I read a post about the sins of social media by Jennifer Horowitz. It made some excellent points on how not to come across to your audience and I just want to cover a few of the main ones.

The first thing they talked about was vanity. In all honesty I would be the first person to shower myself with praise once I have achieved something good but sometimes arrogance takes over from your confidence and you become disliked by many. You should know when to draw the line. If you know you’re good at something the best thing to do is teach others how to do it, instead of bragging about how good you are. The feeling in the end will be a much better one and comments about you will be good ones instead of negative ones.

Although many professionals are not arrogant and pass on their knowledge willingly, you still get the people that I like to call haters. These are the people who do not want to learn from the pros but rather try any tactic to be better than them. As the saying goes “don’t hate, appreciate”.

Your friend list and the people you follow on social media sites is the next important thing the article discussed. Basically, what it says is that you should concentrate on quality over quantity. Rather add people that are relevant to your work or niche instead of just adding for the “I got more friends or followers” bragging rights. This will get you more widely known where it actually matters.

In other social media news, it seems like Facebook has finally overtaken MySpace as the social media leader. Facebook is also the leading social media site in the United States. Personally, I never thought this would happen. Hitwise  shows that Facebook holds 30.31% visits while MySpace is at 29.98% of visits for the past week. This is a small difference but a difference nevertheless. Other movement in the industry shows that the social networking site, Tagged, is doing better than Twitter in the US. Being very similar to Facebook, this site could also be a big name in the future.

Social media stats

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The what not to do in social media guide

The presentation was on blended search and covered various points, such as:

* The types of results
* How to optimise for the main blended search factors
* How popular blended search is in search engines
* Why you need to use blended search to your advantage

Have a look and leave all positive comments below.

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Blended search is the way forward in 2009

There are three factors that I want to be point out for BrowseRank. One of the major differences between PageRank and BrowseRank is that PR uses a link graph in order to determine a website’s importance. In other words, they check how many inbound links a site has and what kind of sites these links are coming from. This is a problem when spammers come in to play because they create automated links from a large number of websites. These links are all calculated in the page’s PR and it leaves the user thinking that a page is important when it really is not. BrowseRank, on the other hand, does not have this problem because inbound links are not the most important factor when determining a page’s importance. So, basically, spam will not affect BrowseRank in any way. Another thing BrowseRank can check is whether users arrive at a page from a URL input or via a link on a different page.

The next thing I would like to speak about is the amount of time spent on a page. I think that this is a very good point to cover. With PageRank, any hit that a page gets is counted as a visit. The bounce rate on that page is not taken into account. If a user spends 3 seconds on a page then the page is obviously not as important as a page that the user spends a few minutes on.

The last thing that BrowseRank checks is how many times a user visits a certain page. That page will gradually start to climb in the user’s search results every time they visit it. BrowseRank can also determine whether the user clicks through to that page of if they entered the URL manually. Three things are recorded when a user visits a page:

• URL: The actual URL that the user visited
• TYPE: Whether they entered the URL or clicked through to it
• TIME: The time that the user landed on that page

In my personal opinion, BrowseRank is a good thing to have but I currently still use PageRank on a daily basis, which is more than I would use BrowseRank. It would be nice to see BrowseRank and PageRank working together in some way; then we would have the ultimate ranking tool.

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Browse Rank to take over from Page Rank

AskKids.com is said to be the best kids search engine so far. They have a fun, interactive home page for children where they can draw and play around with different stickers. This is sure to keep the kids entertained for a while. I even spent a few minutes making some drawings out of my name and creating funny faces.

There is also a school house option that takes you to a results page with different school subjects and sites that could help children with their studies. There are 3 different age levels: kids, teens and advanced teens. Kids is for children who are still in primary school, teens are those children who are moving from primary school to high school and advanced teens are those who are in the upper high school grades. To help with navigation there is a filter for various subjects and other resources in the left hand menu.

In the images menu you will find some popular image searches that include sunflowers, pyramids, Zac Efron, jellyfish and the Amazon River. There is also a video search that will give you video results for popular searches, including volcanoes, dog shows, the Great Wall of China, Harry Potter and the world cup. This is exactly the kind of thing that kids enjoy and anybody can imagine them searching for this kind of stuff.

Let`s move on to the actual search function of AskKids.com. Ask created a “very strict” list of sites for AskKids, so you would expect to see only sites that are relevant to children of 17 years old or younger. I did a search for “Jack Daniels” and some of the results I saw were very surprising and somewhat shocking. There is one result that goes to eBay, which I presume leads to somebody selling a bottle of alcohol. In the left hand menu there is a link to “Jack Daniels recipes” and under “expand your search” they have suggestions like Vodka, Smirnoff, Bacardi, Southern Comfort and beer. Now I know for a fact that no parents in the world want their kids to come across something like this while they are doing their homework.

