There are lots of new things happening in social networking. Flickr, the photo sharing website is now introducing a new sharing option called Flickr Twitter Beta.

This will allow users to automatically notify their friends via Twitter every time they upload a photo. At the moment, it just works for email uploads, but before long it could grow to the whole site. Another future feature is adding the possibility to tweet a photo from inside Flickr.

“How does this work ?” you may ask.
Well let us just say it is very clever and social networking is faced pace, so things advance all the time. The secret is that the system works with what is called “the Oauth protocol” and it links a user’s Flickr and Twitter accounts together. How smart is that? Very smart, it means every single time a user uploads a new photo through email, a message that links to it is posted on the user’s Twitter stream.

Facebook’s first decline in users was between December 2007 and January 2008 where they lost 400,000 British visitors. However it still remains the UK’s most popular social-networking site despite the drop in users from 8.9 million users in December 2007 to 8.5 million unique users at the end of January2008. Facebook’s nearest rival, MySpace, saw UK traffic drop 5% between December 2007 and January 2008. It had 5 million unique users in January 2008. Bebo also had decline of 2% month on month with 4.1 million users.

People are calling the drop in members for these networking sites, particularly with facebook as “facebook fatigue”. There are a number of reasons:

1. Security concerns
2. Amount of personal data people put on the site
3. Employers have banned staff from accessing the site at work.
4. Too much information when they log onto facebook.
5. Trivial information from their contacts
6. No longer niche

Facebook was originally niche – it targeted people based on membership of organisations – the universities. It was for the early adopters. However, now it is mass market and has lost its excitement. There have even been campaigns to get rid of friends. At the end of 2008 Burger King’s Whopper Sacrifice campaign asked users to sacrifice 10 friends on facebook in exchange for a free Whopper. Facebook soon caught onto this and cut short their campaign when By January this year 60,000 users deleted their friends for free burgers

So what is the future of these social networking sites?

The future is in niche online communities. These will be based on interests or lifestyles eg diamondlounge.com, solving problems or self help eg netmums.com. These network sites will be aimed towards business user needs to keep in touch with colleagues and contacts. The innovators and early adopters will be the first ones to take part in these niche online communities. They want to be part of something that no one else is. People like the exclusiveness and the feeling they belong. This will always far outweigh those networks where everyone and anybody can join.

(source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2008/feb/22/facebook.facebook?gusrc=rss&feed=global).

There are over 160 social networking sites covering various countries and topics at the time of writing this blog.

Social networking sites can drive seo traffic to your site. People can share links talk about the site with their friends and family. They can also talk about your site on their own blogs.With twitter they can easily follow your site. What is social networking you might ask? Well it is is the grouping of individuals into specific groups. It is like having your own little community but on line.

Most people use these social networking sites to:

Communicate with people in their extended social network
Stay in touch with people they already know (support pre-existing relationships)
Research suggests that most SNSs primarily support pre-existing social relations
Facebook is used to maintain existing offline relationships or solidify offline connections
All have common offline element – eg went to school together
Not used to meet new people
Facebook users search for people with whom they have an offline connection
Don’t tend to browse to meet complete strangers
91% of U.S. teens who use SNSs do so to connect with friends

Social networks are growing in populartity and the social networking sites took over email in global reach at 68.4% in Feb 09. The reach is highest in Brazil (80%) but fastest growing in Germany (from 39% – 51% in one year). Facebook popular in UK and USA. According to facebook there are more than 30 million active users, not bad for a company that was originally set up for Harvard College students. However, Mixi is the leader in Japan, Orkut in Brazil, Stayfriends, Wer-kent-wen and StudiVZ top 3 social networking sites Germany. Twitter gaining popularity, grew 131% between Feb and March 09 to 9.3 million US users.

So you want to get into SEO but you are told you cannot because you are not an expert.

What do you do?

