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Android

2011-11-04T22:25:00.000-07:00

Android

Operating System (OS) made by:
Google, Open Handset Alliance (mostly cellphone manufacturers), and the Open Source community. Android is still being released by Google. It is open source but it is still under strong guidance from Google. It is not the wild wild west like open source Linux that has no central control. Android has the advantage of BOTH open source and central control of a powerful and innovative company.
Phone carrier / network:
Depending on phone manufacturer: You can now choose Android phones from ALL 4 major U.S. networks: T-Mobile (GSM), Sprint (CDMA), Verizon (CDMA), AT&T (GSM) or by a prepaid carrier such as Criket by Leap Wireless (coming in 2010). By February 2010, Android was supported by 60 phone carriers worldwide.

4G data network.

4th generation cellular standard for digital data that is much faster than current 3G network. This give your 4G device a full broadband speed similar to home’s Cable-Modem or DSL connection.

Yes.

If you are with Sprint 4G “Wi-Max” network. Verizon will have its 4G “LTE” network by summer 2011. No word about AT&T. T-Mobile uses a high speed HSPA+ (4G equivalent) network and it is available now.

First cellphone to utilized the 4G capability . (4.3” screen, 1GHz).

Second phone 4G phone will be the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S Pro (4” screen with slideout keyboard) for Sprint.

Hardware design:

HTC, Sony, Motorola, Samsung, LG, Garmin, Dell, Archos, Acer, Asus, Kyocera, and the list is growing.

This is one significant advantage over the iPhone: CHOICES.

Number of phones make and models to choose from (cumulative total):

2007: Number of Android phones = 0

2008: Number of Android phones = 1

2009: Number of Android phones = 8

2010: Number of Android phones = 25

Above total does not include those models that come in different colors or any different models sold outside the U.S. 4 largest network.

Where can I run my apps?

Everywhere.

Manufacturers are making many devices not limited only to cellphones. Android OS is now running in cellphones, tablets, Android cars, HDTV, desktop phones, microwave oven, washing machine, set-top boxes for satellite and cable TV. Hopefully in the near future, we will see this in specialized field such as medical equipment, manufacturing, scientific, aviation, etc.

Text Entry: (Touch-screen or keyboard?)

Both: Touch-screen or slide-out keyboard.

All of them have touchscreen virtual on-screen keyboard but several phones also have a slideout physical keyboard as well.

Some people love the physical keyboard while others don’t. With Android, you have the choice and that choice is yours.

Processor or CPU (Central Processing Unit):

Depending on manufacturer, from 500 MHz ARM Cortex A8 to 528 MHz Qualcomm processor to 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor with 512 MB of processor’s RAM. This is almost twice the power and speed of the iPhone’s processor.

New upcoming HTC Scorpion is rumored to have either a Qualcomm 1.5GHz, or perhaps the new dual-core 1.2GHz Snapdragon processor.

GPU (Graphic Processing Unit):

samsung i9000 running Android can compute 90 million triangles per second.

Adobe Flash:

Yes.

Full support for latest Adobe Flash 10.1 on Android 2.2 (Froyo).

Syncing (synchronizing):

Android devices can sync wirelessly, continuously, and to multiple services. It could also sync by plugging in should you choose to do so.

Example, Apps are available to allow user to sync their Android phone to an older Palm Desktop software or Microsoft Exchange server.

Camera resolution:

Most older Android phones support a 3.2 Megapixel camera. It varies from 2 Megapixel (LG Etna) to 5 Megapixel (Motorola DROID) to 8 Megapixel (HTC EVO 4G, HTC Incredible, Motorola DROID X)

Take picture in the dark:

Many phones now come with a built-in LED flash. Some with 2 built-in LED flash like the HTC Incredible.

The new Motorola Milestone XT720 (coming) will have a more powerful Xenon flash found on real cameras.

GPS

Yes, since the first Android phone.

There is a free Android app that allows you to do voice recognition turn-by-turn GPS navigation using Satellite and Street View. You can simply use voice command and say “Navigate to the museum with the King Tut exhibit in San Francisco” and this app will figure it out for you. Don’t need specific address or go through Point-of-Interest list.

Multitasking (ability to run multiple apps at the same time):

Yes from day one (since 2008), on all applications and background services. See below for specific example.

Google Voice:

Allows user to make a Voice over IP (VoIP) phone call over the network connection. This means you can make free long distance and extremely low International calls using local cellular or simply using a Wi-Fi connection. If you rely solely on Wi-Fi, you don't even have to pay for cellular phone bill to make phone calls. In addition to VoIP, Google Voice allows you managed your voice mail and the routing of your phone number.

Between Laptop and Desktop

2009-08-05T22:18:00.000-07:00

The main advantage of a laptop over a desktop is that a laptop is portable. You can take a laptop anywhere with you, so it can be used at any time, although laptops do require a mains adaptor in case the battery runs out. Choosing a laptop with a long battery life may be solve this problem.

Laptops also take up less space, and can look neater than a desktop PC. A laptop may generally be more personal, especially as you can carry it around with you anytime. Desktop PC's seem more suited to family use.

Laptop PC's also have an inbuilt mouse, though you can still choose to use a external mouse if you prefer. Laptop keyboards tend to be more compact and not as bulky as desktop PC keyboards.

The only disadvantage of a laptop PC over a desktop PC is the fact that laptops are much more expensive, so if you're looking for a cheaper option then a desktop PC may be a better choice.

But Laptop computers have come down in price significantly over the past few years, and compared to their desktop cousins, performance of this tier of mobile devices now rivals their larger counterparts. With the major computer manufacturers are becoming increasingly power-conscious, laptop users can now be power users. Increased competition among computer companies like Dell, HP, Toshiba, and Apple, has forced them to lower prices and offer greater flexibility in design and specifications of laptops. Whether you use your laptop to create music, edit movies, or just to check your e-mail, you can custom order a laptop to suit your specific needs.

And now i use laptop, i buy Hewlett-Packard CQ60-220US - Compaq Presario - Black several month ago, Product Description HP Compaq Presario CQ60-220US Notebook features: Intel Pentium Dual-Core T3400 2.16GHz - 15.6" WXGA - 2GB DDR2 SDRAM - 250GB HDD - DVD-Writer (DVD-RAM/±R/±RW) - Fast Ethernet, Wi-Fi - Windows Vista Home Premium - Black General Specifications: Manufacturer: Hewlett-Packard Manufacturer Part Number: NB048UA#ABA Brand Name: HP Product Line: Presario Product Series: CQ60-200 Product Model: NB048UA Product Name: Compaq Presario CQ60-220US.
It's work well for me, with no complain.
So What do you think desktop or laptop after read this?

10 Of The Best SEO Keyword Selector Tools!

2009-05-08T11:25:00.000-07:00

Using appropriate keywords are immensely crucial to the ranking of the site you are working on. Imagine a site which has the coolest Flash applications, great and unique content, the best products and services. However, without appropriate keywords, it would hardly ever have a good rank in the Google SERPs! And what about domains and keywords listed in them? This is why Keyword selector tools help us in understanding and analyzing the market while also capitalizing on its benefits.

Mentioned below is a list of 10 best keyword selector tools for SEO in alphabetical order:

Ask: Run a search for say, 'Search Engine Optimization' in Ask.com. On the left side of the SERPs, you will find a segment titled 'Narrow Your Search,' that has links to all many search terms related to 'Search Engine Optimization'. Use these as keywords. Ask gives you refined SERPs through searching further with this feature. However, many may find this time-consuming. Also, it does not feature volume of traffic.

Compete: Compete offers three main features Keyword referral, Site referral and Compare sites. Keyword referral tells the most recommended domains for certain search terms and queries. In site referral, you tupe in a domain to find out the most referred phrases or search terms. And, in compare sites, you type in 2 domains to know the comparison for keyword referrals. With compete, you do gain a lot of insight on how your competition is faring but it doesn't give you ideas on how to take advantage of the data you get.

In case you don't have other alternative analysis tools and you do not mind paying up, its good enough. Else, don't.

Digital point's Keyword suggestion Tool: Digital point's Keyword suggestion Tool incorporates the results of both Overture and Wordtracker's free tool. When you type a phrase, say 'Search Engine Optimization,' and press enter, the site returns two tabular lists of both Overture & Wordtracker information. When you think about it, there couldn't have been a better tool as no keyword is better than the one that brings in most traffic as Overture's tool shows daily results while Wordtracker's free tool shows results of every 6 months.

Again, as it feature's Wordtracker's free tool, the results are limited.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool: The Google Adwords Keyword Tool benefits not just Google AdWords advertisers & AdSense publishers but laypeople like us SEO professionals too. As soon as you type a query, say "Search Engine optimization," it gives long tabular list of keyword variations. Okay, no great shakes! Its the next features, that bring home 1st prize- Search volume and average search volume. It shows how the potential keyword you will use is faring in comparison to 'Search Volume' and 'Avg. Search Volume.'

Google Suggest labs: When it first emerged, I thought it was a really nifty tool. Not only does it try to complete the term for you, it also shows the number of results for each keyword. Obviously, it goes without saying that these are helpful keyword alternatives.

As for its disadvantage, Google search toolbar offers almost the same features now.

Google Trends Labs: Type two terms, say "Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Optimisation" in the query box and it gives a graphical representation about those 2 terms. You can put in 5 search terms at one go. You can also find out about the relevance of the search terms as it displays the frequency in which the respective topics have appeared in Google News. Additionally, it also tells in which location, people have searched for them most. Beyond this, it serves no benefits.

The disadvantage is that, only popular terms are served here. Not good if you are looking for a long tail!

Keyword Discovery Tool: Keyword Discovery is one of the more popular keyword selector tools. It has many excellent features and if you are willing to cough up $49.95 per month, you can get over 1800 phrases!

Keyword Discover Tool lets you search specific results of keyword terms in different countries. For eg- A search for 'search engine optimization' in Australia had '9,164' results while in the UK its had just '16'. This tool is helpful if you want to export keyword data and then later import keyword data into other tools that will provide this kind of intelligence.

MS Adlabs Search Funnels: Use this in Internet Explorer and not in Firefox, as more features are available in the former. Type a query and choose from Funnel in or Funnel out. Funnel in will run a search where the results will show all things users searched for before say, typing "Search Engine Optimization". In the outgoing funnel, the results show is a search that starts with the keyword; for example, an outgoing funnel for "Search Engine Optimization" displays all the queries that customers searched after searching for "Search Engine Optimization". The main benefit of Search Funnel is that you can visualize and study behaviour of prospective clients' incoming and outgoing search terms.

Disadvantage is that, it can take long to learn and use.

NicheBot: Nichebot's results combines the intelligence of Overture, Keyword Discovery and Wordtracker. That's not all, besides the aforementioned three, you can perform 3 more searches on Thesaurus, Lateralus and Google ranking. In simple words, for $9.95, you can have results of 6 searches and that is really a good deal.

However, Nichebot can get slow sometimes and it would only be good to use if it was little cheap!

Word Tracker's Free Tool: Granddaddy of all. Wordtracker is home to 340 million search queries. Use it to discover the most appropriate keywords for your website. This even features a misspelling search which helps you find misspelled keywords. This will ensure your website ranks high in SERPs.

The biggest disadvantage is that, its not for free.

Yahoo! Buzz: As the name suggests, Yahoo! Buzz provides readers and everyone with the latest stories, most searched items, top daily searches and the top percentage movers. SEO can take advantage of these features by analyzing the results. This way, you know which domains to register for.

As helpful as it is, remember that it will only benefit you if you are seeking the 'percentage of users searching for that subject' within the US alone.

What do we use at PageTraffic for keyword research? Our favorites are

Ask, Digital point's Keyword suggestion Tool, Google Adwords Keyword Tool, MS Adlabs Search Funnels and Word Tracker.

Keyword Best Practices: the Seven Habits of Highly Successful Search Engine Marketing

2009-05-07T08:48:00.000-07:00

When I first wrote about the seven habits of effective SEM, my primary motivation was to point out that keyword selection was not the end all, be all of SEM. I have seen too many people waste too much of their day trying to come up with that killer ‘long tail’ keyword, instead of spending their time more wisely on other equally important aspects of SEM. Indeed, I sometimes wonder whether keyword selection still deserves to be a top seven SEM technique, since the search engines continue to ramp up their broad matching technology (see, for example, Google’s recent “advanced broad match” announcement and Yahoo’s new terms and conditions which allow them to optimize your accounts for you), making it more and more difficult to find keywords where your competitors are not.

