SEO or search engine optimization is a technique used to rank up high in Google. Deciding to hire a search engine optimizer is a big decision that can potentially improve your website, as well as, help you save valuable time, money and benefit your internet business further.  If you’re thinking of hiring freelancers to do SEO tasks such as link building and article writing, then you may consider oDesk freelancers.

oDesk freelancers can provide clients with valuable service and it is advisable doing SEO earlier to get maximum benefits. The best time to hire is when you’re planning a site redesign, or considering to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can make certain that your site is designed to be optimally search-engine friendly from the bottom up. Also, a good SEO can help develop good websites content.

Competent employees are considered lifeblood of any business and finding those honest, hardworking and knowledgeable employees can sometimes be frustrating. This is mostly true when searching to employ outsourcers. Whether you are lucky enough to find a qualified candidate or not, you have no uncertainty wasted with your much precious time and money. If you are looking for a faster, easier and cost-effective solution to finding competent outsourcers, then there is no doubt that you can find them in oDesk.

First advantage of hiring an oDesk freelancer is you can definitely save time and money. The most costly part of running any internet business is its employees. This does not refer to their salary, but the cost of finding them, training and retaining them. There are also other costs involved like overtime, health care, office space and finding dedicated individuals for certain projects. Using oDesk freelancers to create a virtual workforce answers these problems and frees up your capital to help manage your internet business.

oDesk can help you post job position and search through thousands of competent applicants. It also gives tests to make certain each applicant has the required skills needed to do the work required. You can look further into an applicant’s work history by carefully reading comments from previous employers and viewing previous work samples. oDesk has streamlined the interviewing and hiring process, making it simple to employ short-term, long-term employees or build a team of freelancers.

When hiring odesk freelancers, you can manage your team as if they were working beside you. One of the main problems with hiring outsourcers or any worker for that matter is making certain that they are basically working and staying well-focused on task assigned. oDesk comes with advanced technology where you can monitor your team’s activity on your wide computer screen. Every minute that a certain task is being worked on is as well, logged into the system giving you total control over your staff, even more so than having all of them in the office beside you.

oDesk does charge a little percentage of the money you make to pay for their valuable services. The quantity is stated when you apply to a job and is included to your bid requested so you can glimpse what your employers would pay in full if they hired you.

In terms of payroll, odesk has also done it very easy for you. The difficulty of paying outsourcers is taken care of in one easy line. You get well-detailed reports on each oDesk freelancer at the end of every week and have the chance to object to any hours billed. If you are in favor to all the hours billed, then payment is done through your credit card or bank account that you specify. oDesk gives you total control of your expenses at a touch of a button.

Using oDesk is simple and hiring qualified freelancers is easy and free without the frustration you have come to imagine from seeking to find qualified outsourcers. Setting up your own account will only take less than five to ten minutes and you will certainly be on your way to searching your next star employee.

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Lior works for a company that developed an innovative online task management app and also for a company that sells nursing tops

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Google Rankings are Earned, Not Entitled

“If you build it, they will come!”, may be a maxim many follow when creating a website, but the reality comes as a cold, freezing slap across the face for most.  Generating traffic to your site is crucial if it is to provide any meaningful impact on your business in terms of profit, sales and generating brand awareness, but this takes more than a great looking website – it takes a lot of planned and recurring effort to promote your website to both the search engines, such as Google, and to human visitors who have money to burn.

Think for a moment about what a website is.  A good analogy is to look at a website as being a billboard on the side of a road – the more cars driving along that road, then the greater the response and impact from the billboard.  How good the billboard is helps a lot to convert drivers, but to have any impact at all, you need the billboard labeled somewhere where people will see it to begin with.

Imagine your website is a billboard which is in the middle of a desert and only rarely does a car pass by.  Fortunately, the satellite navigation systems of all these drivers can detour them past your billboard, provided you offer something of value.  These satellite navigation systems are the search engines and of them all, Google is the largest and most important.  If you convince Google to send you traffic, you stand a much better chance of achieving your online business objectives.

Therein is the crucial key – you must convince Google and the other search engines to send you traffic.

This means there is a lot of work to do in promoting your website which goes beyond simply providing a lot of content.  For a start, the content you do use must be relevant and optimized for the search terms which are likely to generate the traffic to begin with.  This requires website owners to research key phrases extensively so they have a good grasp on what their potential customers are using to find information in the net in connection with their service and product offering.  The content and website coding, then needs to be optimized with this keyword research in mind.

It is almost impossible to get a high ranking in Google without obtaining an extensive network of other websites linking to yours.  A link from another website is considered to be a vote of confidence in your own site, and this in turn is rewarded with a higher ranking.  To be of value, a link must come from a site which is relevant – there is little value in a link from a website selling flowers when you are selling hi-tech electronics.  Link building is a definite art which requires a lot of tact, diplomacy and negotiation between website owners in order to optimize the impact on search engine rankings.  It is time consuming and a good link portfolio is not built in a few days or weeks.

