Welcome to Land of Tricks

While it is hard to argue that Twitter is merely a fad and will soon blow over, we are beginning to see signs that opinion-polarizing micro-blogging service’straffic may have peaked. As if that news wasn’t bad enough, now it appearsthat the 19 million member strong social networking site Facebook may put an end to Twitter.

Facebook made some changes to the way they display users’ statuses on their site on Friday. All three of the changes are very important because they are directly targeted towards micro-blogging services such as Twitter and Jaikuwhich have garnered a lot of attention and have developed a loyal following in the past few months.

The first change on the list is a newly created page that aggregates the status updates of all your friends (need to be logged in to see). One look at this page and you can clearly see the similarities between this and the previously mentioned services.

The second change is the ability to subscribe to the status updates of any of your friends via an RSS reader, or via SMS. You can collectively subscribe to the updates of all your friends by going to the ‘posted items’ page, clicking on ‘my friends’ and clicking ’subscribe to these posted items’. And conversely, you can subscribe to any one friend’s updates by going to that friend’s ‘posted items’ and clicking ’subscribe to these posts’ from there.

The third and most important update is the ability to post status updates from your cell phone to your Facebook status page.

Given Facebook’s generally liberal stance on their open API I have no doubt that developers will come up with a similar arsenal of tools that currently exist for Twitter-like services, rendering them largely superfluous. This instance, coupled with Google’s recent move to replicate StumbleUpon does make me wonder more about the perils of developing any new service right now.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) should be at the top of your Web publishing priority list. If Web surfers can’t find your site, they can’t read it, use it or share it with others.

One might think SEO is an arcane science that only a few experts have mastered. There isquite a bit to it, and there are times you might want to employ an SEO firm or expert to help you optimize your site. Often this is a costly solution that’s not feasible for individuals or small businesses.

The good news is Search Engine Optimization doesn’t have to be rocket science. There are quite a few things you can do on your own. I’ve got a few proven, and easy to do tips and techniques that will help people find your content and make it easy for Google (and other engines) to crawl and index your site.

Lead with good content.

My number one tip for SEO? Provide frequently updated content that people want to read. Incoming links are key and if you can provide content that people will read and get something out of, there is a good chance they will link to that content.

Research your keywords.

You can use a Keyword Suggestion Tool or simply put yourself in the mindset of your target audience. Learn which terms people will search with and get those into your content and meta information.

Provide a good, clear title.

If SEO is important to you make sure you don’t get cute with the titles for your pages. Write titles that are clear and contain your keywords. Once you’ve got that title written, make sure it appears in your title tag as well as in your top level heading tags (h1) on your pages.

Don’t use splash pages or Flash.

Search engines like text. A Flash or image intro can block an engine’s crawler right at your homepage. If you do use images, be sure to add keyword laden descriptions to your alt attributes.

Use Robots.txt

Make sure you provide a robots.txt file that will help tell crawlers what to index on your site. There are quite a few neat things you can do with your robots.txt file, so you might want to read up on them.

Code your pages with standard, clean and semantic markup.

The cleaner your code the easier it is to crawl. Use markup as it is intended with the proper tags tied to the proper information. For example, place your headings with in heading tags, paragraphs within paragraph tags, etc. Another good idea is to move all your presentation into a CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) file. This makes your code lighter, faster and easier to index.

Don’t get tricky!

Whatever you do, don’t try to “trick” your way into more traffic. Duplicate pages, hidden links and other less-than-honest techniques can get you seriously penalized and ruin any positive work you’ve done.

Be patient and don’t forget the people!

Search engines are constantly updating and re-indexing. It may take awhile after you’ve made some changes to see the results. Hang in there, keep working on your content and keep providing something that people find useful.

It’s easy to forget that the reason you want to optimize for search in the first place is that you want to bring people to your site and your content!

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Leading VoIP service Skype goes from strength to strength, with revenues rising by 26 per cent last quarter. Yet despite this success, parent company eBay is rumoured to be looking to offload its cash-cow to none other than Google.

The rumours seem credible when you consider that eBay’s latest financial results were pretty poor (revenue down 7 per cent to $2.04bn), well below the market expectations for what is traditionally retail’s busiest quarter.

No eBay/Skype synergy

“Even eBay has now admitted that its $2.6bn purchase of Skype in 2005 was too much. With still no logical integration between the telephony service and the auction site, speculation over a potential sale is again intensifying,” says Jemima Kiss in The Guardian.

According to The Times, eBay’s Chief Executive, John Donahoe, told analysts earlier this month that: “synergies between Skype and the other parts of our portfolio are minimal.” He also said that Skype is “a great standalone business”.

The Times report mentions US telcos AT&T and Verizon as potential buyers, while Jemima Kiss speculates in The Guardian that: “Google was rumoured to be interested as far back at November 2007, and that would fit with just one of the many pies in which Google has its fingers.”

TechRadar has contacted Skype’s UK press office for further information on this story, so stay tuned for updates.

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