Some years ago back in February 2004, I came across this little start up social networking site called MySpace. At first MySpace didn’t seem like much compared to its only potential rival Friendster which has been around for a while. Since I was a member of Friendster and a few other news groups and small social networking sites I figured why not join this other one and see what MySpace has to offer.

The MySpace of 2004 resembles next to nothing to the MySpace of today. You were only allowed a small handful of photos, you only had a “top 8″ for your friends and the only way you could get a fancy background, graphics or custom profile was if you actually knew how to code the HTML and CSS your self. It was fun, simple and little to no spam or phishing of any sort to worry about.

By word of mouth, MySpace started to spread on the internet. And with the help of some of its more famous members such as Tila Tequila, MySpace started to spread like a virus. It’s membership skyrocketed like no one has ever seen and support websites that taught people how to customize their profiles and even profile generators started sprouting up all across the net. Some of the better code generating sites were even able to charge for their layouts. MySpace was flourishing, people were making money and everyone was happy.

Welcome News Corporation and Fox Interactive Media

Things were going good for MySpace but unfortunately things were about to change.

Just like with every other social popular entity in the internet, MySpace started to get the attention of more traditional media companies who wanted a piece of the MySpace pie. In July 2005 News Corporation, the parent company of Fox Interactive Media purchased MySpace for a cool $580 million.

What seemed like almost over night things started to change for the popular social networking site. Storage capacity increased allowing unlimited number of photos to be uploaded, support of flash profiles, videos and music players. Profiles for famous musicians, comedians, celebrities even every day companies such as Nike, Coca Cola and Hollywood movie studios all were becoming standard on the site.

With all this popularity and media exposure it was only a matter of time before the criminal element started to make its appearance. News coverage of cyber stalking and pedophiles and political and religious hate groups appeared on the evening news at least once a week. Then came the spammers the phishers and all the fake profiles from dating and adult websites started flooding members inbox and friend requests. It got to the point where no one wanted to even log in or at most had to make they profiles private in hopes of avoiding all these scams.

Its safe to say the fun of MySpace was gone and all that was left was a corporate ideal of how a social site should be.

The Rise of Facebook and Twitter

Around the same time in 2004 another social networking site originally called thefacebook.com but now more formally just known as Facebook was started over at Harvard University. This was more or less a social site for Harvard students but eventually expanded to other college students then high school students and finally, to anyone aged 13 and over across the country.

Out of all the social sites on the internet the battle for supremisy was between Facebook and MySpace and in April 2008 Facebook took the lead. Facebook surpassed MySpace in number of unique visits a day with Twitter in a close 3rd and MySpace started to feel the crunch.

Members who were tired of all the commercialism, spam and lack of new features were being driven away in massive numbers to Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is a social micro-blogging site in its most simplest form. Members are only allowed to post 140 characters at a time so think of it as your status update on MySpace, short simple and to the point.

Now why is Twitter so important? Well lets just say this simple micro-blog has had enough influence on the net to make MySpace add a status feature which resembles Twitter and Facebook tried to buy Twitter but failed and shortly there after redesigned, to the hatred of most its users, their entire layout to have Twitter’esq features.

And lets not forget the “Evil Google Empire”, who a few weeks ago was talking down about Twitter, calling it a “poor man’s email system” conveniently just as Twitter was launching its new search feature. Sources say this is typical of Google to do when it feels a web property is a threat,;discredit the threat and then acquire the threat. So I wouldn’t be surprised to see Google place a bid for Twitter in the next few months.

Ok so the last section got a little off on a Twitter Tangent but it just continues to show how “simplicity of design and function” and non-commercialism is the key to a successful social network.

Facebook has luckily found this out early on with their Terms of Service mistake a few months ago where they changed their TOS to the uproar of all its users, so much that it made the nightly news and they had to change them back, to their new re-design which will also probably be reverted back to the original layout.

So the lesson for all social networking sites to learn here is that social sites need to listen to their members, and ask them what they want before changes are made. A social networks isn’t the place for commercials or a place for you to saturate with and bombard members with new movie premiers, music releases, dating services or other advertising campaigns. It’s the members that make the site a success not the corporations who buy them.