Search engines are not the only game in town either – a considerable amount of user time is being spent on social media sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and MySpace.  Building a great site is only one aspect of your online business presence; perhaps it is better to regard the website as the commercial focus around which you will build a network of online sites which point back to the main website.  Blogging, Facebook fan pages, article marketing, Twitter tweeting and a whole lot more should be considered to spread the word about your fantastic website loaded with lots of relevant content, but all of this is going to take time.

Gaining a high Google rank is something which takes patience and a lot of hard work and even more to maintain that high ranking once it is achieved.  This means that successful website management must adopt a reiterative approach to promotion and constantly work at improving the site and site marketing to open the search engine flood gates which will direct potential customers to your online billboard.

Shell Harris, Big Oak SEO

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3. A Twitter Fan’s Review of Plurk

Plurk may do the same as what Twitter does, but it does it far better in my opinion – and I speak as a fan of Twitter who applauds their independent stance, which has so far kept them out of the hands of the likes of Google!

You get a text input box to type in your strictly limited 140 characters, you get to follow friends and persons of interest, and they you in return. All the “immediate” real-time updating that has become Twitter’s hallmark and differentiators from other social media sites is present in Plurk.

But what makes Plurk different is so very attractive and what separates it from Twitter.

The most impressive difference is the timeline which is used to show you exactly when a “plurk” (the same as a “tweet”) is made. You get a scrolling timeline which defaults to the current time being shown in the center of the screen – as time progresses , it scrolls to the right and updates with your plurks and those of connected, fellow “plurkers.” Twitter has “FriendFeed” to manage the tweet thread’s but Plurk has it all in one place as soon as you have the UI up in front of you – very refreshing and extremely enjoyable.

Plurk presents what your fellow plurkers are up to in a very manageable and easily readable way without being clunky or requiring a lot of mouse-messing around. Twitter doesn’t beat that.

While Twitter allows you 140 characters, Plurk provides some qualifiers to allow you to make full use of the rationed characters allowed – on Twitter, I’d tweet, “I love eating hash browns at the American Diner”, but with Plurk, I can use a range of qualifies – Karl loves, hates, shares, wants, wishes …{my plurk message} – this gets around the shortage of characters by using some standardized qualifiers.

Sign up is a breeze – I mean it took me all of 60 seconds to sign up, and most of that time was wasted on the dilemma I faced about disclosing my age! The ability to migrate email and other social media contacts is also extremely straightforward, and my FaceBook and email address books were notified with one click. Privacy settings are also easy to manage. I really liked the ability to regulate privacy settings for different contacts.

In fact, there is nothing clunky about Plurk – the developers have really gotten their act together on this site.

So where did the name “Plurk” come from?

Plurk may sound like a made-up name that evolved from some stoned developer’s bong-time, but the humor behind the name tells a rather different story. Plurk actually stands for something, unlike most other Web 2.0 sites, and here are the components:

Plurk can be an acronym – People, Love, Unity, Respect, Karma (perhaps there was some bong-time involved after all).

On the other hand, Plurk can be a combination of People and Lurk, for all the cyber-stalkers out there, but I prefer the corruption of Play & Work. Plurk is certainly going to spin-off a whole new range of words for the modern lexicon, and all of them are going to sound like they should mean something naughty – I plurk, you plurked, “Who’s plurking over there?” and of course “What a plurker!”

Frankly, Plurk wins out on Twitter not for the UI but because it has one essential ingredient Twitter seems to have lost – fun!

Lawrence Reaves, Big Oak SEO Company

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He answers this question: Links from relevant and important sites have always been a great way to get traffic & acceptance for a website. How do you rate links from new platforms like Twitter, FB to a website?

Essentially, Matt says Google treats links the same whether they are from Facebook or Twitter, as they would if they were from any other site. It’s just an extension of the pagerank formula, where its not the amount of links, but how reputable those links are (the company uses a similar strategy for ranking Tweets themselves in real-time search).

While Facebook and Twitter links may be treated like any other links, they do still come with things to keep in mind. For one, with Facebook, you have to keep in mind that a lot of profiles are not public. When a profile is not public, Google can’t crawl it, and it can’t assign pagerank on the outgoing links if it can’t fetch the page to see what the outgoing links are. If the page is public, it might be able to flow pagerank, Matt says. With Twitter, most links are nofollowed anyway.

“At least in our web search (our organic rankings), we treat links the same from Twitter or Facebook or, you know, pick your favorite platform or website, just like we’d treat links from WordPress or .edus or.govs or anything like that,” says Cutts. “It’s not like a link from an .edu automatically carries more weight or a link from a .gov automatically carries more weight. But, the specific platforms might have issues, whether it’s not being crawled or it might be nofollow. It would keep those particular links from flowing pagerank.”

By Chris Crum

source: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2010/01/14/how-google-rates-links-from-facebook-and-twitter

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