Profile Page:
You can start off with a profile page on Facebook. Your profile page is the platform where you can express your passion about a brand, a company or a product you want to promote. You can make use of various applications, post photos, provide work info, personal info and provide appropriate description about your product. Facebook is a place where people stalk profiles of others to know more about the person. If you have your profile page made to impress others there are higher chances of getting more traffic from there.

Facebook Groups:
Facebook group is the feature where you can join groups or start your own group. It is one of the simplest ways of viral marketing. You can invite your friends to join your group. In this group page you can post information, photos, events, news, comments, videos, discussion board, a wall for remarks etc. As the members increase on your group you can notify them with the latest news, events etc. However, there are few drawbacks of using this feature. When your group is popular there are higher chances of spamming. It’ll be difficult to keep it clean and people might lose interest in your group.

Facebook Pages:
Facebook pages was introduced especially for the businesses to establish their brand presence. This feature is similar to Groups with few differences: Pages are more customizable than “Groups”, you can add Facebook applications, HTML or Flash making it more interesting than groups. Pages have no restriction on the number of fans unlike groups. Pages do not have the option to invite friends by fans. The only way one can inform other members is by “Share” the page with their friends. Pages are another best way of viral marketing.

Facebook Events:
Facebook events is an application where businesses or companies can promote their marketing events, campaigns, product launches etc. Facebook event has a similar page like that of a group where you can have discussion board, wall, photos links etc.

Facebook Messages:
Facebook messages is the place where you can send messages to people who aren’t in your profile. Facebook has this feature where you cannot view other people’s profile unless you are friends. You can however send messages to the people you are not familiar with. So you can use this feature to promote or inform about your business. You need to be careful about spamming. Spamming could lead to deleting your profile. It is better to read the terms and conditions.

Facebook Market Place:
Facebook Marketplace is an online classified service. Not many people are familiar with this feature. In Marketplace you can advertise about your product and services and people who are interested in it will contact you. When you receive a response to your advertisement, the particular person could view you profile even though he/she is not on your friends list. Spamming should be avoided here as well.

Facebook Networks:
Facebook network is a group which has been categorized according to geography, education, work or other network means. No member can have control over the network but like groups they can post comments, participate in discussion forums, walls, discover events, marketplace listings etc.

Social Ads:
Facebook offers advertisers to pay on CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPM (Cost Per Mile or Cost Per Thousand) depending upon the preference for social ads. Social ads have very powerful targeting capabilities. You can create your ad and limit it to certain group of people like certain age, sex, location, education, workplaces, keywords, political views, relationship status etc. You can get creative in placing these ads.

Invitations:
Sending out invitations to add application is one of the strongest viral marketing scheme used by Facebook. When you like certain application you can send invitations to your friends. If your friends find it useful they’ll add it too and it goes on spreading in the similar manner. This means the application should be appealing enough to recommend others and to let others recommend it further.

Sponsored Facebook Groups:
Sponsored pages are Facebook Groups where we can customize the HTML of certain regions of the page. The cost to rent this is very high. It may cost up to US $100,000 per month making it one of the places with small number of advertisements.

MAY 08, 2008 ISSUE #9

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

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

Targeting Wrong Keywords:
List of appropriate keywords is an essential part of every website owner. A common mistake made by most people is targeting wrong keywords or not enough keywords. It is important you know what your customers are looking for. You can make use of free tools like: Google Adwords Keyword Tool & Overture Keyword Tool to find out appropriate keywords for your website.

No robot.txt File:
“robot.txt” protocol, also known as the Robots Exclusion Protocol prevents the search engine spiders and other web robots to access all or certain parts of a website. In simple words they tell these web spiders which portion to crawl and which not to crawl. There is a possibility that your entire site might not be indexed if you do not have this file.

Inappropriate or Ignoring Title tag <title>:
There are many site that use short or inappropriate title tag. In the worst scenario, they completely ignore title tag. This could be one of the biggest SEO mistakes. It will be much better if you can use different title for different page depending on its type. While some use their company name, it is always wise to include few keywords in it. For example: <title>company name – keyword1 keyword2.. </title>.

