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Facebook Launches Vanity URL

2009-06-15T20:17:00.002-07:00

Facebook finally launched a feature that was long overdue from a popular social networking site of its stature. After a dramatic 3 day countdown yesterday midnight they have launched the vanity URLs for its users. Now instead of a random number at the end of your Facebook profile URL you can actually have your name( if you are lucky) or some meaningful word of your choice.

I think I am a bit late on this post ( am a real lazy a** these days) because the rush is full on and if you have not secured your personalized Facebook URL, log on to your Facebook account right away and you will see a notification of the vanity URL on top of your profile page. Just follow the instructions and you should be done in a jiffy.

My relatively long Indian name helped me get some competitive advantage as I guess there are not many Facebookers by my name and now I am at http://www.facebook.com/saptarshi.roy.chaudhury . if you have not yet grabbed your

However, as per Facebook blog for recent Facebook users who have signed up for an account after May 31st this feature would not be available for now. This has been set up to prevent name squatting on Facebook and I think its a very wise decision that the Facebook guys have taken.

If you signed up for a Facebook Page after May 31 or a user profile after today at 3 p.m. EDT, you may not be able to sign up for a user name immediately because of steps we've taken to prevent abuse or "squatting" on names.

Now with this personalized Facebook URL, it would probably be a better tool to use for online search reputation management, and would probably be much more effective if Facebook allows for a little more information on profile pages for users without log ins ( Google bot don't have a Facebook ID ;) )

HTML Color Codes Chart - How To Find Hexadecimal Color Code

2009-06-15T20:17:00.001-07:00

I have always advocated the use of Notepad for people willing to learn HTML properly and recently one of my cousins who have just started learning HTML and is diligently sticking to the notepads, avoiding the lure of easy WYSIWYG editors came back to me with a problem."How can I find the proper HTML color code when coding in notepad"

Instead of giving him a short answer I thought I would make a post here on HTML color codes so that it can be of help to so many other people who are also stuck with issues and doubts about these strange looking hexadecimal color codes.

Though I mentioned them as "strange looking hexadecimal codes" they are not really strange and are rather pretty logically formed. In HTML, at times we use names of colors like, red, blue, green etc but more often than not we use Hexadecimal color codes to add more precise colors on the web pages.Let's look at what is the logic behind Hexadecimal HTML color codes..

HTML color codes are formed basically of three primary colors - Red , Green and Blue, otherwise referred to as RGB. In all the hexa decimal color codes you will typically see six characters, for example #ff6633 - in this case the first two character defines value for red, the next two for Green and the last two for blue. If you would go through a HTML color code chart you will notice that lower numbers and letters display darker colors ( Black: #000000 ). So if we would like to have a bright red color we would have the code as #FF0000 - which would mean to the browser maximum Red ( FF) No Blue (00), No green (00). If you can keep a few basic color codes in mind you can probably do some permutation and combination based on the above mentioned facts to get other color variations. It is important that we append the # before the color code.

How to get the exact HTML color codes

a) When you are creating a webpage from a design, open it in Photoshop and use the color picker tool to click on the color of your choice, it will show you the HTML color code for that. A color picker tool is available on all graphic design applications and this is the easiest way to do this.

b) HTML color code charts - Yes, readymade HTML color code charts are available on the web. A small Google search and you can find a lot of them. Some of them list almost all possible colors and variations along with their hexadecimal code for HTML. So a simple search and then a copy paste job can resolve the issue. Check this HTML color code chart for reference: http://www.webmonkey.com/reference/Color_Charts

12 SEO Tips on Press Release Optimization

2009-06-15T20:16:00.002-07:00

Press releases can be a very handy tool in the process of promoting a web site. While a well distributed press release can bring a bunch of links for your website, if written well, press releases can also rank in search results by themselves resulting in loads of referral traffic.