In the end, I concluded that keywords are indeed still important, just not as important as they once were. So here are my best practices for keywords:

1. Create Basic Keywords. Synonyms, action prefixes and suffixes, runons and misspellings, plurals (Google only). Before you start investing in expensive keyword research tools (some of which can cost up to $30,000 a year!), I recommend that you simply brainstorm a basic set of keywords. There are five types of keyword sets that every campaign should have. These are:

a. Root terms. This is the most basic keyword that relates to your campaign. If you are buying keywords for a mortgage lead campaign, this would include words like “mortgage”, “mortgage rates” and “mortgage quotes.”

b. Synonyms. Alternative words that basically mean the same thing as your root terms. Again, thinking about mortgages, this might include “home loans”, “refinancing”, and “home equity.”

c. Action Prefixes and Suffixes. These are words that you can append to the front or back of a root term or suffix that user might type in to further qualify their query. There are two types of prefixes/suffixes: general and category-specific. A general prefix would be something like “buy”, “find”, or “best.” A category-specific prefix might include a geographic region, a qualifying statement “bad credit”, or a commercial name like “Wells Fargo.” Note that the most generic prefixes and suffixes (like “the”) have now been almost entirely broad-matched out of existence, so if you see a prefix or suffix getting no traffic, this may be the reason (and you should probably delete that keyword to clean up your account).

d. Run-ons and Misspellings. Like generic prefixes and suffixes, the utility of run-ons and misspellings is much less than it once was. Still, you can sometimes get a few cheap clicks by creating words like “mortgagerates” and “refiancing.” You should put these in their own ad groups, especially if you are using dynamic keyword insertion (DKI) in your ad text. I recommend that you don’t get too carried away with run-ons and misspellings – you should limit this practice to the highest volume keywords in your account.

e. Plurals. There can be significantly different user behavior on a singular versus plural keyword (see further discussion below). As such, you need to make sure that all of your top keywords include both iterations. Note that this is not necessary for Yahoo, as Yahoo does not differentiate between singular and plural.

If you create five root terms, five synonyms, 10 prefixes and suffixes, and use plurals, this will result in a list of 200 keywords. Add in another 20 misspellings and you are up to 220 keywords. Add in all 50 states, specific cities, and combining prefixes and suffixes on the same keyword, and you can see how these five simple rules can quickly build a keyword set for you without ever touching a fancy keyword tool!

2. Don’t Overdo It. While it may be true that the keyword “Pacifica California Subprime Refinancing Interest Rates Mortgage Companies” will not be specifically purchased by many of your competitors, it is no longer true that you alone will show up on this keyword should you be the only one to buy it. As I have noted numerous times in the past, the search engine “broad matching” algorithms have gotten increasingly better at aggregating tail keywords into the same auctions with head terms.

In the past, there were two advantages to tail terms – first, that you could show up by yourself on that keyword (no longer the case with broad matching), and second, that you could improve your click through rate (CTR) for that specific query and pay less for high position. The second may still be true to a limited degree, but you aren’t going to be able to pay $.10 on a six token (word) keyword phrase and outperform a big competitor paying $5.00 on a head keyword.

Moreover, Google has explicitly stated that keywords beyond five tokens will be automatically considered “low quality” by their Quality Score algorithm. The rationale behind this (which I don’t necessarily buy, by the way) was recently summarized as follows:

“very long phrases and very low volume keywords well down the long tail are not necessarily an advantage to a marketer, as they don’t reflect how “real users” normally search. The sweet spot of the long tail is 2-to-4-word phrase. 5-8 word phrases, not so much. Among other things, Google will have such limited data on these, they have no choice but to assign slightly worse quality scores to them.”

The other hidden danger of millions of obscure keywords is the risk of either slow bleeds or sudden keyword explosions. A slow bleed occurs when you have 50 or 100 keywords costing you $2 or $3 a month. These keywords fly below the radar but gradually can cost you thousands of dollars a year. Unless you have a bid management system that has the ability to cluster similarly-situated keywords, you are unlikely to discover these bleeders.

A sudden explosion occurs when one of your random long-tail keywords is suddenly matched on a major search, or a news event causes that keyword to get a spike in traffic. As an example, a few years ago I bought the word “Pope mortgage”, which happens to be the name of a city with the word mortgage appended to the end. When Pope John Paul II died, this keyword received a huge rush of unprofitable clicks in a short time.

All this being said, there is still value to the long tail. For most non-retailers (i.e., companies that don’t have thousands of products for sale), a good rule of thumb is to have somewhere between 500 and 5000 keywords in your account. If, however, you find yourself patting yourself on the back for having developed three million keywords, you are living in the past and need to start living in 2008!

3. Keep Them Targeted. Although Google allows 2000 keywords in an ad group, this does not mean you should strive to pack as many keywords into as few ad groups as possible. Indeed, in most instances, you will be better served by having few keywords in many ad groups. There are two primary reasons for narrowly targeted ad groups: CTR and Quality Score. Your CTR will increase if your keywords are closely related to your ad text. Segmenting similar keywords into well-defined ad groups enables you to create very relevant ad text.

Your Quality Score will also benefit from well-defined ad groups. Google rewards advertisers who send a targeted keyword to a targeted ad text to a targeted landing page. When you combine a better Quality Score and higher CTR, you have solved two of the three factors that impact your position on Google (the other being max CPC). This can enable you to pay a lot less than your competitors for the same keywords.

Just to be clear, you could take this targeting approach to the extreme by literally having a one-to-one relationship between a keyword and an ad group. If you have the ability to automatically create relevant ad text and automatically make bid adjustments, this might makes sense. If you are doing most of your work manually, however, the management costs associated with thousands of ad groups may not be worth the effort.

4. Track at the Keyword Level. Keywords are the DNA of your SEM campaigns. As such, you need to measure their performance on a keyword by keyword basis. Whenever I see a tracking URL that reads www.domain.com/?campaign=GoogleAdWords I know that the campaign is not being properly optimized. Individual keywords will vary tremendously in terms of performance. I often use the example of the word “mortgage rate” and “mortgage rates” to prove this point. Someone who types in “mortgage rate” is most likely looking for today’s current mortgage rate; someone who types in “mortgage rates” is looking to get multiple mortgage quotes. Depending on your business, the conversion rate between these two keywords can vary dramatically.

5. Test Match Types. Google offers three match types – broad, phrase, and exact – and you should make a point to test keywords on all of these match types. In most cases you will find that your exact match keyword has the highest conversion rate but also costs you the most with the least amount of traffic, and that the exact opposite is true for broad match. But every account is different and you need to test performance for your specific campaign. Note that I don’t count match types as part of the total number of keywords in your campaign – in other words, if you have 5000 keywords but you match each of these three times, your account would have a total of 15,000 keywords, which I still think is acceptable without “overdoing it.”

6. Be Negative. The number one mistake I see novice search marketers make is not paying enough attention to negative keywords. As the search engines continue to push the limits of broad matching, your best defense against getting a lot of unproductive clicks is to buy tons and tons of negative keywords. There are two ways to create negative keywords. The first way is to create a generic list of negatives that will apply to almost any keyword. This could include words like “lawsuit, complaint, refund, scam, do it yourself, free, sex, UK, etc” – this will vary of course depending on your business.

The second way to create negative keywords is to use the Google keyword tool and look for words that might be semantically related to your product but are in actuality not at all related. A funny example of this would be to exclude the word “one” from an advertisement for “night stands” that are used for bedroom furniture. I consider the creation of negative keywords to be just as important as the creation of actual keywords.

Keyword Research Techniques - The Strategy to Get High Ranking Keyword With Less Competition

2009-05-05T23:30:00.000-07:00

At the end of article you would have learned the techniques and strategies for getting the best keywords in less time. Assuming you are into article marketing or even PPC, then I guess you will need to perform plenty of keyword research. There is need for you to do a thorough and prolonged keyword research in order to evaluate the campaign of your competitors, creating a number of keywords for the niche of your choice and discovering new niches or even the product of your choice.

As someone who is into these, I must tell you that keyword research takes a lot of time and it can even take up to a month or more to get the required keyword for your internet business, niche or campaign. But if you use a keyword research tool, you are assured of getting your result in a fast manner and most importantly you will get the targeted and less competitive in the niche of your choice.

All over the internet, there are varieties of keyword research tool, some of them are AdWord Analyzer, Wordtracker, Keyword Elite, Micro Niche Finder or even HitTail, etc. But the question here is: are they worth your hard earned money? Investing your money into some keyword research can be a waste of money and time.

As for me, one of the best keyword research tools I recommend is micro niche finder. I find it handy, easy and the results I get leads to profitable niches. This is due to it has varieties of features and functions which other keyword research tools don't have.

Are you into article marketing, Pay Per Click advertising, AdSense or SEO or even affiliate marketing, you need this software in order to skyrocket your earning. It will be able to evaluate your competitors PPC campaign, create a big list of profitable keywords quick and it will even save you time, so you won't invest all of your time doing manual keyword research. You just type the keyword of your choice and it will return thousands of similar keyword, both long and short tail keywords.

If you are into internet marketing and you haven't got this tool yet, then now is the time you should get it in order to fill the gap where you are not doing well.

Keyword Research Techniques and Strategies

Assuming you are into marketing a niche about an acne product. Let's say you want perform a search using the keyword "cure acne". Most people will just plug in the keyword "cure acne" in the search box for the keyword stuffing. As someone who is very experienced in this, the best way to get the top keywords out of this is to simply plug in the keyword "acne" in the search box. It will return similar keywords that pertains to acne both relevant and irrelevant ones. You should keep a pen and paper by your side for this. Glance through the result of the acne and select the words that pertain to curing acne like cure acne, treat acne, stop acne, fight acne, acne remedy, acne relieve, deal with acne, overcome acne and acne help etc. These keywords listed above are the keywords for solving a problem, avoid keywords like symptoms of acne, causes of acne etc. Though they are useful, as you are marketing a product about the remedy of a disease it is better to be more targeted here. Still plug the keywords I listed above.

If you continue plugging the keywords and searching them you will end up getting long tail keywords with little competition. You should get Micro Niche Finder, it is the best keyword for uncovering this little and hot niches.

Use High-Ranking and Relevant Keywords

2009-05-05T23:26:00.000-07:00

If you want targeted traffic, then create several web pages, each focusing on just one or two high ranking keywords. The pages should contain high quality and relevant content. Such pages are liked by the search engines and your web pages will rank much higher in the SERP for their keywords because they contain targeted content.
You will thus have many high ranking web pages for different high-ranking keywords instead of having a single page containing plenty of keywords.
If you are selling products and services, then create a unique page for each product and service with its own specific keywords. In this way, you can create targeted traffic for every product and service separately.
This means more targeted traffic to your website, each traffic coming from a unique set of keywords, and possibly more avenues of online income. The other advantage of this method is that, you will have more high-ranking pages in the search engines for the given keywords.

Google PageRank (PR) vs. Alexa Traffic Rank Correlation (Regression) Analysis

2009-05-04T13:19:00.000-07:00

Abstract: a statistical study (regression analysis) of a random sample of 102 websites has shown that a strong relationship (correlation) exists between Google PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rank.

Introduction

Google PageRank (GPR) and Alexa Traffic Rank (ATR) are two different measures of a website's success. As you know (shame on you if you don't), simply speaking, GPR measures the number of links to the site, while ATR measures the site's traffic. (Official detailed descriptions of these two indicators are available at Google Technology and Alexa Help pages.)

Correlation between ATR and GRP has become my concern after I visited two websites in a row, namely CSS Zen Garden and Mail.ru. The first one, a specialized CSS design project, has Google Page Rank of 8 and Alexa Traffic Rank of over 13 thousand. The second one, a huge Russian portal, had Page Rank of 6, yet ranked 23^rd in Alexa! The question occured, «does traffic affect link popularity?» Interestingly, although Mail.ru is a much more popular portal, CSS Zen Garden obviously had much more quality links pointing to it. This phenomenon can be explained with a look at the nature of CSS Z.G.; the site is oriented at designers, who are likely to have a site and give direct links. Users of Mail.ru, on the other hand, are mortals that want free email, videos, chat, news, etc, and are less likely to put links to the site.

Here is a comparative table:

Site            |  GPR  |   ATR
--------------------------------
CSS Zen Garden  |   8   | 13,138
Mail.ru         |   6   |   23

This difference between the actual real popularity of a portal and the quality links pointing to it created this desire in me to test the statistical correlation between the inbound links and traffic, measured by Google PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rank respectively.

A copy of the original spreasheet is available, yet it does not contain graphs and charts.

The sample

The sample for this analysis consisted of 102 randomly picked websites. I tried to pick sites for this analysis as randomly as possible: I caught myself quering Google for such phrases that I would never ask for, such as "knitting", "nothing", "rotting" and other crazy queries. I tried to randomize the sample as much as I could. Yet I understand that there was a bias, because I was the only one who picked sites.

Many websites from the sample I like and visit daily, yet others I don't even know. To get some of the lower quality sites, I went to a lousy web design studio, and simply randomly clicked sites from their portfolio (most clone-looking 0-2 PR sites are their masterpieces). Note that there was a chance of humar error; my Google Toolbar might have malfunctioned or I could have simply overlooked the value. Complete list of websites is also available.

T-distribution (or Student's T distribution) table I used for my analysis offers .... 70, 80, 100, 150 ... degrees of freedom, among others. The key fact is that it does not offer 98 degrees of freedom. This information is important, since the formula I used needs n-2 degrees of freedom, where n is the sample size. Thus, I used exactly 102 observations purposefully (last two added later) so that I could find the accurate tabular values in Student's T distribution table (so that I deduct 2 from my sample and arrive at 100).

Each sample value (site) had three parameters (dimentions), namely URL, GPR, and ATR. In the initial spreadsheet, each observation also has an ID number and the date of measurement. (Please note, that some of the sites I am sure have changed since the study! Few of the them I run/manage/own/develop. Note the date of measurement.)

Google PageRank Distribution

Normally distributed! From GPR point of view, the sample was almost perfectly distributed, representing the bell-shaped curve. As you can see from the diagram, there was a very little skewness to the right. Mean average was 5.05 and median 5, with dispertion of 7. The coefficient of skewness was as low as 0.06, which means that the sample was quite normally distributed.

For the histogram above, I have chosen each of the 11 PageRank values for each class (exactly 11, not 10, remember that zero is also a separate value).