Use of Flash:
Flash could make a website look attractive but it is always advisable to use a HTML alternative as well. Search engines spiders find it hard to read flash sites. This could be a reason why your site did not get indexed at the first place. If you really want to use flash on your site, you can always optimize it.

Lack of Keywords in the Content:
You might have listed all the keywords on the meta tags but lack of keywords in the content is another mistake people usually make. You should place your keywords at appropriate places in the content. Also make sure you do not over stuff your keywords that make your content unreadable.

JavaScript Menus:
If your site includes JavaScript menu, it is necessary you use a site map or put the links on a noscript tag to be crawled by web spiders. It is best if you do no use JavaScript menus as search engines cannot read them.

Consistency and Maintenance:
Some people make a mistake by thinking site optimization is just for once. It is very important that you keep yourself updated with the changes that occur in search engines, keep an eye on your competitors and keep optimizing your site accordingly.

Usability:
User usability should not be ignored. Easy navigation, proper site structure and descriptive link text is admired by visitors as well as spiders.

Keyword Stuffing:
Keyword stuffing is a thing of the past. Keyword stuffing is taken as spamming and you could be banned from the search engines. So be careful not to stuff your keywords.

Backlink Spamming:
Search engines do give priority to website with backlinks, but plastering your link all over will be considered more as spamming than proper SEO. You should try to get quality backlinks from websites with higher page rank or appropriate websites.

APRIL 17, 2008 ISSUE #6

Index Time:
It is important that you give enough time to get your site indexed. It is sometimes listed on search engine’s submission page the amount of time before it gets indexed. Index time usually ranges from 1 – 8 weeks depending on the type of search engine. Search Engines like AltaVista and Inktomi provide paid option to get listed quickly. You can give up to 4 months time to get indexed. If you are still not indexed then you need to go through your keywords, meta-title, meta description and other aspects of SEO.

Already Indexed:
There is a possibility that you’ve already been indexed but do not know about it. It is up to you to find out whether you’ve been indexed or not since major search engines do not tell you if you’re listed. It is not possible for you to search for keywords related to your site and expect it to pop up on the first page. You can find out if your site has been indexed with the command: “url: www.yourdomainname” on Google, Yahoo or Live search.

Missing Page:
It is a must that you upload the pages to your site before submitting them. Submitting a page that does not exist or submitting with a subtle typo in the URL is an error we might all make at one time or another. There is a greater possibility that many search engines will not notify you if the URL does not exist when you submit them hence it is important you make sure all the pages exist.

Roadmap from Home Page:
There are some search engines that have been known to drop pages that cannot be traveled to/from the home page. The reason behind this is that search engines might decide the page is unnecessary or unimportant if there’s no road from your home page to the page you want indexed. You can think of your site links as a series of roads from one page to another.

External Links:
There are some search engines that refuse to index websites that do not have any other websites linking to them. There is a possibility that they might index your home page but refuse to index other pages until you achieve at least one or more links from another domain. The best way to solve this problem is by establishing some links and after that you can resubmit your pages as well as the pages that link to you. Hence it is recommended that you have links to your websites making it easier to get indexed and get better rankings.

Frames:
If you have content inside HTML frames, it can cause problems with submissions because the search engine may index the main content of the page, but not the surrounding menu frame. Visitors find some information but miss the associated menu. It is therefore, for your best if you can create non-framed versions of your pages. Optimizing a non-framed page will often achieve better results.

Free Sites:
One of the drawbacks of free websites is that many search engines do not index pages from them because of all the “junk” submissions. It is a better choice to buy your own domain as they are preferred by search engines. The other drawbacks of free website domains include unreliability, forceful display of banner ads etc.

Spider Blocks:
When you design a website it is always suggested to make it search engine friendly which means the search engine spiders should be able to crawl and index your site. These spiders cannot index sites that require any kind of registration, password authentication or filling out forms. For this you need to create static pages that search engines will be able to find and index without performing special action on your site. There are utility programs that help you with this depending on the database system you have.

Guilt through Association:
You can ask your hosting service if your domain name has its own unique IP address assigned to it. If your website shares the same IP as other websites then there is a possibility that your IP has been banned because of something someone else did.