Too late for MySpace. It went from being that hip cool new club on the strip to being that 2nd class night club where all the 40 year old men hang out trying to pick up on the 21 year old girls that no one really wants to hang out at. Just not a fun scene anymore.

Randy Home, SEO facebook, Myspace, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking, twitter

BlogWorld Expo in Las Vegas

Hey everyone! So I just got back from the 2007 BlogWorld Expo, which was held in Las Vegas and let me tell yo, it was pretty fun. Not only did I learn a few little tidbits of information, mostly I had confirmation on things I already knew which tells me I am on the right path to running a successful and if Im lucky, a profitable blog.

All things considered this was a basic blog convention where I went and sat around listening to some people speak and hope I pick up some good ideas. But what I think was the best part of the trip was the opening night party that was held at the Las Vegas Hard Rock Hotel and Casino’s own night club “The Joint!”

Picture a few hundred bloggers, geeks, Search Engine Optimization specialists and others who I still couldn’t really classify in any category, drunk off their ass thanks to the open bar and free food provided by the Hard Rock Casino. The drinks were strong and flowing. The DJ was very good and kept the music flowing.

My stay at the Imperial Palace Hotel and Casino wasn’t really worth mentioning apart from the fact that this was one of the worst Casino Hotels, or any hotel I have stayed in. The parking structure was confusing, no signs saying what level you were on or direction to where the exits were. Also after you park you have to either take the stairs or the elevator down to the ground floor, walk past all the dumpsters, and the maintenance workers break room, through another outside hallway then into a side door to get into the lobby. Let’s not forget avoiding all the taxi and visitor traffic because you have to cross right through the valet area.

Once inside the lobby of the Imperial Palace you have to take another elevator just to get up into the casino, and the check in is at the front which is in accessible without having to go through all this if you park in the parking garage. Ohhh and there are a whole seperate set of elevators you have to find to jsut get to your rooms. Speaking of the rooms, those were pretty nice actually. But the Imperial Palace is in a horrible location because directly below us was a small little outside cabana club right off the Las Vegas Strip who decided to play music till 3am every night. I was on the 10th floor and it sounded like they were in my room with me. I really wouldnt recomment the Imperial Palace Casino to any one.

I gambled a little bit, won some then lost it again but hey thats the fun of Las Vegas right? As for the speakers all of them were pretty informative and gave some good ideas but the one I enjoyed the most was with Thomas Frey – Google’s Top Rated Futurist Speaker from The DaVinci Institute. His outlook on what the future of 50 years from now holds for the internet and the world in general were pretty interesting and thought provoking. Ideas of Universal commerce, and no more country boarders paint an very exciting future, at least to me.

Well hopefully everyone will enjoy what the future has in store and Ill be sharing some new things with you as the weeks pass by.

-Randy-

Randy Life, SEO Blogs, Google, Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking

Tea Partay Video

So how do you get the word out about your company or product in an ever changing, quickly evolving world of give me more, newer faster now now NOW!!!??
You create a viral marketing campaign such as Smirnoff Ice did with this video Tea Partay.

What is Viral Marketing?

Viral marketing is just a catch term for any marketing campaign that is used to spread the word of a certain event or product from one person to another, hence the word virus.

Perfect example is this Smirnoff Ice music video that was released August 6, 2006 on YouTube.com and has received 3,325,244 views at the time of this writing.
So how do you get your company noticed in a world as fast moving and “show me something I haven’t seen before” as this…well looks like Smirnoff Ice has found the way and it’s viral baby.

Randy Home, SEO Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking

There seems to be a never ending debate on the internet between one way links,
reciprocal links and three way links and which type of link is better for Search
Engine Optimization and your website. Well here is a simple breakdown about what
type of link each one is and how they can effect your search engine rankings in Google, Yahoo or MSN.

What is a One way Link?

A one way link is a simple link from one website to the other. For example, if
you link to http://blog.ienhance.com and that page doesn’t link back to your
website then it’s a one way link from your site to their site.