Alexa Traffic Rank Distribution

For Alexa TR, the distribution was much less normal. The entire sample was significantly skewed right, with as much as 73% observations representing one eighth of the possible values. This vast majority encompassed sites within the first 1,500,000 positions in the rank.

With mean average of 1,245,677.471 and meadian of 109,922, the sample had huge dispersion of 5351667608993.28, range of 10,960,325, and skewness coefficient of 1.47. I have divided the entire sample into 8 classes, with 1,500,000 as a class step, altogether ranging from 0 to 12,000,000.

Obviously, vast majority of the websites from the sample belonged to a minority group, which is a limitation of the study. I should have either gathered sites that were all in the top 2M range, or gathered more lower quality sites.

Analysis and methods

The initial idea was to test whether the ATR actually correlates to GPR. Thus, the null hypothesis H₀ was, «no relationship exists between traffic popularity measured by Alexa Traffic Rank and link popularity measured by Google Page Rank». The alternative hypethesis H_f was, «there is a correlation between Google PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rank». The purpose of the study was to reject the null hypothesis and to prove there truly is a correlation between the two site success indicators. (I must remind that the initial CSS vs. Mail encounter that pushed me toward this analysis showed that there was hardly any correlation between these indicators.)

Simple regression analysis and t-distribution significance test was used for the study.

Regression analysis

The two arrays of data (each of 102 observations) showed rather high negative correlation. The ultimate r (correlation coefficient) was equal to -0.5. The best fit line's equation was y = -439630,50x + 3469690,61. I had Alexa TR on the Y axis (and Google PR on X axis, respectively).

The data points are concentrated vertically at the 11 imaginary lines of PageRank values, because Google's rank only has 11 possible values. This phenomenon creates huge gaps in this discrete data array. Still, the tendency is obvious! There is a strong visible correlation between the two sets of data.

Hypothesis testing (significance test)

Regardless of the visual correlation, I had to test whether this was a chance occurrence, or a statistically significant phenomenon. As I mentioned earlier, I used t-distribution for significance test. The test statistic was r/√[(1-r²)/(n-2)], where r is the regression coefficient and n is the sample size. The number of degrees of freedom is n-2. I used standard significance level α=0.05. The table value of t_{0.05; 100df} appeared 1.984. Thus, with a two-tailed test, if the absolute value of the calculated value of t is greater than the absolute value of tabular t, I can reject the null hypothesis (hypotheses are described above). The calculated value of t was -5.83125. |-5.83125| is greater than |1.984|, and therefore we reject the null hypothesis, and prove that there is statistical significance to claim that correlation between Google PageRank and Alexa Traffic Rank truly exists and is not a random chance phenomenon.

Outliers and interesting observations

Two potential outliers are at the top of the graph; one at point [6; ~11,000,000] and the other one (yet less likely to be considered an outlier) at [3; ~10,400,00]. These two, however, are potential graphical outliers, visible with the naked eye.

Three questionable points, which are not that visible, yet are very hard to believe in, are concentrated near the origin. Especially the one right next to the origin (the bottom point on the Y axis), which is a website with zero Page Rank, yet relatively high traffic. This is an interesting phenomenon, which shows a popular website, with nearly no inlinks. (The site is Red Bean, and at the date measurement on Nov 29th, 2007, it had 0 PR and 27,214 ATR. Yet, at the moment of writing this article, I see it has PR of 7.)

Conclusion

Regardless of the limitations of the test, the study showed very strong relationship between Google PR and Alexa Traffic Rank.

If you notice errors of typos, please leave a comment. The copy of the original spreadsheet is available at Google Spreadsheets.

What Does Your Alexa Rank Mean?

2009-05-04T13:11:00.000-07:00

Alexa is a funny little ranking engine. Your fluctuations in rank can be pretty dramatic until Alexa gets a handle on your site.

They have changed their algorithm to, supposedly, better reflect and predict all your traffic. This means they no longer depend on simply guestimating your rank based on Alexa toolbar users who visit your site.

After the update I went from 32,000 to 60,000+ and now I believe they rank me well over 100,000. Yet, my traffic continues to grow.

The important thing to remember is that Alexa is one of several indicators of your site’s traffic health. Of course, you know the exact number of uniques you get each day from your own stats. That’s the main indicator, above all else, you should use to gauge how you’re doing.

It is quite possible Alexa doesn’t know enough about the traffic that is hitting your site because it is too low at this point to estimate more accurately in their rankings.

With the traffic level you have now, my focus would be on more marketing, deeply important and interesting posts (linkbait) for your niche, more commenting and networking on other blogs and social sites, and link building.

Regardless of the quirks in Alexa’s particular ranking system, you want to set a benchmark of a solid 100 visitors per day and then shoot for 500, 1000 and beyond.

Eventually Alexa should reflect this progress in their rankings.

There's More to SEO than Rankings

2009-05-04T01:09:00.000-07:00

Perhaps one of the biggest misconceptions in SEO is that ranking at Google and Yahoo is all that counts in search engine optimization. Potential clients come to me with a single goal: "Get me a top-ten ranking at Google." Some will also mention MSN, and a few will rhyme off a list of search engines and want to rank well at the top 200 of them.

It is time to separate fact from fiction.

Yes, I can get you a top-ten placement at Google. But...

If the placement is for "dirty brown shoes", it probably won't help your shoe store one bit, even if I get you the first place ranking. Few people are actually searching for that term.
Being number ten might not help much either, depending on the term. People searching for "Essential Nectar liquid vitamins", will probably click on the first result they see, or at least on one of the "above-the-fold" results that do not require scrolling. On the other hand, someone searching for "liquid vitamins" might check through two pages of results to familiarize herself with the options available.
If your title tag reads like a cheap list of search terms, it will not be enticing. For instance, if it reads: "vitamins, liquid vitamins, multivitamins, multi-vitamins", you might skip over it in favor of the next result that reads "Liquid vitamins from the Liquid Vitamin Supplements Store".
If your description tag is a mess, people will more likely skip over your listing, even if it does rank number one, in favor of one that sounds like what they are looking for. Google and others use the description tag usually when the term searched for is found in it, so make sure to include your key search terms in a description tag that actually reads well.

Predicting traffic from SEO results

I recently responded to a forum question, which went something like this: My site ranks number one for this term at this engine. The term is searched this many times per day, and the engine has this percentage marketshare. Can I expect this many visitors?

That's not an SEO challenge; that's a math problem: searches x marketshare = visitors

I responded with a few factors that override mathematics in the SEO game, including the site's title tag and description tag, as well as whether the term lends itself to scrolling. I also pointed out that it depends on the title tags and description tags of the competition, too.

Another factor that makes predicting traffic difficult is the abandonment factor - how many people click on none of the results because they get interrupted or confused, or abandon the search for a new one because they find themselves off-topic or searching too broadly.

It also depends on how many sponsored links there are and how they are marked. Often at Yahoo and Lycos, for example, there are so many ads that the average searcher might never scroll a screen or two to see the organic (natural) results.

And, of course, it also depends on the color of the walls in the room the searcher is clicking from, the weather outside and how well they slept last night. But there is little you can do about that.

What you can do is to work with your SEO consultant to choose the most effective search terms for your business and make sure he develops a title tag and description tag that sell to both humans and the search engines. Then make sure he is monitoring not just the rankings for your key search terms, but also the description used by each of the search engines.

A good ranking at Google and Yahoo is just one measure of your SEO consultant's success. A more complete evaluation is that he is your partner in building long-term, targeted traffic

The Fatal Attraction of Online Marketers

2009-05-03T01:06:00.000-07:00

Suppose you were offered 263 links coming into your website from 263 other websites all in one fell swoop. Everybody knows that the more inbound links you have, the higher you will rise in the search engine rankings.

Suppose further that these were real links from real websites that actually sold real products and services - no cheap FFAs throwing come-ons on a street corner on the bad side of town.

Suppose further that this offer included the reciprocal linking code for all 263 sites that just had to be cut and pasted into your website. Piece of cake.

Does it get any sexier than this? Are you drooling yet? Does the sweet perfume of "ka-ching!" float around your head? Is this love at first site?

Well, no, it's actually a fatal attraction, one you had best resist. One that could infect your website with deadly communicable diseases.

I resisted this very offer not long ago, and you should resist anything similar. Here's why:

The link pages on these sites are essentially link farms. The more links on a page, the less value they have in a search engine's eyes, especially when you start approaching or even passing 100 links. And don't expect any direct traffic from this kind of link, either.
There is a technical term for identical pages within a site or on multiple sites. It is called "duplicate content", and it is strictly verboten by the search engines. Here is what Google says about them: "Don't create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content."
Do some quick math. You have 289 outgoing links, 263 of them are labeled "bad neighborhood websites" by the search engines ... so bad that they might even have been banned. What do you think will happen to your rankings?

Sadly, many webmasters fall for such tantalizing come-ons without thinking carefully about what the repercussions might be.

There is a lot of truly bad advice floating around the Internet on how to trick the search engines or find a short-cut to high rankings. This is one example of how following poor advice and hopping into bed with the wrong partner could kill your business.

Here is a good rule of thumb. Two's company. Three's a crowd. Four or more will get you arrested. OK, so I just made that up, and it's not very elegant. But it will keep you from falling for that inevitable offer with the come-hither eyes and the deadly communicable disease.

Three things you should NEVER do in SEO

2009-05-02T01:05:00.000-07:00

Three things you should NEVER do
(even if some slick-talking "expert"
tells you it will cost you only $499
and will guarantee you gaggles of customers)

A webmistress asked me recently how much I would charge to optimize her site for the search engines. I took a glance at her site, and the first thing I found was a hidden link to an association she was part of.

I asked her why the link was there. She told me it was "for the search engines." It never ceases to amaze me how much really bad - I mean absolutely horrible - advice is floating around the Internet.

She never did hire me, but she did walk away with one free piece of advice that I now share with you: "Remove that link ASAP." Hidden links and hidden text are big trouble and something you should never do.

A hidden link is simply a link the search engine robots would follow, but is not visible to the naked eye. It could be a one pixel by one pixel graphic the same color as the background. Hidden text could be keyword written in the same color as the background.

If a search engine detects text in the same color as the background, it might penalize or even ban your site. In fact, one search engine expert has even suggested that if your background is, say, white, and you have a black table with white text on your page, that search engines would read that as hidden text (white background, white text) even though the text is clearly visible in the black table. Hmm. I will have to revisit my own site's colors.

Why are hidden links and hidden text bad? Because they try to cheat the rules. Cheating is bad, and search engines do not like playing with cheaters.

Duplicate pages are also a no-no. Search engines like original content made for human visitors. Five pages with the same article are seen as spamming, even if you did change "bicycle repair" to "fix your bike" in the second version and to "bike repair" in the third.

I was asked to exchange links with four websites this one person owned. The sites are very wholesome and I believe the webmaster is too. But the link pages on each website are identical: same introductory text and same links in the same order with identical wording each. All it would take is one complain to get all four sites banned, or at very least, severely demoted at Google and other search engines.

Needless to say, I turned down the offer, so that my site would not be associated with a "bad neighborhood".

Why are duplicate pages bad? Because they try to cheat the rules. Cheating is bad, and search engines do not like playing with cheaters.

Doorway pages are also bad. A doorway page is a page carefully designed to do well on search engine results, but is never meant to be used by humans. Often there is then a link to a website or there is some form of redirect.

Why not just optimize your site for the keywords you want, rather than try to trick the search engines? It probably will cost you less to hire a good search engine optimizer, and your website will not get banned.

I was approached by someone offering a combination of doorway pages and link farming (another no-no!). He did not call them by those names, even insisting they were not doorway pages. He wanted a few hundred dollars a month. There's nothing like your friendly neighborhood mortician coming to call when business is slow and bearing his own special brew for you to sample.

Why are doorway pages bad? Because they try to cheat the rules. Cheating is bad, and search engines do not like playing with cheaters.

By the way, "doorway pages" should not be confused with "entry pages". I get lots of my traffic entering through one or another of my articles. But these are real articles with real content, designed for human eyes and optimized for the search engines. This is a good tactic, because it adds content (which is what search engines are looking for).

Hidden links and text, duplicate pages and doorway pages are just a few of the "clever" tactics that can land you in the "Search Engine Slammer". If you spend much time on the Internet, you'll be approached about many others sooner or later.

Here is a simple question to ask yourself: "Would this be helping the search engines deliver the best results, or would it be trying to cheat their rules?" If it feels a little funny, don't try it. Or ask someone who knows.

Search engines are your friends. Be nice to them, and they'll be nice to you. You might just land yourself a berth atop Mount Google.

SEO: Google's Next Big Move archive copy

2009-05-01T01:08:00.000-07:00

By David Leonhardt

(Will your website be ready, or will you be playing catch-up six months too late?

November 2003 might go down in history as the month that Google shook a lot of smug webmasters and search engine optimization (SEO) specialists from the apple tree. But more than likely, it was just a precursor of the BIG shakeup to come.

Google touts highly its secret PageRank algorithm. Although PageRank is just one factor in choosing what sites appear on a specific search, it is the main way that Google determines the "importance" of a website.

In recent months, SEO specialists have become expert at manipulating PageRank, particularly through link exchanges.

There is nothing wrong with links. They make the Web a web rather than a series of isolated islands. However, PageRank relies on the naturally "democratic" nature of the web, whereby webmasters link to sites they feel are important for their visitors. Google rightly sees link exchanges designed to boost PageRank as stuffing the ballot box.

