Have you ever wished that more people would read  an amazing blog post you wrote? Or maybe you took a hilarious picture of your cat that the world needs to see? Well, worry no more because with the help of Webs’ social buttons your cat could have his own fan-made auto-tuned remix in no time.

Just What are Social Buttons?

Social buttons are links that you can place on your website (usually after some content) that let your visitors share that content with their friends with the click of a button. Here at Webs, we are introducing two new social buttons, Twitter and Google, as well as a revamped Facebook button. Using these social buttons can help increase website traffic and increase your SEO ranking.

The Facebook “Like” Button

As you all know, the “Like” button on Facebook is a way for people to show their appreciation for a friend’s status update or picture. Now, though, you can have this button placed anywhere on the web so that Facebookers can share content to Facebook from anywhere! When a site visitor presses this button, a message will be displayed on their Facebook profile as well as on their friends’ walls, giving your link tons of visibility.

We’ve updated our Facebook “Like” button with even more features than before. Now you have the option of having the button “like” a specific URL rather than the web address  of the page the button is currently sitting on. This is great for adding a button next to a link you want to spread. Simply type in the URL of the link you want people to like and you are done (note: if this field is left blank, the web address that the button appears on will be what is “liked”).

You now also have the option to place a “Send” button next to the “Like” button which allows visitors to send the link to a specific person. Our new widget comes with three different layouts: the small button and box layouts work great after page content, whereas the standard layout looks awesome in a sidebar.

*Please note that Facebook Connect must be activated to use this widget.

Twitter “Tweet” Button

The “Tweet” social button is an easy way for your followers to tweet about your site or content on your site. Simply place the “Tweet” button on your page; when visitors click the button they will be connected to Twitter and will see a premade message that they can tweet to their followers in seconds.

The “Tweet” button is packed with features as well: you can change the layout, edit the premade text for the tweet, and even recommend up to two people for the visitor to follow. The “Tweet” button has the same feature as the Facebook “Like” button where the URL that is to be tweeted can be different from the URL on which the button is placed. If you leave the URL field blank, the widget will automatically use the URL of the page it is embedded in.

For those of you who want your site to be connected to Twitter, but don’t yet have any site content to share, we also have a “Follow” social button that lets visitors follow you with a simple click.

Google “+1” Button

The Google “+1” button is our newest social button. By clicking on this button, site visitors can relay to their Google contacts that the content they are +1-ing , is really interesting. Then, the next time any of their contacts are searching using Google, they will be able to see that your content was +1’d, making your content more appealing! This is a great way to drum up more interest in your site. Adding a +1 button is really simple and just requires you to select the button’s size and style, and to decide what URL (be it your homepage, blog app or a specific blog post) you want +1’d. Once again, if you leave the URL field blank, the widget will automatically use the URL of the page it is on.

So what now?

The next time you are adding content to your page, whether it be a new item to your online store, a new blog post, or a new podcast, consider adding social buttons to the page (you can add just one—or all three!). Just remember that social buttons alone cannot catapult your site into the spotlight. It all starts with quality content. If your content is great, and if you make sharing your content easy, your visitors will be singing your praises on Facebook, Twitter, and Google before you know it.

blog.webs.com

If you have ever dabbled with Twitter, you’ll know that the concept is really quite simple: you have 140 characters to use to update your followers. At first this may seem like a novelty fad or something fun to play around with, but Twitter has proven to be a huge and effective tool when it comes to promotions. As it turns out, those 140 characters can make a huge difference in attracting people to your site and getting them to stay.

So what can you do to make sure that you are using Twitter effectively? The main objective is to remember that although Twitter was made to let you tell the world what you are doing, that is not where the real magic lays. The appeal of Twitter comes from the conversations that you can have with just about anybody from your favorite celebrity to a local small business. Ability to reach out to these entities lets followers feel connected and can create strong relationships.

Let’s take a look at how you can apply this concept to promoting your website.

Getting Ready

Before you get started, let’s make sure that your Twitter page is ready for all of the new traffic you will be generating. Here’s a helpful checklist to make sure your Twitter profile looks credible:

• Make sure your username is easy to read and relates to the topic of your site or brand name.
• Fill out all of the fields in your profile – not only does this make you look more credible, but it will also help people find you in searches.
• Make sure that you include the URL to your website in the “Bio” field of your profile. Adding this information helps to drive traffic back to your website.
• Choose a profile picture that relates to your username or website.
• Make sure you have a couple of quality tweets before you start promoting heavily. People like to know that they will be following someone who is insightful. If you are just starting out, don’t be afraid to tweet and let people know that you are new to Twitter.

