Netvibes is a free web site that lets you personalize your web experience. Take everything that matters to you while online — newspapers, blogs, weather, email, search, videos, photos, social networks, podcasts, widgets, games and funny applications — then bring them together in one single page, your personalized page.  You can make this page automatically update every time you open it. That’s what netvibes does. And it does so much more.

Netvibes lets you:

• Put your stuff in a page accessible from any computer or mobile device;
• Manage and update your facebook and twitter accounts from one place;
• Along with your personal, private page, create a public page viewable by everyone;
• Setup a “watch” dashboard to keep track of your favorites subjects;
• Pick a widget from a large catalogue of content and applications;
• Put a widget on your own blog or computer desktop ;
• Share anything in your page with your friends.

If you are ready to (re)mix the web, then try Netvibes and return here to share your feedback.

digglogo

Digg has just introduced some new features aimed at enhancing user experience. Digg Trends is a new feature that highlights active upcoming stories that haven’t yet hit the homepage. Digg TV has been launched so fans of shows like Diggnation and The Digg Reel, can watch their favorite Digg TV shows.

Digg Trends will be available a few times a daily  in a special section at the top of the homepage for a ten minute time span. During that ten minute window of opportunity members can vote and comment thereby influencing whether or not a story becomes popular. Be sure to login to Digg regularly so you can weigh in on Digg Trends and follow the new Twitter account that has been set up @digg_trends – to alert you when a Digg Trend is up for voting on the homepage.

Be sure to check out Digg TV at tv.digg.com.   There you will find:

Diggnation: Hosted by Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose, Diggnation is a beer-fueled tech/web culture show dedicated to the discussion of the top stories on Digg, whether it’s the latest flame wars or thoughts on time travel.

The Digg Reel: Host Andrew Bancroft features the funniest, coolest, & most controversial Digg videos of the week.

Digg Dialogg: You ask, we listen. Submit questions to fascinating luminaries like Matt Damon, Trent Reznor, Sir Richard Branson and we ask the top ones during the video interview.

Related posts found in this blog:
How to use Digg effectively
The importance of mutual friends on Digg

If you are wondering what’s going on with Technorati then you are not alone. Aside from the redesign of the site other changes have taken place and the most common question of the hour is:  “Where did all my authority go?”

Embedded in that Technorati blog entry linked to above are two excerpts that were of great interest to me.

Sites that we have added to the clean index are being crawled, having detailed authority calculated, display recent posts (one at the moment) on our site, and contribute to other sites authority.  We are continuously adding more and more sites to this index, and are working on ways to do so faster, but as you can imagine, the volume of sites to qualify is enormous.

If you find any sites getting that treatment that do not belong, please feel free to let us know in the Site Details page comments on Technorati.com, or over at GetSatisfaction/Technorati.

When I found this time ~ this place: personal growth, development and relationships blog appeared to be lacking an authority,  a rank and at first no no posts were displayed, but a day later one was displayed,  I found a current thread GetSatisfaction feedback on the same topic  and posted into it.

What happened to my authority? Why don’t you show any recent posts for my blog?

this time this space replied 15 days ago

My blog http://thistimethisspace.com doesn’t have any authority or ranking assigned to it either. Up until yesterday the latest post was not displaying but now it is. Hopefully, this problem will be rectified soon.

I’m frustrated

1 Comment

this time this space commented 12 days ago

YAY! I am happy. Many thanks to technorati staff. My blog has now been updated http://thistimethisspace.com (16245.*) has an authority of 415. I appreciate how switfly staff acted to rectify my problem. I appreciate it. :)

Yesterday I submitted onecoolsite to website grader and received the following report:

In Mid-October 2009, the blogging directory and rankings site Technorati discontinued their calculation of Blog Rank and related data. HubSpot was using Technorati’s index for the Blog Analytics report, so we have removed this stat from the Blog Analytics tool. In order to continue to provide you with this valuable ranking data on your blog’s success, we will be integrating our own metric called Blog Grade into this page in the next few weeks.

Until we are able to finish integrating Blog Grade into the HubSpot product, your blog rank will show as “Not Ranked”. You do not need to do anything to prepare for the switch to blog rank – It will be automatically switched over to grade your blog properly when it is available. — Source

The truth is that like everyone else I’m flummoxed when it comes to figuring out what is going on. The six month link window is gone since the tune-up and exactly what’s happening behind the scenes remains a mystery.

Related posts found in this blog:

Technorati and BlogCritics times are a changing

SEO is the acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. Search engine optimization, is the strategy and process of increasing the amount of visitors to a site by making structural changes to the site and the content in it that result in the site ranking high in search engine results.

The higher a site ranks in the results of a search, the greater the chance that that site will be visited by a user who has been using a search engine to locate material of interest to them.

I frequently say, “In blogging content is king and marketing is queen.” What that means when it comes to content is if you write high quality original content and promote it then the result may be an increase in targeted organic traffic, or not. This is because if it’s not easy for potential readers to locate your content using search engines then there will be no increase in new traffic from them. Therefore, what determines success is two things:

• whether or not your content is optimized, indexed by search engines and can be found by readers, and

• whether or not the readers who do find it become subscribers.