I was not surprised to see Google try to counter all the SEO efforts. In fact, I have been arguing the case with many non-believing SEO specialists over the past couple months. But I was surprised to see the clumsy way in which Google chose to do it.

Google targeted specific search terms, including many of the most competitive and commercial terms. Many websites lost top positions in five or six terms, but maintain their positions in several others. This had never happened before. Give credit to Barry Lloyd of SearchEngineGuide.com for cleverly uncovering the process.

For Google, this shakeup is just a temporary fix. It will have to make much bigger changes if it is serious about harnessing the "democratic" nature of the Web and neutralizing the artificial results of so many link exchanges.

Here are a few techniques Google might use (remember to think like a search engine):

Google might start valuing inbound links within paragraphs much higher than links that stand on their own. (For all we know, Google is already doing this.) Such links are much less likely to be the product of a link exchange, and therefore more likely to be genuine "democratic" votes.
Google might look at the concentration of inbound links across a website. If most inbound links point to the home page, that is another possible indicator of a link exchange, or at least that the site's content is not important enough to draw inbound links (and it is content that Google wants to deliver to its searchers).
Google might take a sample of inbound links to a domain, and check to see how many are reciprocated back to the linking domains. If a high percentage are reciprocated, Google might reduce the site's PageRank accordingly. Or it might set a cut-point, dropping from its index any website with too many of its inbound links reciprocated.
Google might start valuing outbound links more highly. Two pages with 100 inbound links are, in theory, valued equally, even if one has 20 outbound links and the other has none. But why should Google send its searchers down a dead-end street, when the information highway is paved just as smoothly on a major thoroughfare?
Google might weigh a website's outbound link concentration. A website with most outbound links concentrated on just a few pages is more likely to be a "link-exchanger" than a site with links spread out across its pages.

Google might use a combination of these techniques and ones not mentioned here. We cannot predict the exact algorithm, nor can we assume that it will remain constant. What we can do is to prepare our websites to look and act like a website would on a "democratic" Web as Google would see it.

For Google to hold its own against upstart search engines, it must deliver on its PageRank promise. Its results reflect the "democratic" nature of the Web. Its algorithm must prod webmasters to give links on their own merit. That won't be easy or even completely possible. And people will always find ways to turn Google's algorithm to their advantage. But the techniques above can send the Internet a long way back to where Google promises it will be.

The time is now to start preparing your website for the changes to come.

Five SEO Tips To Improve

2009-05-01T01:04:00.000-07:00

By David Leonhardt

"Dear David: I just created a website on baby toy safety. What should I do to make sure gazillions of people find me through the search engines?"

I can't promise you gazillions, but there are a few things you should do to make it easy for search engines to find you. I assume you have already decided to submit your site to the major search engines and directories. I assume that you will develop some sort of linking strategy (hopefully a better strategy than most websites use today). I also assume you will have picked key search terms for all the pages on your website.

Beyond that, here are my top five tips for making your website easy for those "gazillions" to find it.

A picture might be worth a thousand words, but search engines don't read pictures. Make sure your key search terms are written out in text, not part of a graphic title you hire somebody to prepare for you. That also means you should not just show pictures of toys, but also write out the names, and possibly a keyword description with the title.
Have several pages of articles related to your website's topic. Use a different keyword search term for each article. For instance, one article might use frequently the term "safe toys for babies", while another might use the term "baby safety".
What's the URL of your website? Your name won't help you there. Your key search term will. In this instance, I might pick www.baby-toy-safety.com, for example (if that is one of your top keyword phrases). Hire somebody who knows what he is doing to develop the right keyword strategy for you BEFORE you choose your domain name.
What's the title of your page? I don't know how many times I see titles such as "Article" or "Contact us". Don't expect the search engine robots to get all excited about that term. And don't expect anybody to search for that term, either. Much better to title your page "Free article on safe toys for babies" or "Contact the *Baby Toy Expert* today". By the way, this is the single most important place to include your keyword phrases.
What about that navigation menu that appears on every single page of your website? Does it say "Contact the baby toy expert?" Or "about the baby toy expert". Or links about baby toys?" Need I say more?

If your website is about life insurance, you have little hope of hitting the front pages of any search engine. "Life insurance" is such a competitive search engine marketplace. Unless, of course, people are searching for a very specific and rare niche. Even then, I suspect you will need much more than these five tips.

In fact, there are dozens, if not hundreds of things you can do to win the search engine race. These top five search engine optimization tips are a great start, whatever your website is about.

How Search Engines Connect

2009-05-01T01:03:00.001-07:00

Maggie knows how to find what she wants. She lets her fingers do the walking - not in the Yellow Pages, but at Google.com. She wants to learn about bread baking, and you have just written Bread Baking Made Simple, and you sell some great baking tools. The good news is the Google and other search engines exist for one simple reason: to help Maggie find your website.

Google will show Maggie 534,000 resources on "bread baking". Unless she fails to find what she wants on the first page, or top 10 results, she will never find your website listed 124th in the results. (Actually, if she does not find what she wants in the top twenty or thirty results, she is likely to refine her search to "easy bread baking" or "home bread baking").

How do you get into the top 10 results so Maggie can find your website? You might have heard a lot about "search engine optimization" and "ranking analysis" and "algorithms". It all sounds very complex, but it really works on a simple 1 - 2 - 3 principle.

A search engine will show Maggie only resources (websites) it has on record. So make sure to submit your site to the key search engines and directories. You do not need to hire somebody who will charge you big dollars to do this. Nor should you fall for any of the auto-submit software or services. This should be done by hand, and anybody can do it. You can do it yourself.
The search engine will rank highest those websites it feels are most "important". This means you have to show that your website is most important. There are a few simple things you can do. First, make sure you have content. Text content equals importance on the Internet. Links, both coming in and going out, are key. Connectivity equals importance on the Internet. Get listed in the major directories (DMOZ.com, Yahoo.com, Zeal.com, JoeAnt.com, etc.), as this also is a measure of importance.
The search engine will show Maggie the most "relevant" high-ranking resources. Google might rank http://TheHappyGuy.com relatively very high, but it is totally irrelevant to a search for bread baking. How does a search engine know which websites are most relevant for Maggie's search? By the number of times "bread baking" shows up in text on your web page. By the variety of ways it shows up on your page. By number web pages you link to and that link to you with the words "bread baking" included.

Are you ready to roll? Possibly. Some of this you can easily do yourself. But there are three places that are worth spending money to help all the Maggies out there find your website and your book.

The first is choosing the right keywords. It might look simple, but "bread baking" might not even be the best keyword phrase to focus on. It might be "easy bread baking" or "home bread baking". The most searched terms might not be the best, nor the term with the least competition.

The second is to prepare a link strategy. The "link exchange" pages that are getting more popular each day are also becoming less effective each day. Here are just a few of the linking factors that will affect whether Maggie discovers your book:

The total number of incoming and outgoing links
The importance of the sites you link to and from
The relevancy of the sites you link to and from
Which pages on their sites and on yours are being linked
What you include in the incoming and outgoing links
Where on the page the links are placed
How many links are on those pages
How many pages are linked to or have outgoing links
The ratio of links to content on the pages involved

You can implement the strategy yourself, but it is worth hiring somebody to put it together for you. Ask the person what factors she would consider when building a strategy for you. If she does not mention several of the above, your money is better spent elsewhere.

The third place to invest is to have somebody knowledgeable review your html code. Chances are that you have missed numerous opportunities to let the search engines know your website is relevant, and possibly some opportunities to show it is important.

When Babies Goes To Travel

2009-03-17T08:21:00.000-07:00

These simple tips will help you manage your baby gear before
and after you board the airplane and make the entire air travel
experience more pleasant for you and your baby.
Just how are you supposed to make your plane
when you have to haul a baby, car seat, stroller, diaper bag,
carry on bag and more through the airport?
Air travel with baby isn't always easy,
and some of the struggles start before you ever board the plane.

The Car Seat Travel
Car seats are sometimes available for rent,
but you never know what the quality will be on a rental seat,
and the car seat may have been in an accident, allways take my Safety 1st Alpha Omega Elite Convertible Car Seat for my baby
Better safe than sorry

Buy Baby A Seat
I suggest buying baby a ticket and using a car seat on the airplane, no matter the age.
Babies who aren't in car seats can be injured when a parent can't hold on during severe turbulence.
If your flight isn't full, you may be able to take the car seat and use it without buying a ticket,
if seats are available.

Carry On Bags and Diaper Bags
One carry on bag that serves the role of purse,
briefcase and diaper bag is the most pared down choice for air travel.
My favorite Black Backpack Diaper Bag that I can share with baby.
A backpack is easy to carry when your arms are otherwise occupied,
and easily holds diapers, snacks, airline tickets,
identification and even a spare outfit for baby.
Most importantly, a backpack holds plenty of baby gear
and still meets most airline requirements for carry on baggage size.

Strollers An Important things for Travel
did you didnt have a stollers for your baby?, check here for my favorite stoller
Even the smallest babies feel heavy after a long time in your arms,
and toddlers often decide they can't walk any longer at the most inconvenient times.
A stroller solves these problems.
Most infant car seats snap onto a travel system stroller,
making it simple to take both along for the trip.
Otherwise, a lightweight stroller with a carrying strap is easy to haul around,
and might help you make a connecting flight if your toddler's legs give out.

Special Travel Gear for Baby
If you're preparing for a long trip, or you travel a lot, invest in some top of the line baby travel gear to lessen travel hassles. Car seat and stroller combinations let you wheel baby right to the plane and board. Add a set of travel straps to baby's regular car seat and wear it like a backpack. Look for disposable feeding supplies like bibs, bottles, sippy cups and utensils so that you don't have to clean up during your trip. And don't forget to buy a few new toys to keep baby entertained!

hope some tips is usefull for you.

10 Mistakes about search engine optimize (SEO) on your site

2009-02-09T02:47:00.000-08:00

every body know about how important about seo, but sometimes we make a mistakes that we didnt know it, after i read a book about seo, i decide to write about this, hope this helpfull for us.

1. Targetting the wrong keywords
This is a mistake many people make and what is worse – even experienced SEO experts make it. People choose keywords that in their mind are descriptive of their website but the average users just may not search them. For instance, if you have a relationship site, you might discover that “relationship guide” does not work for you, even though it has the “relationship” keyword, while “dating advice” works like a charm. Choosing the right keywords can make or break your SEO campaign. Even if you are very resourceful, you can't think on your own of all the great keywords but a good keyword suggestion tool

2. Ignoring the Title tag
Leaving the tag empty is also very common. This is one of the most important places to have a keyword, because not only does it help you in optimization but the text in your tag shows in the search results as your page title.

3. A Flash website without a html alternative
Flash might be attractive but not to search engines and users. If you really insist that your site is Flash-based and you want search engines to love it, provide an html version.
Search engines don't like Flash sites for a reason – a spider can't read Flash content and therefore can't index it.

4. JavaScript Menus
Using JavaScript for navigation is not bad as long as you understand that search engines do not read JavaScript and build your web pages accordingly. So if you have JavaScript menus you can't do without, you should consider build a sitemap (or putting the links in a noscript tag) so that all your links will be crawlable.

5. Lack of consistency and maintenance
Our friend often encounters clients, who believe that once you optimize a site, it is done foreve. If you want to be successful, you need to permanently optimize your site, keep an eye on the competition and – changes in the ranking algorithms of search engines.

6. Concentrating too much on meta tags
A lot of people seem to think SEO is about getting your meta keywords and description correct! In fact, meta tags are becoming (if not already) a thing of the past. You can create your meta keywords and descriptions but don't except to rank well only because of this.

7. Using only Images for Headings
Many people think that an image looks better than text for headings and menus. Yes, an image can make your site look more distinctive but in terms of SEO images for headings and menus are a big mistake because h2, h2, etc. tags and menu links are important SEO items

8. Ignoring URLs
Many people underestimate how important a good URL is. Dynamic page names are still very frequent and no keywords in the URL is more a rule than an exception. Yes, it is possible to rank high even without keywords in the URL but all being equal, if you have keywords in the URL (the domain itself, or file names, which are part of the URL), this gives you additional advantage over your competitors. Keywords in URLs are more important for MSN and Yahoo! but even with Google their relative weight is high, so there is no excuse for having keywordless URLs.

9. Backlink spamming
It is a common delusion that it more backlinks are ALWAYS better and because of this web masters resort to link farms, forum/newgroup spam etc., which ultimately could lead to getting their site banned. In fact, what you need are quality backlinks.

10. Lack of keywords in the content
Once you focus on your keywords, modify your content and put the keywords wherever it makes sense. It is even better to make them bold or highlight them.