The biggest takeaway: the more welcoming your page looks, the more people will be willing to follow you. Remember that your Twitter page is a glimpse into your brand, and/or company.

Getting More Traffic

Twitter can connect you to thousands of people if you know what you are doing. Your main goal should not be to get as many followers as possible, but to get quality and influential followers. It is these followers that will help to drive more people to your Twitter page and ultimately your website.

Twitter was made to spread information virally, meaning information is spread in a chain reaction. For example, let’s say that you Tweet something amazing, and two of your followers decide to retweet the message to their friends. The retweet is seen by all of their followers, who could potentially retweet the message again to their followers, creating a chain reaction of information distribution. This is why it is so important for you to obtain followers who are likely to find your information interesting.

So how do you go about getting these quality followers? Here are a couple of strategies you can try:

• Get your existing fans to follow you. Believe it or not, you probably already have a bunch of people who would be willing to follow you. Let your existing fans on Facebook or the visitors on your website know that you have a Twitter account that they should follow. These people are already interested in your website and can make a very strong starting point for your Twitter campaign.

*Tip: Try using our Twitter widgets on your website that allow visitors to follow you with a click of a button.

• Follow the right people and add to conversations. Just because you are trying to get quality followers doesn’t mean that you can’t be one yourself. Start following people who are linked to the topic of your site. You can find these people by searching through Twitter for certain topics, phrases, or even location. As you follow them and they tweet about something in your field, feel free to respond to them (don’t forget to use “@” to mention them!).

*Tip: If your website is especially relevant to a tweet, feel free to link them to your site in your response.

Keeping People Interested

Now that you have a bunch of quality followers, it’s time to get them to interact with you. Just like your website, people only really respond to quality content. It might seem hard to create quality content in just 140 characters, but it can be done. Just remember that it is all about starting conversations. Here are a couple of tips to achieve that all powerful mention or retweet:

• Links are your friend. Just because you can’t type more than 140 characters doesn’t mean you can’t link to your website that elaborates on a great idea. Remember to let people know what’s in each link though; for security reasons people no longer click on random links.
• Tweet about your unique ideas or views related to the topic of your website.
• Ask questions. Try to draw out responses from your visitors.
• Talk about or retweet the latest news in your industry; let people know that you are on top of your field.
• Be human. Don’t just throw out quotes from your company history page or your pamphlet. Talk like a human and be approachable.
• Use hashtags (#) to label a topic of conversation and start a trend.

Remember that the conversation doesn’t have to end after one response. Keep the conversation going and build relationships. Once you get good at this, these relationships will eventually translate into beneficial conversions for your site.

Things Not to Do

Now that you have an idea of what to do, here are some important faux pas of Twitter that will drive people away from you or make Twitter difficult to use.

• Don’t shamelessly promote yourself all of the time. Your followers don’t want to see that, in fact, they are probably already using your site.
• Don’t over tweet. If you send out too many unrelated tweets at once, people will be annoyed at how you are filling up their feed.
• Don’t send out duplicate tweets, over and over again. Maybe if you have big news or something time sensitive, but generally people don’t want to see the same tweet from you the whole day.

If you follow these guidelines, you will have a successful twitter campaign in no time. Just remember that Twitter is only a piece to the puzzle that is your website. Twitter is a powerful tool, but it alone will not make your site popular. Head over to our How To and Tips section of our blog to learn more about what you can do to make your site great.

blog.webs.com

The web is full of informative blogs and forums where industry experts freely share their knowledge and experience in search engine marketing. Keep up with the pulse of the Internet marketing industry by reading these blogs and forums on a daily basis. Search engine optimization is not an exact science. The ranking algorithms are constantly changing, and though the optimization techniques generally remain the same, new tips and tricks are constantly discovered by these industry gurus.

This article provides you with a framework upon which true industry expertise can be built. Much like other industries, continuing education is a must if you plan to excel at search engine optimization. Take advantage of every free resource that s made available to you. Unlike many other industries, search engine marketing experts are generally not afraid to share some of their best secrets.

There are literally hundreds and possibly thousands of constantly updated resources pertaining to search engine optimization. Respected industry blogs like search engine land (www.searchengineland.com), SEOmoz (www.seomoz.org), pepperjamblog (www.pepperjam.com/blog) and others are updated frequently, sometimes numerous times per day. Although it is impossible to keep up-to-date with every resource, it can be just as difficult to keep up with only a few blogs due to the rapid frequency of updates. To alleviate this problem, customize a free newsreader like Google’s personal home pages to display the most recent entries of your favorite blogs. Each of these industry blogs uses RSS to syndicate content throughout the Internet. Google’s customizable home page reads these RSS feeds and updates your personal home page with the headlines of the most recent posts of each blog whose RSS feed you subscribe to.

