What You Need To Know About Facebook

Earlier this week I noticed Facebook was going to be starting to allow “vanity” urls. I thought, “that will be nice.” As the story goes, I noted the date, but the time-line did not sink in (I was doing too many things at once) …in other words, it is happening this weekend! So here I am giving everyone a shout-out to make sure they know this will be taking place.

To be clear the rush starts, June 13, 2009 –at 12:01 estern time.There are a few names that have already been reserved (or blocked) by Facebook, but if you have a business, trademark, or custom user name you want to use, you will want to act quickly. Does this mean setting your alarm clock for 11:45pm so you can be at your computer when 12:01 strikes? I guess that just depends, but at least now you know (hopefully you are reading this before the deadline).

In any case here is the article about facebook vanity urls, from the facebook blog.

Clike Here To Social Bookmark It

Open Directory Project (DMOZ)

If you are going to submit your site to the DMOZ directory (Open Directory Project), it will require studying the DMOZ rules on how and where to submit your site. When I say study, I mean …STUDY. This is no exaggeration! Sure the DMOZ dragon (Their Logo) looks cute, but don’t be fooled. This little DMOZ dragon will eat you up, spit you out and never look back after rejecting your website.

So if submitting to the Open Directory Project is such a terrible experience, why bother? Who cares? Is it just pride and bragging rights, or are there other reasons? Yes, pride and bragging rights are always motivation, but there are a other (perhaps more important) reasons why submitting to DMOZ is worth your time:

• Search engines, like Google, use it as part of their ranking system that can help grow traffic to your site.
• Organizations take advantage of free access to the directory’s content to populate their websites, providing additional exposure across niche communities.
• A listing in DMOZ will get you listed in the Google Directory.
• And yes, bragging rights.

Is Your Site Listed In DMOZ?

Since it is not my goal to unnecessarily torture you, before you begin this process go to DMOZ to search for your domain. To do this, search from the DMOZ home page for your domain excluding the “www”.

If your site was not found, but you are still interested in getting your site listed in DMOZ, the first thing to understand is DMOZ is a human edited directory. That’s right, a human editor. An editor who I imagine is ringing their hands together as they pick-a-part the submitted website for typos, missing graphics and broken links. These editors are not just glancing at your site, but evaluating the sites content, or lack-there-of. So “take your time” and double check your sites links. Make sure to go through your site, removing under construction pages and symbols. From this warning comes my advice: start by reading the rules on how to submit to DMOZ; and don’t submit unless you have a few hours.

DMOZ Rules To Submit

Free Link Checker

Once the official DMOZ rules have been read, take a moment to reflect on your site and what needs to be done. As you begin to prepare your site for review, do not assume anything. Check you site with a link checker and use a spell checker to review your site’s pages.

W3C Link Checker

Free Browser Checker

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but overflowing text that makes navigating a site difficult will hurt your chances of getting approved. The best way to ensure your website is displaying properly cross browsers is to use a free browser checker. One note on using BrowserShots, select only the primary browsers or it will take a long time to receive your results (screenshots).

Check Website Pages

The Open Directory Project

I’m sure you are beginning to see that submitting to DMOZ is not a 1-2-3 process. However, hopefully any issues regarding your site are addressed and fixed. Once your site is ready, it is time to concentrate on actually submitting your site. As you may have guessed this process is also filled with potential pitfalls, so make sure you are well rested before proceeding.

Bright eyed and bushy tailed, you are ready for phase two -information gathering. Luckily, in the fight to get your site listed I found an online quasi insider who has shared some great tips. Our informant is an editor of DMOZ, whom provides some tips on submitting to DMOZ.

Finally, here are a few other DMOZ resources:

DMOZ blog

DMOZ forum

Lastly, if you have a teen or kids specific site, on November 14, 2000, the Open Directory launched the Kids and Teens directory. DMOZ Kids and Teens

If you have a story about submitting your site to DMOZ we would enjoy hearing from you. Or, if you know of any other resources please comment below.

Clike Here To Social Bookmark It

…in a one-on-one discussion, Jayaram [Twitter's new VP of Operations who until recently, was VP of Search Quality for Google] confirmed that Twitter Search, which currently searches only the text of Twitter posts, will soon begin to crawl the links included in tweets and begin to index the content of those pages.

cnet logo

The New Twitter Search

This improvement to Twitter Search will have two effects.

