of your sites in a matter of hours. Take your time back by automating the submission process, so you can increase your productivity in running your business and websites. Now, download from this direct link for free FREE DOWNLOAD SUBMITTER

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5 Essential Joomla SEO Tips For Beginners

Joomla is not search engine friendly by default. You need to put some work into improving this. The main thing that you notice when you start your SEO work on Joomla website is the URL or each page. The page URLs produced by Joomla are not search engine friendly. They have always query parameters, which doesn't give much information for search engines to properly index and rank those pages. When you do on-page search engine optimization, one of things you should pay a lot more attention is the URL of the page you want to optimize. It has to be informative and meaningful, well populated with keywords and preferably with ".html" extension.

1. Use Search engine friendly URL

To make your Joomla website's URL search engine friendly, you have a lot of options. The first one is to use the default Joomla's SEF plugin. By default this plugin is not activated, so you have to go to your global configuration page and activate that.

You can also use third party free or paid components that do the same thing with additional features. One of my favorite is sh404SEF.

2. Craft catch Page titles for all pages in your website

Most of the time, I see on Joomla websites with default title that say "Home". This is the title of the home page. Mostly beginners don't see that and the way you change that title also a little bit obscure at first. As you know, page title is one of the main on-site criteria considered by search engines when ranking web pages. So you should give your pages meaningful title with your main keyword included in it. To change this title, do the following:

a. Go to Menu Manager and click your main menu.

b. From the list of menu items, open the one that says "home"

c. Now on the right hand side of the screen there are a number of parameters you can change. Open "Parameters (System)" and change the field that say Page title to your desired homepage title and save.

3. Setup Meta data for every page in your website

Meta data may not have as much value in the eyes of search engines as used to have few years back but still you should do proper optimization work on them. When optimizing Meta data of a webpage. You should focus more on the description rather than keywords. You write good descriptions about your page, preferably 160 characters long. This description is the one you see on search engine result page under your title. So it has a lot of value to help your link in the search engine result page stand out. Of course if search engines cannot find relevant description in your Meta tag, they will try to extract some text from your article body on the page and use that as description on the search engine result page. However, you have the chance to decide what to put instead, so use this advantage to attract more visitor from search engines.

The major problem I see on lots of Joomla powered website is that they use one set of Meta description and keyword for all pages on the website. This is wrong! You should set up individual sets of description and keywords for every page on your website. You can still use the global configuration to set Meta data for the whole website, but you should add Meta data for every article you add from you're your article manager page.

To add Meta data for an article you just wrote, look at the right section of Article [edit] page to find fields for entering Meta data.

4. Take advantage of 404 error page pages

Most often you see a Joomla website with the default 404 error page with small information about the error and a link to home page. You should setup a 404 page, either using some sort of plugin or setup one manually. Include valuable resource on this page to direct the user somewhere back to your website. Or include search form that can be used by the user to get back on track. Or use some of the phrases from users query on the previous page and produce a search result page yourself. The point here is to avoid users from being frustrated by the mean error page.

5. Insert H1 Tags In Joomla

It's a good idea to make use of H1 tag as your article title decorator. It has some significance to wards convincing search engines that the page is actually about the keyword you have been mentioning starting from the page title. I know pages that do well without H1 tag, but who cares if you can get a little help on your SEO for little or no work. Go ahead and us H1 tags for your your articles' Title.

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