link

Let me start with the tips provided by BizLand’s director of Web and UI.

1.  Plan your site.

2.  Understand your audience.

3.  Allow for easy navigation.

4.  Choose a color scheme.

5.  Use high quality photos.

6.  Test your site, and test again.

I agree with those tips completely.

I would like to add, though, the importance of (using or building your own) social bookmarking site(s).  While doing a research on the same I found the following article on Search Engine Journal.  Here is an excerpt from the article:

The positive effects of social bookmarking for publishers of news sites, blogs and other web sites is outstanding. Social bookmarking can introduce the sites that you own or you like to others with relevant tastes, can drive traffic to your site, and valuable back links.

Some social bookmark sites like Propeller.com pass on link juice, while some use the NoFollow attribute. But do not let the use of NoFollow fool you, the search engines are looking beyond the incoming links from social bookmarking sites to gauge their value to their search indexes. The external metadata compiled via user generated descriptions, tags, titles and categorization is incredibly valued by the search engines, as in the same philosophy as anchored backlinks, descriptive content about a web site defined by the users of that site who are not associated with the marketing or coding of that site, can be extremely powerful in gauging the importance and relevance of the content and tags which are used on that site.

Bookmarks show how a site is perceived, and when these sites allow voting, they also show the engines or whatever classification system which monitors voting, how people feel about the quality of the site. Furthermore, social bookmarking can introduce a site to the search engines, as in some cases, people may find and bookmark a site or a site’s internal pages before a search engine can find those pages via another form of inbound link.

Monitoring social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Ma.gnolia can help search engines in multiple ways by:

• Indexing Sites Faster : Humans bookmark sites launched by their friends or colleagues before a search engine bot can find them.
• Deeper Indexing : Many pages bookmarked are deep into sites and sometimes not as easily linked to by others, found via bad or nonexistent site navigation or linked to from external pages.
• Measuring Quality : Essentially if more users bookmark a page, the more quality and relevance that site has. A site with multiple bookmarks across multiple bookmarking services by multiple users is much more of an authority than a site with only several bookmarks by the same user.
• External Meta Data : Users who bookmark sites tag them with keywords and descriptions which add an honest and unbiased definition which is created by the public and not the owner of the site.
• Co Citation : Social bookmarking sites tend to categorize sites and pages based upon the tags used by humans to describe the site; therefore search algortihms can classify these sites with their peers.
• Number of Votes : Similar to the number of bookmarks, the more votes a page receives on Digg or Reddit, the more useful that information usually is. If the same page receives multiple votes across multiple social news voting sites, the higher quality the site.
• Categorization : Like Co Citation, categorization can help define the subject of a site, therefore better helping the engine address searcher intent.

To help share the wealth of social bookmarking, I’ve put together a list of 125 social bookmarking sites, some of which are very popular and others which are newer or somewhat unheard of. But besides targeting the major social bookmarking and tagging sites which are listed above, you will find some diamonds in the rough which are niche oriented or treated well by Google and other search engines. I’ve found that one such surprise is Searchles which is regarded as an authority by multiple search engines and bookmarks within Searchles sometimes show up quite high in some branded organic results.

Here is the link to the full article cited above:

Search Engine Journal

I was approached by another friend 2 weeks ago.  This time, I thought I would put together all my research and write about it.  Hence this post is a collection of the material I went through and videos that I watched.  It also includes responses by the recruiters for some questions that I asked them directly.

1a.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W692mWKaxH4 MLM 

1b. link (DateLine, MSNBC) 

2. http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-215989802739458876# link  

3. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOSzJUtMQzk link  (Steve Hassan, Doug M Brooks,  Robert Fitzpatrick) 

4. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CApMzIX46kw&feature=fvwrel LINK  

5. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2kQii3WC9Y&feature=related LINK 

6. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMZsjUWf9O0&feature=related LINK 

7. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4375477/ns/dateline_nbc-consumer_alert/t/pursuit-almighty-dollar/ LINK 

Some excerpts of my conversations with the presenters in the house.

me: how much money will I make?

him: as much as you work hard.

me : do you have anything negative to share about your business?

him : none.

me : (after 20 minutes into his slideshow/explanation of nutrilite business ) is it anyway related to amway?)

him : yes, but Nutrilite independent of Amway and is based in California.

me : where do i do some ‘research’ on this business

him: go to my/our website and see/read what we have to say.  walmart has many lawsuits too.

me: do I have to buy many ‘training material’ to be an ibo?

him: no.

me: suppose I signup now and when will my ‘training/mentoring’ finish?

him: it depends on how much money you want to make.

me : show me a proof of your income in this business.  you claimed to be in it for more than 4 years and ‘retired’

him : he started to show me a slideshow that he had prepared to show me.

me : i said: no, no, no.  this is theory whatever you are about to show me.

him : after a little hesitancy, showed me a check for $20,000.00 given by AmWay.  It was a graphical image of the check on his pc.  I could not see much details on the check, he took his pc back away from my view.

Nevertheless, after two days after this meet, I told them I am not interested in the business.

Today when i clicked it went to an error page on an entirely different site no related to quick books or intuit.

Today I got another similar mail.  When i looked at the url it was linked to, it pointed to another site that was different from the previous mail.

THAT made me sure that it was a phishing mail.  So, I blacklisted it.

Be careful what link you click on in your emails.

Link to part 2 is here and and link for part 1 is here.

In conclusion, let me summarize.

The tools you need are:

First, a genuine upgrade DVD from Microsoft or the manufacturer of your laptop/desktop.  It was Dell in my case.  I also assume that your pc has a dvd rom or you can manage to connect one to your pc.  I do not support any kind of non-genuine windows operating systems that some claim to provide for cheaper price.  See this article for details on such scams or bad purchases.

Second, time and pateince.

The first partition (which contained windows server 2008 hpc edition) had some extra space.  So i needed to move some space about 10 gb from this partition to w7 partition.  I researched for partition software and i came accross easeus.  EaseUS helped a great deal to move about 10gb from first partition to the second.  Now I have enough space in w7 to accommodate all windows updates (specially visual studio sp1) and workspace for normal functioning of the os.

As I was doing some research today on an entirely unrelated subject(windows drivers for Holux GPS receiver), i came accross (probably, via google ads) a website called keyoem.com and wanted to buy one of those keys to upgrade my windows 7 home premium to business/ultimate.  The price they had put on their site was less than $35.

But, before I did do the purchase, I wanted to see if it was a scam.  So i did a search on google with “windows key scam.” Lo and behold, i got several hits.

These websites look genuine, and even have Microsoft partner logos on them.

The first one was from technonsense.com.  This is an article that i took time to read and it saved me $35.

Here is a link to the full article.  Thanks to technonsense.com, who has done a great job with this regard.

BisLinks.