What are Reciprocal Links?

A Reciprocal Link is when you link to a website and that website links back to
your website. You are able to send visitors from your website to theirs and
visitors from their website are able to come to your site. This is one of the
more common linking partners on the internet.

What are three-way links?

Unfortunately some search engines and webmasters feel that Reciprocal Links aren’t
worth much when it comes to search engine rankings. In fact some search engines
devalue them completely because they feel it could be considered a linking scam
where friends are just linking to each other, not with any real value.

Because of this 3 way links are being used. For example: Website A links to
website B, website B links to website C, website C links to website A. This way,
everyone gets a link back to them and its not from the same site they linked to
in the first place.

Which links will help you to get higher search engine rankings?

Honestly search engine rankings are not determined by the type of link you use to link out to a site, but more by how many In Bound Links (IBL’s) you have pointing to your site.

It’s very important to remember that the links to your website should be from
related sites and that are on topic with your site. If the site that is linking
to your site sales Viagra and you sale Designer Denim Jeans, then that link to
your site wont hold much value. Never mind whether it is a one way, reciprocal or a three way link.

The fact of the matter is if a link is one way, reciprocal or three way, it
doesn’t matter if the link is on a non-related website. The only thing that will
help raise your search engine rankings are in bound links from high quality
websites that are related to your website.

Randy SEO

Todays post is just going to be a nice and quick one about Absolute and Relative Links. While sitting at work today I had the “oh so fun” experience of trying to explain to a client why we do things a certain way. Normally this is a daily part of the job and not much of an issue. But this client just happens to be one that took it upon himself to learn some SEO tactics and only did a half-ass job doing it and now thinks he knows everything.

There are few things more frustrating then a client who only has a little knowledge and tries to pretend that they are an SEO Guru.

So I proceed to try and explain the differences between Absolute Links and Relative Links and why we use what we use. Funny thing about website links, there are a few different ways to code them and they all are correct. But in some cases it might be better to use one over the other. And thats when I realized that maybe some people don’t actually understand the difference between the two, so here we go.

Type Of Links

There are basically two types of links, they are:

• Fully Qualified Links also known as Absolute Links are links which the path is created whenever your link uses the full URL of an page. For example, http://www.yourwebsitehere.com is an absolute path to a specific web site. This method is the best choice to use because it will never result in a broken link unless you type in wrong from the start, so always check your links. This is also what you want to use if you are sending anyone to another site. Some people will tell you that it is not needed to use internally on your site but from my experience, not using absolute links for example in your navigation bars can cause a great deal of errors from spiders when the crawl your site. It’s better to be safe then sorry.
• Relational or Relative Links are used much more often than absolute paths and look like this <img src=”../images/title.gif”> The .. in front basically means move up one level in the directory. So you don’t have to write the full path. Any time you need to send a person from one part of your site to another a relative link is ok to use but I would still use a fully qualified link just to be safe. But if you wand to include an object from your site such as an image on one of your pages a relative link will work just fine.

Well I hope that was enough to help you understand the difference between Absolute and Relative links. It really is more of a personal preference for the way you link on your site. Just remember its always better to be safe and take the extra few seconds to code the link correctly so that way you ensure your links will always work.

Randy SEO

So you have optimized your page as best as you can but you still just can’t seem to rank well in MSN or in Yahoo SERP reports? Well, don’t stress over it too much. Surprisingly, when it comes to search engine optimization it is pretty easy to rank well in both MSN and Yahoo and I’m going to give you a few tips from my experience in no particular order. Remember there are a lot of other things to take into consideration such as In bound Links (IBL’s), AdWords, paid links and directory submissions but those will be for another post. Tonight we are going to focus on just “On Page optimization Techniques”.

1. Page Titles: Make sure you use relevant words in your page titles. Yahoo and MSN put a lot of weight on page titles.

2. H1 Tags: Surprisingly H1 titles seem not to carry that much weight with MSN or Yahoo. But don’t think that means not to use them. They are important for your readers and when you optimize your page, I hope you are doing it for both search engines and for your readers. Be sure to use your keyword in your H1 titles but try only using one H1 on your page.

