WDTalk

Exchange4Me is one of a number of social media Exchange systems, and our first to review on WDTalk. Basically, the site is designed to help you increase your site traffic and popularity “FAST and FREE” through the use of coins that are can be used to get traffic for your links.

What can you do with these coins? According to Exchange4Me:

You can use the coins in your balance to place a value on your site or video. For example, you have a fans page you want gain more fans, so you set your page to give 5 Coins for any person who become fan, everytime one of our users become your fan, 5 Coins will be deducted from your account. In other words, if you have 5000 coins in your account and you set to give 5 coins for each view, that means you will get 1000 fans automatically.

You will earn coins for every Like, Follow, View, +1 or visit from you, to our users. Everytime you LIKE a page, watch a youtube video, press +1 on someone’s google plus or visiting a fellow visitor’s site you gain Coins.

Out of curiosity, I checked Exchange4Me’s Alexa ranking, which currently stands at 42,603 globally – impressive! Any time your Alexa rating ranks in the top 100,000 sites, you’re doing something right.

With so much information out there - it’s hard to narrow down any search query to the relevant few you’re truly interested in. I recently found a great list of blogs that are both interesting and successful. I had already been reading some of them, but this is a diverse group with a ton of in depth observations. See my PS: on marketing blogs.

PS: If you’re interested in top performing marketing blogs - see the Power 150 at AdAge Digital. They currently list 1121 marketing blogs (and growing) ranked by a number of indicators including:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• StumbleUpon
• Alexa Points
• Yahoo Inlinks
• Todd Points

Click on the link and it’ll show their last posts.

Just today, I was asked for a recommendation in coming up with a name for a new forum - in a custom niche. I know this sounds easy, but it seems that every conceivable combination of English words has been taken, and is currently either active or parked. The registrar always suggests other combinations, but I’ve yet to find one in my queries that fits what I’m  searching for.

Maybe this is just one of my many pet peeves - but an astonishing number of domains are parked, especially with highly competitive keywords. Cracking that egg requires a sledge hammer the size of my SUV. I did find one this morning I really liked, but the sale price was over $6000.00. My budget is around $12

There are services where you can sell and purchase domain names - like SEDO, but then I’d miss the challenge and frustration, and sometimes the thrill of finding a name that is actually available.

YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world - which is owned by none other than the largest search engine, Google.  Volumes have been written about video optimization, but your core objective should be about the quality of each visitor experience.

I ran across this bit of code on - Web Hosting Talk this morning (OP did not list the source), where the script sets up a YouTube video to autostart only one time, then if the visitor comes back on that page, the video will not start again.

<script language=”Javascript”>
function played(){
var ca = document.cookie.split(‘;’);
for(var i=0; i<ca.length; i++) {
var c = ca[i];
while (c.charAt(0)==’ ‘) c = c.substring(1,c.length);
if (c.indexOf(“played=”) == 0) return 1;
}
var date = new Date();
var days = 7;
date.setTime(date.getTime()+(days*24*60*60*1000));
document.cookie = “played=1″+”; expires=”+date.toGMTString()+”; path=/”;
return 0;
}
if(played()==0){
document.write(“<embed src=\”http://www.youtube.com/v/W5E2Q6PW&autoplay=1\” type=\”application/x-shockwave-flash\” wmode=\”transparent\” width=\”740\” height=\”400\”></embed>”);
}
else{
document.write(“<embed src=\”http://www.youtube.com/v/W5E2Q6PW\” type=\”application/x-shockwave-flash\” wmode=\”transparent\” width=\”740\” height=\”400\”></embed>”);
}
</script>

Replace the YouTube embed with a valid URL.

Please let me know if this works for you (Or Not)

Revised January 18 2012

By default, WordPress blogs use a rel=”nofollow” attribute - so when you read of Do Follow Blogs, these are blogs that have used a plugin that removes the nofollow attribute. Comments then that contain links back to the poster count as backlinks for their sites.

To the Search Engines – these links then are simply links. It’s up to the search engines rather to follow that link and pass value to the poster’s site. There is no “do follow” attribute to instruct a search engine that these links must be followed or assigned value. Why DoFollow versus NoFollow? The NoFollow attribute was introduced in 2005 to discourage comment spam.

Quality Backlinks - To a large segment of SEO experts, a quality backlink is a one way incoming link from a relevant (respected) site with higher PR. It’s a link you earn via hosting a great site that delivers useful information (the stuff that people want to link to).  These are also known as natural (real) links. The theory is that more natural links help boost your site’s popularity and Page Rank.

A Word of Caution - Blog spam is rampant, especially for Do Follow blogs. There are some “do follow” plugins that allow you to set how many comments a visitor needs to leave (with the same domain URL and/or email address) before their comment link will follow. The DoFollow Plugin for WordPress options:

Timeout

Comments

Pingbacks, trackbacks and other special comment types

My Recommendation

• Use a Do Follow plugin for your WordPress blog if you enable comments
• Do not add the “NoFollow” attribute to inbound links.
• Only add the ‘NoFollow” attribute to outbound links in widgets like Subscribe or Bookmark Me.

Center Your Pages – Pages that are left or right aligned don’t work well with larger PC monitors, and often look out of place due to the large amount of space left to one side.

Use Ample White Space – Resist loading up your pages with everything imaginable. Focus is important. Use white space to guide visitors as they navigate your site. Clutter simply invites confusion.

Consistency – This reverts back to short term versus long term memory retention and branding principles. Try to use the same terminology in your prompts and menus.

KISS – We’ve all see the term. Keeping it simple works. Highlight the key products or services you offer on your home page, then provide more in-depth information about them deeper in your site. Don’t try to squeeze everything onto one page that scrolls forever.

Embrace all five senses – reach out to your visitors in a way that they’ll best understand what you have to offer. Use a mix of graphics and short blocks of text to capture their attention.

Employ analytics – to determine how visitors reach your site, how long they stay & if they return. If your site has a high bounce rate, perhaps the search query doesn’t match well with your content, or the content may need to be revamped.

Enhance Credibility and Trust – Add an About Us page. In a era where we’re being warned to avoid certain websites, as they may infect your computer with all sorts of malware, it’s important to convey credibility at first glance. Let’s face it – the design of your site directly relates to the perception of your professionalism.

Color and Layout – speaks volumes about your business. Color themes are perceived differently in global markets, so it’s vitally important to understand your target audience. What works for car dealerships doesn’t necessarily work for furniture retailers. Research your competition – emulate success.

Online Store? Increase your conversions with options, discount codes and freebies. I know if I’m comparing products and one vendor offers an immediate rebate, I’ll opt for that every day over the option to mail in some coupon and wait for weeks to get a check back.

Xen™ – is a virtual machine environment that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with outstanding levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software, released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.

Servers with – quad core processors and GB’s of RAM are ideally suited to employ virtualization to present the illusion of many smaller virtual machines, each running a separate operating system.

Virtual machines – on one dedicated server are isolated from one another, allowing concurrent execution of multiple operating systems – without allowing the execution of one to adversely affect the performance of another partition.

XEN Hypervisor – is a layer of software running directly on the server’s hardware, replacing the operating system, which allows that server’s hardware to run multiple guest operating systems concurrently. It becomes the interface for all hardware requests such as CPU, I/O, and disk for the guest operating systems.

Server virtualization benefits

• dynamic fault tolerance against software failures (through rapid bootstrapping or rebooting)
• hardware fault tolerance (through migration of a virtual machine to different hardware)
• the ability to securely separate virtual operating systems
• the ability to support legacy software as well as new OS instances on the same computer