Dynamic Pages:
Dynamic pages are often ignored by search engine spiders. Pages generated on the fly from a database usually contain symbols like a question mark (?) or an ampersand (&) which are ignored by many search engines. The simpler the page the better it is for search engines. So avoid using unnecessary fancy scripts and code which can hurt your page rankings.

Submission Limits:
There are some search engines that have specific number of submissions per day for the same domain. If you exceed their limit, all your submissions could be ignored. Some submission consultants suggest not submitting more than one page a day to an engine for a given website.

Spam:
Spamming is usually blacklisted by many search engines. Excessive use of keywords, same color text as background are few of the spamming techniques that might result in ignoring or being rejected by search engines.

Large Pages:
If your website has pages that are very complex and takes too long to load then it might time out before the spider finishes indexing it. The solution to this is to limit your page size to 50k or less. Visitors with slow internet connection might leave your page before it is fully loaded, hence it is better to limit your page size.

Page Limits:
Search engine spiders crawl only certain number of pages of your website. This might range from few dozen or three or four hundred depending upon the engine. Search engines like Google tend to crawl deeper into your site. The best way to get search engines to crawl your pages is to get quality backlinks.

Redirects:
If your site contains redirects or meta refresh tags, they can sometimes cause the engines to have trouble indexing your site. Search engines generally indexed the page that it redirects to but if they think you might be trying to trick them by using cloaking or IP redirection, there is a chance that your site might not get indexed at all.

Unreliable Hosts:
A reliable hosting service usually guarantees 99.5% up time. The reason for choosing a reliable hosting service is because when your website fails to respond when the search engine spider visits your site, it might not get indexed at all. In the worst scenario even if your site is indexed but when the engine spider visits at the time your site is down, you might be removed from their database.

Random Errors:
There might be times when search engines just lose submissions at random through technical errors and bugs. Therefore, it is advisable to resubmit your site once or twice a month for good merit.

It is for your best if you stop submitting your site once it achieves a desirable ranking. The search engines might re-evaluate the page and might reduce the ranking.

APRIL 11, 2008 ISSUE #5

1. Domain Name:
You do not have to get a domain name with keywords on it. The best way to choose a domain name is to keep it simple and short which could be easily remembered.

2. Title Tag <title></title>:
The title tag is one of the crucial part of site optimization. The title tag is usually placed at the top of your html page and tells search engines what the page is all about. It is important that this tag includes your main keywords and should be 63 characters or less to appear full on Google. It is highly recommended that you have a title that incorporates your website name and your main keywords.

3. Meta Description Tag:
Meta description tag contains the description of your website. A meta description tag helps you boost your page rankings on some search engines. Some search engines even display this on their result page giving the readers to get a brief idea before visiting the site. Here is an example of meta description tag:
<html>
<head>
<meta name=”description” content=”Site summary here.”>
</head>
</html>
4. Natural Keyword Integration:
Search engines simply hate keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing means over usage of keywords in your content. If your content uses too much of your keywords than normal, your site may be banned from many search engines. Keyword density is the thing of a past. Keyword stuffing not only drives search engines away but if the visitors do not understand what you are trying to sell they might never want to visit your site again. So make your content sound natural with proper usage of keywords.
5. Checking Google Cache:

You can type into Google Search: cache: yourURL to check the Google cache. You will also discover when it was last retrieved. You can check it at: http://www.yourcache.com/
6. Finding Backlinks:
One of the keys to get better ranking on search engines is to get quality backlinks. Search engines like Google give much preference to sites who have backlinks from higher PR sites. If you could get backlink from famous directories like www.dmoz.org or www.aboutus.com you have better chance of getting indexed sooner.  You can check the number of back links to your site by typing into the Google Search: link: yourURL
7. Site Map:

Site Maps make it easy for search engines to find and index every page of your website. According to Wikipedia, “A site map is a representation of the architecture of a website. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a website, typically organized in hierarchical fashion.” Site maps are important if you use Flash or JavaScript menus instead of HTML.
8. Limit Flash Usage:
It is quite difficult to optimize websites that use Macromedia Flash. While it is not impossible to optimize such site, it is highly recommended to minimize the usage of Flash on your website.
9. Duplicate Content:

It is for your best to avoid duplicate content. Unique content is much preferred by Search Engines. If you are afraid your content might be copied too, you can use this free tool: http://www.copyscape.com/
10. Proper Foundation:
It is always wise to check if your site is working properly. It is necessary that you check:
- that all your pages load properly.
- meta tags have been defined.
- your site have no browser compatibility issues.
- robots.txt validates and sitemap.xml works.

