Latest Snap! Website Journals

What's a good Snap! title? A money making headline!

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 12/01/2010 - 14:39

Categories: Advertising Snap! Website Marketing

The 10 worst headlines with the words "Anything" and "Whatever"

Shamelessly taken from Cheeminology

As I mentioned before on my Snap! Blog, the content of your Internet Marketing is quite similar to the content of regular marketing. Trying to do it all differently is not going to make it work better for you. Obviously, you have to make the best use the technology available to you, but the content of the title (your headline!) is still up to you and one of the most important part of each one of your posts.

A headline that works must capture the reader's attention. The attention you generate will bring him or her to start reading your post because it moves them. In many cases, that's all the person will read. If not interested, they will still skip your post, but blunt title without an emotion generator will pretty much always be skipped. Now...

Snap! SEO: Google working on their own advice!

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 11/22/2010 - 21:11

Categories: Internet SEO Website Marketing Technology

Today, I'll be quite lazy...

There is a video from Google presented by Matt Cutts. Matt is an engineer who knows a lot of things about Google search capabilities and talks about them in videos like this one. Check his channel if you want to learn more. This is very similar to my Snap! SEO posts here.

This video talks about the fact that Google, the company, had many products that were not SEO friendly. Remember that if you want to beat competition, it is not enough to bring loads of traffic to your site. You also need something compelling on the page. Generally, Google has compelling tools (also, orkut is terrible!) But if your pages are ugly and not SEO friendly at all, traffic will be much lower than it could other be. This is why I add features in Snap! that help you with your website SEO work. Most of the things Matt talks about here are automated with Snap!

A "username" for your Facebook groups, pages and applications!

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 11/13/2010 - 18:04

Categories: Internet Website Social Media Marketing Technology

Macro picture of a spider with hairy legs and mandibles walking in its web.

Isn't that an ugly spider?!
As ugly as those URLs!

When you first create your group, business page or application its URL looks deadly ugly. It includes your page name, but it has a very large number too... A number you can be sure no one will remember. Okay, maybe one or two people, but I hope you're really looking into getting a few more than that to Like your page! Oh! And Speaking of that, don't forget to click the Like button of this very page, look up there...

Now there is a good example: the Snap! Websites page. Really, it went like this:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/Snap/152277364785349 1

This reminds me of those URLs sent to you by pretty much all the websites where you can create an account or download something after you entered your email address. They will include one really ugly usually random number. Actually, some of those websites will send you 3 or 4 of these long numbers. I'm still not too sure why they cannot do the same thing with one small number. When you register for Snap! I generate one very small number and you still have something like 1 billion possibilities, so the chances for a hacker to get the right number are quite slim. Okay... sorry... that was my rant about silly billies better known as website programmers.

1. Note that when you click on this URL, Facebook automatically changes it to the new URL which is https://www.facebook.com/snapwebsites

Google Search for your Snap! Website

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 11/10/2010 - 00:47

Categories: Advertising Snap! Blogger Lite Internet Technology

About AdSense

You can get an easy to install Google AdSense functionality on your website with Snap! Websites Upgrade: Google AdSense.

As you've seen, quite many websites show you advertisement and those will have a Google AdSense mark in a corner (usually bottom right.) If you do not yet have an AdSense account, it is easy to sign up. The only requirements is for you to have your own website since the point of using AdSense is for you to display the AdSense ads to your website visitors.)1

1. If you did not yet verify your website with Google, you may also be asked to verify it. I passed on that part in this post, but will come back to it in the Snap! Documentation.

Grow your Snap! Website and your mailbox will grow too!

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 11/09/2010 - 21:55

Categories: Mail Internet Technology Knowledge

Does your mail system support filtering?

Do you think we'll soon see light filters for spam?

Pretty much all the mail system I know of have some mechanism to filter incoming mail. This will become more and more important as your grow your Snap! Website. Just like me, you will need to more and more organize your mail to support the growing flood of it.

In general, you can enter the name of a person or their email address and whenever you receive an email from that person, it goes in a specific folder.

More advanced systems let you check all the parts of your email:

From—The ...

Snap! SEO: Should I delete my old Snap! pages?

