When you first get your website up and running, your first thought may be to implement some article marketing strategies to get the traffic pouring into your site. Your sole thought may be to do something “out there” in order to produce the results that you want on your site.

There is one step that should happen prior to that though, and it’s one that a lot of site owners overlook. Before anything, you need to develop the content on your website. You see, in order to attract readers, you need to have some reason for them to be at your website.

Social Networking is the biggest thing to hit the internet since it began. The sheer numbers involved are staggering. If Facebook was a country it would be the 3rd largest in the world behind India. It can be a massive force for good, yet it comes with inherent dangers, not least of which is to your security.

So here are 10 Social Networking Security Tips, to keep you safe and secure while chatting with your mates!

I have been working quite a bit on SEO lately. It works but it is very time-consuming. It is frustrating because every time I create a new Squidoo page, create a new blog post or relevant link I know I will not see immediate results. So what can you do to get traffic to your site now? What if you can’t or will not wait? I believe in long term strategy over short term strategies because tomorrow generally rolls around. However, the two strategies are not mutually exclusive. You can work a short term plan and a long term plan at the same time. Here are 10 things you can do to get traffic relatively quickly to your website:

Mistake 1 – Neglecting On-page Optimization:

I think more people are beginning to understand the importance of on-page optimization when it comes to ranking their web pages. With so much focus on keywords and link building though, often I see webmasters focusing too heavily on the “off page” stuff, without realizing what they do “on” their website is just as important. Proper internal linking, keyword density, LSI, image text, no follow tags, just to name a few, are also very important to search engines. There are free plugins available to help you with a lot of this stuff, so do your due diligence and implement whatever strategies need be.

In a fast changing global marketplace, businesses increasingly rely on technology that enables them to innovate and respond quickly to the evolving business environment.

Every day I see examples of both large and small, public and private sector, organisations turning to open source technologies to support their business goals and deliver better customer experiences.

Open source's potential for delivering significant savings to the bottom line, resulting from the lack of software licence fees, has become recognised by organisations around the globe and validated by independent research.

Now that we have researched SEO, we understand that we individually play an active role as to the success of our website. Make sure that you have a list of questions, as well as do’s and don’ts for your website, to ask your designer or design team before building the website. Building websites is one of the most difficult jobs there is, in my opinion, and it is seldom that you will find designers that know, much less use, the techniques described. If you create them a checklist they should accept it with no problem.

Some of it may be elemental to them, but be sure each item on the list is executed properly in order to gain good site ranking. Remember, you can always check yourself by using tools. I am in no way affiliated with seocentro.com, but it is a great free tool. If you use these tools, along with a good designer that knows a good content management system such as “word press” “Drupal” or “Joomla”, you will have a successful web presence.

The Joomla! developers have released version 2.5.5 of the open source content management system. The new version is predominantly a security update but also includes several new features.

By Scott Benson

If you’re a small business owner, you’ve probably thought a bit about how customers find your website through search engines and maybe even the reputation your business has online. These are questions that hit the core of search engine optimization. Here are a few quick-hitting tactics to allow small business owners to check the health of their websites as well as a few SEO tactics to perform after you begin to monitor that health.

Since we learned earlier that over eighty percent of search is believed to stay in the natural or organic search result area, we now know that Guerilla Marketing on Social Websites can be incredibly successful. There are so many free avenues to take that can enhance your business by leaps and bounds. Many people do not understand that a site’s overall ranking is imperative to our own personal marketing. It is your job to leverage the power of sites like “You Tube”, “Twitter” and “Facebook” to your advantage. In a difficult market, you can break through into those search engine result pages by posting on “Twitter” and using your URLS to lead people back to your website. You may not have been one of the first five results if you tried to install the same post or video on your website, but since you posted or deployed it to a website that has a high ranking with search engine you may get a higher result in search engine result pages. This may, in turn, drive traffic through the parent site, such as “Twitter” or “YouTube”.

Everyday millions of people go online to participate in social networking. Through various websites and groups, people network to promote their businesses, stay in touch with family and communicate with friends. JomSocial is a social networking tool that gives everyone the opportunity to create their own unique interactive Joomla communities. With Joomla hosting you are on your way to creating a social network of your own.

The most important thing when building your website is CONTENT. Many people leave stagnant pages that basically rot the internet. It’s very good to change the content on your site regularly. You should add an article about your company and something it is involved with (possibly charity) and put it under the “news” tab on the website.

