Tag: myspace

How To Drive Traffic To Your Squidoo Lenses

Nelson Tan Leave a comment

This is an article by Jeff Wend which I just received in my inbox.

After using Squidoo for about a year and a half, I have found there are several things users can do to help generate quality traffic to lenses from other websites and search engines. One of the most important things you can do is create incoming links to your lens through various Web 2.0 sites.

The first step is to get organized. I created a folder in my browser tabs called Web 2.0 sites. From there, I place the various Web 2.0 sites that I use after signing up and creating accounts. As soon as I publish a lens, I make my way down the list and create links to my lens from each of these sites. Give it a try!

The sites I use most often are listed below:

1. Facebook – This is one of the best ways to get traffic to your lens. After creating an account, search for groups on your topic. Once you join the group, you can often add the link to the group page. If this option is not available, start a discussion and ask a question with your link as a reference or you can do the same thing on the wall. The key is to not spam the group! Be sure to make quality, relevant comments that add to the group and not take away. Remember that both your name, and Squidoo’s name is at stake. I have seen several lensmasters get chastised for posting spam comments with links to their lenses. This really looks bad and is a big no-no.

2. MySpace – MySpace is another popular and effective way to gain traffic and links. Post a link to your lens in your intro or any of the other “About Me” modules. Start a blog through MySpace and leave reviews of your lenses as you create them. Again, the key here is to add quality content. Quality content is the way to captivate viewers and get them to take action by visiting your lens.

3. YouTube – It is insanely easy to make a video and post it on YouTube. Sign up, add your video, and insert several keywords and keyword phrases to attract viewers from search engines and YouTube searches. Add a link to your lens and give a call to action in the video’s description. YouTube is well loved by the search engines and a great way to pick up traffic.

4. Yahoo! Answers – You need a Yahoo e-mail address to log in (free to get). Then, you can either ask a question about your lens’s theme or topic and add a link and wait for the answers to pour in, or you can search for questions on your lens’s topic and post an answer with a link to your lens. Again, the key is NOT to spam. Make your comments or questions sound “real” and remember to add to Yahoo Answers with quality input.

5. Clipmarks – Clipmarks is very easy to use, and even comes with a button you can add to your browser. To use it, click the button, highlight some text from your lens, and hit save. From there you add a quick review and keywords.

6. Delicious – Del.icio.us is a popular bookmarking service. Squidoo makes using this site easy – there’s a Del.icio.us button on every lens! Don’t forget those relevant tags.

7. Digg – On Digg, people share what they feel is the best stuff on the Net. Squidoo has a Digg button on each lens. You might generate a little bit of traffic through Digg, but the trick to getting real long-term traffic by putting up plenty of quality links and news stories on your blog so they can get bookmarked by visitors. You want to digg more than just your own lenses. Digg what you consider to be the best of what the web has to offer and others will soon follow you by friending and reading your posts.

8. Faves – Faves is a really easy way to pick up links, and also offers a browser button. After publishing a lens, I hit the Faves button and add it to my list. When you Fave your lens, you can rate it, add tags and leave a review.

9. Feedbite – With Feedbite you create what is called a bundle, or news blog. Write a couple of paragraphs on the topic of your lens and put the link to your lens in the title of the short article. Others will vote up or down your article and the most popular articles get a pretty decent amount of traffic.

10. Gather – Gather is a very active community of writers. To use Gather effectively it is best to write a short article of original content. You can add links to your lens in the keywords placed within your article. Here, you will find nice and helpful people who love to read and review articles and stories.

11. Hubpages – Hubpages is a popular site where you create a Hub, which is basically an article. Within the article you can place a link to your lens in a keyword. The key to Hubpages, like Gather, is writing quality original content and not abusing the link system by overdoing it. Hubpages shares their AdSense revenue with members, which is a nice perk.

12. Mixx – Mixx’s tag is “your blend of the web”. Submit a link to the mix for others to vote up or down and leave comments. This site is extremely easy to use and it only takes a moment to add a link. Remember to use good keywords when submitting your link, as this helps the right people find your lens.

13. Reddit – Reddit is much like Mixx. It is very easy to add your link, a quick review, and keywords.

14. StumbleUpon – There is a StumbleUpon button on each Squidoo lens and you can also add StumbleUpon to your browser. Give a lens a thumbs up or down, add keywords, and leave a comment. Stumbling your lens can really bring in a decent amount of traffic if used effectively.

