Showing posts with label agseo. Show all posts

Monday, 17 May 2010

Create Friends Lists - Hide Your Online Status on Facebook Chat from Select Contacts

Create Friends Lists -Hide Your Online Status on Facebook Chat from Select Contacts

In times gone by, you could either be online or offline with regards to Facebook chat. This was annoying because what if you wanted to speak to some people but not others?

Now Facebook has an option that allows you to do just that. It's called Friends lists.

Basically you create a list, assign a friend to it & can then set your online / offline status in bulk.

Lets say you have two lists: Friends & Family / Business Contacts.

Want to be online to your business contacts during the day, but not available to your friends & family in case they disturb you? You can be.

OK, I get it ... but how!?

First thing is to create the lists & assign friends to each list.

Under the Lists heading, click the Friends option.

Then choose Create New List. A new box will appear where you can name the list and add friends to your newly created list.

Online or Offline? You Decide

Now that your lists are set up and you've assigned contacts to them (don't worry if you haven't you can drag & drop from the chat window. You are now in full control of who sees you as online or offline.

Simply open the chat box at the bottom right of the page. You'll see little sliders, green means online and grey means offline. Simply slide them to toggle whether you appear as online (green) or offline (grey) to that particular group.

Any ungrouped friends will appear in the Other Contacts list.

Adam Gardner is a freelance SEO / Social Media Expert. Follow him on twitter @agseo or subscribe to this blog via RSS.

Friday, 14 May 2010

PLR Articles - Are They Worth It?

PLR articles are private label resell articles. That means that once you purchase the article / content you are free to resell it.

A common belief in SEO / Internet marketing circles is that if you purchase PLR articles you can then spin them (reword them) and make them unique enough to promote as your own without incurring any duplicate content penalties from Google.

The main problem I have with this is: How much of a difference do you have to make to an article / page / piece of content before it becomes unique in the eyes of the search engine?

Plus, if you are only rewriting it purely to get round the duplicate content filter, surely it isn't going to be saying much new that isn't already available ... therefore you're unlikely to get people linking to it ... and therefore unlikely to gain much benefit from it.

My other problem is probably more personal. You see, when I write an article I want it to have value and be genuinely useful to myself (as a reference) as well as a website visitor. Therefore I often find it difficult purely to switch a few words around and change a pre-written article.

Very often I'll end up scraping it and writing my own from scratch anyway .... so there's no huge benefit for me to buy PLR articles.

That said, I'm sure people will continue to buy them & tweak them & they will continue to evade the dup. content filter ... but shame on you! Bring some value to the web & your followers and they'll be forever greatful :)

Adam Gardner is a freelance SEO / Social Media Expert. Follow him on twitter @agseo or subscribe to this blog via RSS.

Monday, 10 May 2010

Phonat vs ATFC - Sleep Talk hits the Fan

This one is simple, could help but feel that the brilliant Love Hits the Fan by Phonat needed some vocals ... Sleep Talk by ATFC fit the bill perfectly. Enjoy :)

Comments / Suggestions below please!

Sunday, 9 May 2010

Google's new Layout: How it Affects You

Google's new Layout : How it Affects You

Google have just roled out a new layout with more in-depth search options down the left hand side of the page. The choices in this column aren't necessarily new, they've been available for some time.

Some of the options will already be familiar to users such as maps, videos, images & news since they've been available (and still are) along the top of the results page for a while now.

However the new additions to these search options are critical - they have been available for a while, but only if you went looking for them in the sub menus at the top of the results pages.

These new options include Blogs, Updates, and Discussions.

Blog Search

Google Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com) has been around for some time although people will notice it more now. If you want to find the latest blog post / opinion / review for a product or site then this is surely the easiest way to find it without specifically intending to use the blog search engine from the outset. If you needed another reason to start a business blog, surely this is it!

Updates

The updates option in the Google results pulls data from the real time search results (sites such as Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google Buzz, etc.) It's now more important than ever to be listed in the real time search results - Get a Twitter account!

Discussions

This option returns results from the forums, Q&A sites & help sections. Helping out and answering questions in forums and message boards has always been a great way to get noticed and build a reputation in your industry, but now that there's a dedicated search option ... isn't it essential that you encorporate it into your online marketing strategy?

It's worth baring in mind that each of these options have sub-options to return and sort data by freshness (last 24 hours, last week etc.), length and also by location.

Therefore if you're running a local SEO campaign this could be a potential goldmine of relevant traffic!

Paid Links - Buying Links

Paid Links & Buying Links

Buying links or paying for links (which pass PageRank) has been officially forbidden by Google & is against their TOS.

That means that any links you buy or sell with the intention of gaming the search engines can potentially damage your site or even get it removed from the search engine's index.

Buying links isn't necessarily prohibited, Google rightly state that it is "a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results." and that "links purchased for advertising should be designated as such."

