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Google Plus vs. Facebook: Who Will Win In the Battle of Social Networking Sites?

Surely Facebook felt very little guilt when all of Myspace’s fans began ignoring their accounts and started networking by the thousands through Facebook instead, but I wonder how they will feel now that the tides have turned.  Pretty soon Google may know exactly what it feels like when Google + takes the world by storm in the very near future.  It should not come by surprise that Google is trying to hop on the social networking bandwagon again as they have tried in the past with platforms like Google Buzz and Google Friend Connect.  But the new Google attempt at social networking has got a lot of features that it didn’t have before, and a lot of features that Facebook only wishes it could have.

Chatting On Facebook vs. Hanging Out On Google Plus

Why chat with your friends when you can hang out with them right?  Well, we never had the option otherwise before Google + but now we have no excuses.  Facebook’s cheesy chat area will likely be getting little attention when users discover that Google Plus allows users to video chat with multiple friends at once.  What makes the feature super cool though is that you never know who might stop by to “hang out” with you and your friends, so its like being out while having the luxury of staying in.  Staying home on a Friday night may just get a little less boring thanks to Google Plus.  Sorry Facebook but I think Google won this round…

Facebook Status Updates vs. Google Plus Circle Updates

It’s great being able to update everyone on what is going on in your life but somethings are meant for some to hear and not others.  Facebook’s status update section is better than Myspace’s was but the Google Plus Circles updates are going to be a major Facebook update competitor.  With Google’s new feature you can update different circles of friends and family with different information.  So your friends don’t have to know that your mom made you lunch on any given day and your mom doesn’t have to know that your going to a strip joint that night.  Facebook will be hard pressed to compete with a feature like that, and probably wouldn’t even try since “privacy” is an ambigous word to them to begin with.  

Facebook Photo Sharing vs. Google Plus Instant Upload

Sharing photos through Facebook is a great way to share your experiences with friends and family but you could send them pictures in the mail by the time you get them uploaded to FB.  Google Plus is making it easier by doing all the work for you.  With Google + pictures are uploaded instantly so you can post them instantly.  Seems like Google + is winning this round too but I guess we will really just have to wait and see.

The preliminary evaluation puts Google + in the lead but until more people are”invited” to try it out we won’t know who the winner is going to be.  One thing we can be sure of though is that Google + has already got features that we have been waiting to see.

Written by Leonard, a freelance writer who writes about different web applications, os x antivirus, seo, technology, registry cleaner, hardware and software.

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Blogging and SEO are inseparable. The blog is perhaps the defining website content, and blogs cover every imaginable subject on Earth. The trouble is that low grade SEO, or non-existent SEO in many cases, is an own goal for blogs. If people can’t find your blog, how do you expect to get read? SEO is a logical approach to a basic online issue, and it’s more of a science than anything else these days.

There are a lot of businesses around the world which are literally built on SEO. These are often online businesses, but many of them are “bricks and mortar” businesses, too. SEO is how their clients find them. This is the new Yellow Pages, more efficient and easier to carry around. For bloggers, it’s best practice to make absolutely sure that your blog is easily searchable using keyword phrases, the sort of terms people normally use to search.

Checking your own SEO as it is

There’s an easy way of checking your current SEO situation:

Try searching your own blog, using two or three key phrases from your text related to your subject matter.

How did you go? Did you:

• Find your blog instantly?
• Not find it at all?
• Find it down on Page 50 of the search results?

You’ll have noticed that some phrases are much better than others. You’ll also have seen that you got a lot of other sites on the top rankings. That’s SEO at work, and it’s what SEO is all about. The SEO keywords are the core issues when searching.

For bloggers, there are two major SEO issues:

• Blog content and subject matter
• The fact that many articles vary considerably and keywords may need some adjustment to make the individual blogs easier to find.

If you use WordPress, you’ll know their tagging options. WordPress uses tags as a default process for SEO purposes. Tagging is built in to WordPress specifically because the SEO process is so crucial to blogs. Convincing argument, isn’t it?

The other big issue is content. Search engines look for useful information, links and additional values. It’s like saying an encyclopaedia entry is more valuable to searchers than a Post-It note full of scrawl. SEO uses articles to provide high value relevant materials to improve search rankings. As a matter of policy, Google also uses content as a value indicator for its basic search algorithms.