Internet marketing professionals and SEOs have all realized the potential of press release in optimizing their website and are trying to leverage this to maximum benefit.In this article I will list a few tips that will tell you how to write a search engine optimized press release.

a)Similar to the basic principle of SEO content writing, do a short keyword research to identify which are the keywords you want to target. Find a keyword that people are actually searching for and is a proper match/ description for your product/ service/ company. Use any keyword tool like WordTracker or Keyword Discovery to find this.

b)Ensure you use your chosen keyword phrase in the headline of your press release. If your press release is relatively long, create a sub heading using the keyword phrase.

c)Use this keyword phrase in the content of the press release wherever applicable but make sure that you aren't forcibly stuffing your keyword in the content. A keyword stuffed press release would never meet its proper distribution potential thereby failing the basic purpose of the exercise. If you are not the best person when it comes to writing skills it is strongly advisable to take help of professional writers.For a good press release it is extremely important to maintain balance between the natural content appeal and the keyword insertion for optimization.

d)Use your website URL in the body of the press release. Make sure that the URL is inserted in proper URL form ( http://www.yourdomain.com ) and not just yourdomain.com

e)While Press releases are official communication and demands the mention of brand names, unless your brand is already a household name try to use short descriptive phrase for your product or service than just using the brand name. This would increase the chance of your press release showing up on search results when people search for those product descriptions. For example, instead of referring to your SEO software by its name "SEOUltima", if you would mention it as "SEO Software" or "SEO Software SEOUltima" that would help in optimizing the Press Release for SEO Software keyword.

f)Another easy way to increase the frequency of such descriptive phrases or brand names in your press release is to use them instead of pronouns like "it".

g)This should probably have been the first point in this list. Make sure that your Press release is actually newsworthy. That is one of the key factor that determines how well it gets syndicated.

h)Depending on available budget and importance of the release use a paid PR distribution service. Alternatively, there are various PR services that will distribute your news for free.

If you are choosing a free PR distribution service, first check if the service is indexed by popular news search engines. Check the coverage in places like Google News, Yahoo News.

i)Besides submitting to PR networks, put up the press release on your own site in its separate page and link to it from the home page.

j)Submit your press release to popular social media websites like Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl etc

k)Search Google News for your target keywords and make a note of the sites that are already listed. Check if those sites would accept and publish your Press Release.

l)If you are publishing frequent press releases ( that helps ! ) make sure you have a RSS feed for your press release.

Can Bing.com be Microsoft's Answer to Google ?

2009-06-15T20:16:00.001-07:00

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer sent an email to the employees confirming the launch of Bing.com and it clearly portrayed their seriousness towards the business. Ballmer in his email mentioned that Bing.com, the new search engine from Microsoft is an extremely crucial step forward for MS in redefining search and expanding their share of the online advertising market.

In fact Microsoft is positioning Bing.com top be more than a search engine. They are calling it the decision engine. To quote Ballmer on this..

"With Bing, our goal is to do more than just make it easier for people to find information. Today, we’re delivering a powerful set of tools that will enable people to make faster, more informed decisions.

In short, Bing is a decision engine that goes beyond what people have come to think of as search—and what our competitors offer today."

At present this search engine is available only to the Microsoft employees and from next week on it would be made public at Bing.com, till then you might like watching this video that shows Bing in action.

As with most major search engine launch a buzz has again started on the question if Bing is going to be the Google killer ? I think it is too early to comment or speculate on this because we haven't yet seen the new engine in action.

With Google's personalized search catching up and their extensive coverage of local search I think one of the main challenges that Bing would face ( if they plan to be a Google replacement) is in regards to local and personalized searches.

How to Optimize Videos in You Tube

2009-06-15T20:15:00.002-07:00

We always talk about Google and how much traffic Google search can drive to our website but how much time do we spend on thinking how we can use the various other Google channels to drive traffic? Besides the web search Google provides various other search channels that can drive an equal amount of traffic and one such highly potent traffic driver is YouTube.

Trust me YouTube can drive enough traffic to your site to get your servers to crash. Many of us post videos to YouTube but never bother to optimize them and some of us don't even care to add videos to YouTube.