Well, all experts have to start somewhere. The first thing you need is passion and enthusiasm.
I tell you, this gets you a long way. This will drive you to pick up those books and more importantly read them and the other blog posts on the internet about seo.

Then I suggest you practice those skills. Take a website of a close friend or family, a small one, of five to ten pages. Go through that site and conduct a “site analysis”

This is where you will look at:
1. The title tags
2. The meta keywords
3. The meta description
4. The alt tags
5. The internal links
6. The outbound links
7. Anchor text
8. dynamic pages

Then I suggest if you have access to the site, to try out your new found skills.
First thing is to do keyword research – find out what the competitors are doing. If there is a lot of competition for a word, try and be creative. Include commonly mis spelled names eg champagne can be mis spelt champane. Combine words together like Louis champane or roederer champane.

Upload these keywords into the content management system and try finding your site with these words. Remember to change the terms often as it can be a very competitive market.

Remember to also install google analytics so you can track the number of visitors to your site and see how it increases dependent on your work.

Continue to work on a wide range of websites. I guarantee in a few months, your confidence would have grown and within a year’s time you will have an impressive portfolio. And by managing different websites you will have also gained experience in the account management field. Keep on top of the news in seo and you will be the “expert” you have always wanted to be.

You want to increase traffic to your site but are not sure where to start.

Here are a few tips:

Content
As I mentioned before, content is king. But it is even more important that you have relevant content on your website. Do not have duplicate content. It needs to be updated regularly, so it is a good idea to have a content management system in place. You need to be able to go back to site and amend the anchor text, insert new links, make sure the current links are still active. Put the keywords in the title tag and also the domain name. For example I want to increase traffic to this site and therefore one of the steps I have made is to have the domain name seojoblogs.

Links
Use trusted sites to link too. If you link to a spam site or a link farm, you will not begin to rank higher. You will need to start is by using less competitive words and writing content with those words in mind. For example you may want to put a h1, h2 tag using the exact match of key phrase. Build links to the page and see if you hit that page with the keywords.

Inbound links are also important. People think it is important just to have inbound links to the home page, but you need links to the tier two and tier three pages. At least 50% of links should go to the other pages on your site.

Never give up
SEO is an ongoing job. If you want to achieve high ranks, you will need to see what your competitors are doing, research keywords. You also need to make sure there are calls to action on each page. For example, allow users to sign up for RSS feeds, incentivise them to make a purchase. You want these customers to come back.

The benefit about SEO is that you are able see measurable increases in web traffic. The more you optimise the better chance you have of gaining market share in your area. You may need to add new links to your site, add new pages or even new sub headings within the page. What you mustn’t do is leave your site. A static website is sure to fall down the rankings in all search engines.

I know I haven’t written on my blog for a while. No excuses, except for the usual, busy with work, with study etc.

Anyways, a lot seems to have happened since I last uploaded a post.

Microsoft has launched its new search engine. That’s right, the company that seems to be always at the forefront of technology has decided to improve on its 8.2% market share of the search market and update its MSN live search.

Bing.com went live June 3rd.

Microsoft wants users to have a better search engine experience with its new product. Before Bing was launched there was a lot of hype about it, www.discoverbing.com was a site to introduce people to bing.
Bing is supposed to deliver a more organised experience, deliver better results than the search engines out there at the moment. It is marketed as a decision engine, it brings more relevant results. Also offers different tabs, not just images and maps, but videos and shopping as well, similar to google. I must admit, when typing in a search request in bing compared to google, I have got very different results.

The home page of bing will change daily but is already looking prettier than google’s with its different arty photos.

There will be a lot more news in the coming weeks about the new search engine. Feel free to add comments on what you like or dislike about Bing.

By now most of you will have heard of facebook and I am sure a lot of you have or had a facebook account.
Some people have hundreds of friends, but they are not real friends.

Here are some facts about facebook

What is a facebook friend?
Someone who you have not spoken to for over 10 years and you found them on facebook. You exchange a couple of emails and plan to meet up, but most often do not.