15. Twitter – Twitter is a site where people meet, share their thoughts, make friends, and talk about what they are doing. The key here is to take part in the community. Do not simply post link after link to your Squidoo lens. Instead, join in discussions, talk about what you are doing, and from time to time, talk about the lens you may be working on.

16. Zimbio – Zimbio is great! It is very easy to submit your lens and add it to a related group. You can also use your RSS feed from SquidUtils to put your lenses on autofeed—bonus! Search engines like Zimbio, and I have been able to track sales directly coming from Zimbio traffic.

There are other sites to help build links and traffic for your lenses, but these are some of my favorites. You can use these to help your lens get indexed quicker, to gain traffic, and to become more search engine friendly.

One last thing: I cannot stress enough how important it is to be responsible with Web 2.0 sites. Megan made a great post about this on the Squidblog here. Do not spam, and do not pester others. Instead, contribute with quality content. Be nice to others and leave comments and reviews of others work, as this will help to gain the trust and have others follow your work in return.

Own the community portal script that drove 9 million visitors!

Nelson Tan Leave a comment

phpFoxFor anyone who wish to run their very own Web 2.0 community site, the phpFox social networking script is a proven solution that combines submission of blog content, video clips and web pages. All members can send messages to each other, invite friends, bookmark web pages, edit profile, upload photos, bookmark members, edit their friend list, check the sent box, post bulletins and check all of their posts in your website. For business intentions, it has a virtual marketplace section for you to post your special offer listings.

phpFox also has a very supportive community forum where users discuss and suggest future features to be added into the script or to help out anyone who has trouble installing and handling the script. Nearly 90% of cases have underlying physical problems, which may include – cheapest viagra generic High blood pressure High frequency smoking Daily basis drinking habit Parkinson’s disease Heart disease Clogged atherosclerosis Diabetes and obesity High fat and insulin level Natural therapy to boost the percentage of erection 1. Men who quit smoking can have full or partial cialis cheap no prescription restoration of erection. Your physical, https://www.unica-web.com/archive/2002/mipropv02.pdf best price for viagra sexual, mental and emotional health are the reason we’re here. The majority of laymen think that a man may also suffer from the lack generic viagra tab of libido. It is the power of this voluntary community support that enables phpFox to go beyond features found on major social networking websites like Facebook and MySpace as fans program new mods to augment the script. A default mobile theme for phpFox now allows all mobile devices to easily browse your site without all that extra data, saving your users time and money!

Why Google spiders love blogs and snippets too.

Nelson Tan 3 Comments

Back in the last SEO workshop, I consulted Shi Heng Cheong over a problem with our article directory: less than 20% of the pages were ever indexed (there were lots of supplementary results, but consider them ‘bastard’ pages).

I showed him this page, where if you scroll down and look to your bottom right, you see some links to 5 articles. That’s how we reckoned the spiders will dig deep via a “front door” page and index more pages. Anyway, the page is never meant to be a direct-response page and it will be deleted at an appropriate time. Learn what NOT to do from us gooroos!

Whether it was a coincidence or not, Shi mentioned something that relates to how article directories work. To solve the problem as best as we can, we must bring up the article links as a top-fold section AND include a writeout of the first paragraph as a snippet so that spiders can easily ‘look’ at the content for its indexing decisions.

To increase the ‘originality’ degree of the article, rewording the first and last paragraphs is just fine. That reminds me of an urban myth about teachers. During the busy exam season, teachers don’t read from start to end of every student’s essay. They scan through the first few paragraphs and give a mark according to that.

But can’t spiders look at every single link of a page? Aren’t they machines? What Shi said next completely knocked me of my chair and I have yet to find evidence of his explanation. Google is actually modeling spiders as closely to human eyeball movement as possible (surely that has to do with heat maps). Now…not one of us have any idea how googlebot can not only determine your page layout but also how visitors read through it just by ‘looking’ at your HTML code, but at least that gives us an insight into why Google loves blogs.

And the truth is layout and culture are the blog’s 2 best assets.

For one thing, the blog has an elaborate archiving system that takes away non-techies’ fear and hassle of uploading web pages via FTP and linking to them from the “front door”, so they can happily post away as frequently as they wish. The more frequent a blog (or site) is updated, the more often spiders come to look for food. The blogging culture precisely promotes originality because blogging motivates original opinions, thoughts and comments too. Chances are, when there is original content, would not readers scroll all the way down to read what they have missed out before? Would not spiders emulate readers’ behavior by ‘looking’ all the way down? And index new posts along the way? 1 post per page. We know spiders are more than happy to index 3 posts a day instead of penalizing you if you are that hardworking. As a saying goes, “The more pages you get up in the search results, the bigger your online presence.”

