a> On page Optimization
b> Off page Optimisation

The most important criteria of achieving high rankings is to have a scientifically designed and programmed website with rich content. Content is gold in SEO industry.

Following are some of the factors that influence search engine rankings :
ON PAGE FACTORS :

Keyword Use in Title Tag
Keyword Use in Body Text
Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords (Topic Analysis)
Effective Use of header tags - h1,h2,h3
Keyword Use in Domain Name
Keyword Use in Page URL
Keyword Use in Alt Tags and Image Titles
Keyword Use in Bold/Strong Tags
Keyword Use in Meta Description Tag
Keyword Use in Meta Keywords Tag

OFF PAGE FACTORS

Global Link Popularity of Site
Global Link Popularity of All Linking Sites
Age of Site
Anchor Text of Inbound Link
Topical Relationship of Linking Page
Age of Link
Domain Extension of Linking Site (edu, gov, com, ca, co.uk, etc)
Topical Relationship of Linking Site
Text Surrounding the Link
Internal Link Popularity of Linking Page within Host Site/Domain
Temporal Link Attributes (when in time the link was created/updated)
PageRank (as measured by the GG Toolbar) of Linking Page

Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
Rate of New Inbound Links to Site
Relevance of Site’s Primary Subject Matter to Query
Historical Performance of Site as Measured by Time Spent on Page, Clickthroughs from SERPs, Direct Visits, Bookmarks, etc.
Manual Authority/Weight Given to Site by Google
TLD Extension of Site (edu, gov, us, ca, com, etc)
Rate of New Pages Added to Site
Number of Queries for Site/Domain over Time

Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
Quality/Relevance of Links to External Sites/Pages
Age of Document
Amount of Indexable Text Content
Quality of the Document Content (as measured algorithmically)
Organization/Hierarchy of Document Flow (i.e. broad > narrow)
Frequency of Updates to Page
Number of Trailing Slashes (/) in URL
Accuracy of Spelling & Grammar
HTML Validation of Document (to W3C Standards)

It’s time to start comparing the big global social networks on something other than unique visitors and page views. I believe an effective way to value a particular user is based on the average Internet advertising spend per person in the country they live in. The higher the spend, the more value the social network can get out of the user by serving them advertising and other products. That means that, for now, users in a handful of key countries are worth far more in terms of revenue potential than those in the rest of the world.

We’ve begun to build out a model that looks at social network usage by country/region and compares that to available data on total Internet advertising spend in each of those countries. The model is then able to turn an apples-to-oranges comparison into an apples-to-apples comparison. The early results are surprising.

The ultimate financial value of any asset is, ultimately, what the market will pay for it. We have only a few data points to help us: Facebook, Bebo and LinkedIn are worth $15 billion, $850 million and $1 billion, respectively, based on relatively recent valuations (although only Bebo was actually sold completely; Facebook and LinkedIn raised investments at those valuations). The last valuation of MySpace was just $580 million, back in 2005 when it was acquired by News Corp.

Which valuation is most “correct?” It’s hard to say based on the data that’s been available to date, which is mostly just aggregate page view and unique visitor numbers from Comscore and other services. Based on worldwide unique visitors, for example, Facebook recently overtook MySpace to become the “largest” social network.

According to raw worldwide user number, the biggest social networks are Facebook, Myspace, Hi5, Friendster, Orkut and Bebo, in that order. But when you apply the model that we’ve created below, which takes into account where users live, the rankings change substantially. MySpace is by far the most valuable social network based on available data. A competitor like Orkut is worth only 1/20th of MySpace, even though it has nearly 1/4 the number of users.

Properly Ranking Social Networks

Our model takes Comscore data for available countries and regions. We’ve graphed each of 26 well known social networks with the data we have been able to collect. We’ve then calculated the average advertising spend (estimated by PriceWaterhouseCoopers in a recent report) for each person online in each of those countries. For example, in the U.S., the total 2008 estimated Internet advertising spend is $25.2 billion. We’ve divided that by the number of people online in the U.S. according to Comscore (191 million), to get an average Internet spend per person of $132. View the raw data and calculations here.