Improving your SEO

There are various ways of improving your search engine optimization:

Content quality: This is a major issue for search engines, and relevance to search subjects is highly important.

Accurate, useful keyword phrases: This is basic, and you’ll need to put some thought into each blog piece for good tags.

Focusing your blog on critical core subjects: Some blogs cover far too many subjects for a search engine to consider the blog subject-specific. You may need to create another blog to help organize the subject matter, keeping your original blog for its basic subject matter.

Get help if you’re not sure what to do with your blog. It’s easy enough to get some professional assistance with your SEO. This also acts as training, explaining how specific SEO issues relate to your blog.

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Perfect Math

Tonight I watched Proof. Before I got a computer I watched movies all day long while reading books. Now a chance to watch a movie comes few and far between. And because it does and it is one of my favorite things to do is veg out for hours and watch a movie, it gives my mind a chance to look at my work from a little perspective. The work I had been looking at with a microscope for weeks at time. If I can get far enough away for a little while, the answer will come.

I thought about math. I never really liked mathematics until I played poker for the first time. But I was always good at it. I remember doing Algebra, Geometry, Calculus and Advanced Math and running out of places to go in mathematics where I could be challenged, so I started programming in my last year of high school, games mostly, when one person could do that and screens had 32 colors. I was home schooled so subjects came and went fast and I could pick what I learned for the most part.

And now I couldn’t tell you one thing about Calculus. It’s the way my mind works. Fast to learn, quick to discharge when it’s done with it. None of the books that taught me math taught me how to apply it, so I lost it all. I do remember physics and some descriptive geometry because I could apply it. And I love catapults in physics. I could finally write the pattern of that arc I always noticed down in a language. I already could visualize it in every rock I threw as a kid.

And with poker, I learned statistics and probabalities or what I like to call prediction and it ran directly into the part of mathematics I could have loved 7 years out of school. But I soon learned that poker was not all math and I was not a people person and moved on.

And math sort of followed me everywhere. I picked up a book on design and it was there. No wonder a conch shell is amazing. I could draw one and come close. But now I could build one out of numbers.

Math is pattern recognition in a language. It is turned into the language so that pieces of different patterns can be manipulated and merged and then pulled out again and put back into concrete ideas. Take object, turn into number. Take another object, turn into number. Shake them around a bit in their number world. Pull them back out again as newborn baby predictions of what will happen or of something you don’t know yet.

If you have one apple and bob give you two, you will then have three. This face has a 99% chance of being Bob Jones’. An eye-witness would make it a 100% chance in a court of law. So math is an attempt to put down on paper the way the world works as we interpret it. What natural law says that people can recognize faces in the first place? And if everything I saw visually as orange, you saw as green, how would you know? You would call it green and I would agree, but my lawn would look totally different to me than you.

So math could never be said to 100% describe the world we live in because some part of it is still a justification of the patterns we see in the outside world as filtered through our senses and finally our psyche and that last one can be a doozy.

I throw rock, hit target. You throw rock, hit target. We not insane. Ok, throw rock this hard, hit target. Go get Bob, have him throw rock too, just in case. Then we’ll be sure. Then we’ll go sacrifice this goat to thank the gods for this inspiration.

If mathematic were always 100% accurate this were not so, we would not be in the financial fiasco we are currently in. Mathematics made the risk seem less than it was, sometimes by removing the risk from the equation before it is written. Garbage in, garbage out and garbage algorithm.

More money could be lent on the hopes of more money to be made when it was paid back. But the formula did not work. It was wishful thinking or maybe meant to only look good in the short-term like our perfect calendar that has to correct itself every four years. An economy cycle diet meant to shift the numbers to a steeper slope.

Which makes me wonder if the ultimate model of economy is mother nature herself and it just doesn’t know it yet or at least the rest of the world doesn’t. And mother nature is really a bitch on the person to person level with the whole survival of the fittest thing. Mother nature is not fair. The damn whales people try to save suck down thousands of shrimp in a mouthful. A you freakin Vegans, plants have a conscious too, so you better find a new diet of rocks, water and air. There is no way to live with out killing a lot of other things in the process and just to survive.

And SEO Chasing It’s Tail or The BeeWatcher Watcher

And by now, I myself am wondering when I am going to get to SEO. All those paragraphs were just meant to lead in and I got carried away. But during the movie, I started thinking about mathematics, search engines and SEO. Some people who use math change the way we look at the world. And some use it mundanely.