The search engines will locate content and with new content continuously being updated, they know your site is “alive”. The most important task of any designer or project manager is to help the client properly align the content of their website with the content of their meta information. I know many people in the Web field believe that meta-tags don’t hold much weight with Google and other search engines. This could be correct, yet we may never know with Google’s algorithm being private. It is, however, my belief that it’s imperative to set up a proper title, description and keywords in your meta-tags and ensure that same content is on the landing page of your website.

Drupal CMS Users Can Now Target Visitors and Personalize Website Experiences in Real-Time

SAN FRANCISCO, May 16, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Demandbase, the real-time personalization and targeting platform for B2B, today announced the availability of a Real-Time Identification module for the Drupal CMS platform, which provides for the ability to identify and target companies visiting their websites in real time. Demandbase customers using Drupal CMS can now use Real-Time Identification to target website visitors with relevant content, personalizing the website experiences based on more than 40 corporate targetable attributes including company, industry, revenue, location, DUNS numbers and much more.

 “Facebook”, “MySpace”, “LinkedIn” and “Twitter” are just a few of the growing social networks on the internet. The internet is the connection we use to gain access to the world wide web. Its resources are abundant. For instance, people using “Twitter” find one another because they’re like-minded, or they follow someone based on good content. If you are interested in snowboarding, you can find other people that are interested in snowboarding. Then, their posts will keep you up to date with the snowboarding community.

If you are someone who designs custom snowboards and you are on the web to sell snowboards and to talk about things you enjoy, including snowboard tips and tricks or news or maybe a competition coming up nearby, people take pleasure in this type of information. They enjoy reading that information and then below that blog message they see your name and that you sell custom snowboards. You already know the people you follow are interested in snowboarding, so now you may directly market to thousands of people on your Twitter account that you know are interested in a similar product. Marketing in this way is a great tool and can be free. They also trust more in your product because your information has directly helped them in the past. They automatically think of the you next time they go to purchase a snowboard.

One of the most widely popular content management system is Joomla for which it has received great admiration. Benefiting large organizations and industries, it offers many systematic content management system. Huge businesses have widely benefited from services provided by Joomla. Any type of website you own/run, a dynamic CMS is required to look after its overall management. A robust CMS is able to build a sense of community. The daily operations as well as the overall presentation of the website are enhanced by Joomla CMS.

WordPress Core Developer Andrew Nacin has announced the arrival of the first release candidate (RC1) for version 3.4 of WordPress. The next major update to the open source blogging and publishing platform features improvements to theme search and selection, as well as a new theme customiser and previewer.

WordPress 3.4 will allow users to select custom headers and background images from the Media Library, and custom headers sizes are said to be more flexible. An API for registering theme support for custom headers and backgrounds, and an XML-RPC API for external and mobile applications have also been added. Other changes include internationalisation and localisation improvements, support for HTML in image captions and better WP_Query performance.

VirtueMart is one of the world's most popular ecommerce platforms, and is experiencing huge growth each month since VirtueMart 2 was released. VirtueMart has more shops in the Alexa Top One Million survey than osCommerce, PrestaShop, Volusion, Yahoo Stores, OpenCart or Ubercart.

As Joomla grows in popularity as an open source CMS more and more individuals and businesses of all sizes rely on the platform to get their products and services online. In fact, more than 2.5 percent of websites are running on a Joomla CMS -- and for good reason.

When working with a database, an index is the structure that improves the speed of a database table. Most all new websites in some way use a database. MYSQL is a database often used on the Linux platform. With Linux, you’ll have a few things you need to research with your site designer. You need to make sure your site will be designed with a good content management system. Websites now are designed for users without knowledge of coding to change and add content. This is important because content is king and you are going to be creating good content for your website to enhance your websites visibility on search engines.

This is very important because your web designer or program manager is not going to be able to nurture your website with content like you may be able to. Large companies will often times employ people dedicated to writing articles and content strictly for release on the web. After you have found out you are using a content management system, you now have a few things to make sure your designer does with that website.

By David Leonhardt

From the obvious to the "Hey-I-never-thought-of-that-great-idea-before", here are 10 of the top 52 tips on how to optimize your website for its turbo-charge rocket ride up the search engine rankings.

Be bold. Use the tags around some of your keywords on each page. Do NOT use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is plenty.

Deep linking. Make sure you have links coming in to as many pages as possible. What does it tell a search engine when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site? That you obviously have lots of worthwhile content. What does it tell a search engine that all your links are coming in to the home page? That you have a shallow site of little value, or that your links were generated by automation rather than by the value of your site.