Overall I think that AskKids.com is a great site for children but there are still a few problems that need to be sorted out to make it a valid children`s website.

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Ask.com makes you feel like a kid again

Just a few days after it went live some tests were run and it was found that certain pages on the knol site had already been ranked on the first two pages of the SERPs. Google said a few months ago that the fact that knol is on a Google domain won`t give the pages on the site any advantage in the results pages. The PageRank would still be determined like every other page on the internet, through links and PR pointing to that page. I ran a test of my own and found that when you do a backlink check (using the Google toolbar) most of the pages have no links pointing to them. So how do they get these good rankings?

I did a search for devil may cry 4, which is a popular Playstation 3 game. The knol page of this query was number 8 in Google, which to me is simply amazing. It was ranked higher than sites like amazon.com, which actually sell the game compared to the knoll page that doesn`t even give it a good review. So, how many people are actually visiting or linking to a useless knol page in position 8 in the SERPs, instead of better sites that actually have something valuable to offer? It all seems pretty odd to me.

Many experts have been saying that the knol site has been created to compete with Wikipedia. The knol site is still in its early days, however, and may only be able to compete with Wikipedia some time in the future. One of the major differences between the two sites is that the knol site feature articles about various things that come from the author`s point of view. These articles cannot be edited by the public and are not a very good source of information. Wikipedia, on the other hand, gives readers the facts and if the facts are wrong they will be edited by someone who knows the real story.

Someone could challenge my point of view by saying that Google has a site like YouTube, and that if a video is posted today, it won`t be ranked highly in the SERPs by tomorrow. In other words, Google doesn`t influence the rankings just because it is their own site. That is probably because YouTube is a major brand in its own right and is already the number 1 streaming video site across the world. It has almost no competition, whereas Google`s knol site has Wikipedia to compete with and we all know how big that is. I am sure that in due time the quality of the knol pages will improve and then their high positions in the SERPs will actually be earned.

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KNOL links could give you a major nitrous boost to the top

When a customer reads what previous users of a certain product had to say about it, their attention will be caught more quickly than just a basic advertisement. Searchengineguide explained a survey by Nielsen, in which consumer recommendations and opinions were two of the most trusted marketing techniques while search engine ads were third from the bottom with a mere 34% trust factor.

Many companies will pay big bucks for a single ad. Word of mouth is absolutely free and it gives the user much more insight on the product itself. Personally I think both ads and reviews have a major part to play. If you are competing in a big market, you need an attractive ad to get the attention of customers first. Once they are on your site they should be shown the product they are looking for with a few consumer reviews linked to it. This would increase your chances of making a sale because customers trust other customers more than they would trust a basic explanation of what your product can do.

So if you have a site and it`s getting loads of traffic with no conversions, something is obviously wrong. Check your marketing strategy. Let your happy customers give feedback on your site about why they liked your product. For example, send them an email two weeks after the sale asking them to give feedback. If you still don`t get any conversions, then you should check that your product is actually any good and whether people are giving positive or negative reviews.

With all this said, don`t go to all your friends and ask them to give feedback on your product because that would be cheating. Let the consumers sell your product for you. It gives you less advertising work and more ROI. This is a real win-win situation.

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Word of mouth and consumer reviews top paid ads

In a post I read from Seroundtable, it is said that the footer links wont actually be penalised if your links are relevant and kept under a certain limit. I fully agree with this. If you have over 100 links with all different anchor text, Google might crawl your site and lose what the true content in your site covers. Whereas if your footer links are all relevant, and there are not a lot of them, it might work to your advantage. Relevance to the content would be the key to remember when creating footer links.

In addition to lowering the number of links in the footer, another thing they say you should avoid is having many repetitions of keywords or anchor text on a page, because that might hurt your site’s ranking.

Many users employ the footer links as a quicker way to move around any website, instead of going through a menu on the top of the page, and clicking through a number of times before reaching your destination. That does not mean you have to go out and put a link to every page on your site in your footer but rather add links to important pages that your visitors would want to see or those that you want your visitors to see. You could also add some links to related authority sites.

No user likes to look through a whole lot of links cramped into a tiny space at the bottom of the page with font size 6, that you have to strain your eyes just to see the anchor text. Think about your visitors next time you want to design your website with all those footer links.

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Footer links penalised by Google?