The SEO learning curve

You can read books,  online SEO instruction, tutorials and tools and optimize your site by yourself, just as I am doing. You can learn the importance of keywords, and how to use keywords effectively in titles, subtitles and in the natural flow of text, without keyword stuffing You can learn how to optimize blog structure. You can learn the correct way to use anchor text for links.  You can learn how to optimize your images as well.

On page and off page SEO- It is true to say that Google weighs off page factors pretty heavily, however it is false to claim that on page optimisation doesn’t figure. The truth is that recent research shows that Google gives around 60% weight to off page factors and the rest to on page. This clearly leaves a great amount of importance on on page search optimisation and it is important to understand how to use it to increase your sites online presence. — Tim Grice in SEO Basics For On Page Optimisation

There is an SEO learning curve, but in my opinion it’s not as steep as the social media learning curve. Without doubt high quality website content and good SEO can attract thousands of free targeted readers via search engine to your blog, so learning SEO and using the basic elements and techniques makes sense.

If you need some help understanding what SEO is about then a good place to start the learning process is by reading Google’s SEO Starter Guide.

Free SEO Resources

The SEO Book Training Program offers you:
* Over 100 training modules, covering topics like: keyword research, link building, site architecture, website monetization, pay per click ads, tracking results, and more.
* An exclusive interactive community forum
* Members only videos and tools
* Additional bonuses – like data spreadsheets, and money saving tips
* Every order comes risk free, and with the best selling SEO Book as a free bonus Watch this video to learn more.

Free SEO Kit – 5 Steps To Improve Your Website

Interested in using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to drive more traffic to your website? Our free SEO Kit gives you the tips and tricks you need to optimize your website to get found by more visitors and convert higher percentages of them to leads and paying customers. Download link

Free SEO Tools

(1) See your website like a Search Engine sees it.

(2) Google Analytics – powerful full featured analytics tool. Even allows you to track your ROI by keyword for each AdWords ad position. Google AdWords also has internal split testing and conversion tracking software. (Not available to wordpress.com bloggers.) Google Website Optimizer – allows you to A/B split test landing pages and track how well Google AdWords traffic converts.

(3) Website grader – Example: Report for onecoolsite.wordpress.com

A website grade of 96.9/100 for onecoolsite.wordpress.com means that of the hundreds of thousands of websites that have previously been evaluated, our algorithm has calculated that this site scores higher than 96.9% of them in terms of its marketing effectiveness. The algorithm uses a proprietary blend of over 50 different variables, including search engine data , website structure, approximate traffic, site performance, and others.

The website onecoolsite.wordpress.com ranks 54,462 of the 1,757,701 websites that have been ranked so far.

A. Score Summary

(4)Cubestat - Website Value Calculator, Estimations and Information
Cubestat is a free and perfect tool for website value calculation, estimations and information. How does it work? You simply enter the domain url above, our unique algorithm will calculate and estimate the website worth, daily pageviews and daily ads revenue of the present domain. Among the estimation it will show precise information available for the domain.

(5) Quantcast – to measure and organize the world’s audiences in real-time so advertisers can buy, sell and connect with those that matter most.

(6) Websiteoutlook -  contains a collection of actual number of pageview from other websites. The visitor data is combined with information about number of links that point towards the site, country, Alexa ranking and other data that is available on-line. All this information has been used to make a formula that uses the information that is available on-line to estimate the number of pageviews, its worth and possible daily income that the site has.

(7) Piwik – open source web analytics program.

(8) Site Meter – starts off as free, but charges for advanced features.

(9) Stat Counter – starts off as free, but charges for advanced features and bandwith usage.

(10) Webalizer – default log analyzer on many servers.

(11) Analog – default log analyzer on many servers.

(12) Awstats – another popular default log analyzer on many servers.

(13) Total Validator is a free one-stop all-in-one validator comprising a HTML validator, an accessibility validator, a spelling validator, a broken links validator, and the ability to take screenshots with different browsers to see what your web pages really look like.

(14) Keyword Density Analyzer

(15) 69 SEO tools and resources

(16) SEO tips top SEO Sites

SEO Forums

Search Engine Watch Forum
SEOchat
Search Engine Roundtable
Search Guild
Vv7ncom
Digital Point
SEO guy
cre8asiteforums

Related posts found in this blog:
Improving your Google Page Rank
How to structure a reader and search engine friendly blog
Why, how and where to create a sitemap

The good news for wordpress.com blogger is that there is now a convenient method to verify ownership of their blogs with the 3 big search engines.

The method is for Google Webmaster, Yahoo Site Explorer, and Bing Webmaster Center verification.  The easy to follow step by step instructions can be found in the WordPress.com Support Documentation at the Webmaster Tools link.

Bloggers with wordpress.com blogs cannot not verify ownership by adding the meta tag or file  as we all work on a wpMU (multiuser) blogging platform and cannot access and edit the underlying templates for our blogs.  Consequently, in the past the method we used for verification was the alternate method.

We offer two methods of verification. You can either upload an HTML file with a name that we specify or you can add a meta tag to your site’s index file. — Google

This amounted to creating a new Page and giving it the title which was the code for verification and then deleting or making the page private once verification was achieved.

More information about Search Engines.

Related posts found in this blog:
How to: Google Site Verification
Google Changes to Meta Tag and HTML File Verification Methods