The U.S., by the way, is only the 4th most valuable market per Internet user, trailing The UK ($213), Australia ($148) and Denmark ($144).

We’ve then multiplied the average Internet spend per user in each market with the number of unique users each social network has in that market, essentially creating a “weighted average” based on the advertising dollars chasing users. If a social network has more users in the U.S., Japan, the UK, Germany, Australia, and other bigger advertising networks, they will have a higher weighted average valuation.

We believe this model is an effective way to rank various competing social networks. It bumps down networks like Orkut and Friendster who have tens of millions of users in markets with very little advertising spend, and bumps up networks with lots of users in higher value markets.

Based on this model, MySpace is by far the most valuable social network. Second place Facebook has just 75% of the value of MySpace (even though it now has more users), followed by Bebo (26% of MySpace value), Hi5 and Amebio. LinkedIn comes in at no. 11, at 6% of MySpace’s value.

Valuation Ranges

The real-world revenue numbers being reported for the big networks supports this approach to valuation and shows a direct tie between monetization efforts and where a network’s users are. MySpace is estimated to have generated $755 million in revenue over the last year. The (now) larger Facebook, with a far higher percentage of users in less lucrative markets, will generate just $255 million this year:

EMarketer estimates that MySpace will post $755 million in revenue in the fiscal year ending June 30. MySpace would not comment on the estimate. About a third of the revenue is expected to come from the Google ad pact. For the year, Facebook is estimated to earn $265 million in ad revenue.

Since we have three recent data points valuing social networks (Facebook at $15 billion, Bebo at $850 million, LinkedIn at $1 billion), we can start to apply valuation ranges based on the model. Facebook’s 10.2 million value points and $15 billion valuation puts a $1,467 value on each value point. LinkedIn is valued very similarly, at $1,325 per value point. Bebo, with lots of users in the rich UK market, appears to have been undervalued at only $241 per value point.

Based on these three publicly available data points we’ve created value ranges for each of the top 25 worldwide social networks. There is a very wide disparity (MySpace, for example, is worth between $3.3 billion and $20 billion, based on which comparable you look at). But it does yield very interesting data. For example, If Facebook and LinkedIn were valued similarly to Bebo, they would be worth just $2.5 billion and $182 million, respectively, far less than what their investors recently paid for a piece of them.

Interestingly, the recent sale of Polish social network Nasza-klasa for $92 million appears to be right in sync with Bebo’s price. The model estimates its value at $91 million based on Bebo’s valuation metrics.

There are some big flaws with the model and analysis in its current state. First, LinkedIn may be in a different class of network, given that all of its users are business focused (no super-poking going on there). As a result, it may be able to monetize users far better than its competitors, no matter what geographic market is being looked at. Still, we’ve decided to leave it in as a data point, with that caveat.

The model itself needs more data. The user numbers are based on April Comscore. We will shortly revise it with the May numbers, although the absolute rankings probably won’t change. More importantly, some big markets are not included yet. The Chinese Internet advertising market, for example, is estimated to be $2 billion in 2008, yet they are not included (mostly because I can’t find data on user numbers for the networks). Also, the Philippines isn’t broken out separately, again due to data availability issues (although the total Internet advertising market in the Philippines is just $3 million this year, so it won’t affect the rankings materially even though Friendster is so strong there). Finally, Russia is currently grouped with “the rest of Europe,” and needs to be separately broken out - it has a large and growing online advertising market and lots of users, so that update may affect the mid-level network rankings.

The advertising spend model is just an estimate and from a single source. I’m less concerned with this data since it doesn’t matter to the model if the estimates are absolutely correct. If the estimates are wrong by different rates in different countries, however, the model will break. If we find better relative data between countries, we’ll update the model with that data. But for now, the PriceWaterhouseCoopers data seems to be pretty good.

