You wouldn’t think something classifiable as “wearable storage” would look so darn dapper, but here we are, staring at just about the finest cufflinks we ever did see. Not only are these handmade shirt cuffs beautiful in the most steampunk of ways, they’re also pretty useful as each features an 8GB flash storage chip with the utterly ubiquitous USB connector attached. Basically, they’re what James Bond would wear if James Bond wore really awesome cufflinks. The general idea behind them might not exactly be original anymore, but we can’t really fault the execution here. What we could probably find fault with is our lack of $225 of disposable coin, the price one will have to pay to sport this unique pair of hand-carved, walnut-enclosed memory sticks.
Search engine ranking affects the amount of traffic coming to a website in a big way. Rarely do users go past the second page of search engines when searching for something. Therefore, it is important to have your website on the first two pages for you to get any substantial traffic.
There are a number of things that may be making your website to rank poorly. These can include both on-page and off-page search engine optimization factors. On-page factors refer to things or actions done on the website to improve its rankings while off-page factors are those that are done outside the website.
Below are on-page and off-page factors that could be making your website not to rank well in search engines:
On-page Search Engine Optimization Factors
Does your website have meta tags?
Meta tags are short descriptive words that search engine robots read to define what a website is about. The tags are place within the head tag and should contain the keywords that the business is targeting. Ideally, each page should contain its own set of meta tags, which should be revolving around the niche of the website.
What about title tags?
Does your website have a title tag? The title description is what is usually seen at the menu bar when a person opens up a website. Most websites simply have a “welcome to our website” or “home” text in the title bar. Such websites miss on leveraging on their target keywords. Put a short description about your website or service at the title tag and make sure you include your keywords.
Are your images optimized?
Search engines robots cannot read images. Thus, it is futile to write your keyword as an image. However, you can optimize the image by using alt tags. These tags should describe what the image is about and should also contain the keywords that you are targeting.
Off-page Optimization Factors
Off-page optimization techniques refer to link building. This is the single most-powerful way of making a website rank well in search engines.
Link building can be done by submitting articles with a link back to your website to article directories, submitting blog comments with your an anchor text linking back to your website, social bookmarking, creating profile links, exchanging links with other webmasters, submitting the website URL to web directories, building link wheels among others.
However, it is important to remember that link building should be more about quality than quantity. Websites are given a page rank (PR) of 0 to 9 by search engines, with 0 being the least value and 9 being the highest. A link originating for a higher ranking page is more valuable than one from a low ranking one. For example, a link from a PR 9 site may be valuable than hundreds of links from a PR0 page.
Check that the links you are building are originating from high PR websites.
Duplicate Content
Is your content unique or has it been scrapped off from another website? Duplicate content is usually penalized by search engine and websites with duplicate or copied content usually rank poorly. There are two forms of duplicate content:
• Copying content from another website and not rewriting to make it unique.
• Using the same content in your website on different pages.
In the first instance, the website that originally had the content will be ranked whenever a search query that can be addressed by the content is initiated. In the second instance, only one page of your website will be ranked for the content while the rest will be ignored.
Flash and Video Websites
While Flash websites are very appealing to the human eye, they do not rank well because search engine robots cannot read Flash objects. If you would like to use flash in your website, keep it to a minimum. Also, avoid using too many videos and images as they will not rank as well as text. Ideally, 90 percent of your website should consist of unique text optimized for specific keywords.
Black Hat Techniques
If you use unethical, also known as “blackhat“, methods to achieve higher rankings, you may have to pay with poor rankings. Blackhat techniques include keyword stuffing, using iframes, link cloaking, getting links from link farms among others. In fact, your website may be penalized by Google and banned from appearing in search engine results.
Another technique that is usually penalized is automatic link building. If you have just started a new website and suddenly get 1000 links in one day, your website may be temporary ranked poorly. Webmasters refer to this temporary drop in ranking as “sandbox”. It can take as many as 12 months to get the sandbox lifted.