Become a foreigner. Canada and the UK have many directories for websites of companies based in those countries. Can you get a business address in one of those countries?

Social bookmarking. Make it easy for your visitors to social bookmark your website, creating important links that the search engines value. There are plenty of free social bookmarking widgets available. We offer The Bookmarketer

 

.

Newsletters. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines. The links stay live often for many years in their archives.

First come, first served. If you must have image links in your navigation bar, include also text links. However, make sure the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won't follow additional links to the same page. You can see this in action at the link to the home page on this web site monitoring page

Multiple domains. If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way. Why not a site dedicated to gumbo pudding pops?

Article exchanges. You've heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. You publish someone else's article on the history of pudding pops with a link back to their site. They publish your article on the top ten pudding pop flavors in Viet Nam, with a link back to your site. You both have content. You both get high quality links. (More on high quality links in other tips.)

Titles for links. Links can get titles, too. Not only does this help visually impaired surfers know where you are sending them, but some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.

Not anchor text. Don't overdo the anchor text. You don't want all your inbound links looking the same, because that looks like automation - something Google frowns upon. Use your URL sometimes, your company name other times, "Gumbo Pudding Pop" occasionally, "Get gumbo pudding pops" as well, "Gumbo-flavored pudding pops" some other times, etc.

Site map. A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It's called the navigation bar. See how the second navigation bar at the bottom of Last Minute Florida Villas is like a mini-site map?

1. If you absolutely MUST use Java script drop down menus, image maps or image links, be sure to put text links somewhere on the page for the spiders to follow.

2. Content is king, so be sure to have good, well-written and unique content that will focus on your primary keyword or keyword phrase.

3. If content is king, then links are queen. Build a network of quality backlinks using your keyword phrase as the link. Remember, if there is no good, logical reason for that site to link to you, you don’t want the link.

4. Don’t be obsessed with PageRank. It is just one isty bitsy part of the ranking algorithm. A site with lower PR can actually outrank one with a higher PR.

5. Be sure you have a unique, keyword focused Title tag on every page of your site. And, if you MUST have the name of your company in it, put it at the end. Unless you are a major brand name that is a household name, your business name will probably get few searches.

6. Fresh content can help improve your rankings. Add new, useful content to your pages on a regular basis. Content freshness adds relevancy to your site in the eyes of the search engines.

7. Be sure links to your site and within your site use your keyword phrase. In other words, if your target is “blue widgets” then link to “blue widgets” instead of a “Click here” link.

8. Focus on search phrases, not single keywords, and put your location in your text (“our Palm Springs store” not “our store”) to help you get found in local searches.

9. Don’t design your web site without considering SEO. Make sure your web designer understands your expectations for organic SEO. Doing a retrofit on your shiny new Flash-based site after it is built won’t cut it. Spiders can crawl text, not Flash or images.

10. Use keywords and keyword phrases appropriately in text links, image ALT attributes and even your domain name.

11. Check for canonicalization issues – www and non-www domains. Decide which you want to use and 301 redirect the other to it. In other words, if http://www.domain.com is your preference, then http://domain.com should redirect to it.

12. Check the link to your home page throughout your site. Is index.html appended to your domain name? If so, you’re splitting your links. Outside links go to http://www.domain.com and internal links go to http://www.domain.com/index.html.

Ditch the index.html or default.php or whatever the page is and always link back to your domain.

13. Frames, Flash and AJAX all share a common problem – you can’t link to a single page. It’s either all or nothing. Don’t use Frames at all and use Flash and AJAX sparingly for best SEO results.

14. Your URL file extension doesn’t matter. You can use .html, .htm, .asp, .php, etc. and it won’t make a difference as far as your SEO is concerned.

15. Got a new web site you want spidered? Submitting through Google’s regular submission form can take weeks. The quickest way to get your site spidered is by getting a link to it through another quality site.

16. If your site content doesn’t change often, your site needs a blog because search spiders like fresh text. Blog at least three time a week with good, fresh content to feed those little crawlers.

17. When link building, think quality, not quantity. One single, good, authoritative link can do a lot more for you than a dozen poor quality links, which can actually hurt you.

18. Search engines want natural language content. Don’t try to stuff your text with keywords. It won’t work. Search engines look at how many times a term is in your content and if it is abnormally high, will count this against you rather than for you.

19. Not only should your links use keyword anchor text, but the text around the links should also be related to your keywords. In other words, surround the link with descriptive text.

20. If you are on a shared server, do a blacklist check to be sure you’re not on a proxy with a spammer or banned site. Their negative notoriety could affect your own rankings.