I started thinking about what a great discovery in SEO would be. It would be discovering the algorithm that someone else wrote to recognize a pattern in language and use it to rank documents. These documents themselves are ideas encoded in one written language or another. The goal of these documents is to transmit these ideas to another person who wants them.

An SEO works in the gap between the algorithm and what people see. This is not even a science, more of a meta-science, if there is such a thing.

I starting writing this post months ago and dropped it, because I could quite get to what I wanted to say. But for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been playing around a lot with the my6sense android app, which I now prefer to any social media app because it pulls my Google Reader feeds in also. I do like reading more than random brain farts.  And what did I see, the same stories over and over. And in my area of the internet, the Google Farmer Update, which to me just seemed like Google’s rules, which have been there for years. were finally being put to use.

In all this, the thought never crosses most people’s minds that Google in its current state is not the end of information retrieval. Stop being librarians with the Dewey Decimal System. The Dewey Decimal System was great for paper cataloging, because location in the library and topic indexes could be one in the same thing. One number was all you needed. And it worked at any library you walked into. It is about the best you can do for physical books, because the contents of each book aren’t indexed.

The printing press was invented in 1436, 440 years before the Dewey Decimal System was invented in 1876 and has been updated 22 times since then. I know technology moves quicker now, be we are no way near the end of search engine evolution. All search engine algorithms are just that, algorithms, mathematical constructs that are never 100% accurate and only infinitely get closer to accuracy through change.

Google’s system ultimately will become a system of providing commerce above information. It has stock and shareholders and no real rules governing how to organize or order its content. A corporation’s core interest is the bottom line. And the bottom line means, sell as much as ads as you can in the space you have. When does this core interest interfere with “Do No Evil”. When does it interfere with “most relevant content” and who is this content relevant to. Network TV jammed as many ads in as it could and someone came up with cable and then cable did this and another ingenious bastard invented the dvr.

Google is big. Which means they move slow. Oh, yes, Google has done a lot in the last year or so. So much so they look like a combination of Yahoo, Facebook and Bing. But much of this technology and features were already being done by competitors. They have become a “do that too” company, which means they partially do something another company has put all their effort into. Some of these swipes are more apparent. I didn’t realize the extent of copying until I started looking through some semantic search engines and found the origin of many of Google recent “innovations”.

And I thought Google’s homepage was the way it was for a reason, with a bunch of scientific mumbo jumbo to explain why minimal was better. Or maybe I’m the idiot and the history police have already rewritten that part and I didn’t get the memo.

So I think Google has become sloppy with change on the heels of Facebook’s popularity, Twitter’s ability to serve information happening now instantly and Bing’s increase in search market share.

But this has nothing to do with the Farmer/Panda or whatever the fuck it is update. That needed to be done. It knocked out some crap content.

And if the Internet Was Forever

And, we as SEO’s just follow Google around like a God with a lot more commandments. What we have to realize in this is that Google is following around everyone else, trying to figure out what they like, so they can serve it up. Which makes us as SEO’s, the beewatcher watcher (Dr. Suess reference).  Let me explain.

Let’s say you bookmark your site at one site and it is dofollow and you submit an article at another site but your link is not dofollow. The use of a dofollow or nofollow tag is a bandaid to prevent spam link building but it is a hindrance to ranking content. Back to the link submissions. If the article site or guest blog post gets 100 the clickthrough times the traffic of the bookmarked link, and that article link in nofollow and therefore gives you no link juice by Google’s algorithm, then by all logic, Google’s algorithm is wrong.

And if Google algorithm stays wrong and flaws are not fixed, another search engine will find a way in. Read a college paper on knowledge theory or information retrieval every once and a while and you will realize that the Google algorithm is a toddler when it comes to finding relevant information, while the company itself is getting older. Not a good combination in my book.

And if the internet was forever, who gives a crap. But then again, what is forever on the internet. About the time between the launch of AltaVista and the launch of Google and it probably decreases as time goes on.

I am not saying or want anyone to take away that I think Google will be going down any time soon or in the future.

What I am saying is this. If you start thinking about your websites as a house you own in the city. Repaint it (tables to css to html5) every now and then and keep it occupied with good content and it can only go up in value. Your house is there forever if you want it, past search engine algorithm changes, before and after social media, however long this internet protocol lasts. I have never sold a domain and don’t really plan to. I want to pass them down to my kids if they want them. I want them worth money and I treat them that way.