Finally, this model doesn’t take into account execution at the company level. Two very similar networks may monetize vastly differently based on methods of advertising and even the brute effort and passion of the employees. This model obviously doesn’t take that into account.

CSS only defines the structure and content presentation of a website it has nothing to do with the design of a website. A single CSS sheet can control the font, positioning, colour and style information of an entire website.

Advantages of using CSS

1. Web pages are easier to load and uses less bandwidth

CSS style sheets are preferred by web developers for website development because they are lighter than table layouts, which consumes lots of bandwidth. The style sheet is downloaded only once and stored in the cache memory, so subsequent pages load faster.

2. CSS style sheet compliments well with HTML

HTML is insufficient when used independently in website development, but when combined with CSS they can result in technically stronger web pages.

3. CSS allows you to position your element anywhere in the webpage

Web developers love to use CSS because it allows them to position their element where ever they want in the web page. If during any phase of web development the developer feels that particular links or columns are not going well with the situation then it becomes easier for them to position them easily using CSS. CSS reduces the risks associated with maintenance of the website.

4. CSS is compatible with all web browsers

CSS is combined with HTML or XHTML by web developers for web application development because it is compatible with all web browsers. The sites that use CSS appear similar in all the web browsers.

5. CSS can be used to create print friendly web pages

Most of the web developers love to use CSS for building their HTML based web applications because they allow them to create print friendly web pages. These web pages can be easily printed. The colours, images and other things which are difficult to be printed can be eliminated and printed easily.

6. CSS style sheets allows the user to customize the web page

Now days many websites allow the user to change the layout of the website without affecting the content. The CSS style sheets which are stored externally allow the user to make requisite changes by themselves. Most of the modern browsers give user the liberty to define their own style sheets like changing some font properties etc.

7. CSS style sheets makes it easier for your website to feature in search engines

The CSS style sheets are favoured by web developers because they allow them to position their elements as per their wish anywhere in web application. Positioning helps to project the main contents first, so that it is easily captured by web spiders. CSS also gives cleaner HTML codes thus cutting down the job of web spider to search the real content from junk code.

8. CSS allows the web pages to have absolute consistency

One of the reasons for using CSS during web development is that they allow consistency to all web pages. All the expressions and texts will get their characteristics from external style sheet. Web developers need not to worry about the change in characteristics of the elements because they can be easily altered at any stage of web development by using CSS.

9. CSS lends portability to content

By using CSS you can make separate style sheets for different media. This provides you the great flexibility in presenting your content. CSS allows you to redefine the characteristics of elements in a website to suit the need of the situation. For e.g.: A separate style sheet will allow you to redefine the characteristics of certain elements so that they are easier to be printed. Also the user will never come to know that you had restructured the characteristics for their benefit.

CSS is created to make the things easier for your website and also to give you control over different elements in your website. Utilising benefits of CSS will give you popular user friendly web pages.

Adotube’s innovative video monetization technology enables advertisers to pay for individual customer’s attention, not just per thousand people who happen to be watching at the time – because Adotube makes ads optional for viewers, with advertisers only paying when someone chooses to watch an ad because it interests them, not because they’re forced to.

Anybody with video content to publish online can upload their videos to Adotube.com, which then serves them back on to the publisher’s own website, along with a series of highly targeted, relevant ad previews underneath it. At any point in the video, viewers can choose to watch an ad if they see one that interests them. When they do, their video is paused, and the ad plays. Once finished the ad closes, and their main content picks up where it left off instantly.

To make sure this opt-in advertising model works, Adotube’s closely-guarded algorithm dynamically selects which ads to offer each viewer based on a variety of carefully balanced factors; including the ad’s popularity, relevance and reputation. So viewers can be sure that if they click a Adotube ad, they’ll see something relevant, interesting and fun. Importantly, this ad-selection and prioritisation process ensures that advertisers with ads that prove popular with their audience will find that they receive extra exposure, even if they’re paying less per-view than their competitors.