It will keep the existing users tweeting and it will increase the number of new users. The bottom line is, an improved twitter search will make Twitter more valuable at a time when Twitter and Social Networking are seemingly everywhere.

Twitter Search

Tips on Using Twitter

There are a lot of ways to use Twitter. Let us know how you use Twitter. Is it for business or personal? Do you use Twitter for branding? Or, do you tweet your latest blog articles? When you comment on how you use Twitter make sure to include a link to your twitter account and tell us what you think of Twitters new search.

Clike Here To Social Bookmark It

Typography has become very popular among graphic designers, website designers and artists. Why? Because typography is an effective method of drawing a viewer into a layout, while keeping the design interesting. The power behind typography is the use of fonts, colorful text and twisted punctuation; and the combination of these elements is what makes typography an art. In addition, typography works well across multiple mediums. Examples of typography and can be found on: posters, magazine ads, newspaper ads, and brochures; but this is just the beginning. Other examples of typography can be found on buildings, signs and posters.

I did not design either of these two samples.

Here is an example of typography being used in a poster (visit: bridgerun.com).

Example of typography used in a poster

The next example uses typography in a layout (visit: Skirt! Magazine, march 2009)

Typography Ad

Typography is an art that has no bounds. With twisted puncuation, change in colors and interesting fonts, the combinations are infinate. As typography brings creativily to both graphic designers, website designers and artists, the power of typography to create fun and interesting layouts can also be a great method of holding a views attention.

Clike Here To Social Bookmark It

The sad truth is your website might be hacked and you don’t know it! That’s right, hackers will hide the links that are only visible in the source code. What this means to most people is thousands of spammy links are generated from a hacker’s script that is hidden in your code. This is not just annoying, but Google will penalize a site with these hidden links! Your ranking for keywords will drop and all the while you may have never see any signs as to what was causing it.

To find out if your blog or website has hidden links, or parasites, here is a link to a free blogging tool that will scan your code and let you know if you have been hacked. Just go to: Unmask Parasites

If your WordPress blog has been hacked, here is a article on how to find and remove the script: remove hackers script. It is also has some good tips on prevention, so I suggest taking a look even if your site is clean.

Next, make sure to back up your database regularly. I use a WordPress plugin that I set to automatically email me a backup of my WordPress database once a week. I also set my email client to filter the email into a folder I created, this way it is out of my way; but there if I need it. There are quiet a few WordPress Backup plugins, but here is the one I use – WordPress Backup

Finally, here is a site that has some good posts on Blog security. It also touches on other social media websites that might have a security hole. Take a look at – Blog Security

Checking to make sure your blog is clean of hidden parasites that a hacker puts on your blog or website, is easy. The challenging part comes if your site has been hacked. However removing the parasites are crucial to improving your site’s performance and organic ranking. So, if your site has been hacked, take a deep breath and follow the links I provided, they will help you find the hacker’s script. Once all is clean, back up your WordPress database on a regular bases and from then on it is just a matter of keeping up on the latest hacking schemes and security holes.

Hope this helps –happy blogging

Clike Here To Social Bookmark It

I want to give you a tip on how a professional SEO firm optimizes for inbound links. Most SEO firms will say a domain name should have your keywords in the title. This is true. Having a keyword phrase in your domain name title is a good search engine optimization technique for improving your sites organic ranking in Google. But beyond this SEO tip, having keywords in your domain name has another direct benefit related to Inbound links. In SEO a professional seo consultant will stress, you want your Inbound links to use keywords. This is also a great seo tip, but how about when you don’t have a choice? That’s right, some websites will just add your domain name and you don’t have an option (or opportunity) to modify the linking text. This is when I know, as an SEO consultant, that having a keyword phrase in the domain name can really add some extra punch to inbound links and organic seo. I want to stress that:

having a domain name that includes a keyword phrase will make it possible for every inbound link to enforce a keyword, especially when you do not have an option of adding the linking text.

There is one last point that I want to addressed regarding domain names. There is a growing trend that Google seems to be adding value to a brand, or branding. I mention this as a reminder that your brand is also a very important consideration and your domain name is a very good way to enforce your brand. So don’t stuff your domain name with keywords, making your domain name spammy; this will only hurt your efforts.