What is the wall?
An area where you can snoop in on conversations your “friends” are having. People don’t realise your wall messages can be followed by anyone if you have not amended your security settings.

What is the info on the wall?
The area where people reveal their whole biography, where they went to school, where they work, their life story.

You must be careful what you put on your facebook. One 16 year old recently got fired as she said that her job was boring. Another worker got fired when he called in sick, only for his colleague to see on facebook that he actually was just hung over.

Twitter is a micro-blogging site which has taken off in the UK since March 2009 but has been around since 2006.

It allows you to stay in touch with all friend and family in real time.  You can leave “tweets” which are short messages, no longer than 140 characters anytime.  Some say Twitter is the SMS of the internet.  You will begin to have “followers” who are updated with your tweets.

“Should I join Twitter?” I hear you say.  Well it is free and easy to set up like any social networking site. Only join it if you have the time to update your “tweets” and if you have interesting messages to leave.  However, celebrities who have also been bitten by the Twitter bug often leave just random comments.  Stephen Fry and Lily Allen are just two of the many celebrities who have joined Twitter and who have a lot of followers.

Here are a few reasons to use Twitter:

1. Push traffic to a site.
You can use Twitter to drive traffic to your site or your friend’s websites. Post a link on your page and start discussing it with other friends and you will notice an increase of visitors.

2. Network
You can meet many people in the same industry using Twitter. You can start following other twitter people and vice versa.

3. Friends
You can also meet people on twitter who have similar interests, and you can even make friends.

4.Work
Twitter can be used to find work and also freelancers to work with you.

So you never know what is out there till you try. Go on, get your twit pic today.

You have heard that links are very important in seo, but where is the best place to start?

Inbound links will get your website ranked highly than any other link.

The more inbound links you have, the more robots will visit your site.

The importance of links.

It is very important to have good quality links coming to the site.  Links are essential in SEO, bots and crawlers check the incoming and outgoing links to our site.  The crawlers rank how important this links are and if they are relevant to your site.
There are lots of directories and blog articles where the website can be submitted to. With genuine content, you will be able to generate links with other website and blohs. If you link to other sites then they will link back to us and our page rank number will increase.

Link Building methods
Links should be built from a variety of places
–    Web directories such as dmoz.org or business.come
–    Seo press releases
–    Blogs and blog comments
–    Any other of your other websites (eg parent company)
–    Social booking like de.licio.us, Digg
–    Niche websites in our area
–    Affiliates

•    Search Engine and Directory Submissions
This is an important step in link building process.
You should not submit to all search engines, this is a timely and costly process (some require a submission fee).  Alternatively, you could submit the site to webdirectories – global and local depending on your target audience.
You should submit your site to the Yahoo directory and the open directory http://www.dmoz.org/. Once submitted, the search engines should fine your site within 2 or 3 months.
Alternative free directories
www.splut.com (directory of UK websites)
www.thefreewebsitedirectory.com
www.worldwidewub.org
www.wowdirectory.com
•    Online press releases
Press releases can also be an effective way of promoting your website and increasing traffic and awareness of the site. This is also a good way to build inbound links to the online community.
•    Blogging
Blogging is a very important way to upload fresh content to the website
It also provides an area where you or your company can communite with its customers.  There are a lot of free blogging software.  One that I am using now is wordpress!!
•    Social media
This is a growing factor in helping promote websites, facebook, linked in and social bookmarketing sites such as de.li.cious, digg and stumbleupon. These sites can help in building back links, articles about your site and as a result increasing traffic to the site.
•    Internal Site Linking

This is also an important aspect of link building but is often overlooked.  Internal keyword navigation is an important party of search engine algorithm.  Some sites may have very few internal links.
•    Link scouting
It is important to research sites that could provide a potential link to your website.  This means a lot of work should be done into the competitor link campaign and web searches to find potential sites for us.

I bet you didn’t think I could write some much about link building!