Sexy Lingerie Costumes

2009-01-26T09:55:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I searched on "How to take sexy lingerie pictures". I want to take my own pictures for my boyfriend with lingerie. I was "blogwalking" and I found flirtylingerie .They have many articles about lingerie. After I read about all the things that I needed, I went to the main page. They have a great selection of sexy costume lingerie, adult costumes and also plus size lingerie, like sexy school girl costume or sexy pirate costume

Since a lingerie website is in another state or perhaps another country you must be able to make decisions about products without trying them on. Sexy lingerie is often sold as one size fits most and this means there is a good amount of stretch spandex in the product for it to fit a woman with 5'2" to one that is 5'7". Also the weight differences will range from 110 to perhaps 165. Corsets are sold by bra size so if you wear a size 34 bra then you may need a size 34 corset. Cup size is not important in purchasing corsets. Shelf bras are sexy bras that support your breasts on a "shelf" that exposes your breasts and nipples. Again cup size is not a factor in these bras. When it comes to sexy stockings keep in mind that there are two types of thigh high stockings. One is a stay up stocking that has silicone strips on the inside of the stocking tops that hugs your thighs and helps them stay up. The other stocking is not a stay up and requires a sexy garter belt in order to stay up on your legs.
Adhesive bras are used by women when a conventional bra with cups, straps, back clasps just won't work. Many outfits require adhesive bras as they "stick" to your breasts over your nipples and can be reused if maintained carefully. They hide your nipples preventing headlights and give you confidence that you won't be showing off your nipples in that clingy dress or top. Breast Enhancers are used to enhance the size of a woman's breast and can add up to a cup size or two to a woman's figure. They fit in a woman's bra and no one needs to know that your aren't naturally busty and sexy.
Open Bust Lingerie or boob out lingerie is sexy lingerie that shows off a woman's breasts with the garment having little or no coverage over her breasts. Very popular as it is undeniable what a woman is thinking when she wears boob out lingerie. Along the same line is our line of Crotchless Panties and other crotchless lingerie. Wildly popular these open crotch panties or crotchless panties are a huge hit with women and especially with men. You are and you aren't wearing panties with these sexy crotchless panties.

you know what?
after i go to main pages i make decision to buy "Dropout School Girl Costume"
(Sexy Reform School Dropout Costume, Microfiber top with attached plaid tie, Includes matching plaid skirt with safety pin detail, Three piece set includes tie). It was very sexy , and the price was very exellent for my pocket.
While their prices werent the lowest, they were competitive, and the other advantages outweighed price. They have an excellent variety of merchandise, promised security and delivery options.
hmmm I can't wait to long to wear that costume.

Sometimes I can not trust an online shop, sometimes It makes me not feel secure to purchase online. Or it is frustrating to try and get hold of a company only by email. If they do not have clearly visible email contact informatino, I move on as this will likely cause problems later on/ I'm afraid I will encounter bad customer service, because I don't really like having to write, i just want to get to the point and talk about if face to face
or by phone. That's why I usually don't buy something in an online shop, expecially if it's lingerie.
I just worry that it might not fit and that I won't be able to get a refund.

I went to the testimonial page in the web, and I found the same complaint like I usually get, but then I found someone who left this feedback:
"I had several problems with finding in stock items. Usually I would be a little annoyed by it, but the ladies that I talked to were so helpful and nice it actually made everything enjoyable.
I cant emphasize how helpful and personable the ladies were. Personally I would make them all employee of the month, a raise, or something. They went out of their way to help me, I have never had customer service like this. I am not exagerating, I know that me and my boyfriend were very satisfied and I know that next time I shop I will absolutely go through flirty lingerie again.
I would like to thank them, so if you could pass this on please let them know!! THANK YOU!"

Wow I think not only do "they have a great selection of lingerie and also adult costumes"
but they have good customer services too, they have a toll free number, excellent shipping,
and for me they have an excellent price for my pocket.

The next time I shop I will absolutely go through flirty lingerie again.

How Search Engines Work

2009-01-02T20:37:00.000-08:00

The term "search engine" is often used generically to describe both crawler-based search engines and human-powered directories. These two types of search engines gather their listings in radically different ways.

Crawler-Based Search Engines

Crawler-based search engines, such as Google, create their listings automatically. They "crawl" or "spider" the web, then people search through what they have found.

If you change your web pages, crawler-based search engines eventually find these changes, and that can affect how you are listed. Page titles, body copy and other elements all play a role.

see about how to listed in google index

Human-Powered Directories

A human-powered directory, such as the Open Directory ( see about how to submited to open directory ), depends on humans for its listings. You submit a short description to the directory for your entire site, or editors write one for sites they review. A search looks for matches only in the descriptions submitted.

Changing your web pages has no effect on your listing. Things that are useful for improving a listing with a search engine have nothing to do with improving a listing in a directory. The only exception is that a good site, with good content, might be more likely to get reviewed for free than a poor site.

"Hybrid Search Engines" Or Mixed Results

In the web's early days, it used to be that a search engine either presented crawler-based results or human-powered listings. Today, it extremely common for both types of results to be presented. Usually, a hybrid search engine will favor one type of listings over another. For example, MSN Search is more likely to present human-powered listings from Look Smart. However, it does also present crawler-based results (as provided by Inktomi), especially for more obscure queries.

The Parts Of A Crawler-Based Search Engine

Crawler-based search engines have three major elements. First is the spider, also called the crawler. The spider visits a web page, reads it, and then follows links to other pages within the site. This is what it means when someone refers to a site being "spidered" or "crawled." The spider returns to the site on a regular basis, such as every month or two, to look for changes.

Everything the spider finds goes into the second part of the search engine, the index. The index, sometimes called the catalog, is like a giant book containing a copy of every web page that the spider finds. If a web page changes, then this book is updated with new information.

Sometimes it can take a while for new pages or changes that the spider finds to be added to the index. Thus, a web page may have been "spidered" but not yet "indexed." Until it is indexed -- added to the index -- it is not available to those searching with the search engine.

Search engine software is the third part of a search engine. This is the program that sifts through the millions of pages recorded in the index to find matches to a search and rank them in order of what it believes is most relevant. You can learn more about how search engine software ranks web pages on the aptly-named, see about How Search Engines Determine Your Rank.

Major Search Engines: The Same, But Different

All crawler-based search engines have the basic parts described above, but there are differences in how these parts are tuned. That is why the same search on different search engines often produces different results. Some of the significant differences between the major crawler-based search engines are summarized on the Search Engine Features Page. Information on this page has been drawn from the help pages of each search engine, along with knowledge gained from articles, reviews, books, independent research, tips from others and additional information received directly from the various search engines.

Now let's look more about how crawler-based search engine rank the listings that they gather.

How To Make Your Website More Popular

2009-01-02T20:08:00.000-08:00

At this very moment there are billions of people that are using the internet to surf, gather some facts and information and have fun. For this reason alone there are also millions of people from all walks of life who are creating a website and one of the major reason is that they have seen the potential to expand their business to the help of the internet. But creating a website alone does not warrant that an individual would be successful this field or that the web site he has will be searched and visited. A website without number of traffic is a site that is dead. It is a given fact that traffic inside the web site synonymous to being frequently searched.
There are 10 ways to make your website more popular and here is how it works;

1. Develop a nice design and concept. Having a nice design that is carefully planned will give an impression to your readers that your website is a legitimate and trustworthy website. Use appropriate fonts and colors, this will make important element in your website to be more appealing and eye catching.

2. Make your website convenient and easy to navigate. Think of every regular Jane and Joe that would conduct the search. And the way to do this is by having a simple yet powerful keyword ( see about keyword techniques and how to find good keyword ) or phrase that would make your website be visited by search engine crawlers for indexing.

3. Have relevant content rich articles. Bear in mind that the people visiting your website are looking for information and answers to their problems. It is important that they can find substance in the articles in your website; you should be able to provide quality and informative information. Is at this point that search engine spiders and crawlers will regularly visit your site because of the quality content you are writing.

4. Manage your site. It is important that you keep your articles fresh and updated. Remember a SEO worthy site is those that sites that are giving informative articles. And being informative means that you have to supply fresh information to your visitors so they will keep visiting your site and bookmark it even.

5. Be accommodating and answer queries and questions regularly. As much as possible prompt in answering their questions.

6. Join social networking sites from there endorse your website, then create links that will lead into your websites.

7. Be creative and create some stir in your target market. Give press releases to make your website popular. There are other websites and press release directory ( see about free directory list ) that is available that you can use for this kind of advertising.

8. Offer free giveaways like free newsletter, free tutorials or live video instructions that are related to the contents of your site. This will generate traffic and will rapidly make your website more popular.

9. Incorporate informative events that are happening in your circle. Make your readers be informed in the world you belong too, incorporate news about what is the latest development that pertains to your product.

10. Be informed, learned how SEO ( see about seo tips ) works and how top search engines such Google and Yahoo operates. Understand how these giants operate and how they track down relevant and informative websites to belong to their database of indices. Learn how to get a rank from this giant search engines and apply it into your website. ( see about pagerank tips and about increase alexa rank )

Increase Site Popularity

2008-12-29T19:09:00.000-08:00

1. Backlinking is an easy way to increase the number of visitors to your blog or website (and also increase search engine rankings, see about google page rank secret). This is nothing more than having your site address listed on other websites generating traffic back to your site (see about inbound and outbound links). Backlinking can be done in a number of ways. Following is a short list of ideas to get you started.

2. The first, and easiest, is to use article marketing. Write a few articles and submit them to free article directories. At the end of each article, use a signature line that includes your web address.

3. Double the impact by using social bookmarking sites such as digg, reddit, del.icio.us and others to submit your article information to.

4. Another technique is done through online classified ads (link to great free classifieds site under Resources heading). Here you will place brief descriptions of your site and your site url. Just be sure that when you are listing your site to use your site address, don't use a text link leading to your site, such as "Click Here To... It is important that the address itself is listed.

5. These few ideas alone can have a huge impact. Repeat these steps every week or so and you should see your number of visitors increase over just a short period of time.

Increasing Quality Inbound Links

2008-12-29T04:30:00.000-08:00

after reading this post maybe you can turn to this posting!

Inbound links may increase your site's popularity among web surfers as well as search engines. But how do you get them? Paul Bruemmer gives some advice.

(June 21 2005) There are several ways to increase inbound links -- and also a few ways not to.

It's always a good idea to have quality links coming into your site regardless of the fact that it helps your search engine rankings. So your linking campaign can be dual purpose by bringing in more traffic while improving your rankings. Back in the old days, it was derigueur to request links. You can still do this today, but you need to be a lot more sophisticated about it.

Link Requests

When soliciting links, research your project well to learn which sites are the best targets for a link request. Another tip is to use the phone rather than email whenever possible.

Look for quality sites that don't compete with your own site but can complement it. Find these sites by doing a search for your own strategic keywords. Then weed out the competitors and locate the related sites to approach.

Explain your interest in their site and what they have to offer. It's very important to give them a good rationale for providing the link. If your site has quality content that complements theirs, chances are they might link.

Links from Search Engines and Directories

It goes without saying that a link from Yahoo and Open Directory are desirable for commercial sites (despite recent reports about ODP slowness).

Depending on your industry, there are also many vertical search engines and directories that can provide valuable links.

See Danny Sullivan's list of Specialty Search Engines to find such verticals as business.com (financial and business search engine), FindLaw (legal search engine), or WebMD (medical search engine).

Links from Newsletters and Discussion Threads

Yes, these links are good. Write an article for industry trade zines and get a link in your bio. Post on industry forums and get a link there. Keep active and seed those links, but only when you can contribute to industry knowledge and educate your peers.

Links from SEO Press Releases

One of the newer linking strategies is to gain links with search-engine-optimized press releases. SEO press releases provide opportunities for inbound link development when Yahoo News, Google News and major news search engines list your data online. This helps achieve excellent rankings within major search engines.

The link structure of a properly distributed "search optimized" press release also benefits your website when you issue a release because you are providing relevant information to those searching for news related to your industry.

It could be a prospect looking for industry info when researching a purchase or a journalist researching a story. At any rate, your company will be represented in the search results, which increases the relevant traffic to your site.

SEO Press Release deliverables include:

450-500 word press release; optimized for a core search term and 2 to 3 niche terms

Release incorporates anchor text; based on search term associated with target web page

You often have your choice of distribution

Access to view statistics about how your news release performed over a 30-day period

RSS feed and paid inclusion distribution

Prior to preparing your search-optimized press release, a qualified SEO technician conducts keyword research and planning. Using the business information you provide, the vendor can then make comparisons with your competitors and similar websites.

A weighted value is calculated for each keyword based on the number of searches over the past two months compared to its percentage of relevance.

Because the first step in optimizing a web page for search engine ranking is placing keywords in the Title, it makes sense to determine how many pages have been somewhat optimized.

A good vendor will perform an "InTitle" and "Title+Anchor" search at Google to give you an indication of the popularity of your various terms, comparing these results with WordTracker's KEI (keyword effectiveness index).

This research allows one to determine relevancy, evaluate competition, and add modifiers for providing you the best advice on selecting your best keywords and phrases. The vendor may also marry the Keyword List to a Site Review and consider your current content to make recommendations for overall improvement and performance. Benefits of an SEO Press Release

Top rankings in Google News, Yahoo News and MSN news for targeted search terms

New rankings in Google and Yahoo web search results, often first page results

Coverage on hundreds of relevant web sites subscribed to PR Web's RSS feed

Links from web sites that pick up your news release

Help in building link popularity for your web pages

Archived press releases to deliver long-term link value

Often, the vendor can provide you with a tracking report to summarize the rankings achieved in news and web searches. The vendor can also provide stats on top search terms for which a news release is accessed; page reads and downloads of a release; number of sites that carried the release as news; and number of links created back to target web page.