3. H2 – H6 Tags: Here is where the H tags seem to matter. Be sure to use your keywords and different variations of your keywords in H2 – H6 tags at least two times in your article. Seems in my experience that H2 and and H3 tags will be all the ones you need.

4. Keywords: Keywords, for those who don’t know, are the main words or phrases you are trying to be found for. Its smart to do some keyword research before you start writing your articles. That way you will be sure to know what words and phrases people are looking for and will help them find your page. Keyword Discovery is a great tool to use for this. Google AdWords has a nice free keyword research tool and Wordtrackers Free Keyword Suggestion Tool is a pretty good one too.

5. Keword Density: Keyword density plays an important role when trying to rank in the search engines. Make sure you try to stay to at least 3% to 5% but no more. If you use keywords more then that you may end up looking like you are trying to keyword stuff which search engines look down on greatly.

6. Keyword Placement: Depending on the length of your article or post, you will have to adjust how many times you actually use your full keyword. Try to keep it simple and remember that you are “optimizing for both the search engines and for your readers“. Be sure to list your full exact keyword at least in these three main places: in the first paragraph, the middle of the body and the last paragraph. During the rest of the body use partial keywords and different variations of them for best results.

7. Bold and Italics: You should bold your full keywords and a few of your partial keywords to show the Search Engine Spiders that these are important words in your article. Use italics on larger phrases or other parts of interest that you want the spiders to recognize as important too.

Keep in mind who you are writing for. Choose words and subject matter that they will understand and that they will be looking for. Also, and I can’t stress this enough, that you are writing for both your customers and the search engines. You need to take a 50/50 look at optimizing your page. There is no point in writing a great article, blog, or online ad-campaign if no one can find it; and no point in optimizing your site 100% for the search engines when people who land on your page don’t make the jump from reader to customer and you don’t get any conversions from your site.

I hope these tips will help you with your Search Engine Optimization and your rankings. I’m not making any promises considering search engine algorithms seem to change all the time, these are just some of the steps that seem to continue to work for my sites. Anyway if you have any comments to add I’d love to hear them.

Randy SEO

1. Its free publicity to the 162,404,809 and growing members that are on MySpace
2. MySpace profiles are indexed by search engines and show up in almost every result of Google and Yahoo searches.
3. There are bulletins and event features that you can use to notify your friends of specials. (Example: if a Anchor Blue and and you’re having a back to school special, you can notify everyone on your friends list with just one notice.)
4. Offer incentives to your friends if they post a Banner with a Link to your Website on their MySpace profile. (Once a month pick a winner and give them a prize)
5. You are able to target your demographic very easily using the Advanced Browse feature. With options from age range, sex, height and weight specific, has children or not and more. Even the location can be set to span out from a giving zip code in 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and 250 mile increments.
6. MySpace sells advertising mainly through banner impressions, not clicks. The costs vary, but it’s in the area of $5 per 1,000 impressions. the minimum buy for an advertising campaign is $5,000 to $10,000,” according to Luke J. Bodley from www.MarketingProfs.com
7. When you buy banner ad space on MySpace, you can target your banners so they show up only to the exact demographic you want. This includes all those specific demographics like religion, body type, sexual orientation and so on.
8. If you are advertising your local business on MySpace, make sure you include your city name on the banner. Your returns will be a lot higher, because people don’t expect to see their own city name on an international Web site, and they will click just out of curiosity.

Randy SEO Search Engine Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, SEO, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking

Properly marketing your business online is one of the most important things you can do.
Most people spend thousands of dollars on banner ads or text links but there’s a cheaper way and it’s gaining more popularity every day.

Myspace.com is a free social networking website that will expose your companies profile to millions of potential customers everyday, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year world wide. There are a lot of ways you can market your site on myspace and I’ll let you decide that on your own, but here are some basic guidelines that everyone can benefit from.