It’s true, as reflected by our own tracking of blog pages. We hope blogging may be an activity you would resolve to do more consistently to build up credibility, relationships and SEO too as you go along. We will type something concerning the Long Tail of SEO. This is amazing stuff, and it works. You will know how to get ranked on the first page for every possible key phrase combination. The “how to get noticed on myspace” in the previous post is one example.

Last but not least, the 4th run of the SEO workshop, to be conducted by Shi, commences on March 2nd and 3rd. There will be a lot more covered in the areas of on and off-page optimization, including press release optimization and social media marketing plus continual support and opportunities for idea exchange within the community. Register on this page. Having this SEO skillset will make things easy for you in the future.

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Is Friendster Dead?

Nelson Tan Leave a comment

Rival Myspace is catching up with its attractive features.

It was once so addictive users claimed they were getting fired from their jobs because of it.

Lately, however, social networking website Friendster seems to have lost its edge.

Competitor Myspace is now making headway in the popularity stakes.

Friendster, launched in March 2003, made news for giving the dating website format a twist. Instead of ploughing blindly through profiles of date-able strangers, one could get connected to friends and friends-of-friends. You have to be 16 and above to sign up on Friendster.

Every user creates an online identity by filling out a questionnaire profile and uploading a picture. They then browse existing users and add them as friends.

Owing to this non-threatening vibe, the community grew to more than 20 million users. Even stars like Pamela Anderson got their own Friendster profile.

But the website was plagued by slow server response time in its early stages. Many users found it hard to log on to their pages.

Among similar web services which have popped up are Friendscene and Profileheaven.

Myspace, founded in July 2003, is one of the strongest contenders. It has grown to more than 16 million monthly users.

The concept of Myspace is similar to Friendster’s, with user profiles, photo-sharing and a growing gallery of friends. Users can customize their profiles and stream music from their profile pages.

Popular bands like The Black Eyed Peas post tracks on their Myspace home page for others to listen to for free.

In July this year, Rupert Murdoch News Corporation bought Internet company Intermix Media, which owns Myspace, for US$580 million.

In Singapore, Myspace is steadily gaining fans like marketing executive Joanne Tan, 25. She now logs on to check her page 3 times a week. She still visits her Friendster page, but only sporadically.

She says, “Myspace is very personal and interactive.”

One feature she likes is the existence og ‘Tom’, a real-life Californian, on the site who is there to help confused users.

She says, “I saw on his profile that one of his heroes is Lee Kuan Yew, so I messaged him out of cynicism. And he replied. Since then, we’ve chatted on Myspace’s instant messenger, and he would recommend good movies.”

But don’t sound the death knell for Friendster yet. Oil analyst Luke Panchymuthu, 31, says he still visits the site, especially when he gets automated e-mail reminders about his Friendster contacts’ birthdays.

He adds, “It sure looks like there are loads of people who use it.”

Friendster vs. Myspace

What They Are: Both are social networking websites originating from the US that allow you to meet friends-of-friends and so no.

Friendster launched in March 2003 by its chairman Jonathan Abrams, while Myspace was founded in July that year by its Chief Executive Chris DeWolfe and president Tom Anderson.

Design: Friendster has a clearer interface with a grey-and-white page. Myspace’s blue-and-white design looks generic and feels cluttered.

Reach: Friendster has more than 20 million members while Myspace has more than 16 million users.

Buzz: Since the initial frenzy, Friendster has quietened down. Some members have logged on to their pages since 2003.

According to Nielsen/NetRatings, Myspace drew 12 million visitors in June this year, ranking 6th among users in terms of page views, behind Yahoo!, eBay, MSN, Google and AOL.

Features: Myspace has games and allows you to download musice posted on a band’s personal page. Friendster recently added a games section. Unlike Friendster, Myspace allows you to pick your own URL for your personal page.

Help: Friendster has a team of support staff to help answer questions. Myspace features ‘Tom’, a 29-year-old from California, who is a kind of multi-purpose friend.

‘Tom’ who has 27,744,387 friends on his Myspace page, answers messages from confused users 24/7.

News article by Clara Chow. Extracted from The Straits Times.