Links You Don't Need

1. FFA (Free For All) pages where links can be obtained by any means without scrutiny, resulting in junk that no one looks at. Useless.
2. Guestbooks -- This is where a site invites visitors to sign a guestbook, many of which allow HTML code in the comments section where anyone can create a link to their site. Don't bother.
3. Link Farms - Don't even think it - could get your site banned.
4. Auto linking software - Don't bother, a waste of time.These are the types of links you do not need:

Social Network Sites: Scholarship (part 3)

2008-12-27T22:35:00.000-08:00

after read this http://atur4ku.blogspot.com/2008/12/social-network-sites-definition-history.htmlpost and this post you can go with this post!
Previous Scholarship

Scholarship concerning SNSs is emerging from diverse disciplinary and methodological traditions, addresses a range of topics, and builds on a large body of CMC research. The goal of this section is to survey research that is directly concerned with social network sites, and in so doing, to set the stage for the articles in this special issue. To date, the bulk of SNS research has focused on impression management and friendship performance, networks and network structure, online/offline connections, and privacy issues.

Impression Management and Friendship Performance

Like other online contexts in which individuals are consciously able to construct an online representation of self—such as online dating profiles and MUDS—SNSs constitute an important research context for scholars investigating processes of impression management, self-presentation, and friendship performance. In one of the earliest academic articles on SNSs, boyd (2004) examined Friendster as a locus of publicly articulated social networks that allowed users to negotiate presentations of self and connect with others. Donath and boyd (2004) extended this to suggest that "public displays of connection" serve as important identity signals that help people navigate the networked social world, in that an extended network may serve to validate identity information presented in profiles.

While most sites encourage users to construct accurate representations of themselves, participants do this to varying degrees. Marwick (2005) found that users on three different SNSs had complex strategies for negotiating the rigidity of a prescribed "authentic" profile, while boyd (in press-b) examined the phenomenon of "Fakesters" and argued that profiles could never be "real." The extent to which portraits are authentic or playful varies across sites; both social and technological forces shape user practices. Skog (2005) found that the status feature on LunarStorm strongly influenced how people behaved and what they choose to reveal—profiles there indicate one's status as measured by activity (e.g., sending messages) and indicators of authenticity (e.g., using a "real" photo instead of a drawing).

Another aspect of self-presentation is the articulation of friendship links, which serve as identity markers for the profile owner. Impression management is one of the reasons given by Friendster users for choosing particular friends (Donath & boyd, 2004). Recognizing this, Zinman and Donath (2007) noted that MySpace spammers leverage people's willingness to connect to interesting people to find targets for their spam.

In their examination of LiveJournal "friendship," Fono and Raynes-Goldie (2006) described users' understandings regarding public displays of connections and how the Friending function can operate as a catalyst for social drama. In listing user motivations for Friending, boyd (2006a) points out that "Friends" on SNSs are not the same as "friends" in the everyday sense; instead, Friends provide context by offering users an imagined audience to guide behavioral norms. Other work in this area has examined the use of Friendster Testimonials as self-presentational devices (boyd & Heer, 2006) and the extent to which the attractiveness of one's Friends (as indicated by Facebook's "Wall" feature) impacts impression formation (Walther, Van Der Heide, Kim, & Westerman, in press).

Networks and Network Structure

Social network sites also provide rich sources of naturalistic behavioral data. Profile and linkage data from SNSs can be gathered either through the use of automated collection techniques or through datasets provided directly from the company, enabling network analysis researchers to explore large-scale patterns of friending, usage, and other visible indicators (Hogan, in press), and continuing an analysis trend that started with examinations of blogs and other websites. For instance, Golder, Wilkinson, and Huberman (2007) examined an anonymized dataset consisting of 362 million messages exchanged by over four million Facebook users for insight into Friending and messaging activities. Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfield (2007) explored the relationship between profile elements and number of Facebook friends, finding that profile fields that reduce transaction costs and are harder to falsify are most likely to be associated with larger number of friendship links. These kinds of data also lend themselves well to analysis through network visualization (Adamic, Büyükkökten, & Adar, 2003; Heer & boyd, 2005; Paolillo & Wright, 2005).

SNS researchers have also studied the network structure of Friendship. Analyzing the roles people played in the growth of Flickr and Yahoo! 360's networks, Kumar, Novak, and Tomkins (2006) argued that there are passive members, inviters, and linkers "who fully participate in the social evolution of the network" (p. 1). Scholarship concerning LiveJournal's network has included a Friendship classification scheme (Hsu, Lancaster, Paradesi, & Weniger, 2007), an analysis of the role of language in the topology of Friendship (Herring et al., 2007), research into the importance of geography in Friending (Liben-Nowell, Novak, Kumar, Raghavan, & Tomkins, 2005), and studies on what motivates people to join particular communities (Backstrom, Huttenlocher, Kleinberg, & Lan, 2006). Based on Orkut data, Spertus, Sahami, and Büyükkökten (2005) identified a topology of users through their membership in certain communities; they suggest that sites can use this to recommend additional communities of interest to users. Finally, Liu, Maes, and Davenport (2006) argued that Friend connections are not the only network structure worth investigating. They examined the ways in which the performance of tastes (favorite music, books, film, etc.) constitutes an alternate network structure, which they call a "taste fabric."

Bridging Online and Offline Social Networks

Although exceptions exist, the available research suggests that most SNSs primarily support pre-existing social relations. Ellison, Steinfield, and Lampe (2007) suggest that Facebook is used to maintain existing offline relationships or solidify offline connections, as opposed to meeting new people. These relationships may be weak ties, but typically there is some common offline element among individuals who friend one another, such as a shared class at school. This is one of the chief dimensions that differentiate SNSs from earlier forms of public CMC such as newsgroups (Ellison et al., 2007). Research in this vein has investigated how online interactions interface with offline ones. For instance, Lampe, Ellison, and Steinfield (2006) found that Facebook users engage in "searching" for people with whom they have an offline connection more than they "browse" for complete strangers to meet. Likewise, Pew research found that 91% of U.S. teens who use SNSs do so to connect with friends (Lenhart & Madden, 2007).

Given that SNSs enable individuals to connect with one another, it is not surprising that they have become deeply embedded in user's lives. In Korea, Cyworld has become an integral part of everyday life—Choi (2006) found that 85% of that study's respondents "listed the maintenance and reinforcement of pre-existing social networks as their main motive for Cyworld use" (p. 181). Likewise, boyd (2008) argues that MySpace and Facebook enable U.S. youth to socialize with their friends even when they are unable to gather in unmediated situations; she argues that SNSs are "networked publics" that support sociability, just as unmediated public spaces do.

Privacy

Popular press coverage of SNSs has emphasized potential privacy concerns, primarily concerning the safety of younger users (George, 2006; Kornblum & Marklein, 2006). Researchers have investigated the potential threats to privacy associated with SNSs. In one of the first academic studies of privacy and SNSs, Gross and Acquisti (2005) analyzed 4,000 Carnegie Mellon University Facebook profiles and outlined the potential threats to privacy contained in the personal information included on the site by students, such as the potential ability to reconstruct users' social security numbers using information often found in profiles, such as hometown and date of birth.

Acquisti and Gross (2006) argue that there is often a disconnect between students' desire to protect privacy and their behaviors, a theme that is also explored in Stutzman's (2006) survey of Facebook users and Barnes's (2006) description of the "privacy paradox" that occurs when teens are not aware of the public nature of the Internet. In analyzing trust on social network sites, Dwyer, Hiltz, and Passerini (2007) argued that trust and usage goals may affect what people are willing to share—Facebook users expressed greater trust in Facebook than MySpace users did in MySpace and thus were more willing to share information on the site.

In another study examining security issues and SNSs, Jagatic, Johnson, Jakobsson, and Menczer (2007) used freely accessible profile data from SNSs to craft a "phishing" scheme that appeared to originate from a friend on the network; their targets were much more likely to give away information to this "friend" than to a perceived stranger. Survey data offer a more optimistic perspective on the issue, suggesting that teens are aware of potential privacy threats online and that many are proactive about taking steps to minimize certain potential risks. Pew found that 55% of online teens have profiles, 66% of whom report that their profile is not visible to all Internet users (Lenhart & Madden, 2007). Of the teens with completely open profiles, 46% reported including at least some false information.

Privacy is also implicated in users' ability to control impressions and manage social contexts. Boyd (in press-a) asserted that Facebook's introduction of the "News Feed" feature disrupted students' sense of control, even though data exposed through the feed were previously accessible. Preibusch, Hoser, Gürses, and Berendt (2007) argued that the privacy options offered by SNSs do not provide users with the flexibility they need to handle conflicts with Friends who have different conceptions of privacy; they suggest a framework for privacy in SNSs that they believe would help resolve these conflicts.

SNSs are also challenging legal conceptions of privacy. Hodge (2006) argued that the fourth amendment to the U.S. Constitution and legal decisions concerning privacy are not equipped to address social network sites. For example, do police officers have the right to access content posted to Facebook without a warrant? The legality of this hinges on users' expectation of privacy and whether or not Facebook profiles are considered public or private.

Other Research

In addition to the themes identified above, a growing body of scholarship addresses other aspects of SNSs, their users, and the practices they enable. For example, scholarship on the ways in which race and ethnicity (Byrne, in press; Gajjala, 2007), religion (Nyland & Near, 2007), gender (Geidner, Flook, & Bell, 2007; Hjorth & Kim, 2005), and sexuality connect to, are affected by, and are enacted in social network sites raise interesting questions about how identity is shaped within these sites. Fragoso (2006) examined the role of national identity in SNS use through an investigation into the "Brazilian invasion" of Orkut and the resulting culture clash between Brazilians and Americans on the site. Other scholars are beginning to do cross-cultural comparisons of SNS use—Hjorth and Yuji (in press) compare Japanese usage of Mixi and Korean usage of Cyworld, while Herring et al. (2007) examine the practices of users who bridge different languages on LiveJournal—but more work in this area is needed.

Scholars are documenting the implications of SNS use with respect to schools, universities, and libraries. For example, scholarship has examined how students feel about having professors on Facebook (Hewitt & Forte, 2006) and how faculty participation affects student-professor relations (Mazer, Murphy, & Simonds, 2007). Charnigo and Barnett-Ellis (2007) found that librarians are overwhelmingly aware of Facebook and are against proposed U.S. legislation that would ban minors from accessing SNSs at libraries, but that most see SNSs as outside the purview of librarianship. Finally, challenging the view that there is nothing educational about SNSs, Perkel (in press) analyzed copy/paste practices on MySpace as a form of literacy involving social and technical skills.

This overview is not comprehensive due to space limitations and because much work on SNSs is still in the process of being published. Additionally, we have not included literature in languages other than English (e.g., Recuero, 2005 on social capital and Orkut), due to our own linguistic limitations.

Overview of This Special Theme Section

The articles in this section address a variety of social network sites—BlackPlanet, Cyworld, Dodgeball, Facebook, MySpace, and YouTube—from multiple theoretical and methodological angles, building on previous studies of SNSs and broader theoretical traditions within CMC research, including relationship maintenance and issues of identity, performance, privacy, self-presentation, and civic engagement.

These pieces collectively provide insight into some of the ways in which online and offline experiences are deeply entwined. Using a relational dialectics approach, Kyung-Hee Kim and Haejin Yun analyze how Cyworld supports both interpersonal relations and self-relation for Korean users. They trace the subtle ways in which deeply engrained cultural beliefs and activities are integrated into online communication and behaviors on Cyworld—the online context reinforces certain aspects of users' cultural expectations about relationship maintenance (e.g., the concept of reciprocity), while the unique affordances of Cyworld enable participants to overcome offline constraints. Dara Byrne uses content analysis to examine civic engagement in forums on BlackPlanet and finds that online discussions are still plagued with the problems offline activists have long encountered. Drawing on interview and observation data, Lee Humphreys investigates early adopters' practices involving Dodgeball, a mobile social network service. She looks at the ways in which networked communication is reshaping offline social geography.

Other articles in this collection illustrate how innovative research methods can elucidate patterns of behavior that would be indistinguishable otherwise. For instance, Hugo Liu examines participants' performance of tastes and interests by analyzing and modeling the preferences listed on over 127,000 MySpace profiles, resulting in unique "taste maps." Likewise, through survey data collected at a college with diverse students in the U.S., Eszter Hargittai illuminates usage patterns that would otherwise be masked. She finds that adoption of particular services correlates with individuals' race and parental education level.

Existing theory is deployed, challenged, and extended by the approaches adopted in the articles in this section. Judith Donath extends signaling theory to explain different tactics SNS users adopt to reduce social costs while managing trust and identity. She argues that the construction and maintenance of relations on SNSs is akin to "social grooming." Patricia Lange complicates traditional dichotomies between "public" and "private" by analyzing how YouTube participants blur these lines in their video-sharing practices.

The articles in this collection highlight the significance of social network sites in the lives of users and as a topic of research. Collectively, they show how networked practices mirror, support, and alter known everyday practices, especially with respect to how people present (and hide) aspects of themselves and connect with others. The fact that participation on social network sites leaves online traces offers unprecedented opportunities for researchers. The scholarship in this special theme section takes advantage of this affordance, resulting in work that helps explain practices online and offline, as well as those that blend the two environments.

Future Research

The work described above and included in this special theme section contributes to an on-going dialogue about the importance of social network sites, both for practitioners and researchers. Vast, uncharted waters still remain to be explored. Methodologically, SNS researchers' ability to make causal claims is limited by a lack of experimental or longitudinal studies. Although the situation is rapidly changing, scholars still have a limited understanding of who is and who is not using these sites, why, and for what purposes, especially outside the U.S. Such questions will require large-scale quantitative and qualitative research. Richer, ethnographic research on populations more difficult to access (including non-users) would further aid scholars' ability to understand the long-term implications of these tools. We hope that the work described here and included in this collection will help build a foundation for future investigations of these and other important issues surrounding social network sites.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the external reviewers who volunteered their time and expertise to review papers and contribute valuable feedback and to those practitioners and analysts who provided information to help shape the history section. Thank you also to Susan Herring, whose patience and support appeared infinite.