If you are building links automatically, build them gradually and in small numbers so that they appear to be natural.
Does web hosting affect rankings?
Web hosting may have an impact on the performance of your website in terms of accessibility and load speed but it does not affect search engine rankings. Websites on both shared hosting and dedicated server hosting have a level platform when it comes to search engine rankings. However, it is still important to get a good web hosting solutions company to host your website.
Add to the discussion:
The above are some of the things that may be making your website to rank poorly. Anyone who has other points or experiences with poor rankings is welcomed to share. If you have any more questions or problems with SEO, leave a comment, and let’s have a chat!
Mark Zuckerberg may have come to China, but Facebook is unlikely to enter anytime soon. Neither Facebook nor the Chinese government are interested in a messy compromise on freedom of expression (all Chinese networks are censored), especially after the Facebook-fueled revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.
Instead, China’s social media scene is different from anywhere else: Four homegrown networks are vying for the mass market. Renren, a faithful copy of Facebook, is China’s leader and is planning for an IPO soon. In addition to its nickname-based network (Qzone), internet giant Tencent is at long last awakening to real-name social with its new network, Pengyou. Finally, Kaixin001 is dying, stuck between the decline of its social games and rise of Sina Weibo (China’s Twitter).
In addition to the top four, China also has a “long tail” of social networks that are more specialized — just for children, gamers or lovers. Here, we take a deeper look at those top four networks and what makes them tick.
Renren is like a miniature Facebook with a mean streak and a quest for monetization. One year ago, Renren was concerned that Kaixin001 might overtake it. Kaixin001 attracted a white collar audience before Renren had fully expanded out from its on-campus origins (like Facebook, Renren started at its nation’s elite universities). But Renren has since left the slower Kaixin001 in the dust and is now China’s leader in real-name social networking (even though Tencent’s Qzone has far more users overall).
As one social network operator (who asked to remain anonymous) described it, “Renren is all about business. Kaixin001 has a tech founder [Cheng Binghao] who wants to do more than just copy.” Kaixin001 was reportedly offered the domain name Kaixin.com for 500,000 yuan (about $75,000), but the Binghao passed. The consummate businessman Chen Yizhou, chairman of Oak Pacific Interactive (OPI is Renren’s umbrella group), jumped at the opportunity. OPI set up an exact clone of Kaixin001 at Kaixin.com. That cutthroat tactic was a masterstroke.
Anything Facebook releases, Renren immediately copies: Connect, Like, Places, Groups, etc. To be fair, a few features are localized: brand advertising, a game layer and emoticons.
Renren is strong when it comes to monetization. Brand campaigns are sold to companies at high prices. Fan pages, while free on Facebook, start at 600,000 yuan (about $90,000). That said, Renren’s fan pages are like mini-sites, such as the example from Nike above. Targeting is used only sparingly and the “long tail” of small, local advertisers has yet to arrive in China.
The umbrella group, Oak Pacific Interactive, is building an empire on top of Renren. Renren users are channeled toward Oak Pacific Games (gaming is the traditional cash cow for China’s Internet) and now Nuomi, one of China’s top Groupon clones. OPI is far more aggressive than Facebook in terms of monetization.
Renren has the most open third-party ecosystem of any social network, but unlike Facebook, it has been unable to effectively monetize social games. One of its competitors is now opening up to third-party developers. That could be a point of weakness for Renren.
User experience cannot suffer too badly during Renren’s aggressive monetization and IPO focus in 2011. Renren’s social graph is strong and it executes faster and better than any of its competitors, but it’s still nowhere near as dominant as Facebook is in the West.
Tencent should own real-name social networking in China, but has instead been sleeping on the opportunity until now. Tencent has similarities to AOL, circa 1998. Its walled garden is the Internet for many Chinese, particularly in second- and third-tier cities. QQ, its dominant instant messenger, claims 637 million active accounts, a flood of users that it can direct at any service or content it cares to. Moreover, Tencent monetizes much better than AOL was ever able to via games and virtual goods.