No More BeeWatcher Watching and Meeting Google at the Pass

This got me thinking. Google is not God. Google is a fixture and now must filter new search technology and roll it out slowly. The key is not to know Google, but to be there before Google is. Google follows the internet. Google follow internet technology. Google follows what people do. Google can’t do it too quickly or it will freak people out. A few search engines were years ahead of Google with LSI and Semantic search. Google can’t do it too slowly or Google will not be where it is supposed to be and someone else will be there and quick, YouTube. And Google just can’t get some things right, maybe too many PHD’s and not enough hard knocks. My nickname for Google +1 is Google Me (Windows reference to go along with the current antitrust issues).

Google is trying to figure out the way we rank content and SEO’s are trying to figure out what Google is trying to figure out. Why not cut out the middleman?

Backrub (Google 0.0) used academic papers as it’s model for ranking content. Before this, every search engine mainly used keyword concentration for a rank indicator.  The internet was bigger than any mountain of data a computer had ever climbed and indexed correctly before. But it was in HTML and HTML had various indicators of content importance similar to acedemic papers. 6 levels of heading tags from H1 to H6 could indicate rank. A link to another paper could indicate importance. Count those links and you have a scale. And on and on.

But the truth is, Backrub was reinventing the wheel in code. The heading tags were already an indicator of rank when reading a document and you knew when you hit a list, to take notes.

But the wheel now is code and content. The sonnet was invented. The novel was invented. Twitter invented a new content type. What about videos? Social networks invent new content types every day. Algorithms still have to be built to process all of this stuff and those must adjust with time. Everything is in flux and social is here to stay, smart phones guaranteed that for a while.

Google can write it’s algorithm but social networks gave people a voice against Google which Google must eventually adjust to or perish if it is to provide “relevant content”.

Google can refuse to index a technology or content type correctly for a while but when enough people start using it, they must change or perish.

Know Your Media and Your Audience – Zen and the Art of SEO

I have actually become bored writing about SEO because most of the concepts are pretty simple.

• People search with keywords
• Research words that people would use to find what you have to sell
• Write content with these keywords
• Write better or more controversial content with these keywords (linkbait)
• Build links to this content
• Get social buzz for your linkbait
• Build different iterations of this very flexible erector set

But really isn’t this just:

• Do research on topic
• Write cool shit on topic
• Find people who like this kind of shit
• Tell people about cool shit

There is not really much to it for someone with an analytical mind and creativity. Pick a new social site, bookmark site, article site, etc.,  figure out it’s dynamic, and work a little magic with it to get links in to your site. There are and were new social sites every week. Simple concepts with an almost endless work schedule if you wanted until you had the site where you wanted it. I guess you could write about each and every site, but then spammers would read your stuff quicker and start manual spamming and then write software to do it.

Every social network has a dynamic. You can consider blogs a disconnected social network, a huge one. I consider forums in the social network realm. Any site that you can add content to, that you do not own, I consider a social network. Most likely, the links you get from here and beyond will come from social networks.

Think of link directories, for example. We all know they are worthless. DMOZ and Yahoo may have some value. Small niche directories that have other content may have value. Directory sites with voting and comments (LOL: review sites) may have some value. But the cookie cutter sites? Would you go there? Would someone else?

I had to add the “Would someone else?” because I am 36 now and there are some places I would go 16 years ago I wouldn’t now. But it still is fucking simple. And Google finally said enough. Ditto on the other random crap sites too. And that is the end of the audience section.

But you still have to know your media, not that I do (shoemaker’s children), for those who want to throw stones at glass houses. Google did make some other “Duh” changes, like ranking more speedy content. After all, it is their damn search engine and if you want to drive your broke ass model T site down it, they are going to force you into the slow lane. This post is already almost 3000 words. But there are ways to make your site faster and they are many and varied. I have played around with most of them to know that they won’t fit here.

Make your HTML current, look good or at least presentable, easy to navigate and organized logically. Again, broke ass Model T’s.

Your media is also your content. Write right, for fuck sake (I guess I do earn a few stones for that one, but really don’t give a crap here).

