Website Promotion Blog

The article “5 Myths of Web 2.0” by The Drama 2.0 Show explains it best:

Even if the cost of building Web 2.0 products is cheap, effectively distributing them in the marketplace is a significant challenge because of the competition… Proponents of the notion that Web 2.0 businesses are cheap to build fail to distinguish the difference between the costs of building the product and building a viable company around a product.

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This week, Paris is playing host to a meeting that may change the face of the Internet as we know it. The international nonprofit group ICANN will vote on (and likely pass) new procedures in assigning new generic Top Level Domains or gTLDs. The move is a response to the Internet’s massive growth that threatens to use up most of the existing domain names by 2013. The proposal will make URL restrictions much more relaxed than ever before, except for the 64-character limit. Among the changes that may happen are:

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Are you a Twitter fan? Twitter is everywhere in the news, it seems. It’s great for keeping in touch with friends, and even addictive, but a lot of people have been using it for more than just idle updates. Twitter’s concept is quite simple, but given the right tools, it can be harnessed into an instrument to help your business, like blogs have become. There are many apps out there, and I encourage you to continually search for the best out there. To get you started, I’ve compiled some tools you can try out.
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Hitwise, an Internet metrics company, has just released the latest statistics in search engine usage for the US and UK. The data was collected from a sizeable sample of 10 million users. As expected, Google is leading the pack, even posting slight increases that help it pull farther away from its main rivals.
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6. Use UFOs. Though not the flying kind, UFOs (Unobtrusive Flash Objects) are cool in their own way. They are DOM scripts that add intelligence to your website by allowing it to detect if the visitor’s computer has the Flash plug-in or not. They will only embed Flash objects on your site if they are supported. A similar but improved technique would be to employ SWFObject 2.0.

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We may be living in the 21st century, but as far as Flash SEO is concerned, it’s as if we’re trapped in the Dark Ages. While there are successful, high-ranking Flash websites, most of these are of already established brands and/or have the ability to generate a huge number of backlinks to boost their PR (and therefore they don’t have to rely on their content being crawled). If you’re designing for a new product/concept, it’s definitely a lot harder. The rule of thumb is still the same: avoid Flash if you can. But if you absolutely must use Flash for web design (and who can blame you?), there are some things you can do to make your site a little friendlier to search engines.
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While websites are great for gaining immediate global exposure (or notoriety, as the case may be), there are times when your product would benefit more from local search engine targeting. For example, you have a pizzeria in Trieste, Italy. A person in Hawaii may accidentally stumble on your site and get a craving for your mouth-watering oven-hot thin crust Four Cheeses pizza… but he can’t order it anyway. It makes much more sense to concentrate your efforts on the people in and around your locality. For domains with a country code like .sg for Singapore and .jp for Japan, it’s automatically done, but if you’re using a neutral domain extension such as .com or .org, it has to be arranged manually. Here’s how to set it up using Google’s geographic targeting.
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Small applications embedded in web pages called widgets are enjoying a huge amount of reach among the online community. ComScore’s Widget Metrix measured 20% penetration worldwide, and 40% penetration in the all-important US market. Universal McCann’s research showed roughly the same results. Penetration is defined as the number of unique widget viewers versus the number of total population of Internet users. With its enormous popularity, widgets are ideal for use in business branding, and many companies have been jumping on the bandwagon. If you’re interested to enter into this segment, there are some things you have to keep in mind.

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With the advent of Web 2.0, social media has become an integral part of daily online life. It has become so powerful with its viral nature that succeeding in this arena may become a make or break deal for your website. If you plan to harness it, you might as well do it properly. Here are just a few tips.

1. Link Bait – The content on your site should be stuff that’s interesting and/or useful, the type that other people would want to link to and share with their friends. There are many ways to do this: having a blog on your site, offering free white papers, gathering breaking news, how-to articles, pictures, videos, statistics, and collections of multiple resources and tools.

2. Others First Policy – A common mistake rookies commit (including myself when I was starting out), is that they submit their own content to social media sites exclusively, right from the start. That’s a no-no. Build your reputation first as a source of great sites within the communities of these sites. Digg or Stumble other people’s content. Only when you get yourself a sizeable following should you start submitting your own.

3. Presentation – Now when you send other people to your site, make sure they’ll like what they see. Great content badly presented will not be terribly effective, negating all your hard work. So, make sure your ads, if any, don’t clutter up your pages. Check for the site design’s compatibility to major browsers and screen sizes. Add life to your pages by including relevant images. To make reading easier for your visitors, break the content down to sections and highlight the titles.

4. Buttons – All the popular social bookmarking sites have their own little buttons you could put at either the top or bottom of your post. If you’re using Wordpress or some other CMS, make them part of your template.

5. Discuss – Social media sites have their own groups and forums. Try to join the discussions on topics related to your site. If there are questions you can answer, by all means offer your take on things. This helps to boost your ranking among the community. In forums that permit it, you can put a link to your site on your signature.

6. Reciprocate – If someone Diggs your article or posts it on a forum, write a thank you note to that person. If he or she has a blog, try to see if you like any of the entries and return the favor. You can also ask if this person wants to exchange links, which is mutually beneficial for climbing the search engine rankings.

The keyword here is “social”. To be able to take advantage of social bookmarking sites, you have to become a part of the community, learn their culture, and use your knowledge to play the game (following the rules, of course). In social media, there are regular users and power users. When regular users submit a page, they get usually get modest traffic. In contrast, when power users submit a page, they are likely to generate traffic that would make servers cry. The difference? Power users have many friends within the community, and when they talk, people listen.

How do you become a power user?

1. Observe. Choose your preferred social bookmarking site and particular niche, then subscribe to it. The more specific the category, the better. Get a feel for the trends. Know what works and what doesn’t.

2. Keep ahead. Also, subscribe to the top blogs or sites related to your niche. Your RSS reader should have at least 20 of those. Some of these are probably among the most dugg sites already.

3. Branding. Join the site using a short catchy username, and an equally memorable avatar.

4. Get personal. Go to the Upcoming section and try to digg the ones you think will make it to the top. More importantly, be the first one to add comment of support. Add them as friend and check their profiles constantly to digg their other submissions. If you do this, they’ll most likely return the favor.

5. Test. Once you’ve accumulated about 50 friends or so, start digging posts from your own blog, one at a time. Don’t spam or you’ll get banned. Only your best posts should be dugg. See how much diggs you can get automatically, and how close you can get to Digg’s homepage. You might need to ask a little help from your friends first so that they know about your site. If you fall short of the number of diggs needed, just go back to #4 and expand your network. Remember, it’s all about being social.