Constantine, CEO of Adotube says “The Internet has changed the way people watch videos… The time has come for video-advertising to catch up. The days of advertisers buying ad-views by the thousands, and just hoping that people actually pay attention is over, now we can serve targeted, relevant advertising just to viewers who actually want it. This model is better for advertisers and for viewers, because it means that video advertising is now open to any company with the creativity to create something cool, not just giant corporations. Targeting and paying on a view-by-view basis is more measurable, more effective and more manageable. For viewers we believe this revolutionary approach will mean that they get better, more innovative paid-content about products and services that genuinely interest them. For video publishers we offer a way to monetize their content effectively, without compromising the viewing experience with obtrusive advertising”

Invitations have been sent to an undisclosed number of internet and advertising industry insiders to gain preview access to the system as plans are finalized for the formal public launch of the service to the general public in the near future. During this beta-test period, advertisers will be given a daily budget of $1000 per day to play around and familiarize themselves with the system. Publishers signing up during the period will not receive a share of revenue, but will instead be given a 65% revenue share (versus the normal 50%) once the site opens to the public.

Step 1 - Compiling FFMPEG

A lot of the work in this tutorial is done in linux command line, so open up that console.

Ensuring that you have a reliable interent connection to your server, type out the following commands:

sudo apt-get build-dep ffmpeg
sudo apt-get install liblame-dev libfaad2-dev \
libfaac-dev libxvidcore4-dev checkinstall fakeroot
DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS=risky fakeroot apt-get source ffmpeg –compile


Install all the deb packages that are created. A little finer control could be exercised if instead of setting DEB_BUILD_OPTIONS, the debian/rules file can be edited.

Additional configuration

(Some steps may be excluded as were performed above)

First, get your dependencies:

sudo apt-get build-dep ffmpeg
sudo apt-get install liblame-dev libfaad2-dev \
libfaac-dev libxvidcore4-dev liba52-0.7.4 \
liba52-0.7.4-dev libx264-dev checkinstall \
build-essential subversion


Step 2 - Next, grab the ffmpeg source:

Type the following command in your console:

svn checkout -r 8998 svn://svn.mplayerhq.hu/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg


If you’re feeling adventurous, you can try the very latest code by omitting the -r 8998 part of that line. Revision 8998 is the latest at the time of writing, and worked for us.

Now you can configure and build ffmpeg. Use the following commands, this takes a little while:

cd ffmpeg
./configure --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-libvorbis \
--enable-libogg --enable-liba52 --enable-libdts \
--enable-dc1394 --enable-libgsm --disable-debug \
--enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaad --enable-libfaac \–enable-xvid –enable-pthreads –enable-x264
make
Finally, install it. checkinstall gives you the option to edit some parameters: I set the name to ffmpeg and the version to 3:0.svn20070511

sudo checkinstall

Step 3 - Install FFMPEG-PHP

ffmpeg-php is a very useful php extension which provides several methods to query information on the uploaded media. if you are going to do media conversion , you have to know the frame size, frame rate,ect of the input file, and ffmpeg provides those facilities. What ffmpeg-php does is, it provides an PHP interface to ffmpeg tool.

Installing ffmpeg-php is trivial. But make sure you have FFMPEG properly installed , please read the previous post for that.

Download the source code from

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=122353&package_id=133626

Untar the file and then…

phpize


./configure --enable-ffmpeg-php --with-ffmpeg-php --enable-maintainer-zts --enable-debug --with-php-config=/usr/local/php/bin/php-config


Note that –enable-maintainer-zts –enable-debug –with-php-config=/usr/local/php/bin/php-config

A few options were required to ensure this extension complies with the PHP installation i have. so you might not need those.

make
make install


Then…

vi /usr/local/php/php.ini
cp /usr/local/php/lib/php/extensions/debug-zts-20060613/ffmpeg.so /usr/local/php/lib/php/extensions/
apache stopp
apache startphp -r ‘phpinfo();’ | grep ffmpeg
you should see
ffmpeg
ffmpeg support (ffmpeg-php) => enabled
ffmpeg-php version => 0.5.0
ffmpeg.allow_persistent => 0 => 0

php -f ext/ffmpeg-php-0.5.0/tests/test_ffmpeg.php


You should get a page with various info with ffmpeg and ffmpeg formats,ect. You can do further tests by using the media provided by ffmpeg-php source.

