Rock, Pop, Hip – Hop, or just Jazz – You Tube is opening up with this music band. Bent on giving you a wonderful time, this site will enable you get the best, in the easiest possible ways. Vevo is here to be, and just recently launched.
Rock On
Vevo is backed by You Tube, and is partnering with the Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, EMI Music, AT&T, and CBS Interactive Music Group. As of now Vevo is offering 14,500 videos from 5,000 plus artists for more than 20 genres. This interface is similar to Hulu with a dynamic banner promoting Vevo’s featured content.
The Channels section has a very interesting way to browse through content. “Hit List”, “VEVO Canada”, “Michael Jackson Legacy”, “This Is It”, and “Vevo Go Shows” are some of the prominent channels that we can find.
The playlist has a unique touch, allowing us to create, view and share our own custom playlists with up to 75 videos, and save them into our Vevo account. Simply arrange the order of videos on our play list by dragging and dropping them. Here we have our own user created playlist on Vevo.
Since this is a freshly launched site, and hence is having teething problems – but, like Vevo say’s “bear with them while they try to smooth everything out.”
Roll Call
A clean & easy to navigate interface; well organized content; and crisp looking, smooth playing videos; Vevo is giving us, what only Hulu was able to up till now. High quality videos that are very easy to use, our own custom created play-lists, and a space where we can view videos on demand, Vevo might just be on the way to replacing TV Music stations as the premier destination for music videos.
Twitter – the cool application that has been used by everybody today is a great resource for building links to your site or blog. Backlinks have always been very useful in determining the ranking of a site in the search engines. Though the overall process is termed as SEO, but building quality backlinks is a major step in achieving higher search engine rankings.
There are tons of articles on the web that describe the best link building techniques, which you can refer to. In this post, I will discuss on how you can use Twitter to build quality dofollow backlinks which will not only increase traffic to your site but also pass on quality link juice.
Twitter offers three opportunities to pass links from your profile. One through the status messages, second through your Twitter Bio and third through the application(s) you use for tweeting. Twitter had nofollowed the links that we pass on in the status messages since a long time. They had kept the links in the Bio field dofollow, until Matt Cutts made the Twitter Bio links nofollow. And I bet, you never thought about the third option as a means to pass links.
Bob ArdKor has written a great article on achieving dofollow links from Twitter. Though his original post is written in French, but you can find the Google Translated version of the same in English.
Bob says,
On twitter, users post their tweet from customers for I-phone as Twitterfon, Nambu … others use Firefox extensions TwitterFox to post their message on Twitter, others pass by scripts that use the API and Of course, others go directly from Twitter.
When you post from these applications, as appears tweet posted a statement containing the date of publication of the tweet and at what support you have posted the message with a link to the site of application.
This link is dofollow and followed by search engines.
Bob has explained the method of customizing those links for leveraging the link juice. It’s a great find by Bob who has implemented this strategy in his Twitter profile and seems to benefit from the same. But with Twitter becoming a threat to Google with the ability to search real time updates, it’s a matter of time when they will make those links nofollow as well. Therefore, start using this method right from today and give a boost to your SEO efforts.
PS: I have not tried this method yet, but it seems to be effective. Please note, this method is not black hat; after all you are just customizing the look and feel of your Twitter profile.
Someone said, “You’re not a true SEO until you’ve been banned at least once!” Of course, I do not intend to say that every SEO guy should get banned. I know it sucks. But sometimes it helps to understand the finer lines when your site is banned.
Search engine penalties and banning are not the topics that are discussed frequently by webmasters, except those who are proud to call themselves blackhat. But many times, I have seen people getting confused with low SERP rankings and banning. Just because your site is not ranking in Google for a certain keyword(s), which was a traffic puller earlier, does not necessarily mean that your site has been banned.
Remember, Google is CRAZY! It is extremely choosy about the quality (and quantity) of your links. You can try an exercise to believe this. Try searching for your backlinks using Yahoo Site Explorer and the link:http://sitename.com command in Google. What do you see? I am sure you got my point now.
