SEO Hosting Blog

I have seen an increase in sites using floating footer toolbars. I decided to do some homework and figure out how I could add a floating footer toolbar to some of my sites too. A floating footer toolbar is a program with a user interface that allows visitors to bookmark, save, or share information discovered on your site. One of the best floating footer toolbars I have found is Wibiya.

Using Wibiya you can boost your blog or website by adding rich and interactive features. It works on all the popular blogging platforms and also includes a universal javascript code that will work on any type of website. Using the toolbar can help you create a grow a community of returning readers or visitors.

Wibiya gives owners the option of creating a community using FaceBook Connect. It can also help you increase page views. You can gain traffic from FaceBook through your members news feeds and engage readers and raise pageviews with applications such as post navigator and blog search. Wibiya also has their own traffic growth and analytic tools so that you can track your traffic growth.

Communicating with readers and visitors is simple. With Wibiya, readers and visitors can share content using Twitter. Tweets can also be shared among other readers and visitors in real time. Short messages can be sent to members alerting them of new contents or posts on your blog or website. FaceBook fan pages can be created and members can join and communicate via a direct channel connection.

In Wibiya, these features are called applications and you’re able to custom build your toolbar to fit the needs of your blog or site. Available applications are simply dragged, dropped and installed onto your toolbar.

The available applications are:

• Blog Search, which can help you increase pageviews and reader engagement.
• Translations, which provides for easy content translation into one of twenty available languages.
• Post Navigator, which offers readers and site visitors easy navigation tools.
• Live Notifications, which broadcast alerts, messages, news, and more to all your visitors.
• Twitter Gadget, which will show your visitors live notifications of your latest twitter messages.
• Community (via Facebook), which gives you your own blog community with facebook connect, and allows users to join your community through their facebook account.
• Sharing Tool, which enables your visitors to share, save and distribute to your content through the AddToAny application.
• Register to RSS Feed, which gives your visitors the ability to subscribe to your blog through an RSS reader.

All in all, if you’re looking to add a floating footer toolbar to your blog or website, I recommend using Wibiya. At the time of writing this post, the toolbar is available via invite only; however, I received an invite less than 24 hours after registering. To get your Wibiya toolbar, simply register on Wibiya.com for an invite and wait for it to arrive in email.

Blogging seems to be the ideal solution for many things, one of which being SEO. Many people know this, and even more learn this, but I wonder if people often understand why having a blog is important for SEO. Basic and very practical SEO Tips tell us that we should avoid bad coding, use relevant keywords, be conscious of where we place them in text, and get inbound links. Considering these tips, then a blog is an ideal solution for SEO.

Let’s consider coding. Both WordPress and Blogger maintain excellent coding standards. Each platform comes with a standard (approved) template that meets the W3C standards. Actually, Blogger comes with around 25 and WordPress only has one. In both platforms, however, there are hundreds of open sourced templates available that also meet the coding standards. These templates can be downloaded and installed at no charge. (more…)

Have you seen the People of Walmart website? Perhaps, you’ve already contributed and uploaded a picture or two? I find it interesting how certain things go viral on the Internet. Typically, I see low grade YouTube videos or cheesy webpages hit it off on the web. And so is the case with a newly launched blog called People of Walmart. It went viral, people love it, and the way I see it, for site owners, there is a lot that can be learned.

People of Walmart is very simple self-hosted WordPress blog that allows users to contribute content. In this case, it can be a picture of an unusual person found at Walmart. Users who want to contribute must submit the photo by email and manually include a title, description, and include tags. After editors review the picture, it will be published on a blog post. These are called Wal-Creatures.

With over 15,000 fans on FaceBook, People of Walmart has grown very quickly and has captured the interest of thousands of people almost overnight. The site has been of huge interest to FaceBook users, and with over 700 people following on Twitter, awareness of the site seems to be spreading into other networks as well. But, what about SEO? Once the viral buzz wears off and the sudden spike in traffic dwindles down to a trickle, where will the site stand in the SERPS?

My prediction doesn’t look very promising. However, it doesn’t have to be that way. Whether the owners of People of Walmart make changes or not, one thing remains possible: You can make changes to your own site. Granted, your site might not go viral like theirs, but if it does, you’ll at least be ready. And as I had mentioned above, a lot can be learned from People of Walmart. And no, I don’t think People of Walmart will last very long after the buzz wears thin. The reason why is because of their lack of SEO. (more…)

Yahoo! has had it’s share of struggles over the years. As we are all well aware, the company has been faced with the challenges of keeping up with the trends of social networking. It has been a rough and costly journey. You may recall the closing of Yahoo! 360 and announced the closure of GeoCities happening this October.

I would more say that Yahoo! has been behind the social networking wave and have been struggling to keep up. Recently, Yahoo! made an update to their homepage which made an attempt to attract and retain users to their site by offering new widgets that allow users to access their accounts from some of the more popular sites online such as FaceBook. To drive the company forward even further, Yahoo! has unveiled a new FaceBook style feature in Yahoo! Mail, which gives users the ability to post status updates. These updates have a very similar feel like FaceBook or Twitter. At this point in time, I think Yahoo! is better off continuing to develop ways to cater to social networking rather than compete with the contenders within the social networking.

One of the most breaking news occurred today with Yahoo! announcing the acquisition of a popular Arabic Internet services site called, Maktoob.com (#1, #2, #3). At this time, the price Yahoo! paid is not known. The acquisition is estimated to be fully complete by forth quarter of this year. (more…)

Yesterday an unknown number of FaceBook users were presented with a link to try a new beta version of FaceBook called, FaceBook Lite. Many of the users who tried to access the beta version of FaceBook were met with disappointment because the link didn’t work. The reason why the link didn’t work for so many people was because FaceBook made a mistake of rolling out the beta version prematurely.

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