But Tencent struggles among sophisticated netizens (though most still use QQ Messenger) and is playing catch-up in real-name social. Tencent’s most popular social network, Qzone, claims 492 million active users. It’s unclear just how active those users are though; many profiles are simply skeletons. And just like on QQ, many users go by a nickname rather a real name. Users are younger and from comparatively more rural areas of China, making it less attractive to advertisers.
Benjamin Joffe, Tencent expert and CEO of Internet market research firm +8*, states, ”Tencent is definitely not the best in terms of products or innovation — similar to Zynga in that sense — but their ability to deliver a ‘good enough’ mass market service and integrating it within their ecosystem is impressive.”
On January 6, 2011, Xiaoyou’s users were just merged into a new social network, Pengyou (friends), which is finally Tencent’s attempt to reach the entire population of Chinese social networkers.
With Pengyou, Tencent is pushing into real-name social and taking a step toward becoming a more open and mature firm. The network has an open platform with about 90 applications and games – a step forward for the notoriously closed Tencent.
But ”open” still has limits in China. “The problem with the Chinese market is that the social networks are game developers themselves. There is a conflict of interest. If your games are popular, they’re not only not helping you but even put pressure to squeeze you out,” says Liu Yong, the CEO of social games firm Rekoo. Rekoo is based in Beijing, but focuses on the Japanese market.
But Tencent can use QQ Messenger to direct near limitless traffic to its own offerings. On the downside, it’s difficult to persuade China’s sophisticated netizens to “trade down” for a service with a less urbane user base. That’s the reason why Pengyou is Tencent’s first major product that is not branded with the cute and youth-friendly QQ penguin.
The sleeping giant is awakening from its slumber, though it still has a long way to go in real-name social. 2011 should be a decisive year in the Pengyou (friends) vs. Renren (everyone) showdown.
In 2008 and 2009, Kaixin001 gained a widespread following among white collar office workers in top tier cities and threatened to become China’s leading real-name social network. But it’s now in trouble.
Kaixin001′s meteoric ascent was fueled by two factors: 1) social games, and 2) a content forwarding feature, where users share the hottest news, jokes or celebrity gossip, with comments attached.
These two attractions have since lost appeal. Social games have dropped in popularity, and post forwarding — quick updates on the hottest news — is now provided in a purer form by Sina Weibo, China’s popular micro-blogging service. The other opportunity they missed is group buying. Kaixin001 had a huge amount of white collar users, which is the perfect match for a group buying service.
Because Kaixin001 is still popular in tier one cities like Shanghai and Beijing, foreigners in China often have a warped perception of the network’s nationwide popularity. In reality, Kaixin001 does not have much traction elsewhere, nor does it have the funds or network — like Tencent (Pengyou) and Oak Pacific Interactive (Renren) — to push into China’s “lesser-tier” cities.
All the tech insiders I’ve spoken with tell of a site in decline. One post on Zhihu (China’s Quora clone) estimates that Kaixin001′s acquisition value has fallen from 500 million to 50 million ($75 million to $7.5 million). Kaixin001′s Binghao has expressed his ambition to join the rush of China tech IPOs, but that seems highly unlikely.
These setbacks will test the true strength of Kaixin001′s social graph. But not all news is bad. The network does still command a large, high-value audience, and it has strong ties to the Sina Corporation, so being acquired is a possibility (Sina holds a stake in Kaixin001 and Binghao is a former Sina CTO).
Sina Weibo is a microblog that far surpasses Twitter in functionality (threaded comments, groups, audio messages and direct video uploads). And it is hot in China right now. Sina Weibo has more than 100 million registered users, expects to keep growing rapidly, and perhaps even exceeds Twitter in active users. This explosive growth has brought the value of the network up to an estimated $2 billion.
Yu Jin, analyst at China International Capital Corporation, writes: “Microblog services became popular at the end of 2009 as [they] match the needs of Chinese Internet users. They have acquired users at an astonishing speed, to some extent at the expense of SNS websites.”