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Not everyone is going to be an expert at every aspect of search engine optimization. To take full advantage of what search engine optimization as to offer your web site, many skills are required. These skills include but are not limited to HTML writing, knowledge of CSS, data analysis, graphical design, server administration, copy writing, link building, blogging, and so on. Do not hesitate to put together a team of people skilled in these different areas to assist in the project. You do not need to hire a team of people to work at your side; you can outsource some of the work to others through popular outsourcing web sites such as Elance.

You are sure to find that you excel at some search engine optimization tasks and lack the knowledge or motivation to excel in others. You may be an excellent web designer and copywriter, but terrible at server administration and link building. In this case, you may want to consider an outsourced employee to help you take advantage of the advanced server side search engine optimization techniques and someone else to assist in link building; or, you ma want to pass on the web designing and copy writing and focus solely on link building. Either way, there are many alternatives out there to doing all the work yourself. How you decide to take advantage of these alternatives depends on your level of experience and ultimately your budget.

As you read through the rest of this book, you are going to encounter many techniques that you feel uncomfortable performing due to lack of knowledge or just a lack of time. Just about everything can be outsourced, so do not heritage to explore that option if necessary.

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Setting realistic goals for your SEO project ensures that you stay on task and keep focused despite the many mountains and valleys you are sure to encounter. SEO s not an exact science, and even f you follow best practices, there are no guarantees.  Many SEO companies guarantee front-page rankings or even place time frames on when success is likely to be realized, but ultimately, the search engines decide your fate. Set realistic goals for the project, and you are less likely to be disappointed and distracted throughout the process.

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If you decide to do your own SEO, more than just your time is required. Set aside a budget for your SEO as if it is any other form of marketing. There are certain tasks involved in a comprehensive SEO plan that require a financial investment. You may not need to hire a company to do your SEO, but you should give yourself the best opportunity to increase your rankings, increase your traffic, and beat your competitors. To give yourself that opportunity, a budget is required.

www.seofreetools.org

To get the most from SEO efforts, you should design and optimize your website for your target audience. Your target audience is the group of people that you are trying to reach through your online marketing efforts. Target audiences are often defined by demographics such as age groups, nationalities, or specific interests.

Understanding who your target audience is and what they are searching for can greatly increase the effectiveness of a SEO campaign.

Make sure you are speaking your target audience’s language when optimizing your site. If your business is an online marketing company, your main focus is to generate more traffic to your customers’ sites. Make sure you speak the same language on your site that your target audience uses.

Research and analysis uncovers the key terms and phrases that web uses are searching for. This may be as simple s figuring out what terminology people are using when searching. Are people searching for “seo” or “search engine optimization”? You can use a tool like Google Trends to discover trends in the popularity of different search queries.

Knowing your target audience also provides you the opportunity to identify other online marketing opportunities. If your target audience is primarily the teenage demographic, marketing on platforms such as MySpace could be lucrative. If your target audience is mostly young college graduates, marketing on a social network like Facebook may provide benefit. The benefits of having a full understanding of your target audience cannot be overlooked. Rather than waste time trying to figure out what that audience is later, try to define your audience early in the SEO process.

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Choosing a topic is the first step to get start with SEO campaign. So if you have a website with a topic you satisfied then you can skip this step. The topic being chosen can have a great effect on both the quality of the results your SEO achieves and the speed you can achieve them.

Increasing website rankings for competitive topics is much more difficult than increasing rankings for less competitive topics. Let get some examples of highly competitive topics such as commodity trading, prescription medications.  Those sites concentrating on such topics can be very lucrative to site owners if the manage to generate visitors.

If you have a brand-new site and want to be profitable quickly then you need to focus on site ranking rather than these highly competitive terms. The important factors of increasing site ranking are site age, quality and quantity of content, and quality and quantity of inbound links.

Unless your site already possesses those factors, you should choose a topic that is less competitive. Optimizing for less competitive topics can provide quicker and more impressive ranking results. If you are developing a site about commodity trading, consider focusing on a specific topic within the overall topic of “commodity trading”.

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Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the volume or quality of traffic to a web site or a web page (such as a blog) from search engines via “natural” or un-paid (”organic” or “algorithmic”) search results as opposed to other forms of search engine marketing (SEM) which may deal with paid inclusion. The theory is that the earlier (or higher) a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine. SEO may target different kinds of search, including image search, local search, video search and industry-specific vertical search engines. This gives a web site web presence.

