50 Kick-Ass Websites You Need to Know About - Page 7 | Maximum P Crackle.com Watch TV Shows and Movies You Can’t Find on Hulu NBC’s Hulu may be the dominant video-streaming service for legally watching TV shows and movies, but its catalogue isn’t nearly comprehensive. Rival service Crackle fills in missing shows and films owned by Sony Pictures, in case you want to watch movies like Ghostbusters or Groundhog Day. Offworld.com Insightful Gaming News without the Kotaku Crowd Boingboing’s gaming spinoff cherry picks only the most interesting gaming links and industry news for its blog, adding insightful commentary with a little nostalgic bent to each post. Also worth checking out: Rockpapershotgun.com, featuring frequent Offworld and PC Gamer UK contributors. Vimeo.com The Best Place to Upload Your Videos We’ve given up all hope for Youtube. Craiglook.com Craiglist Gets Unstuck from 1995 Craigslist is undoubtedly the best place online marketplace to barter or trade goods, but its interface and navigation system leaves much to be desired. Drop.io Spotify.com
How to Optimize 7 Popular Social Media Profiles for SEO If you want to strengthen your personal or business brand’s visibility, then one of the top things you will want is to have strong social media profiles that rank in the top results for your name along with your website and blog. Having a strong online reputation that is comprised of nothing but content that highlights the best about your personal or business brand will allow you to keep undesirable results at bay, such as bad online reviews or mentions. You’ve probably read lots of posts talking about how to properly optimize your social media profiles for search, and they’ve probably all sounded a little like this. Be active – Yes, this is true. While these are great tips for your overall social media strategy, they are not the end all of SEO for your social network profiles. Quick and Dirty Onsite SEO 101 Before we get started, here are some key things to keep in mind about the following mentioned SEO elements of your social profiles. But what if you don’t care about the SEO?
26 Places to Find Free Multimedia for Your Blog Nothing makes a blog post more eye-catching than a great header image, but not all publishers have artistic talent. And even accomplished digital creatives often crave some found material to start from or work with in a project. Luckily for all of the above, sources abound for finding a compelling photo to grab your readers' eyes and draw them in, or to locate fresh multimedia to remix. Creative Commons search You may be familiar with the Creative Commons free licenses that aim to give creators more freedom to allow sharing and remixing of their content. Here are several excellent spots to search large pools of Creative Commons-licensed images: 1. Free stock and public domain images Need a professional-looking image but don't have the budget for spendy stock photo houses? 5. WikiMedia Commons 12. Free audio sources Free video sources 20. Further resources 24. More blogger resources from Mashable: Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Johnnyscriv
Nine Ways to be a Competitive SEO This post has been inspired and adapted from one of my favourite non-SEO bloggers, James Altucher. He recently wrote: 9 Ways to break all the rules. As an SEO, regardless to the fact we proscribe or prescribe the definition, our jobs are to get our content high up enough in SERPs to attract searchers into our sites. Simply put, it’s the art of making something findable. However, in order to do that, we need to try and follow a set of rules; rules that have been set for us by search engines to get that content up there. Of course, these rules are different for different people, but don’t let that stop you. Sometimes rules are meant to be broken. Part of being a good SEO is to understand what these rules are, but part of being a GREAT SEO is to know how far you can stretch these rules, how to cleverly interpret them, and when you can break them. A few of these are going to be shocking, a few outrageous. rules in SEO ===> Do the opposite. ===> Surprise ===> Change one thing Reputation Issue?
20 BEST Websites to Host Your Flash Files (SWF) for Free | K-Dir We’ve seen a lot of free image hosting web services out there but hardly can get one for Flash files (swf). We understand some of you might want to host Flash files (swf) for free as well. If so, here’s what we manage to compile – 20 best websites to host your Flash files (SWF) for FREE. Details next! MegaSWFMegaSWF offers you a free, stable .SWF file repository on our high-speed servers.
Majestic SEO: Site Explorer 3 Successful Google+ Pages and Why They Work Have you created a Google+ page for your business? In this article I’ll show you what three top pages are doing. Still in its infancy, Google+ has become a very hot topic. Amid concern that this “new kid on the block” couldn’t compete in a social media landscape owned by Facebook, some have opted to dismiss the platform entirely. While Google+ and Google+ business pages are still in the early stages, there is growing evidence that they’re here to stay. You Can No Longer Ignore Google+ Google+ may be the newcomer in social media, but it can no longer be dismissed. “Search is probably the biggest reason it changes everything. Google+ Updates Coming Fast Over the past few weeks, there has been a slew of Google+ updates that should make marketers sit up and take notice. Google+ is here to stay, with updates coming out almost weekly. The Google+ team is actively soliciting and responding to user feedback and suggestions on their Google+ page, hinting that more updates are in the works. #1: Android
Business Social Media Benefits with Google Plus Google Plus offers business opportunities available nowhere else. The social network run by Google — the gateway to your business — is a game-changer. It ties together several Google products and delivers many rewards for brands. Vic Gundotra, the head of Google+, has said, “It’s really the unification of all of Google’s services, with a common social layer.” Google Plus and social signals Sharing things on Google+ and encouraging others to +1 your content works essentially the same way as Facebook “likes”, but the impact is more pronounced because Google Search favors sites that have received more social credibility from others. According to a study by Searchmetrics, social signals — recommendations through Likes, tweets and Google+ — account for 7 of the 8 most highly correlated ranking factors in Google search results. Google Plus and PageRank Google+ posts are crawled and indexed almost immediately. Key points about followed links: Google Plus and Web influence Google Plus and Local SEO
How to Build Links to Your Blog - A Case Study I recently took some time out to do a bit of travelling across East Asia (which was incredible!) and decided that I would, along with a group of friends, set up a travel blog. Knowing that I would be embarking on some amazing adventures, I thought it'd be a waste not to blog about them. Plus, the idea of bringing in a little extra cash to go into my travel fund helped in my decision. After a month or so of development the site was finally ready and I wanted to start thinking about how to get some traffic going on the website. Whilst paid advertising and social media were a huge part of the strategy, I knew that appearing in the search engines for a wide selection of long-tail phrases was going to be instrumental to the blog's success. Identifying My Link Targets As a brand new blog it can be really tough to gain links from high authority sites. "The link must have a genuine potential to generate traffic back to the blog" Resource/Links Pages Hi NAME HERE, Acquiring Links from Your Targets
What is an Unnatural Link? An in-depth Look at the Google Quality Guidelines - YouMoz Do you know how to recognize an unnatural link? Sometimes unnatural links are easy to spot. But, other times they are not. In this article we will take an in depth look at the link schemes section of the Google Quality Guidelines and discuss what this document says in regards to unnatural links. Along the way I will share some of my experiences in dealing with websites who have been given unnatural links penalties. You can find the link schemes portion of the Google Quality Guidelines here. The first line of this article makes a bold statement about what is considered an unnatural link: “Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.” Really! If you are at all interested in how Google works, I would highly recommend reading Steven Levy’s book, In the Plex. So let’s go back to the first line of the link schemes section of the Quality Guidelines. car insurance