There are a few ways to do this but the most effective is to use the rel="nofollow" tag to tell the search spiders not to follow that particular link & not to pass any PageRank (reputation) along with it.

So, stop building sites just to gain PR & therefore to sell links & bring your online money making efforts into the 21st century!

Don't believe me? Here is Google's official stance.

Saturday, 8 May 2010

Start Youtube Video at Specific Time

How To: Start a Youtube Video at a Specific Start Time

Here's how to start a youtube video automatically at a given time. This method also works with Facebook embedding!

Find a video you wish to share. Copy the video URL (address) :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aTG3FlEv4VQ

Now we have to slightly reformat the URL so that it becomes

http://www.youtube.com/v/aTG3FlEv4VQ

Next simply work out (in seconds) where you want the video to start. To start at 1 minute & 30 seconds, use 90 seconds & add this to the end of the new URL.

&start=90

So the complete URL becomes:

http://www.youtube.com/v/aTG3FlEv4VQ&start=90

Then simply copy and paste this into Facebook!

Autostarting the video

Automatically starting a youtube video is simple! All you need is another parameter tagged onto the end of the URL ... here's the code:

&autoplay=1

Where 1 is the number of times you wish the video to autoplay.

So to start the above video automatically at 90 seconds the complete address would be:

http://www.youtube.com/v/aTG3FlEv4VQ&start=90&autoplay=1

Enjoy!!

Sunday, 2 May 2010

Why PageRank Doesn't Matter

Why Google PageRank Doesn't Matter

What is PageRank (PR)?

Google's pagerank is a measure created by Google of a sites trustworthiness in the eyes of Google.

It is important to realise that PageRank applies to each individual page on a site & is not a sitewide value. One page can be PR 5 and another could have no PR.

Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

That is why you'll hear search engine professionals talking about how a single link from an authority (high PR) site can be worth more than lots of links for a low PR site.

What? Two Versions?

Google has two versions of PageRank, a publically displayed metric and an internal value that they do not release to the public.

The public version is only updated once every 3 months or so (there's even rumours that it only gets updated once a year).

Therefore the public toolbar PR is almost always out of date by up to 3 months.

That's reason #1 why your PR doesn't matter.

Rankings & PageRank

It is well known in the search marketing industry that good (high) pagerank doesn't equate to good (high) rankings. A PR 0 site can easily outrank a PR4 or PR5 site (and above).

Therefore concentrating on building PageRank in the hope that it will automatically convert into higher rankings for your keyphrases is a waste of time.

That's reason #2 why PR doesn't matter.

Pagerank alone doesn't pay the bills, it doesn't generate enquiries, sales or conversions. A little green bar will never make your business or website a success, no matter how optimistic you are.

A great site with a PR0 doesn't make it a bad site. It may be a new site, have had recent server problems (downtime) or the toolbar itself may be reporting bad data.

As has been said many times before, concentrate on building quality content that people will want to share with others & build your inbound links to get rankings that bring traffic, the PageRank will follow ... but if it doesn't ... so what?!!?!

PS. You don't just have to take my word for it, most SEO experts agree on this. Here, and here and even here.

Saturday, 1 May 2010

Location and Previous Searches: Affect on Google Results

How does Location & Previous Search History Affect Google Results?

If Google (and other search engines) know where you're located, they can (and will try) to display more relevant results based on that location.

For example if you're searching for pizza shops or plumbers or car dealers & you're located in London, you're going to want ones that are nearby and not a pizza shop in Edinburgh.

If you sign in to your Google account (Youtube is obviously included in this) and you have previously searched for MS and been looking for pages and information about multiple sclerosis then you're likely to want to see the same sort of result should you search for MS again. Rather than seeing results for Microsoft or manuscript or milestone.

Of course, there is the option to opt out of these services and clear your browser history and cookies but most people will find that providing Google with your location is a small price to pay for much more targeted results.

Does Google use META tags to categorise its web pages?

They no longer use the keywords meta tag to rank sites in the results pages.

They do use the TITLE tag, meta title tag (two seperate entities) & the meta description along with other tags such as the robots meta tag.

While the meta description doesn't have a huge (if any) impact on ranking position, the keywords used to search will be bold in the description. Therefore a well written description tag will increase CTRs to your pages.

It is worth noting that the search engines can choose whether or not to use the description tag but in most cases they will.

Pingomatic Button for Firefox

Pingomatic browser button for Firefox

Wouldn't it be great if you could ping a page instantly as soon as you land on it. Well now you can.

Pingomatic is a multi-service ping engine that basically informs various bots (including Google) that the page is new or has recently been updated. Therefore the spiders will rush to the page in an attempt to index it as quickly as possibly.

This method doesn't require any browser addons or additional software.

Here's the code if you want to see the workings of it (Text File Download as Blogger doesn't like embedding live code).

Alternatively you can simply drag this to your Firefox Toolbar and everything will be setup and ready to go --> Ping This Page