Clike Here To Social Bookmark It

• To rank well in Google, write good original content that your visitors will find valuable.
• Make sure the robots understand what information you consider to be the most important.
• Get other sights to link to your website.

Now this is very general and basic information, but it leads me to an interesting article called, “Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine“. It was written back in June 2007, but the information is still very relevant and if you have not read this article …Google allowed a reporter from The New York Times to spend a day with Mr. Singhal and others in the search-quality team, observing some internal meetings and talking to several top engineers. There were many questions that Google wouldn’t answer. But the engineers still explained more than they ever have before in the news media about how their search system works…

So if you are curious about how Googles search engine works and you want some insight into Googles search engine,  read the article, Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine

Clike Here To Social Bookmark It

Ok …everyone should have a Google account and they should have activated the Webmaster Tools.

1. From the Dashboard, click the link to your website.
2. In the left sidebar click the Tools link.
3. There will be a few links under this option, you want the one that says, “set preferred domain”. Here you will choose either the non-www version or the www version. If you are not sure what version to use take a look at my post on Increase Your Link Juice.

I realize for some of you this is nothing new, but for those who are not familiar with this feature it is just one more thing to add to your seo arsenal.

Clike Here To Social Bookmark It

Before we begin lets check to see how our non-www and our www url is set up. To do this lets check the server headers. Go to this link – Check Server Headers – and enter your non-www into the field provided. Below you will see a response, typically of either a 200 ok, or a 301 permanent move, or a 302 temporary move. After you get the information on the non-www server header, do the same thing with the www url.

What you DON’T WANT TO SEE is a 200 ok for both the non-www and www. Why …well basically this result means your non-www and www urls are considered two different sites. Depending on how your website has been getting indexed (and how you have been submitting backlinks), this could be hurting your search results!

To make sure this is not hurting your website, you will want to concatenate your non-www with your www.

First, if you have been using a mix of non-www and www in your backlink campaign, stop! Pick one version. Which version should you use. Well …generally there is no benefit to using one or the other, non-ww vs. www. However, if you have been using a mix and you are unsure of which version to use here are a few suggestions to help make a decision.

1. Type in the non-www into your browser, using the Google Toolbar, check Googles PageRank. Next, type in the www version and check Googles PageRank. If one is higher that will be good to know before Rewriting your URL.
2. Next, type in your primary keywords that provide you with the most traffic. Find your listing(s) and note the url that is being linked; is it the non-www or the www??? Depending on the url that is indexed will also help you in making a final decision as to what version to use.

Once you made your choice on non-www or www you will want to do the following:

For a website on a Unix Server you will be changing (or adding) a htaccess file.  NOTE! -CAUTION you should have technical experience when changing a htaccess file. PROCEED WITH CAUTION.

With that being said. If you are on a UNIX server create an htaccess file and add the following code making sure to replace the “yourwebaddress” with your website address:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourwebaddress.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yourwebaddress.com/$1 [R=301,L]

The above code will change your “non-www” into your “www”. It will also tell the server that it is a permanent move; which is what you want in this case. If you want to keep your non-www as your primary, switch the RewriteCode.

If you are a Windows Server contact your host and ask them to make the change for you.

To make sure your Rewrite was done correctly use this link – Check Server Headers – Once you are on the site recheck your server headers. Depending on how you Rewrote the url(s) you will either see a 301 permanent move or a 200 ok.

As a result of doing this you will consolidate your links to one website giving you a bigger BANG for every link.

In the next post learn how to set your preferred domain in Google!

Clike Here To Social Bookmark It

1. Backlink campaign or Reciprocal link campaign .
2. Internal link structure.
3. Site structure.

So if a website is getting a decent page rank than the search engine optimization and search engine marketing campaign are working in unison. As a result website traffic will benefit from a continued effort. However, if a backlink campaign has been in place for 12 months and there is no PR it might be a signal that something is wrong. This might translate into lower website traffic.

Importantly, a site can be doing everything correctly (backlink, internal structure and site structure) and still not have a good PR. In this case, finding out why the PR is low might uncover valuable information that could lead to an improvement in some other area of the website. In the end this has the potential to improve the website’s traffic.

Clike Here To Social Bookmark It