But also keep track of what is happening. New web technologies and ideas sprout up all the time. If you see an in and have the time, jump in. Google will be there soon or someone else will get there first. Microformats were out a while before Google recognized them. If a social network becomes popular, Google will be there. Google is only a diplomat. The internet is king.

And if you are deeper into SEO, read papers and check out new search engines. Something will hit you that is new, that Google missed for a second and you may have a jump on.

The Mantra

If you are doing your own SEO, Google’s changes may have freaked you out.

Evil God Google Smash Site.

But if you are in it for the long haul, then it is just time to rebuild. Upgrade your site design. Speed it up. Make sure your content is unique and fits your visitors. Maintenance would have fixed most of this.

When you get too wrapped in SEO, remember this.

Google is trying to find the people you are trying to find. You just have to be there.

I guess if you work as an SEO, it’s a bit different. You already know this stuff.

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This is a guest post by Brandon Hopkins

When I first got the email from “Sandra Bullok” I was excited. Did she want me opinion on Jesse James? Was she looking for a movie recommendation? Did she want my opinion on Beiber??

Unfortunately, it wasn’t the real Sandra Bullock, just a spammer. However, for the record I think Beiber gets a bad rap!

Just like anyone who owns a website, I get emails from “professional” link building companies every day. As we all know, they’re scraping email addresses, filling out comment forms and generally spamming in any way possible. Since it’s obvious that these emails are completely spam, we can use them to as a “What Not To Do When Building Links” guide. Here are some observations about building links through email.

1. Don’t be Generic.

If you don’t use my name, I won’t be reading your email. You will earn extra points and probably even a contact back if you use some other personal piece of information beside just my first name or email address. All you would have to do is read the “About Me” page to find that piece of info. Anything from a hobby to children would work.

Sandra’s Email Fail: Dear Webmaster,

2. Use a Company Name.

“SEO Company” isn’t actually a company. Instead use either your own name or a company name to make your email a little unique.

Sandra’s Email Fail: I am Sandra from SEO Company

3. Use Correct Capitalization and Punctuation.

Certain words, no matter how important they are, should be capitalized. Here is an easy to understand guide of capitalization instructions.

Sandra’s Email Fail: We are looking as a long term Link Exchange Partner with your team of link builders.

4. Features and Benefits

Since you’re essentially “selling” yourself and your website, you should know something about the sales process. One of the strongest sales tactics is showing the features then benefits of your product or service. In this case, the feature would be “You will be providing your website visitors with a website that will help them with XYZ.” The benefit would be “This will help them remember that your website gave them exactly what they were looking for, so they’re more likely to remember your website in the future”.

Sandra’s Email Feature Fail: I am excited to offer you a very good back link (no site or page was listed, we all know it’s going to be on a links.html page buried on some junk .info site registered yesterday)

Sandra’s Email Benefit Fail: none.

So how do you write a good email asking to either buy a link, or get a free link? Here is a template you can follow.

Hey Brandon, (never use “Dear Brandon,” or “Dear Mr. Hopkins,” or “Sir”, only spammers use those terms)

I wanted to let you know that I really liked your latest post about Twitter. I really liked the part about building a strong twitter following. That’s much more important that the total number of followers.

The reason I was emailing you was to see if you wanted to sell some advertising on the page, http://www.example.com. I have a website that would fit nicely and give your readers some additional information about Twitter resources.

My budget is fairly small, I’m just a guy with a website .

Let me know what you think.

Thanks!

Alexander Dombroff (don’t use a celeb’s name…)

p.s. your daughter is really cute! How old is she in that picture on your site? My daughter just turned 3 last week, they look about the same age.

There is a reason that buying links under the radar is so expensive, it takes a lot of time! All of this doesn’t include the actual cost of paying for the link, which is generally $20-$50 depending on the site. That is the same reason that people don’t mind spending money on a few high quality web directories like BOTW, Ezilon, and Yahoo! Directory.

Brandon Hopkins runs a team of freelance link builders with the one goal of getting your website to rank #1 for your terms. Contact Brandon at brandonchopkins@gmail.com to discuss link building!

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For the last year or so, I have visited Digg randomly or rarely. I tried Digg for a while, but always felt I was posting in the wrong category. So I only visited when others asked for it. And then a few weeks ago, I got a notice that someone was following so I went to login and the login didn’t work.