APRIL 03, 2008 ISSUE #4

Reciprocal Links:
In this type of website linking two websites interchange links to ensure mutual traffic. For example: A and B have websites. If A’s website links to B’s Site and B’s website links to A’s, the websites are reciprocally linked. There are many reciprocal linking websites where one can get many reciprocal linking partners. Some of the popular ones are: www.linkexchanged.com, www.linkpartners.com.

• Three Way Linking:
  Three way linking is a special type of a reciprocal linking where you don’t have to give a link back to link partner but place his/her link on any other third party site. Three way linking can be explained as: Site A àSite B àSite CàSite A. Site A gives link to Site B, B places A’s link on a third party Site C which in turn links to Site A. This method is adopted to get link partners and save own site’s page rank. There are many websites that provide this service for free.
• Automated Linking:
  There are many automatic link exchange services launched in order to take advantage of the need for inbound links to rank well in the search engines. In this you agree to have several links added to all their web pages in return for getting similar links back from other sites.
• Link Exchange:
  Link exchange is an alternative to automated linking where you will advertise on the sites you want to get links to and you in turn offer reciprocal or three way links back to the sites that link to you.

One Way Link:
One way links are hyper links which directly points to your site without reciprocal linking. One way links are given more priority by search engines since it looks more natural. One of the best way of building one way links is by distributing articles on various content sites and article directories. The other forms of one way link building includes: directory submission, blog, press release, blog comments, creating RSS feeds, newsletter distribution, forums etc.

Multi Way Linking:
Multi way Linking evolved from reciprocal linking where link exchange occurs between 2 websites. In this technique websites may create similar one way links that each involves 3 or more partner sites. This provides each website with a one way non-reciprocal link. According to Google and Yahoo’s latest search engine algorithm, more preference is given to websites that maintain a high level of incoming non-reciprocated links. The term ”multiway” simply refers to the fact that the link exchange is between 3 or more websites, however each link is singular by only pointing to one other website. Other means of linking that may increase your web presence may also include other indirect methods such as loading images, videos, content or RSS feeds from a third partners website.

Incestuous Linking:
When a number of sites all link to each other in order to increase their search engine ranking it is known as Incestuous Linking. Incestuous linking is an SEO strategy used by a webmaster to promote a collection of their own web sites, or those of close friends. Since search engines like Google give priority to those sites which have incoming links from highly ranked sites, lots of websites inter-link to artificially improve the ranking of a website without merit i.e. without valuable content.

Link Campaign:
Link campaign occurs when you want to increase traffic to your website and for that you ask your strategic partners, professional organizations, suppliers, customers etc. to place links from their websites. A link campaign may include mutual link back and may or may not include reciprocation of links. Building a link campaign is very time consuming. It involves searching for links on the internet, composing emails and sending them to prospective linking partners with all your linking information, and then you might need to add a reciprocal link to your link pages. The solution to this is the availability of link management software which automates the whole process.

Overlinking:
Overlinking in a webpage or hyperlinked text is the characteristic of having too many hyperlinks. It is advisable to avoid overlinking.

Underlinking/ Null linking:
Null linking or underlinking is the opposite of overlinking which are phenomena in which hyperlinks are reduced to such a degree as to remove all pointers to a likely-needed context of an unusual term, in the text-area where the term occurs.

Link Bait:
Link Bait is the process of attracting visitors to your site through interest, anger or knowledge seeking. Matt Cutts defines link bait as anything “interesting enough to catch people’s attention.” Linkbait is content written to educate or entertain your prospective readers. These articles create buzz and this buzz virally spreads in form of comments that others make about. These inbound or backlinks are used by search engines to rank your website. Link bait could be

Informational: You provide information that educates the readers
News: You provide updates about the latest happening on different topics
Humor: You provide funny stories, humorous pictures, videos, cartoons etc.
Controversy: You can criticize or drop in your point of view about someone and
Tools: Youcanbuild a good tool that is useful enough for people to link to it.

