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.

What about using relevant keywords? With a blog, you have all the tools needed to write about the topics you want and stay on topic. Each blogging platform gives you the ability to categorize, label, and or tag your articles by sub-topic. Writing content based on relevant keywords comes very easy doing so on a blog. Housing your content within a blog also gives you the ability to stay organized yourself and drill down into micro niche keywords and more longtail keyword topics.

Considering the ease of writing content around relevant keywords, obviously the placement of keywords comes easy too. With most blog platforms, especially Blogger and WordPress, users are given a rich text editor to use. This means that you can properly write content, placing your keywords in your intro paragraphs, and control the amount of reinforcing keywords within the body content and closing paragraph. Also, and most importantly, the rich text editor allows you to easily using heading, bold, and italic tags. Your rich text is formatted into W3C compliant HTML code in the background.

Last item is gaining inbound links to your site. Now, this part is something that not many people do very often. If you have a website and you’re trying to get it to rank for top rated keywords, the blog itself is what can thrust your website into top rankings. The key to doing this is to make sure that you’re blog is completely separate from your website. Meaning, if your website is YOURBUSINESS.COM, don’t make your blog YOURBUSINESS.COM/BLOG or BLOG.YOURBUSINESS.COM.

Instead, make your blog something like YOURBUSINESSBLOG.com. Additionally, your blog and website should be different IP addresses, in fact, maybe hosted by different companies. The purpose of doing this is to have the ability to point links back to your website and have search engines credit these links as true external inbound links.

This part handles a portion of inbound links to your website, which there should also be other link campaigns going on as well. Perhaps a second or third blog as well. Now, with the blog itself, because you’re writing (or should be) excellent content that appeals to people, their natural behavior will be to link to the articles on your blog. Some readers may share your articles with friends by submitting them into social networking site such as Digg, Twitter, FaceBook, and StumbleUpon. When that happens, your articles will be viewed by more people. Search engines, especially Google, keep track of this.

To summarize. A blog is a great thing to have if you’re focused on SEO. A blog can be used to help a main website rank better in search engines simply due to increasing inbound links. Secondly, a blog is a natural inbound link magnet itself. Thirdly, a blog provides users with excellent publishing tools to write and format content in a search engine friendly way. All in all, if you have a website, it would be an excellent idea to also have a blog, covering a relevant topic to your main site. Doing so could be the difference of your site landing on page one, or page doesn’t matter.

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.

Let’s look at the element of user generated content and how to optimize it for search engines. In the case of People of Walmart, photos that are being sent in manually via email. With that, perhaps WordPress isn’t the best option to use. There are many other open source programs available that are more suitable towards handling pictures such as Coppermine. With proper configuration of the software and some minor SEO tweaks, submitting content into People of Walmart could easily become a fully automated and instant process, and most importantly, a search engine friendly one. Titles, descriptions, and tags could be done without the assistance of an editor. A moderator would only be needed to review the submitted content and to the “Publish” button.

Regardless though, WordPress was chosen and with that, many improvements could be made to help the site in the long term for the years to come, long after the viral buzz. But let’s look at how post titles appear in Google. There are other things that could be optimized, but post titles, along with the process of how user content is being generated are the most important.

As you can see in the screen shot above, all titles appear the same. Let’s take a closer look at this entry:

You wouldn’t know it from the entry, but the entry links to a blog post titled, MISS NEW BOOTY which potentially has the ability to pull rank on the miss new booty SERP. The problem is that the blog post doesn’t and it could if it was displaying the post title before or preferably instead of the blog name. Using the All In One SEO Pack can easily correct this. If the post title is visible then the words used in the post title have the potential of becoming keywords that can be used to find the post in search. Right now, unfortunately those valuable keywords are truncated, thus totally wasting the potential of having INTITLE keyword strength. One last element that should be updated is the permalink structure. The site is using the default (p?=123) style and it should be modified to use the /post_title/ style so that INURL keywords can be used. (Read Google Basic Searches)

All in all, it is great to see sites like People of Walmart find success, but also seeing sites like this show me that there continues to be a need for professional SEOs. In order for People of Walmart to have long term success, their site may soon need to undergo some SEO as well as platform changes.

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.

On Maktoob.com, Arabic users can get the latest news, keep up with business, socialize online, perform Internet research, follow popular sports events, and even search real estate. For the most part, this portal site has a lot of Yahoo! characteristics. In fact, if you view the site, while not paying too much attention, you’d might even think you were visiting Yahoo.com. One of the most popular services on Maktoob.com is their free email service.

Maktoob.com claims to be the first web based Arabic email provider on the Internet. They offer users the ability to send and receive email, and create and organize folders within the Inbox all in Arabic language. Additional features allow users to change the appearance of their screen when logged in, auto scan email for viruses, and access other web based email accounts such as Gmail, Yahoo, HotMail.

So what is your opinion? Do you think it was a good idea for Yahoo! to purchase Maktoob.com? Do you think this acquisition will help Yahoo! in the long run, or be another typical Yahoo! acquisition blunder similar to the GeoCities acquisition? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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.

The Lite Version of FaceBook isn’t intended to replace the current. Instead, it is going to be offered as an alternative way to access FaceBook quickly and easily. It serves as a stripped down version of the original, increasing load times, and performance. The idea is to help people make the best of FaceBook who live in areas of the world with slow Internet access.

Some speculated that the FaceBook update was intended to take a stab at their competition, FriendFeed and Twitter, but TechCrunch doesn’t think so. FaceBook Lite doesn’t have many things in common with Twitter or FriendFeed. But, in time, that could change. It’s more thought that FaceBook Lite is intended to help others with slow access similar to the Lite version of MySpace.

For years, Yahoo has had the same look and feel. Soon they will be launching a brand new homepage that will showcase many of the more popular Web 2.0 services that have been gaining popularity over the last two years.

The new Yahoo! homepage features new application such as FaceBook, MySpace, and eBay. These applications pop up on the screen and from there, the user can simply login and access their account without having to leave the Yahoo! homepage.

While these enhancements seem to be great, many people wonder if this upgrade came too late. Here is a screen shot of the new Yahoo! homepage:

Connecting your FaceBook account with the new Yahoo! homepage is very easy. Simply login to your Yahoo! account, mouse over the FaceBook application, enter your FaceBook credentials, and proceed to connect your FaceBook account with your Yahoo! account.

One additional feature I enjoy is Apps Gallery. With the Apps Gallery, you can search for your favorite websites and add them into your personalized Yahoo! homepage.

I have to admit that the new Yahoo! homepage looks very appealing and takes the role of being a very nice portal. I hope that Yahoo! didn’t wait too long to roll this enhancement out. Some people wonder if the new design will change SEO Strategies. What are your thoughts?