21. Be aware that by using services that block domain ownership information when you register a domain, Google might see you as a potential spammer.

22. When optimizing your blog posts, optimize your post title tag independently from your blog title.

23. The bottom line in SEO is Text, Links, Popularity and Reputation.

24. Make sure your site is easy to use. This can influence your link building ability and popularity and, thus, your ranking.

25. Give link love, Get link love. Don’t be stingy with linking out. That will encourage others to link to you.

26. Search engines like unique content that is also quality content. There can be a difference between unique content and quality content. Make sure your content is both.

27. If you absolutely MUST have your main page as a splash page that is all Flash or one big image, place text and navigation links below the fold.

28. Some of your most valuable links might not appear in web sites at all but be in the form of e-mail communications such as newletters and zines.

29. You get NOTHING from paid links except a few clicks unless the links are embedded in body text and NOT obvious sponsored links.

30. Links from .edu domains are given nice weight by the search engines. Run a search for possible non-profit .edu sites that are looking for sponsors.

31. Give them something to talk about. Linkbaiting is simply good content.

32. Give each page a focus on a single keyword phrase. Don’t try to optimize the page for several keywords at once.

33. SEO is useless if you have a weak or non-existent call to action. Make sure your call to action is clear and present.

34. SEO is not a one-shot process. The search landscape changes daily, so expect to work on your optimization daily.

35. Cater to influential bloggers and authority sites who might link to you, your images, videos, podcasts, etc. or ask to reprint your content.

36. Get the owner or CEO blogging. It’s priceless! CEO influence on a blog is incredible as this is the VOICE of the company. Response from the owner to reader comments will cause your credibility to skyrocket!

37. Optimize the text in your RSS feed just like you should with your posts and web pages. Use descriptive, keyword rich text in your title and description.

38. Use captions with your images. As with newspaper photos, place keyword rich captions with your images.

39. Pay attention to the context surrounding your images. Images can rank based on text that surrounds them on the page. Pay attention to keyword text, headings, etc.

40. You’re better off letting your site pages be found naturally by the crawler. Good global navigation and linking will serve you much better than relying only on an XML Sitemap.

41. There are two ways to NOT see Google’s Personalized Search results:

(1) Log out of Google

(2) Append &pws=0 to the end of your search URL in the search bar

42. Links (especially deep links) from a high PageRank site are golden. High PR indicates high trust, so the back links will carry more weight.

43. Use absolute links. Not only will it make your on-site link navigation less prone to problems (like links to and from https pages), but if someone scrapes your content, you’ll get backlink juice out of it.

44. See if your hosting company offers “Sticky” forwarding when moving to a new domain. This allows temporary forwarding to the new domain from the old, retaining the new URL in the address bar so that users can gradually get used to the new URL.

45. Understand social marketing. It IS part of SEO. The more you understand about sites like Digg, Yelp, del.icio.us, Facebook, etc., the better you will be able to compete in search.

46. To get the best chance for your videos to be found by the crawlers, create a video sitemap and list it in your Google Webmaster Central account.

47. Videos that show up in Google blended search results don’t just come from YouTube. Be sure to submit your videos to other quality video sites like Metacafe, AOL, MSN and Yahoo to name a few.

48. Surround video content on your pages with keyword rich text. The search engines look at surrounding content to define the usefulness of the video for the query.

49. Use the words “image” or “picture” in your photo ALT descriptions and captions. A lot of searches are for a keyword plus one of those words.

50. Enable “Enhanced image search” in your Google Webmaster Central account. Images are a big part of the new blended search results, so allowing Google to find your photos will help your SEO efforts.

51. Add viral components to your web site or blog – reviews, sharing functions, ratings, visitor comments, etc.

52. Broaden your range of services to include video, podcasts, news, social content and so forth. SEO is not about 10 blue links anymore.

53. When considering a link purchase or exchange, check the cache date of the page where your link will be located in Google. Search for “cache:URL” where you substitute “URL” for the actual page. The newer the cache date the better. If the page isn’t there or the cache date is more than an month old, the page isn’t worth much.

54. If you have pages on your site that are very similar (you are concerned about duplicate content issues) and you want to be sure the correct one is included in the search engines, place the URL of your preferred page in your sitemaps.

55. Check your server headers. Search for “check server header” to find free online tools for this. You want to be sure your URLs report a “200 OK” status or “301 Moved Permanently ” for redirects. If the status shows anything else, check to be sure your URLs are set up properly and used consistently throughout your site.