The Final step - finding a cool player

You now need a cool video player, we recomend this one:

JW FLV PLAYER 3.12

SMO (Social Media Optimization) - the phrase Social Media Optimization was first invented by Rohit Bhargava. It means Making your web pages and your site content easy to bookmark, share, recommend to friends, to comment on or even to syndicate on Facebook, other blogs etc. Things like adding chicklets for Digg and Delicious, email this link options, post to Facebook, embed video links, add to social shopping sites (for ecommerce)…

SMM (Social Media Marketing) - this is the off-page stuff. This gets into link building a bit, if you’re using social networks to build links. For example, you make a certain type of handmade Stone (Granite , Marble ETC….). You can join the social shopping engine Etsy which focuses on hand-made and Kitchen COuntertops, submit your products to the social shopping site FiveLimes that loves the green friendly business, and write an article about how your product saves the planet and post it on Green friendly sites like Care that allow you to post your own blog entries. Include keyword optimized contexual link within the article, and you’re SMM’ming and SEO’ing.

I agree that these are e tenants to social marketing (SEO, SMO and SMM) and that one is focused on your site and one is focused in neighborhoods away from your site.I also see SMO as not only onsite but also in optimizing results that are offset with SMM efforts. The two components are essential in any great SMM campaign.

There are various processes that need to be included when a web site has to be socially optimized. Basically, social media optimization helps to increase the linkabilty of the site. This is in fact, the main purpose for doing social media optimization for any online web site. Moreover, it should be made sure that the look and the feel of the web site for which social media optimization is being done, is constantly changed so that every time the site gives a fresh feeling to the visitors. This is also a necessity because nobody likes to see the same old graphics and read the same old content. Therefore, changes in the website help to get more visitors and at the same time help the business to earn revenue. Therefore, the content and the other materials used in the site should be highly attractive and attention grabbing.

The principle that works behind social media optimization is to mainly draw traffic to the site. Drawing a good amount of traffic is in fact, one of the best ways to get the site popular among various social media platforms and search engines like Google, Yahoo etc. The thing that mainly needs to be done is to write good articles and then get them circulated in the various social media platforms so that people can read them and come to visit the site. This not only helps in getting good traffic for the website but also helps in getting popular among internet users and various social media platforms. Once the content in the form of articles are floated among the various social media platforms, social media optimizers get hold of them and use them to optimize the site, which further helps in the promotion of that particular website.

After search engine optimization, social media optimization has become one of the most used techniques for the online promotion of a website. Social media optimization is a relatively newer concept but it is gaining a lot of impetus in the market as more and more optimization firms are using this concept to optimize the website of their clients. In fact, social media optimization proves to be a good option for drawing good traffic to a site and at the same time popularizing it in the social media platform

Marketing a social networking site depends on the target market and budget and without knowing exactly about these, it is difficult to go in to much depth. Getting thousands of people on your website is fine but if they do not sign up then it would be considered as waste effort.

For Marketing and promotion it becomes easy when you have solid demographic data and you are placed in a location where you can legally have a contest and it is within the prescribed limits of your budget. In this case the contest prize should be unique and of equal value.

The other option is buying customers. Generally it becomes tricky specially when you don’t have solid numbers related and you are not sure about what the real cost of new acquisition is.

If you plan big and you have short and recognizable url then you could plan your advertising program in a unique way depending on your target market.

You should be prepared for everyone that you try to sell a marketing solution which is the greatest thing ever. You can also write press releases for your website. It helps to gain alexa rank as quickly as possible. There have been some social networking sites that went from bottom to the top one lac Alexa rank within a week only due to the content of the press release. Most entities fail to work with press release properly and are not able to derive the correct benefit.

