Website Managers

Archive for January, 2009

While building your website, making all of the pages visible is more than just putting it online. You have to link to it so that you and your visitors can find it. creating a new web page and putting it online is just the beginning. Following these examples to notify the search engines about your new page, will get it noticed faster.

When you want all the pages that are meant to be public indexed by the search engines, there are 4 methods of making them available:

1. Internal Linking to each page from your home page, navigation menu and/or a sitemap.html page
2. Creating a sitemap.txt file and putting it in your home folder
3. Using the Google Sitemap plugin for WordPress, which creates the sitemap for you
4. External Linking: Those links from other websites to the specific pages

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If you were tied up or hung over on New Year’s Eve and weren’t watching your toolbar (we weren’t) then you might not have noticed that Google updated its toolbar PageRank. Matt Cutts actually Twittered it. If you’ve got questions about how Google figures its PageRank, Matt’s the guy to ask. It’s rather complicated and he’s actually on the record for saying he doesn’t understand every little nuance either. In a cool little Q&A format, Matt Cutts answers some of those niggling questions we all have about PageRank and its importance. I like one user’s attitude: Read the rest of this entry »

User-generated content is easy to come by if you know how to get it. With the right software and scripts you can encourage your visitors to participate in the building of your website. Here are some software packages and scripts that you can find online to help you build your website:

• Forum Building - There are two forum software packages that are popular and that you can use to encourage user-generated content through forum particiatpiong. phpBB is a free open source forum management solution. Another popular software that isn’t free is vBulletin. Both are popular and widely used and able to help you get the user-generated content that you want for your website.
• Comments - There are various comment scripts online that you can use to encourage user participation and feedback. There is a widely circulated php script that you can include on the pages of your site that you want to allow user comments on. But another way you can achieve this is to add Google Friend Connect to your website, which includes a script for commenting. If you perform a Google search for comment script then you’ll find plenty of others.
• Social Bookmarking - Social bookmarking is relatively new, but you can add a social bookmarking service to your website for people to save their favorite sites within your niche. Each submission of like content on your site means more content on your website and a more sticky site. Pligg is a very good software to use for this purpose.
• Articles - There are two ways you can encourage articles on your take. Take direct submissions and maintain human approval over each manual submission or install an article directory on your site. An article directory will invite the search engines to visit your site every time a new article is submitted. One very popular open source package for this purpose is Article Dashboard.
• Blog - Blogging is the newest form of Internet publishing and there are a variety of ways to get new blog content on your website. The best software for adding a blog to any website is WordPress. WP has a multi-user version that is great for allowing multiple users to start and run a blog on a continuous basis.
• Wiki - There are a variety of wiki software available for you to use to distribute user-generated content on your website. One of the more popular ones is MediaWiki. It’s free.
• Video - Want your own YouTube-like video sharing site? KickApps allows you to run a video sharing site and the software also includes other features similar to blogs, forums, and social networking applications.

When it comes to user-generated content, you’ll be hard pressed to make it happen on your site without the use of a good script or software packages. These user-generated content management solutions are some of the best and most popular that you’ll find online. Check ‘em out!

User-generated content is one of the most powerful ways to grow your business online. Every time a user, whether it be you or a member of your community, adds new content to your site, they are making your site more sticky and crawlable by the search engines. Each new piece of content invites the search engine bots back to your site to crawl it again. And if you have a lot of content on a single page then that page becomes more sticky and crawls up the search engine rankings, especially if users are using your keywords. But what kind of user-generated content should you have? There are many types of user-generated content that can benefit you. Here are just a few: Read the rest of this entry »