Notes

1. To differentiate the articulated list of Friends on SNSs from the colloquial term "friends," we capitalize the former.
2. Although one out of seven teenagers received unwanted sexual solicitations online, only 9% came from people over the age of 25 (Wolak, Mitchell, & Finkelhor, 2006). Research suggests that popular narratives around sexual predators on SNSs are misleading—cases of unsuspecting teens being lured by sexual predators are rare (Finkelhor, Ybarra, Lenhart, boyd, & Lordan, 2007). Furthermore, only .08% of students surveyed by the National School Boards Association (2007) met someone in person from an online encounter without permission from a parent.

References

Acquisti, A., & Gross, R. (2006). Imagined communities: Awareness, information sharing, and privacy on the Facebook. In P. Golle & G. Danezis (Eds.), Proceedings of 6th Workshop on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (pp. 36-58). Cambridge, UK: Robinson College.

Adamic, L. A., Büyükkökten, O., & Adar, E. (2003). A social network caught in the Web. First Monday, 8 (6). Retrieved July 30, 2007 from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue8_6/adamic/index.html

Backstrom, L., Huttenlocher, D., Kleinberg, J., & Lan, X. (2006). Group formation in large social networks: Membership, growth, and evolution. Proceedings of 12th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery in Data Mining (pp. 44-54). New York: ACM Press.

Bahney, A. (2006, March 9). Don't talk to invisible strangers. New York Times. Retrieved July 21, 2007 from http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/09/fashion/thursdaystyles/09parents.html

Barnes, S. (2006). A privacy paradox: Social networking in the United States. First Monday, 11 (9). Retrieved September 8, 2007 from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_9/barnes/index.html

BBC. (2005, July 19). News Corp in $580m Internet buy. Retrieved July 21, 2007 from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4695495.stm

Benzie, R. (2007, May 3). Facebook banned for Ontario staffers. The Star. Retrieved July 21, 2007 from http://www.thestar.com/News/article/210014

boyd, d. (2004). Friendster and publicly articulated social networks. Proceedings of ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1279-1282). New York: ACM Press.

boyd, d. (2006a). Friends, Friendsters, and MySpace Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites. First Monday, 11 (12). Retrieved July 21, 2007 from http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_12/boyd/

boyd, d. (2006b, March 21). Friendster lost steam. Is MySpace just a fad? Apophenia Blog. Retrieved July 21, 2007 from http://www.danah.org/papers/FriendsterMySpaceEssay.html

boyd, d. (in press-a). Facebook's privacy trainwreck: Exposure, invasion, and social convergence. Convergence, 14 (1).

boyd, d. (in press-b). None of this is real. In J. Karaganis (Ed.), Structures of Participation. New York: Social Science Research Council.

boyd, d. (2008). Why youth (heart) social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life. In D. Buckingham (Ed.), Youth, Identity, and Digital Media (pp. 119-142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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Donath, J., & boyd, d. (2004). Public displays of connection. BT Technology Journal, 22 (4), 71-82.

Dwyer, C., Hiltz, S. R., & Passerini, K. (2007). Trust and privacy concern within social networking sites: A comparison of Facebook and MySpace. Proceedings of AMCIS 2007, Keystone, CO. Retrieved September 21, 2007 from http://csis.pace.edu/~dwyer/research/DwyerAMCIS2007.pdf

Ellison, N., Steinfield, C., & Lampe, C. (2007). The benefits of Facebook "friends": Exploring the relationship between college students' use of online social networks and social capital. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 12 (3), article 1. Retrieved July 30, 2007 from http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol12/issue4/ellison.html

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Geidner, N. W., Flook, C. A., & Bell, M. W. (2007, April). Masculinity and online social networks: Male self-identification on Facebook.com. Paper presented at Eastern Communication Association 98th Annual Meeting, Providence, RI.

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Golder, S. A., Wilkinson, D., & Huberman, B. A. (2007, June). Rhythms of social interaction: Messaging within a massive online network. In C. Steinfield, B. Pentland, M. Ackerman, & N. Contractor (Eds.), Proceedings of Third International Conference on Communities and Technologies (pp. 41-66). London: Springer.

Gross, R., & Acquisti, A. (2005). Information revelation and privacy in online social networks. Proceedings of WPES'05 (pp. 71-80). Alexandria, VA: ACM.

Haythornthwaite, C. (2005). Social networks and Internet connectivity effects. Information, Communication, & Society, 8 (2), 125-147.

Heer, J., & boyd, d. (2005). Vizster: Visualizing online social networks. Proceedings of Symposium on Information Visualization (pp. 33-40). Minneapolis, MN: IEEE Press.

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Hjorth, L., & Yuji, M. (in press). Logging on locality: A cross-cultural case study of virtual communities Mixi (Japan) and Mini-hompy (Korea). In B. Smaill (Ed.), Youth and Media in the Asia Pacific. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

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Hsu, W. H., Lancaster, J., Paradesi, M. S. R., & Weninger, T. (2007). Structural link analysis from user profiles and friends networks: A feature construction approach. Proceedings of ICWSM-2007 (pp. 75-80). Boulder, CO.

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About the Authors

danah m. boyd is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of Information at the University of California-Berkeley and a Fellow at the Harvard University Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Her research focuses on how people negotiate mediated contexts like social network sites for sociable purposes.
Address: 102 South Hall, Berkeley, CA 94720-4600, USA
Nicole B. Ellison is an assistant professor in the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media at Michigan State University. Her research explores issues of self-presentation, relationship development, and identity in online environments such as weblogs, online dating sites, and social network sites.

Social Network Sites: History (part 2)

2008-12-27T22:31:00.000-08:00

A History of Social Network Sites

The Early Years

According to the definition above, the first recognizable social network site launched in 1997. SixDegrees.com allowed users to create profiles, list their Friends and, beginning in 1998, surf the Friends lists. Each of these features existed in some form before SixDegrees, of course. Profiles existed on most major dating sites and many community sites. AIM and ICQ buddy lists supported lists of Friends, although those Friends were not visible to others. Classmates.com allowed people to affiliate with their high school or college and surf the network for others who were also affiliated, but users could not create profiles or list Friends until years later. SixDegrees was the first to combine these features.

SixDegrees promoted itself as a tool to help people connect with and send messages to others. While SixDegrees attracted millions of users, it failed to become a sustainable business and, in 2000, the service closed. Looking back, its founder believes that SixDegrees was simply ahead of its time (A. Weinreich, personal communication, July 11, 2007). While people were already flocking to the Internet, most did not have extended networks of friends who were online. Early adopters complained that there was little to do after accepting Friend requests, and most users were not interested in meeting strangers.

From 1997 to 2001, a number of community tools began supporting various combinations of profiles and publicly articulated Friends. AsianAvenue, BlackPlanet, and MiGente allowed users to create personal, professional, and dating profiles—users could identify Friends on their personal profiles without seeking approval for those connections (O. Wasow, personal communication, August 16, 2007). Likewise, shortly after its launch in 1999, LiveJournal listed one-directional connections on user pages. LiveJournal's creator suspects that he fashioned these Friends after instant messaging buddy lists (B. Fitzpatrick, personal communication, June 15, 2007)—on LiveJournal, people mark others as Friends to follow their journals and manage privacy settings. The Korean virtual worlds site Cyworld was started in 1999 and added SNS features in 2001, independent of these other sites (see Kim & Yun, this issue). Likewise, when the Swedish web community LunarStorm refashioned itself as an SNS in 2000, it contained Friends lists, guestbooks, and diary pages (D. Skog, personal communication, September 24, 2007).

The next wave of SNSs began when Ryze.com was launched in 2001 to help people leverage their business networks. Ryze's founder reports that he first introduced the site to his friends—primarily members of the San Francisco business and technology community, including the entrepreneurs and investors behind many future SNSs (A. Scott, personal communication, June 14, 2007). In particular, the people behind Ryze, Tribe.net, LinkedIn, and Friendster were tightly entwined personally and professionally. They believed that they could support each other without competing (Festa, 2003). In the end, Ryze never acquired mass popularity, Tribe.net grew to attract a passionate niche user base, LinkedIn became a powerful business service, and Friendster became the most significant, if only as "one of the biggest disappointments in Internet history" (Chafkin, 2007, p. 1).

Figure 1. Timeline of the launch dates of many major SNSs and dates when community sites re-launched with SNS features

Like any brief history of a major phenomenon, ours is necessarily incomplete. In the following section we discuss Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook, three key SNSs that shaped the business, cultural, and research landscape.

The Rise (and Fall) of Friendster

Friendster launched in 2002 as a social complement to Ryze. It was designed to compete with Match.com, a profitable online dating site (Cohen, 2003). While most dating sites focused on introducing people to strangers with similar interests, Friendster was designed to help friends-of-friends meet, based on the assumption that friends-of-friends would make better romantic partners than would strangers (J. Abrams, personal communication, March 27, 2003). Friendster gained traction among three groups of early adopters who shaped the site—bloggers, attendees of the Burning Man arts festival, and gay men (boyd, 2004)—and grew to 300,000 users through word of mouth before traditional press coverage began in May 2003 (O'Shea, 2003).

As Friendster's popularity surged, the site encountered technical and social difficulties (boyd, 2006b). Friendster's servers and databases were ill-equipped to handle its rapid growth, and the site faltered regularly, frustrating users who replaced email with Friendster. Because organic growth had been critical to creating a coherent community, the onslaught of new users who learned about the site from media coverage upset the cultural balance. Furthermore, exponential growth meant a collapse in social contexts: Users had to face their bosses and former classmates alongside their close friends. To complicate matters, Friendster began restricting the activities of its most passionate users.

The initial design of Friendster restricted users from viewing profiles of people who were more than four degrees away (friends-of-friends-of-friends-of-friends). In order to view additional profiles, users began adding acquaintances and interesting-looking strangers to expand their reach. Some began massively collecting Friends, an activity that was implicitly encouraged through a "most popular" feature. The ultimate collectors were fake profiles representing iconic fictional characters: celebrities, concepts, and other such entities. These "Fakesters" outraged the company, who banished fake profiles and eliminated the "most popular" feature (boyd, in press-b). While few people actually created Fakesters, many more enjoyed surfing Fakesters for entertainment or using functional Fakesters (e.g., "Brown University") to find people they knew.

The active deletion of Fakesters (and genuine users who chose non-realistic photos) signaled to some that the company did not share users' interests. Many early adopters left because of the combination of technical difficulties, social collisions, and a rupture of trust between users and the site (boyd, 2006b). However, at the same time that it was fading in the U.S., its popularity skyrocketed in the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia (Goldberg, 2007).

SNSs Hit the Mainstream

From 2003 onward, many new SNSs were launched, prompting social software analyst Clay Shirky (2003) to coin the term YASNS: "Yet Another Social Networking Service." Most took the form of profile-centric sites, trying to replicate the early success of Friendster or target specific demographics. While socially-organized SNSs solicit broad audiences, professional sites such as LinkedIn, Visible Path, and Xing (formerly openBC) focus on business people. "Passion-centric" SNSs like Dogster (T. Rheingold, personal communication, August 2, 2007) help strangers connect based on shared interests. Care2 helps activists meet, Couchsurfing connects travelers to people with couches, and MyChurch joins Christian churches and their members. Furthermore, as the social media and user-generated content phenomena grew, websites focused on media sharing began implementing SNS features and becoming SNSs themselves. Examples include Flickr (photo sharing), Last.FM (music listening habits), and YouTube (video sharing).

With the plethora of venture-backed startups launching in Silicon Valley, few people paid attention to SNSs that gained popularity elsewhere, even those built by major corporations. For example, Google's Orkut failed to build a sustainable U.S. user base, but a "Brazilian invasion" (Fragoso, 2006) made Orkut the national SNS of Brazil. Microsoft's Windows Live Spaces (a.k.a. MSN Spaces) also launched to lukewarm U.S. reception but became extremely popular elsewhere.

Few analysts or journalists noticed when MySpace launched in Santa Monica, California, hundreds of miles from Silicon Valley. MySpace was begun in 2003 to compete with sites like Friendster, Xanga, and AsianAvenue, according to co-founder Tom Anderson (personal communication, August 2, 2007); the founders wanted to attract estranged Friendster users (T. Anderson, personal communication, February 2, 2006). After rumors emerged that Friendster would adopt a fee-based system, users posted Friendster messages encouraging people to join alternate SNSs, including Tribe.net and MySpace (T. Anderson, personal communication, August 2, 2007). Because of this, MySpace was able to grow rapidly by capitalizing on Friendster's alienation of its early adopters. One particularly notable group that encouraged others to switch were indie-rock bands who were expelled from Friendster for failing to comply with profile regulations.

While MySpace was not launched with bands in mind, they were welcomed. Indie-rock bands from the Los Angeles region began creating profiles, and local promoters used MySpace to advertise VIP passes for popular clubs. Intrigued, MySpace contacted local musicians to see how they could support them (T. Anderson, personal communication, September 28, 2006). Bands were not the sole source of MySpace growth, but the symbiotic relationship between bands and fans helped MySpace expand beyond former Friendster users. The bands-and-fans dynamic was mutually beneficial: Bands wanted to be able to contact fans, while fans desired attention from their favorite bands and used Friend connections to signal identity and affiliation.