Sometimes, it is very difficult to determine, whether a site has been banned, penalized or sandboxed (in case of Google). Let’s see them in detail.
When does Google ban a site?
- You don’t follow their guidelines.
- You get involved in link farms.
- Your site is screwed up. This happens when you neglect the code to content ratio and keep adding a number of scripts to your site.
- You have a huge number of affiliate links / paid links on your site.
When does Google penalize a site?
- You really mess with some of their serious guidelines.
- You keep using the same anchor text for linking to a particular page.
- The keyword density for certain keyword(s) remains on a higher end for all the pages of your website.
When does Google sandbox a site?
Though webmasters have different opinions about the existence of Google Sandbox Effect, but assuming that it exists, here are a few things why Google will sandbox a site.
- You caught their attention due to your black/grey hat SEO techniques.
- Your site is new but yet attracting huge number of inbound links.
- The links to your site are from a bad neighborhood.
It is very important to know whether you have been banned, penalized or sandboxed by Google. If you are banned, you can opt for a reinclusion request or just move on and forget the site. If your site is being penalized, then you are being monitored by Google and every action of your’s either helps in rectifying the penalty or pushes you deeper into the banned zone. But if your site is sandboxed, then the best option for you is to keep your site in good shape. Be careful with the content of your site and avoid any black/grey SEO techniques. Within a short span of time, your site will be out of the sandbox if you keep it clean.
Conclusion: Don’t jump to conclusions by merely touching waters from the surface. Go deeper and find the root cause and work towards it. This will not only focus your efforts in the right direction but will also help in giving your web site ranking.
In the last 5 years or so, we have seen many websites turning into successful businesses. Be it Google, Digg, Facebook or TechCrunch. Of course its an incredible moment for the founders of these sites, but sometimes the popularity just bigger and bigger.
Twitter is one such website that has become a household name now. Today, even a kid knows the significance of a tweet or RT or @ (reply). The fact that people use the word twitter as a verb or noun shows its popularity and global appeal. And considering such a massive attractive appeal, Twitter has added another feather to its cap by finding a place in the dictionary.
The Collins English Dictionary has decided to include the word ‘twitter‘ in its 30th anniversary edition to be published later this year. Here’s how twitter would be defined:
As a Noun: “a website where people can post short messages about their current activities”
As a Verb: “to write short messages on the Twitter website”.
About 3 years ago ‘google‘ was added to the Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary and the Oxford English Dictionary. Though twitter is a pure word and google is a revised version of googol, but the fact that the names of websites/businesses are making their way to dictionaries is self explanatory about their popularity.
If this trend continues, then we might see businesses being set up on existing words (duh. its already happening) and becoming popular enough to replace the original definition of the word with that of the business in dictionaries. Irrespective of its effect on the businesses, such a phenomenon will surely screw our English. What do you think?
The popular microblogging service Twitter has made people go crazy. Developed as a social media site to tell people, “What are you doing?”, Twitter has come a long way.
Twitter has made connecting with people so easy, just requires 140 characters, or even lesser. And for this reason, everyone signs up on Twitter and starts streaming with information on their profile page. But this massive popularity has cost a few reputed and well known people dearly. Account hacking, tweeting with a false account, impersonation or even mistaken identity has become a common thing now. And to tackle these problems, Twitter is testing the process of verifying the accounts (still in Beta).
So, what is a verified account?
To prevent identity confusion, Twitter is experimenting (beta testing) with a ‘Verified Account’ feature. Twitter is working to establish authenticity with people who deal with impersonation or identity confusion on a regular basis. Accounts with a Verified are the real thing!
This is how a verified twitter account looks like -
Look at the top right side. Every verified account will sport a Verified Account badge ensuring authenticity of the account.
So if you are competing against impersonation, you better get your Twitter account verified. Also, this verification process is not for individuals alone, its meant for businesses as well.
Do not let anyone take your reputation for granted while you try hard to build it by tweeting.
