299 Steps to Website Heaven

Fantastic post from Chris Brogan on using Social Media to improve your marketing:

50 Ways Marketers Can use Social Media to Improve Their Marketing

1. Add social bookmark links to your most important web pages and/or blog posts to improve sharing.
2. Build blogs and teach conversational marketing and business relationship building techniques.
3. For every video project purchased, ensure there’s an embeddable web version for improved sharing.
4. Learn how tagging and other metadata improve your ability to search and measure the spread of information.
5. Create informational podcasts about a product’s overall space, not just the product.

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So, Coca Cola ‘rented’ the blogs of 9 prominent bloggers in Brazil to promote the launch of their new product i9 Hydrotonico in Brazil.

And the Blogosphere went mad….

Bloggers came from everywhere to state they were “not to be bought” and derided not only the ‘rented’ blogs but also Coca Cola themselves.

There was even a new manifesto developed:

“A blog is a personal page, is a time logbook, is expression, is someone saying what they think/reckon/believe for those who want to read it. There aren’t bloggers’ union, wages, holidays, but we do lots of overtime. A blogger is not a journalist or an advertising agent: they can be everything and nothing, teenager or mother, hairdresser or CEO. Each one has the audience they deserve, the credibility they have conquered.”

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According to the official Google blog, Google are now starting to index Flash websites:

Google learns to crawl Flash

6/30/2008 09:26:00 PM

Posted by Ron Adler and Janis Stipins, Software Engineers

Google has been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files of all kinds, from Flash menus, buttons and banners, to self-contained Flash websites. Recently, we’ve improved the performance of this Flash indexing algorithm by integrating Adobe’s Flash Player technology.

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Considering it’s owned by Google, you would have thought that WMT verification and use for Blogger would have come along a lot quicker, eh?

Well, it’s here - they say:

Ever wonder why your blog shows up where it does in the Google search rankings? With our new Webmaster Tools integration that information is just a click or two away.

Webmaster Tools is a Google service that provides you with detailed information about your website’s visibility to Google’s search engine. You can see how often Google’s web crawlers visit your site, find out who links to your site, what searches are used to find your site, and even control how your page appears in the Google web results.

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A few weeks ago we suffered at the hands of hackers - they’ve been targeting popular SEO sites, so maybe i should have been flattered?

Well I would have been if they hadn’t decided to place ads for all sorts of things I didn’t want my readers seeing ads for!

Withe the help of friendly ecademist Nick Braak we soon got the site up and running again (although we’re still working to add in some pages that were lost).

There’s a great tip on blogstorm today telling you how to use Google Alerts to find out if you have been hacked.

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