As an Internet marketing strategy, SEO considers how search engines work and what people search for. Optimizing a website primarily involves editing its content and HTML and associated coding to both increase its relevance to specific keywords and to remove barriers to the indexing activities of search engines.

The acronym “SEO” can refer to “search engine optimizers,” a term adopted by an industry of consultants who carry out optimization projects on behalf of clients, and by employees who perform SEO services in-house. Search engine optimizers may offer SEO as a stand-alone service or as a part of a broader marketing campaign. Because effective SEO may require changes to the HTML source code of a site, SEO tactics may be incorporated into web site development and design. The term “search engine friendly” may be used to describe web site designs, menus, content management systems, images, videos, shopping carts, and other elements that have been optimized for the purpose of search engine exposure.

Another class of techniques, known as black hat SEO or spamdexing, use methods such as link farms, keyword stuffing and article spinning that degrade both the relevance of search results and the user-experience of search engines. Search engines look for sites that employ these techniques in order to remove them from their indices.

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HTML5, depending on who you listen to, may be either a disruptive new technology that has the potential to bring entire companies to their knees, or a smooth transition from current HTML 4.0 that promises to make life much easier for developers. Both are at least partially true, and in this continuing series, I hope to help you make sense out of HTML5: both business sense and nuts-and-bolts coding-level sense.

HTML5 is most definitely a work in progress. It began to take shape back in 2004, and the official specification may not be actually complete until the year 2022! But HTML5 is already here, in everything from your current desktop browser to your new smartphone, so there’s no problem with getting started.

So Let’s Get Started with HTML5

Perhaps the most important thing to understand about HTML5 is not the coding details and changes themselves, but the high-level functions they give you access to. In fact, HTML5 is all about high-level functions rather than details. For instance, instead of thinking of multimedia objects and then defining them as video or audio and so on, in HTML5 you can simply write something like:

<video src="watchthis.mp4" width="640" height="480">
	<a href="watchthis.mp4">Here's my video</a>
</video>

This functional methodology extends even to typical page coding. We’re all used to writing complex pages in terms of low-level objects like </div>, which is kind of amorphous and easy to lose track of. So we often attempt to keep track of things by coding like this:

<div id="header">
<H1>Web Developer Basics: Learning About HTML5</H1>
<p>by David Fiedler</p>
</div>

In HTML5, we can cut right to the chase. We’re writing a header, and now we can code it that way:

<header>
<H1>Web Developer Basics: Learning About HTML5</H1>
<p>by David Fiedler</p>
</header>

So what, you might say at this point. Well, it’s not just the header of a page that we can now view as a complete functional object, it’s almost everything we use on a daily basis: <header>, <footer>, <article>, <section>, <nav>, <menu>, <figure>. This gives us tremendous flexibility in terms of how we can think of the page. So it’s not just easier to understand the structure of the page, it’s easier to correctly code the structure of the page.

Begin At the Beginning

The beginning of many modern HTML 4.0 pages looks something like this:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

But in our brave new world of HTML5, all we need is:

<!DOCTYPE html>

Similarly, the complex XHTML boilerplate declarations many people use can be simply replaced by:

<html lang="en">

and encoding declarations such as

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

can be toned down to a mere

<meta charset="utf-8">

Oh, and we may as well get this next bit out of the way now, even though I hesitate to mention it for fear of being responsible for people writing near-incomprehensible HTML5 pages. You no longer need those double quotes around attributes, so that <p> is now as legal as <p>. But please use this power wisely.

A Bit Of Magic

Just to show that HTML5 isn’t only about structure and saving keystrokes here and there, here’s a nice example of an attribute feature that is simple on the surface, but demonstrates some real power. Paste this simple little document into a text file, and call it something like foo.html:

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
     <meta charset="utf-8">
     <title>You Can Edit This</title>
</head>
<body>
     <h1>I Mean, You Can Really Edit This</h1>
     <p contenteditable=true>
     Now is the time for all good cats to come to the aid of their catnip.
     </p>
</body>
</html>

The only new thing here that will jump out at you is the attribute of contenteditable on the paragraph tag. You can use this on any element, not just a paragraph, and it takes effect for everything within that element. Now, open this file using any modern browser, and you’ll see that you can indeed edit the paragraph – but not the heading! – right in the browser.

But wait, there’s more! Change that paragraph as much as you like, then save the page to your computer as a new HTML file. Open it up in a text editor…and presto, the source code has changed to reflect the text changes you made in the browser. Shazam!

Future articles in this continuing series will cover the details of how to use the new HTML5 elements and features (along with working examples, naturally). And we’ll keep it real, and readable, without devolving into quoting language syntax by the ton.