1. Make the Profile useful and entertaining to ensure people come back to the profile.

2. Profile is completely editable using HTML and CSS. This will let the design of the myspace profile mimic that of the client’s proprietary website; or be designed in a completely different style, be creative.

3. Treat Myspace as what it is, a social networking site. So make your profile more personal and friendly not purely a commercial for your company.

4. Constantly post bulletins and blog’s. (example: new articles or specials you are having)

5. Have a lot of friends. Friends are the backbone of myspace. It links everyone together and keeps everything growing. Easy way to get friends is to browse MySpace and visit profiles and click the “request as a friend” button. This will send an invitation to that profile where they have the option of denying or accepting your friend request. This is not considered spam.

6. Make use of the many topic specific forums that are on MySpace. Find those that fit into what your business is and start posting in them

7. DO NOT send out unsolicited email messages to strangers on MySpace. That is considered spam and MySpace users are quick to report it as well as MySpace support is quick to remove it.

8. DO NOT post any photo containing nudity, pornography, sexually explicit images or any copyrighted image (unless you own the copyright). Again MySpace support is fast to find this and will suspend or delete your account.

Randy SEO Myspace, Search Engine Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking

There are many spamers (mostly pornography sites in nature) on MySpace who will fill out their profile to look as legitimate as possible but include links embedded in their text to take you to their site. Some will just use you to post spam in your comment section and worse some will try to hijack your page so they can spam all your friends with bulletins.

Here are a few simple yet effective ways to avoid this;

1. Check the text in their “About Me” section of their profile. Look for the hypertext by different color text or just run your cursor over it to find a link. Read the navigation bar of the link if its spam you will be able to tell.

2. Be cautious about people who offer you friend requests who do not have any pictures of them self’s but have hundreds or thousands of friends. Most people who are on myspace will have a few picture’s at least of them self.

3. Be cautious of obvious professional photography pictures being used as their default pic. Now this might be difficult at first because there are many legitimate people with professional modeling style pictures but compounded with the other clues you can easily spot them out. Plus models and celebrities will not be adding you as friends just out of the blue, use common sense.

4. If you receive a friend request and an email saying something to the effect of “Hey my friend saw you online but they don’t have their own computer, click here to speak with them” That is obvious spam and you might as well just report them to MySpace Support.

5. Look at their comments that others leave on their page, spammers post with other spammers, look for them.

6. If the person gives their private aol, msn, hotmal or yahoo Instant message name or email but its written with
spaces like “myname @ a o l.com” or write me here at “m y name @ya hoo. Com” this is an obvious attempt to avoid any detection by MySpace support looking for known spam address.

7. And finally if your just on the fence about accepting someone but you want to add them do it and watch it. If they are spammers then they will quickly start posting comments or bulletins and you can see who they are and delete them.

8. On a side note, periodically check your “edit friends” list to see who has been removed for spam. MySpace will delete them and their picture will show a huge red X in its place but their name will still be on your friends list, so just remove them.

Randy SEO Myspace, Social Media Marketing, Social Networking

Ok so google has made it clear they don’t like people getting paid to put a link to your site from theirs but why?

This is an advertising issue that the entire world has to deal with. Look at commercials or super bowl or magazines or billboards.

Could it be that google hates when you put paid links on a page that aren’t from their own AdSence program. To me those are paid links, which is clearly a spam tactic or violation of googles own rules as it could be interpreted. Google claims they will devalue or remove a site using paid links like that. But will they let their own go through unpunished? I’m sure they would.

What about all those reviewers out there for the movies. They get paid, either in money or other ways to write a promising review of a movie and then that is what is used to get people into the theaters. It’s nothing new, it’s the American Way.

Google needs to take notice that they do not “own” the internet and shouldn’t be able to force webmasters to build their sites all to googles standards. Google isn’t the only search engine out there. Google should have to grow and adapt with the internet instead.

With such a huge public presence and influence on the world, google needs to take on the responsibility that its power has created and be fair to everyone, not just favor the ones who do what big brother google says.

Lol, hope I don’t get banned now.

Randy SEO