Take my words for it, if you know how to optimize for YouTube it can be a great source for good traffic. In this article we will look at some tips for optimizing for You Tube.

a) Use a proper Title for the video. Do a little keyword research before you write the title, make sure it makes sense and yet contains the keywords. Make it Short and Crisp.

b) Write a Description that is actually descriptive. Keep in mind that search engine's can't read video content, so this description would help it understand the video.

c) Use the word "Video" in Title and Description. People often search for keywords with the word "video" as a suffix

d)Do not disable comments. Enable all the features like video responses, ratings, embedding, syndication etc to encourage community participation. Reply to comments if applicable

e)Add applicable tags for the video

f) Add a link to your website in the description

g) Make sure you mention your link in the video at the end of the show, particularly if it is a teaser

h)Embed the video in external websites wherever applicable

i) Add a few links from external websites to the video page with suitable keyword anchor text

Why Should You Do All These ?

a) Traffic from YouTube

b) With the Universal Search being adopted by all major engines, if you can optimize your video properly it might rank for competitive keyword. Now think what does that mean ? It means you will basically have an image/video placement on Google ( because Google displays video thumbnails in SERP ) or your target keywords while your competitors would have the normal listing and we all know how much more attractive images can be compared to those stale text search results.

Here is an example...

Click Image to Enlarge

How to Build Back Links with Google ?

2009-06-15T20:15:00.001-07:00

Building links is a crucial part of any SEO campaign. Most of us understand it and spend considerable time on improving our back link portfolio. There are various techniques to get free back links that I have discussed before but what I plan to discuss in this post is how we can use Google to help find related links for a website.

There are a lot of tools in the market that helps us to find prospective link sources and some of them do more than that by providing other related information. What we often tend to overlook is most of these tools are actually using Google to find the information that they serve. If you are really pro about using Google you can easily find similar results even without using any such tool.

For example, try searching intitle:directory "seo" in Google - you will easily get a list SEO related directories. What this query basically tells Google is to find webpages that contains the word "SEO" and has the word "Directory" in page title.

If you are familiar with the advanced parameter in Google search you can easily frame hundreds of such queries that can help you find various link building opportunities.

For those of you who are not so familiar with this type of Google tricks, this LinkSearch tool can actualy bail you out. Not just that it can probably give you some new thought process on building links ( Have you ever thought that guest blogging can be an effective way to increase your link counts ? )

* Sorry for my Google biasness, you can use most of these queries in other search engines as well to find link partners.

Change in Google Referral Strings - Another Attempt to Push Google Analytics ?

2009-06-15T20:12:00.000-07:00

Google has again made a change to their search result page URLs that is likely to create trouble with most other web analytics package besides Google Analytics. A few days back they experimented with their SERP URLs by using AJAX and putting the URL parameters after a #. While that experiment had the potential to kill all the existing web analytics package in the market and created a big buzz in the blogosphere, they seem to have stopped that.

Now in their new experiment with the Google Search result URLs, they have done some changes which again would leave most other web analytics package high and dry to track Google referrer data.

At present a typical Google search referrer URL would look like
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=candles&btnG=Google+Search

The New Referrer URL format would be
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=7&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.example.com%2Fmypage.htm&ei=0SjdSa-1N5O8M_qW8dQN&rct=j&q=candles&usg=AFQjCNHJXSUh7Vw7oubPaO3tZOzz-F-u_w&sig2=X8uCFh6IoPtnwmvGMULQfw

Now besides showing the complete result page URL and other multiple parameters, the key difference between these two referrer strings is that in the first on the parameters started after "/search?" and in the second one they start after "/url?". Now most of the present day analytics packages parses the Google referrer string based on the "/search?" part and looks for information after that to figure out which keyword or which page of the search result the traffic came from. Also most of them look for the "/search?" to determine if a visitor is coming from organic search results. Replacing "search" with "url" would leave them all messed up.

Google analytics however does not depend on the "/search?" string in the referrer and would continue to work properly. Also the latest version of Urchin (6.5) would not be affected by this change.

Other analytics packages would probably need to do some changes to adapt to this change in Google referrer string to provide accurate analytics report.

These new referrer String is launched at beta stage and only a small percentage of users are getting this at present but it is likely that Google would soon roll out this in the main stream.

While Google has not explained or given any reason for this sudden changes there seems to be just two possible reasons for this.
a) Making other third party analytics less usable / giving them a hard time - I don't think other analytics providers would have a lot of problem to adapt this but they would definitely need some time and webmasters would need an option for that period and Google Analytics would be the choice.

b) This new referrer string would allow Google to pass all clicks through their server thereby making it much easier for them to track the CTR for individual sites. As it has always been said that Google uses CTR data as a factor for their algorithm, now that Google can track individual CTR with so much precision I would think that they are very likely going to use these information for further refining the organic results.