So now I am signing up for Digg Alpha so I can paste 6a597fd2647d468bbfe408607517b7b8 here and get it in my feed to verify my site. Nice trick, Digg. But it is pretty cool that from now on, my posts will automatically be sent to you.

Auto Submit Your Blog Feeds on Digg Alpha

But I have to say that signing up was easy. First put in your username, password, and email address in the form. You are then taken to page much like the “who to follow” page in Twitter and you can choose popular new diggisens to follow by Topic. After you are done there, you are taken to a page to connect your Digg account with Your Twitter, Facebook and Google Accounts.I simultaneously clicked the three buttons to connect to Twitter, Facebook and Google just see if all three would run at once and yes, yes they did. Which brought me 117 people to follow on the new Digg.

Connect Digg Alpha to Twitter, Facebook and Google

Now I can separate what is popular on digg from what is popular from people I follow.

Digg Alpha Home Page

And after you digg a few stories, your profile looks like this. And there are only a few stories, for real. Pretty crazy move. Everyone sign up again, wipe out all the history, start from scratch.

New Digg Profile Page

And if you want to, follow me there.

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I have been writing in journals and drawing these, as well as working on my sites, of course. But I have been hard at work. So I write intricate descriptions of site plans and have started keeping a journal just for diagrams, doodles and random thoughts. But the writing has been active writing. Writing and then doing with no time to edit it into something readable for my blog before I have a chance to test it. All I really want is a site that thinks for itself.

Stop Words?

Category Killer Extended

Product Promotion

Content Relations

Category Spreaders and Automation Triggers

Category Killer Site

This is the third Magento book I have reviewed at this blog. The first book took a beginner through the basics of adding products to and running a Magento store and not much more. The second book was for Magento Developers interested in extending Magento’s functionality. So both of those books covered the “build it” part of running an online store with Magento. And this book covered the “and they will come” part of running your store.

And believe me the work has just begun once your store is up and running. Now you have to make sales. The great part about having an online store is that you can market it quicker and more cost effectively than a brick and mortar store. The bad part is that it is hard to know where to begin. But you have to begin.

The most common issue I run into when someone is wondering why they aren’t getting any sales is that they just aren’t doing anything to promote their sites, get links to it or interact with their customers. And Magento 1.3 Sales Tactics Cookbook gives you the tools to get started on a marketing plan for your ecommerce site and hopefully with them, you can stick with it.

The SEO Part

One point brought up in the book was you optimize a page and not a site. The Sales Tactics Cookbook goes over the basics of fleshing out your product pages completely from product title to meta tags. Magento has a lot of places to add your keywords and the product pages have a lot of options. Don’t just skip through them. Use them to your advantage.

The book also goes through customizing the title of pages throughout your site in the Magento configuration menu. Every store owner’s first thought is to put the name of their store on every page title. This is definitely a good practice, but the importance of your store’s name depends on whether people search for it by name and whether that name is descriptive of the products you sell. Page titles hold valuable keyword real estate and if you can find common search terms to fit in there with your store name that describes what you do, you may be surprised at the results.

You will also learn how to create and submit your sitemap to Google. A sitemap is a file that tells Google where every page on your site is. It doesn’t really help with SEO but it does help Google pick up and index your newly optimized pages quicker. With Magento, you can cron your sitemap generation so that your store automatically generates a sitemap for Google and the other search engines every day or every week.

The Sales Tactics Cookbook also walk you through adding your products to Google Base and a few things you can do to make your products more visible there. Google Base and other shopping sites can bring you a lot of customers if you do it right. You are not going to be an SEO master after reading the book but you will know where to go and what to do in Magento to edit the data that will affect your rank in Google. After all, books 3 times this size have been written on just SEO.

The Landing Pages

I have shopped online for a long time. I do compare prices and tend to find the best price on things. But I also pass judgement on the sites I buy from. It doesn’t take long. A few seconds. If your site is inviting, well laid out and up to date graphically, I hang around longer and don’t second guess checking out. If your site looks like it has needed a design update about 10 years ago, then I go into security mode. Anything a bit off in the store and I am looking elsewhere first.

If you are selling online, look like it. The Cookbook will walk you through making your online store an inviting place for your customers. It will walk you through adding videos to your store, optimizing product images and using all 4 of Magento default page layouts. You will also learn how to use Magento’s CMS system to create landing pages, linkbait pages and customer service pages. Even if you are using one of the default Magento themes, you can still create an attractive store and there is no end of customizations you have available.