Futhermore, MySpace differentiated itself by regularly adding features based on user demand (boyd, 2006b) and by allowing users to personalize their pages. This "feature" emerged because MySpace did not restrict users from adding HTML into the forms that framed their profiles; a copy/paste code culture emerged on the web to support users in generating unique MySpace backgrounds and layouts (Perkel, in press).

Teenagers began joining MySpace en masse in 2004. Unlike older users, most teens were never on Friendster—some joined because they wanted to connect with their favorite bands; others were introduced to the site through older family members. As teens began signing up, they encouraged their friends to join. Rather than rejecting underage users, MySpace changed its user policy to allow minors. As the site grew, three distinct populations began to form: musicians/artists, teenagers, and the post-college urban social crowd. By and large, the latter two groups did not interact with one another except through bands. Because of the lack of mainstream press coverage during 2004, few others noticed the site's growing popularity.

Then, in July 2005, News Corporation purchased MySpace for $580 million (BBC, 2005), attracting massive media attention. Afterwards, safety issues plagued MySpace. The site was implicated in a series of sexual interactions between adults and minors, prompting legal action (Consumer Affairs, 2006). A moral panic concerning sexual predators quickly spread (Bahney, 2006), although research suggests that the concerns were exaggerated.²

A Global Phenomenon

While MySpace attracted the majority of media attention in the U.S. and abroad, SNSs were proliferating and growing in popularity worldwide. Friendster gained traction in the Pacific Islands, Orkut became the premier SNS in Brazil before growing rapidly in India (Madhavan, 2007), Mixi attained widespread adoption in Japan, LunarStorm took off in Sweden, Dutch users embraced Hyves, Grono captured Poland, Hi5 was adopted in smaller countries in Latin America, South America, and Europe, and Bebo became very popular in the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Australia. Additionally, previously popular communication and community services began implementing SNS features. The Chinese QQ instant messaging service instantly became the largest SNS worldwide when it added profiles and made friends visible (McLeod, 2006), while the forum tool Cyworld cornered the Korean market by introducing homepages and buddies (Ewers, 2006).

Blogging services with complete SNS features also became popular. In the U.S., blogging tools with SNS features, such as Xanga, LiveJournal, and Vox, attracted broad audiences. Skyrock reigns in France, and Windows Live Spaces dominates numerous markets worldwide, including in Mexico, Italy, and Spain. Although SNSs like QQ, Orkut, and Live Spaces are just as large as, if not larger than, MySpace, they receive little coverage in U.S. and English-speaking media, making it difficult to track their trajectories.

Expanding Niche Communities

Alongside these open services, other SNSs launched to support niche demographics before expanding to a broader audience. Unlike previous SNSs, Facebook was designed to support distinct college networks only. Facebook began in early 2004 as a Harvard-only SNS (Cassidy, 2006). To join, a user had to have a harvard.edu email address. As Facebook began supporting other schools, those users were also required to have university email addresses associated with those institutions, a requirement that kept the site relatively closed and contributed to users' perceptions of the site as an intimate, private community.

Beginning in September 2005, Facebook expanded to include high school students, professionals inside corporate networks, and, eventually, everyone. The change to open signup did not mean that new users could easily access users in closed networks—gaining access to corporate networks still required the appropriate .com address, while gaining access to high school networks required administrator approval. (As of this writing, only membership in regional networks requires no permission.) Unlike other SNSs, Facebook users are unable to make their full profiles public to all users. Another feature that differentiates Facebook is the ability for outside developers to build "Applications" which allow users to personalize their profiles and perform other tasks, such as compare movie preferences and chart travel histories.

While most SNSs focus on growing broadly and exponentially, others explicitly seek narrower audiences. Some, like aSmallWorld and BeautifulPeople, intentionally restrict access to appear selective and elite. Others—activity-centered sites like Couchsurfing, identity-driven sites like BlackPlanet, and affiliation-focused sites like MyChurch—are limited by their target demographic and thus tend to be smaller. Finally, anyone who wishes to create a niche social network site can do so on Ning, a platform and hosting service that encourages users to create their own SNSs.

Currently, there are no reliable data regarding how many people use SNSs, although marketing research indicates that SNSs are growing in popularity worldwide (comScore, 2007). This growth has prompted many corporations to invest time and money in creating, purchasing, promoting, and advertising SNSs. At the same time, other companies are blocking their employees from accessing the sites. Additionally, the U.S. military banned soldiers from accessing MySpace (Frosch, 2007) and the Canadian government prohibited employees from Facebook (Benzie, 2007), while the U.S. Congress has proposed legislation to ban youth from accessing SNSs in schools and libraries (H.R. 5319, 2006; S. 49, 2007).

The rise of SNSs indicates a shift in the organization of online communities. While websites dedicated to communities of interest still exist and prosper, SNSs are primarily organized around people, not interests. Early public online communities such as Usenet and public discussion forums were structured by topics or according to topical hierarchies, but social network sites are structured as personal (or "egocentric") networks, with the individual at the center of their own community. This more accurately mirrors unmediated social structures, where "the world is composed of networks, not groups" (Wellman, 1988, p. 37). The introduction of SNS features has introduced a new organizational framework for online communities, and with it, a vibrant new research context.

read part3

Social Network Sites: Definition (part 1)

2008-12-27T00:12:00.000-08:00

this posting is taken from www.jcmc.indiana.edu (http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html) i just interesting to read this posting than i copy and paste for you in here..
this great article by.
danah m. boyd
School of Information
University of California-Berkeley
and
Nicole B. Ellison
Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies, and Media
Michigan State University

Social Networking

Abstract

Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research.

Introduction

Since their introduction, social network sites (SNSs) such as MySpace, Facebook, Cyworld, and Bebo have attracted millions of users, many of whom have integrated these sites into their daily practices. As of this writing, there are hundreds of SNSs, with various technological affordances, supporting a wide range of interests and practices. While their key technological features are fairly consistent, the cultures that emerge around SNSs are varied. Most sites support the maintenance of pre-existing social networks, but others help strangers connect based on shared interests, political views, or activities. Some sites cater to diverse audiences, while others attract people based on common language or shared racial, sexual, religious, or nationality-based identities. Sites also vary in the extent to which they incorporate new information and communication tools, such as mobile connectivity, blogging, and photo/video-sharing.

Scholars from disparate fields have examined SNSs in order to understand the practices, implications, culture, and meaning of the sites, as well as users' engagement with them. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together a unique collection of articles that analyze a wide spectrum of social network sites using various methodological techniques, theoretical traditions, and analytic approaches. By collecting these articles in this issue, our goal is to showcase some of the interdisciplinary scholarship around these sites.

The purpose of this introduction is to provide a conceptual, historical, and scholarly context for the articles in this collection. We begin by defining what constitutes a social network site and then present one perspective on the historical development of SNSs, drawing from personal interviews and public accounts of sites and their changes over time. Following this, we review recent scholarship on SNSs and attempt to contextualize and highlight key works. We conclude with a description of the articles included in this special section and suggestions for future research.

Social Network Sites: A Definition

We define social network sites as web-based services that allow individuals to (1) construct a public or semi-public profile within a bounded system, (2) articulate a list of other users with whom they share a connection, and (3) view and traverse their list of connections and those made by others within the system. The nature and nomenclature of these connections may vary from site to site.

While we use the term "social network site" to describe this phenomenon, the term "social networking sites" also appears in public discourse, and the two terms are often used interchangeably. We chose not to employ the term "networking" for two reasons: emphasis and scope. "Networking" emphasizes relationship initiation, often between strangers. While networking is possible on these sites, it is not the primary practice on many of them, nor is it what differentiates them from other forms of computer-mediated communication (CMC).

What makes social network sites unique is not that they allow individuals to meet strangers, but rather that they enable users to articulate and make visible their social networks. This can result in connections between individuals that would not otherwise be made, but that is often not the goal, and these meetings are frequently between "latent ties" (Haythornthwaite, 2005) who share some offline connection. On many of the large SNSs, participants are not necessarily "networking" or looking to meet new people; instead, they are primarily communicating with people who are already a part of their extended social network. To emphasize this articulated social network as a critical organizing feature of these sites, we label them "social network sites."

While SNSs have implemented a wide variety of technical features, their backbone consists of visible profiles that display an articulated list of Friends¹ who are also users of the system. Profiles are unique pages where one can "type oneself into being" (Sundén, 2003, p. 3). After joining an SNS, an individual is asked to fill out forms containing a series of questions. The profile is generated using the answers to these questions, which typically include descriptors such as age, location, interests, and an "about me" section. Most sites also encourage users to upload a profile photo. Some sites allow users to enhance their profiles by adding multimedia content or modifying their profile's look and feel. Others, such as Facebook, allow users to add modules ("Applications") that enhance their profile.

The visibility of a profile varies by site and according to user discretion. By default, profiles on Friendster and Tribe.net are crawled by search engines, making them visible to anyone, regardless of whether or not the viewer has an account. Alternatively, LinkedIn controls what a viewer may see based on whether she or he has a paid account. Sites like MySpace allow users to choose whether they want their profile to be public or "Friends only." Facebook takes a different approach—by default, users who are part of the same "network" can view each other's profiles, unless a profile owner has decided to deny permission to those in their network. Structural variations around visibility and access are one of the primary ways that SNSs differentiate themselves from each other.

After joining a social network site, users are prompted to identify others in the system with whom they have a relationship. The label for these relationships differs depending on the site—popular terms include "Friends," "Contacts," and "Fans." Most SNSs require bi-directional confirmation for Friendship, but some do not. These one-directional ties are sometimes labeled as "Fans" or "Followers," but many sites call these Friends as well. The term "Friends" can be misleading, because the connection does not necessarily mean friendship in the everyday vernacular sense, and the reasons people connect are varied (boyd, 2006a).

The public display of connections is a crucial component of SNSs. The Friends list contains links to each Friend's profile, enabling viewers to traverse the network graph by clicking through the Friends lists. On most sites, the list of Friends is visible to anyone who is permitted to view the profile, although there are exceptions. For instance, some MySpace users have hacked their profiles to hide the Friends display, and LinkedIn allows users to opt out of displaying their network.

Most SNSs also provide a mechanism for users to leave messages on their Friends' profiles. This feature typically involves leaving "comments," although sites employ various labels for this feature. In addition, SNSs often have a private messaging feature similar to webmail. While both private messages and comments are popular on most of the major SNSs, they are not universally available.

Not all social network sites began as such. QQ started as a Chinese instant messaging service, LunarStorm as a community site, Cyworld as a Korean discussion forum tool, and Skyrock (formerly Skyblog) was a French blogging service before adding SNS features. Classmates.com, a directory of school affiliates launched in 1995, began supporting articulated lists of Friends after SNSs became popular. AsianAvenue, MiGente, and BlackPlanet were early popular ethnic community sites with limited Friends functionality before re-launching in 2005-2006 with SNS features and structure.

Beyond profiles, Friends, comments, and private messaging, SNSs vary greatly in their features and user base. Some have photo-sharing or video-sharing capabilities; others have built-in blogging and instant messaging technology. There are mobile-specific SNSs (e.g., Dodgeball), but some web-based SNSs also support limited mobile interactions (e.g., Facebook, MySpace, and Cyworld). Many SNSs target people from specific geographical regions or linguistic groups, although this does not always determine the site's constituency. Orkut, for example, was launched in the United States with an English-only interface, but Portuguese-speaking Brazilians quickly became the dominant user group (Kopytoff, 2004). Some sites are designed with specific ethnic, religious, sexual orientation, political, or other identity-driven categories in mind. There are even SNSs for dogs (Dogster) and cats (Catster), although their owners must manage their profiles.

While SNSs are often designed to be widely accessible, many attract homogeneous populations initially, so it is not uncommon to find groups using sites to segregate themselves by nationality, age, educational level, or other factors that typically segment society (Hargittai, this issue), even if that was not the intention of the designers.

Getting into Yahoo and Live (Formerly MSN)

2008-12-26T23:51:00.000-08:00

Most websites get into Yahoo and Live by getting spidered from other sites. Meaning if you're already linked from another site or web directory, Live and Yahoo's robots will eventually find you when they update their search index.

If you don't want to wait to get spidered, you can submit directly to Live by going here http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx.

Do not keep re-submitting your site. It will not speed up the process of getting listed and may even get you banned.

Yahoo's direct submission site is https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/submit.

The Yahoo Directory

Not to be confused with the regular Yahoo search function, the Yahoo directory is also a place you can add your site.

When you go to Yahoo.com and enter a search into the box, you are using their regular search engine, not the directory. So it is possible to be included in Yahoo's regular search index and not be included in their directory.

The Yahoo directory is actually a categorical listing of sites located here http://dir.yahoo.com and it's not used very much by web surfers.

The real benefit to being listed here is to have a high quality link pointing to your site. Many search engines look at who is linking to you and if you have a link from the Yahoo directory, it may give you some "credibility" points.

Some believe that having a listing in the directory will help boost your rank in Google and other engines. There is no solid proof of this, however. Yahoo also states that if you are listed in their directory, it does not have any affect on your position in their regular search results.

If your site is commercial it will cost you $299 per year to be included in Yahoo's directory. So if you can justify/afford the cost, I would still recommend getting into Yahoo just to have the high-quality link pointing to your site - but don't expect a lot of traffic from the actual page you'll be listed on.

It's up to you to decide if it's worth it or not. Many webmasters do quite well in the "Big 3" search engines without a listing in the Yahoo directory.

see too about how to get listed in google