The other methods include: Link Doping, Link Popularity, FFA (Free For All) e.t.c. These linking methods help you increase your page rank. Try the appropriate ones and get great links to increase visibility and traffic to your website.

MAR 27, 2008 ISSUE #3

So how do you really impress search engines these days? The first thing you need to do is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). The other thing you can do is build inbound links. Inbound links are still given much preference by search engines. Getting one way links from popular sites have mainly two advantages: first your site gets indexed when the search engine spiders crawl the popular site and second is search engines think your link is important as it has been placed on a good ranked site. There are many methods to gain inbound links. The simplest way is to request the site owner to place your link on their website. It is simple but websites with high page ranks do not readily agree to place your link for free. You might have to pay them, exchange links with them or just look out for other websites since your page rank is not good enough for them. Yes it can get really depressing at times but hey no worries, I am here to help you with that. The other ways to increase your inbound links are as follows:

1. Pay Per Click (PPC):
If you cannot get on the first page of Google, Yahoo or MSN then PPC or Pay Per Click could be the thing for you. You bid for certain keywords and according to the clicks or the highest bid your advertisement with your URL will be listed on the search engine pages. This also is a good form of getting backlink or inbound link.

2. Social Networking:
Social networking is now the target for many marketers. With millions of users worldwide social networking is the best place to let the word out about your website. Go ahead open your own profile, let people know about you, your website, your expertise field and lots more. Here’s the list to start socializing on the internet.

3. Social Bookmarking:
Social bookmarking is similar to bookmarking in your browser. Wikipedia defines it as a method for internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet. These bookmarking sites are the best way to get one way links. The idea is to get your website bookmarked. The more it is bookmarked the better it is for your website. Here’s the list of popular social bookmarking sites.

4. Blog Comments:
It’s time to get a bit creative here. Smart comments, suggestions are usually welcomed by bloggers. If you love to read then this is the best way to get backlinks for your website. Read the posts, drop your piece of mind, leave your URL and there you go, you got another easy way to get inbound links.

5. Forums:
You can participate on forums related to your business which is another way of marketing and getting backlinks for your website. If you are an expert in your field you can always be a forum authority. A forum authority is someone who is referred to as an expert in a certain field by the members. Forums are all about interaction, so communicate, provide tips, suggestions and people will respond to you.

6. Wikipedia:
There are very few internet users who haven’t heard about Wikipedia, an online encyclopedia. You can sign in for free and provide information about various fields. You can even edit contents of wikipedia. This is an informative site so anything that sounds like product promotion might be banned. It will be wise to go through their terms and conditions before posting your view on Wikipedia.

These are the 6 simple ways to get inbound links and advertise about your website. Even if you’ve made the best website in the world, no one would know about it until you spread the word. So go ahead, a little bit of hard work and creativity will bear fruit for sure.

MAR 19, 2008 ISSUE #2

There are different ways to search for an appropriate affiliate program.

1. Affiliate Directories:
Affiliate directories are the easiest way to look for affiliate programs. Wikipedia defines affiliate directories as, “niche web directories that are very like the large and broad web directories like the Yahoo! Directory or the Open Directory Project also known as Dmoz. Web directories are like the Yellow pages in the offline world, listings of sites grouped by niche, geographic location or special characteristic or property”. Some of the famous affiliate directories are associatedirectories, affiliatescout, top-affiliate etc.

2. Affiliate Forums, Chats and Blogs:
The other medium to find appropriate affiliate program or affiliates is by visiting affiliate forums, chat rooms or blogs. They are good source to find affiliate programs and you can also get more information about affiliate marketing.

3. Affiliate Networks:
An affiliate network is an intermediary between the affiliates and the affiliate programs. They are third party solution providers who track your sales and makes sure you get paid. The affiliates can join without paying anything whereas the affiliate program or the merchants need to pay a fee.

4. Websites:
You can visit the websites of the companies who sell the products you are interested in and inquire if they have affiliate programs. It is a beneficial step to follow as there’s a greater chance of being offered good commission by less popular companies.

Many popular companies are adopting this concept to increase their sales. Affiliate marketing can be done through websites or through banner ads, text ads etc. Its popularity is due to its success.

Feb 18 2008, ISSUE #1