1. Do not translate your web site only because everybody is doing it. Carefully evaluate your business needs and establish performance indicators to measure your success (or lack thereof). Most managers these days demand return investment on all marketing activities. It will be to your advantage to be able to show bottom line improvements (i.e. online sales in Germany increased 20% or support calls dropped by 10% after we launched the German web site).

2. Identify which section of the web site needs to be translated and define a hand-off process to your translation vendor. Some of the web pages are simple HTML files which can be easily opened and translated. But with anything non-HTML, the text often has to be extracted. This category includes all the graphics that contain text, Flash files, and .PDF files.

3. Try to provide your translator with all of the source files from the very beginning (such as cost estimating). Do not copy and paste every page of your web site in a Word file. It is not necessary and can be time consuming. Even though your translator can download all the files from your web site, it is still a much better practice to hand over all the files relating to the web site. Word count and cost estimates can be very inaccurate if the translator doesn’t have all of the files to work with. Actually, if you have a dynamic web site, the word counting could be off by a long shot because of the unnecessary repetitions.

4. Make sure that your translator uses a translation memory (TM) tool. A TM tool keeps all the translated material in a database and makes it available for any future updates. Using a TM tool can help you save money, improve consistency, and speed up turnaround. In addition, working within a TM tool, tags and script code are recognized and protected during content translation. Provide your translator with any available reference material such as translation guidelines, previous translations and glossaries. The guidelines can address issues such as what terms should be left in English, punctuation, adaptation of date/time format, addresses, symbols, and measurement systems. A glossary is a multilingual terminology list that defines how abbreviations, product names, or industry specific terms should be translated. If the translator is using a translation memory tool, these glossaries can be imported to ensure consistency.

5. Provide your translation vendor with original graphic files including navigation buttons, Flash objects, textual graphics, and PDF files. These will have to be localized as well. It’s in your best interest to send the native PhotoShop and Illustrator files that were used to create the GIFs and JPEGs on your web site! Also, some languages such as French and Spanish are often longer than English. So, you should keep this text expansion in mind when you create your initial graphics to allow for longer text. The desktop publishing specialist at your localization company will keep the background image and will reconstruct the layers containing text and merge them to make the target language images for web.

6. Do some testing after the initial localization is done to make sure that the site looks good and works properly. Check the visuals first. Then do some functionality testing (such as creating and filling out a test form) to see if any function was lost during the translation process. Check to make sure that all necessary pages have been uploaded and translated, all the links are working, and that the translated text can be viewed properly (your developer should change the character encoding according to the target language).

In addition, you should perform testing to ensure that your web site works well on different platforms, operating systems and browsers at this phase. Make sure that the translator or agency understands how browsers work with special characters (diacritics). If your localizer is working or making revisions on the translated text in HTML mode, be careful to never enter characters with accents into the code itself. Certain browsers could display the web page incorrectly.

7. Some translators will try to differentiate the localized files from the source files by adding a distinguishing extension for each language (the German file for index.html will be named index_de.html). When this happens, every link reference in every file will need to be renamed to point to the right link. This will be time consuming and it will increase the possibility of creating errors. Instead of doing this, it is better to store each language version in its own folder.

8. Almost every target language requires localization of measurement systems, date format, punctuation, the thousands/decimal system, and colors. Everyone involved in the localization process should have cultural sensitivity to avoid offensive content.

9. Pay attention to web site layout when localizing in a language like Arabic or Hebrew. Because these are right to left languages, it is most likely necessary to redesign the layout (especially when your web site has navigation bars on the left).

10. If you want to optimize your multilingual site you should be aware that not all major search engines are working properly with foreign pages and your web site may not be listed in many of them. Also, the terminology your translators prefer (however correct or appropriate) might be VERY different from what your customers are using to find you. You must understand how your customers search online to effectively achieve high rankings and good online results. You should do research on what the major local search engines are and what your competition is doing.

If you’re potential clients speak different languages other than English or you want to attract customers from around the world, then DIS UK is here at your service, and you want to develop a multilingual website then contact us.