Advertising on the internet is no more limited to banner, text ads or blogs. Internet marketing has taken a different twirl and every business should be aware of the changes to promote their product. The new method of advertising on the internet is the Social Media which includes social networking and social bookmarking. Social networking sites have proved to be one of the best places to advertise your product. Early social networking sites included classmates.com which focused on ties with former school mates and sixdegrees.com which focused on indirect ties. Here’s the list of few social sites which can help you drive more traffic to your website.

Social Networking Sites:

Facebook:
Facebook is more than just a place to connect to friends or posting pictures. Facebook has various marketing schemes. Facebook has now become a place for advertisement, event opportunities, event promotion e.t.c.

MySpace:
MySpace is another popular social networking site. The features of MySpace include: Bulletins, Groups, MySpace IM, MySpace TV, MySpace Mobile, MySpace News, MySpace Classifieds and MySpace Karaoke.

LinkedIn:
LinkedIn is a professional networking site where business associates and other companies connect to each other. 

Ecademy:
Ecademy is yet another professional networking site focused on serving businesses to connect online.

Ryze:
Ryze is a business networking site which helps you make better business contacts, get in touch with your friends and you can even make deals with other members.

YorZ:
YorZ is a job site. It is also a business networking site. You get access to great job opportunities as well as network with professionals in your niche.

Xing:
Xing is the place to find deals, employees, colleagues and jobs.

Care2:
Care2 is a global networking site for organizations and for people who care to make a difference. If you or your company is involved in making earth greener then this could be just the place for you.

Gather:
Gather is a networking site where you can browse different categories like books, health, money, news etc.

Network for Professionals:
This is a dynamic business networking organization that powerfully combines online business networking and real life events.Some other social networking sites include: MEETin, Tribe, Ziggs, Plaxo, NetParty etc. 

Social Media/Bookmarking Site:

Stumbleupon:
Stumbleupon is a gateway to connect with friends, share your discoveries, browse interesting sites, meet people with similar interest etc. You can get all that by installing the Stumbleupon toolbar to your browser.

Reddit:
On Reddit you can upload stories or articles to drive more traffic to your site or your blog. You can rate the articles by voting for or against them.

Digg:
You can discover and share articles or content on this site. You can also vote or leave comments on stories submitted by other diggers.

Del.icio.us:
Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking site for storing, discovering and sharing website links.

Technorati:
If you own a blog Technorati could be just the thing for you. Technorati indexes over 112 million weblogs. You can find other blogs or advertise about your own blog.

Squidoo:
Squidoo is the place to share your knowledge with others. You can set up your own page on a topic you are interested in or you expertise in. The advertising revenue is shared with these content creators.

YouTube:
YouTube is the place where you can share videos. You can upload, view and share video clips. You can make a commercial about your company and share it on YouTube.

Ma.gnolia:
Ma.gnolia is a social bookmarking site where you can discover, share and discuss the best of web.The other social media sites are: Ning, Tubearoo, Wikihow etc.

MAY 06, 2008 ISSUE #8

An absolute link gives the absolute path to a webpage where as a relative link points to the current area of the page. This short definition might not be enough to tell you the difference between these two. There has always been two sided opinion about which one should be used the most. It is better if I start off describing each one individually and then compare the pros and cons.

What is Absolute Linking?
When the href value is a fully qualified URL, it is known as an absolute link. A fully qualified URL consists of the transfer protocol (http://), domain name (www.yourdomain.com) and filename (pagename.html). An absolute link looks like this: <a href= “http://www.avenuesnepal.com/#newsletter_subscribe“>

What is Relative linking?
When the destination href value is relative to the location of the current webpage or source anchor, it’s known as relative linking. Relative links can only link to a page from the same site. The address of the link is always relative to the position of the file. A relative link’s example: <a href=”links/webfiles.html”>

Absolute link Vs Relative link:
So which one is better? People have individual opinion about that but when everything is taken into consideration, absolute linking is a much preferred method. Here are the reasons why relative linking should be avoided. When you use relative link, search engines will index the non www version of your site which some search engines might take it as a different page from that of the one with www and you might lose the entire search engine ranking you’ve earned with so much effort. This will happen also if other sites link to you without www in the link. It is however much easier to code and program with relative links. It is equally easy to hack it. If you manage a large site with lot of folders and sub-folders, you might save a file in a wrong folder and all the links will be broken as the structure is not the same.

No matter how easy it is to program with relative links, it is always recommended to use absolute linking wherever possible. When you leave comments on posts or drop your address on directories, absolute linking will do a great job for better ranking of your site. Some major search engines index sites from popular directories like dmoz.org. Most of your backlinks will be linking to www.yourdomain.com, not domain.com. There’s a possibility that search engines might index your site with domain.com and you could lose your search engines rankings as I’ve already mentioned before.

There are cases where using absolute links has caused difficulty in programming but due to the major problems caused by relative linking with search engine rankings it is highly recommended to use absolute links. It is always better to get good rankings on search engines as they bring more traffic to your site, the primary reason why you developed a site at the first place. When we compare these two linking method, absolute linking is preferred by most SEO experts.

APRIL 24, 2008 ISSUE #7