The Social Media Part

The internet is full of buzzwords like social media that make you think you are dealing with a whole new form of marketing. I don’t see it that way. You need customers in your store whether it is online or down the street. To get those customers to your store, you need to advertise and market it. The tools may be different but the concept is the same. This guide introduces you to social media and how you can use it to increase traffic and sales at your store. This book will walk you through setting up Twitter, Facebook and Posterous accounts and then show you how to effectively use each of your accounts to bring even more customers to your Magento store.

The Customer Relations Part

Magento was built for customers. Most of the features the average online store would need are available without adding extensions and for added functionality, you can choose from free or commercial plugins in Magento Connect. The Sales Tactics Cookbook shows you how to use these tools to bring in more sales and satisfied customers. In the book, you’ll learn how to:

• Entice customers to add more to their cart with Upsells, Crossells, Related Products and Free Shipping
• Create promotional pricing in the cart, with coupons or by amount of sale.
• Build a clearance category to liquidate old inventory
• Give your customers a voice with Reviews, Ratings, Polls, Public Wishlists and Tags
• Set up Email to a Friend on your site
• Create an international store or multilingual store to expand your market
• Build a wholesale customer group, set up bulk tax-free pricing for them and setting your wholesale policies
• Keep in touch with your customers with a Newsletter

All these features come in the free Magento Community version and I am sure most store owners are only using a percentage of these tools. This book is a must for anyone who is working to get their Magento shopping site more traffic and sales and have yet to learn any SEO or social media marketing techniques. It is also a great help for SEO’s that must work with Magento. It shows you where to go to make tweaks in structure and content.

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• PSD to Magento (ukwebsitedevelopment.com)
• Yoast: hreview and hproduct in Magento – Yoast (yoast.com)
• Magento Announces Magento Mobile (eon.businesswire.com)

I haven’t been posting for a couple weeks but I have been working on things. Here are some updates to my lists. There may still be some sites that don’t belong, but all are valid urls now. And they all have PageRank and Alexa Rank numbers now. The increase of sites in each is approximate since I really wasn’t paying attention:

• I added about 70 free blog hosts to my free blog host list
• I added about 300 bookmarking sites to my bookmarking site list
• I added about 60 press release sites to my press release site list
• I added about 500 classified sites to my classified site list

I plan on updating more of my lists and adding more lists in the upcoming weeks.  I need the data for software I have just finally decided to write myself.

And now since they are on Google Docs, they will update automatically and you can submit your own sites with a form below the lists.

Have fun and build links!

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• Linkextend: Display Alexa Rank And Google PageRank With Search Results (shoutmeloud.com)

And here are some similar phrases that I put in the same basket:

• “We are more gullible and superstitious today than we were in the Middle Ages, and an example of modern credulity is the widespread belief that the Earth is round.  The average man can advance not a single reason for thinking that the Earth is round.  He merely swallows this theory because there is something about it that appeals to the twentieth century mentality.”- George Bernard Shaw
• “If you build, they will come” – Random Ghost in W. P. Kinsellas “Shoeless Joe” (yes, there was a book before the movie “Field of Dreams” and the author they were traveling to see was J. D. Salinger.)
• “If men were meant to fly, God would have given him wings” – A lot of people with a close connection to God who seems to have changed his mind. He does that a lot. He’s an old god and has a touch of Alzheimers.
• “Sex education classes in our public schools are promoting incest.” – Jimmy Swaggert
• “Fascism combats . . . not intelligence, but intellectualism . . . which is . . . a sickness of the intellect . . . not a consequence of its abuse, because the intellect cannot be used too much . . . it derives from the false belief that one can segregate oneself from life. . .” – Giovanni Gentile, addressing a Congress of Fascist Culture, Bologna, 30 March 1925
• “Ignorance is better than knowledge” – Tao Te Ching

This is an answer to this post: sachin.posterous.com/will-seo-experts-ruin-search-results-or-will

And no, that is not a link because that would be SEO too, just to let you know.

Image via CrunchBase

This is a guest post by Craig Smith of Trinity Insight.