Sina, also the owner of China’s largest portal site, has lofty ambitions for Weibo that could compete with traditional social networks. It’s constantly experimenting with new features and already seems to have stolen away much of Kainxin001′s audience. You don’t understand China social if you don’t understand Sina Weibo.
The Next Tier of Networks
In China, the difference among the “top four” social networks and the next tier is not as vast as the gulf in the U.S. between Facebook and “the rest.” Notably, 51.com and Douban are two mid-sized networks that are neither mass-market nor niche.
51.com started strong with backing from Sequoia and Giant Interactive and an audience of users in rural areas but now has no chance of conquering the mass market. Social networks often operate on an elite spread basis: You can move down the “social ladder” but not up. It’s no accident that Facebook started at Harvard and Renren started at China’s elite Tsinghua University. Although 51.com has dropped off from the top ranks since last year, it still claims to have 40 million monthly active users. But Chinese tech news site DoNews reports that its peak user base is down from 11 million to 700,000, a big flameout for a site that once had intentions for an IPO.
Douban, an urban network built around fan groups for books, music and movies, has 20 million active users. Douban has a highly engaged and participatory user base, making it worth watching. In addition, there are countless additional Chinese social networks for dating, business, and any other community you can imagine.
Despite government regulations that make the Internet an “invisible birdcage,” Chinese social networks have just enough space to fly. The social media space is diverse and thriving, with Renren, Qzone, Pengyou and Kaixin001 leading the pack. Just don’t attempt to directly port your “global” Facebook strategy here.
Interested in more Social Media resources? Check out Mashable Explore, a new way to discover information on your favorite Mashable topics.
Credited with revolutionising mobile phone user interfaces, Apple sought to protect its brand by applying to patent its popular iOS icons and overlays. This week, the Cupertino-based company was granted 24 patents in relation to its icons and onscreen input buttons which also cover utilities and productivity folders.
PatentlyApple reports that since the start of the year Apple has been busy protecting its brand, particularly in the EU, filing five major design patent documents. Its filings included Ping, the branding for their social network for music, which also included it’s “Bubbles” logo. The company then applied to patent “Places”, “Apple” and then the Granny Smith logo that it had famously tried to capture back from The Beatles.
With 24 iOS design patents granted, Apple’s European competitors will now have to be careful when designing icons for their own interfaces. These include the calculator, iBooks, Keynote, Numbers and World Clock within iOS. Also included were Apple’s Maps + Compass, iPod, Notes, Contacts, Voice Memos, Photos, MobileMe, YouTube, Settings, Weather and Stocks icons.
Apple also patented how icons were displayed on the iOS Display Dock, the Utility Icon Bar and other designated window graphics.
Remember when Apple introduced folders? They’ve also been patented – well, the way the folders are added and named.
Apple’s patents aren’t likely to slow the number of knock-offs and fake iPhone and iPad devices coming from the Far East but it could land some manufacturers in trouble in Europe if their icons are found to be a little to close to Apple’s.
We do hope that it doesn’t hamper the creation of unofficial iOS merchandise on marketplaces like Etsy but this remains to be seen.Image Credit
Dan May was born and raised in the suburbs of Rochester, NY. He attended Syracuse University, where he received a BFA in illustration. Dan spends his days (and nights) painting dreamlike environments that transcend space and time. These delightfully haunting images are often based in personal observations of both human’s and nature’s relationships with each other. His artwork has been exhibited in galleries throughout the US and abroad. Dan has collaborated with numerous publications, design firms, advertising agencies and publishing houses. Some of his clients include WIRED, St. Louis Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle, Aspen Magazine, Village Voice Media, AOL Productions, 20th Century FOX and VIZ Media.
Search engine ranking affects the amount of traffic coming to a website in a big way. Rarely do users go past the second page of search engines when searching for something. Therefore, it is important to have your website on the first two pages for you to get any substantial traffic.
Interested in more Social Media resources? Check out 