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 11/05/2010 - 15:58

Categories: Snap! Internet SEO Website Marketing

There is one thing that I always tell my customers: Do not delete old pages. Continue to grow your Snap! Website and keep that good old content.

Well... There is a more in depth explanation for this saying.

Aging Content

All content grows older in some way. However, some content survives time. For instance, 1 + 1 = 2 will remain true for a while1.

1. See the real proof that 1 + 1 = 3.

Snap! SEO -- Considering cross linking? Is it bad?

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 11/01/2010 - 14:55

Categories: Snap! Internet SEO Marketing

What is Cross Linking?

I have seen many people talking about cross-linking and how bad such practice can be. So... first of all what is Cross Linking?

I already talked about links. There is only one type of link on the Internet: the an anchor tag. Whether you are using Snap! Hosting or another service, a link is a link1. The anchor tag is defined as follow:

<a href="destination">text or image or both</a>

There are reasons why you'd want to use text within the anchor, but using an image is safe as long as you make sure to include a valid alternate text and title attributes on the image. Either way, the text should include your keywords whenever possible (i.e. not « click here » unless that's what you're selling...)

1. Note that there are links within Flash animations and links formed using JavaScript. Those are likely to be ignored by many search engines and they are not recommended to create valid SEO links.

Google "We're sorry" message...

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 10/28/2010 - 15:47

Categories: Internet Security Technology

I don't usually run Google searches on FireFox only to see some detailed information as provided by SEOQuake. Yet, today I was searching for some potential answer to a problem I'm running into with MS-Access which crashes a database and ran those on FireFox instead of my favorite: SeaMonkey.

As I was testing, all of a sudden I got the screenshot as shown in the figure below. Although it did not feel like I was sending automatic requests to Google, the SEOQuake toolbar does so on all the results! That means each time I do a search "I" send at least 11 requests to Google. After 3 or 4 searches with pretty much the same terms each time, that's well over 40 requests within 2 or 3 seconds.

That's the first time I got this screen, I'll have to think of turning off the SEOQuake bar whenever I do intensive searches like these.

By the way, our Snap! Websites system has a similar protection: MO Anti-pounding. Most of our websites, if hit too many times, will give you an Error 500 asking you to slow down. This ensures everyone can enjoy the experience of using our systems.

Snap! SEO: Consider getting your domain in different countries?

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 10/27/2010 - 23:37

Categories: Internet SEO Marketing Technology

I'm sure you've noticed that Google has a country code domain name for each country in the world. This goes for Yahoo! and Bing and that's an important Snap! SEO trick for any product that can be sold internationally1.

For instance, British people search using:

http://www.google.co.uk/

Similarly French people use:

http://www.google.fr/

1. Even if you limit your product to English speaking countries, there are many of those in the world!

Considering doing banner advertising for your Snap! Website?

Submitted by Alexis Wilke on 10/26/2010 - 16:28

Categories: Advertising Tools Internet Snap! Business Marketing

Whenever someone thinks of creating a banner ad for their Snap! Website, they think they need to hire a graphics person to do all the work. Truly, if your banner looks 100% like an ad, it is likely to not be clicked very much (unless you have something that's anyway really hot and always generates clicks...) On the other hand, a banner that looks like text being part of the website where it is shown has a greater chance of success. So? Why not create it yourself?

OpenOffice.org

I use many totally free tools to create and manipulate my graphics. All are available under Linux, Mac OS/X and MS-Windows. The first one is OpenOffice which is now 10 years old. OpenOffice is not only free, it also creates files that are easy to share, contrary to Microsoft Office which has been creating proprietary file formats. By the way, it is owned by Oracle so it ought to be good quality!

OpenOffice is a suite of tools. There is even one to write Math Formulae... But I won't talk about that one today. At this time, what we want is the Drawing feature. This one lets you place graphics on your screen and move them around until they are arranged exactly the way you like it. This makes it one of the best tool to create mostly text based banners.

Snap! Websites

Latest Snap! Website Journals

About AdSense

Does your mail system support filtering?

Aging Content

What is Cross Linking?

OpenOffice.org

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