In early February of this year, search engine representatives within Google, Yahoo, and MSN (before it was Bing) made an announcement into a uniform method of embracing a new html tag to reduce duplicate content for a webmaster.  This “canonical” tag, which would be inserted within the HEAD portion of any HTML document, is a great way to reduce potential negative affects that can happen when you have the same page indexed multiple times under a variety of URL’s

The tag is written as this:  <link rel=”canonical” href=”http://mysite.com/page1.html“/>

This is essentially saying to a search crawler, “Hey Googlebot, this isn’t the preferred page for this content, href=http://mysite.com/page1.html is.”

In working with a variety of ecommerce platforms and content management systems, this is a pretty widespread issue and this tag will go along way to helping webmasters properly structure a site for optimal SEO.

Think about this for a minute.  You can have the following example variations for a fictional homepage:

www.mysite.com

mysite.com

www.mysite.com/

www.mysite.com/index.htm

mysite.com/index.htm

www.mysite.com/home.aspx

You get the picture.  Which is the primary page?  All of these pages can be indexed by search engines, but which version should an engine render when users are searching?

Sure you can use 301 redirects to fix this issue, but sometimes these are tough to generate within varied system and server environments.  You could try to eliminate varied parameters such as session ID’s and tracking codes, but then you are losing valuable data to help you understand the dynamics of your visitors and marketing campaigns.

In working with a new client in the eCommerce sector, we saw this issue first hand.  A single product page had 27 different versions of the page (different url’s for each) indexed within Google.  Each page had the same title and each page had exactly the same content.  Because of the different paths that users could take to find the product, due to the parametric filtering capabilities on the site, these urls existed in the index for years.

How does this impact your SEO efforts when you have these duplicate url’s in search indexes?  For starters, unlike a 301 which redirects all web traffic, the canonical tag is an indicator for only engines which allows you to keep your existing url parameters.  It will help engines in concentrating link equity into one primary URL, for a specific piece of content, as well as essentially tell them which page you want to have as the “authority” page.

Looking for answers direct from Google relating to the canonical tag?  Here are some Q&A answers that they provided in their webmaster central blog

Is rel=”canonical” a hint or a directive?
It’s a hint that we honor strongly. We’ll take your preference into account, in conjunction with other signals, when calculating the most relevant page to display in search results.
Can I use a relative path to specify the canonical, such as <link rel=”canonical” href=”product.php?item=swedish-fish” />?
Yes, relative paths are recognized as expected with the <link> tag. Also, if you include a <base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL.
Is it okay if the canonical is not an exact duplicate of the content?
We allow slight differences, e.g., in the sort order of a table of products. We also recognize that we may crawl the canonical and the duplicate pages at different points in time, so we may occasionally see different versions of your content. All of that is okay with us.
What if the rel=”canonical” returns a 404?
We’ll continue to index your content and use a heuristic to find a canonical, but we recommend that you specify existent URLs as canonicals.
What if the rel=”canonical” hasn’t yet been indexed?
Like all public content on the web, we strive to discover and crawl a designated canonical URL quickly. As soon as we index it, we’ll immediately reconsider the rel=”canonical” hint.
Can rel=”canonical” be a redirect?
Yes, you can specify a URL that redirects as a canonical URL. Google will then process the redirect as usual and try to index it.
What if I have contradictory rel=”canonical” designations?
Our algorithm is lenient: We can follow canonical chains, but we strongly recommend that you update links to point to a single canonical page to ensure optimal canonicalization results.
Can this link tag be used to suggest a canonical URL on a completely different domain?
No. To migrate to a completely different domain, permanent (301) redirects are more appropriate. Google currently will take canonicalization suggestions into account across subdomains (or within a domain), but not across domains. So site owners can suggest www.example.com vs. example.com vs. help.example.com, but not example.com vs. example-widgets.com.

So what’s your action plan?  First thing is to evaluate your site paths and look for instances in which you have multiple url’s with the same content.  Look for the duplicates and decide which version that you desire to have as your primary version.

Embed the tag on the duplicate pages as indicated above, potentially in an automated basis within an eCommerce platform, and help the engines more effectively index your site.  The canonical tag is a major development within the SEO market that has flown a bit under the radar, but can really make a difference in your rankings.  Best of luck in reducing your duplicate content and making your website more efficient for search engines to crawl and index!

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About Author:

Craig Smith is the founder of Trinity Insight, an eCommerce optimization firm that specializes in web analytics consulting and multivariate testing