There's no hiding from the environmentally conscious trend that's taking the world by storm. Environmental awareness has hit everyone from the residential stay-at-home mom to the big business CEO. Everyone wants a piece of the 'saving the world' pie. Mom and Dad are buying organic groceries, maybe even cutting down their carbon footprint and buying less meat every week. Businesses are trying to clean up their means of production and making certain that consumers take notice as soon as they do. From purchasing environment-friendly cleaning supplies to joining a social network made for the environmental activist, there's always an opportunity to do the earth some good. Wait - a social network made for the environmental activist? Yes, the effort to go green is reaching as far as the world wide web. Check out these green social networks:

* BigCarrot

o BigCarrot is a site devoted to rewarding the world's do-gooders. The whole scheme of the website is all about offering rewards to people who achieve goals concerned with the environment. If the best way you can think to make a difference is by offering 30 bucks to the first person who collects trash at the park by your house, then BigCarrot is the social network for you. It can be a little difficult to get around the site and create prizes, but its relatively easy to find friends in its active community. It's worth a shot to win some prizes, as well.

* Carbonrally

o Carbonrally wants you to reduce carbon emissions by working with others who use the site. After signing up, each user creates his own personal challenge. To achieve your goal, you've got to find team members to help you. You can also sign up for challenges posted by other users. To meet your goals you've got to communicate with other team members, discuss the steps towards your goal that you've taken thus far, and discuss how the challenge could be improved. Fortunately, the challenges aren't too difficult. An example of one would be taking your air conditioning down two degrees and maintaining that temperature for one week. The site will tell you the impact that each individual can make by doing this, as well as the impact that the whole group of people that signed up can make.

* Celsias

o The purpose of joining Celsias is to be a good user by raising your Celsias temperature from a beginning value of 0 degrees on up. You can raise your Celsias temperature by participating in green activity. You can do this by turning the air conditioning down, buying more vegetables and less meat, or using energy-efficient lightbulbs. It's easy to follow and interact with other users as you discuss your strategies and encourage each other along the way.

* Change.org

o Change.org is a great place to start if you want to really make a difference. It encourages you to raise money for green iniatives and improve your ability to live an environmentally friendly lifestyle. You can also discuss a variety of topics with other users. You can make friends with the other users or just join causes. Change.org rates you on the amount of money you raise, the users you''ve recruited to your cause, and the steps that you've taken personally to go green.

* Creative Citizen

o Creative Citizen rates you based on "Greenage." The higher your Greenage the more prominent you are in the community. This is done by engaging in activities that are better for the environment. Creative Citizen is fairly small yet, but the existing community is very involved.

* Green Voice

o On Green Voice, people can work together to start up grassroots projects. Individuals can create their own projects or sign on to ones previously started by other users. The site lets you use photos, videos, blogs, and other forums to get the word out about your campaign. It also provides you with access to petition templates and any other tools or resources that help you achieve your goals.

* HowYouEco

o On HowYouEco, you can build a profile and make friends as soon as you sign up. This website helps the environment by providing user reviews of green products, which has proven to be very useful. The site also has a Twitter-like update box for every profile so that you can share your going green ideas.

* Make Me Sustainable

o Make Me Sustainable is a website dedicated to making you aware of your own carbon footprint. You will first answer questions about your car and your home followed by questions about your lifestyle. Once you answer the questions, the site tells you what your impact on the environment is. You can make this information public to other users, become friends with them, and discuss ways to better your results.

With all these great opportunities for the internet-inclined, it's possible for anyone to go green these days!

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No matter what your website is about, your ultimate goal is to make it a popular destination for internet users. Your best bet: SEO. Trying to stay conscious of the keys of SEO while building an ecommerce site can prove to be a challenge. Informative, valuable content is certainly a must in the SEO world, but ecommerce sites typically have much less content than other sites. Also, since products on an ecommerce site are generally constantly changing, it can be difficult to get a good place in search results. Fear not, it IS possible to find SEO success with your ecommerce website. There are a few things you can do, starting with website basics, that will help your site ranking.

Keywords, keywords, keywords. Among SEO basics, your choice of keywords is a standard issue that has a huge effect on the ranking of any website. Before you get started, remember the importance of staying organized in the development of your website. You may want to create a spreadsheet that will allow you to keep track of all of the keywords that you choose. For your homepage, start with broad terms and phrases that you think your customer would enter into any search engine's search bar. If you're selling books on your website, the obvious choice would be things like "discount books," "online bookstore," or "buy books online." As you look through your webpages, narrow your terms accordingly. Keywords like "fiction books," "mystery novels," and "autobiographies," are obvious choices in narrowing down the genres of your selection. If you can prevent it, don't use the same keywords on every page of your site, and don't try to stick in as many keywords as you can on every page. Each page stands on its own when it comes to search engine ranking. Don't underestimate the importance of the keywords you choose because you'll be using them in these four places:

* Navigation/Links - As you set up your site navigation, you'll want to use your keywords in the categories and page names you create. You'll also want to put your keywords in your URL's if you can, but do be conscious of the length of your phrases in both cases. * Breadcrumb Trail - Breadcrumb trails help your site's visitors see where they've been and generally look like this: home > fiction books > mystery novels. Googlebots follow these trails, as well. * Alt Tags / Image Attributes - The keywords you place here are also indexed to major search engines.

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Today's tip is about correctly diagnosing your website problems.

Have you observed a drop in traffic to your website? Before you jump to conclusions, take the time to correctly diagnose the problem. Scary as it sounds, you'll have to approach your website the way a doctor would approach a patient. Granted, there's a reason you're interested in SEO and not in biology, but you've got to make a correct diagnosis before you can begin treatment. A traffic problem is not always a ranking problem. It's important to remember that a drop in traffic isn't always the result of an issue with search rank. You may not have a problem with your ranking at all. You have to explore all of your options, including issues with crawling. Maybe your site is being crawled but not getting indexed. It could even be an issue with extraction, but it's up to you to figure it out. How? Start here:

* Develop an infrastructure to diagnose your website dilemmas. Start with ranking report benchmarks so that you can get a better sense of where you stand in the rankings for some of your top queries. Once you get an idea of how you compare with your competitors in those queries for the search engine ranking pages, you'll be able to stay up-to-date on any significant ranking movement.

* Organize your pages into categories. Look at your server logs for search engine bot activity on a per category basis. Once you implement this, you'll be able to better understand about how well the bots are spidering/indexing your content. You might see that certain categories are being actively crawled by the search bots, while others are getting very little attention. Different category pages might also be crawled at different rates, which is important to remember. Rates can range from 10 to 100 pages per day. Being able to see how many pages the crawlers pick up from the individual categories will tell you a lot about how long it takes the bots to get through your whole site.

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Today's tip: Don't become a victim of LINK FARMS!

Everyone knows that one of the top secrets to achieving the best SEO results: powerful, contextual, relates LINKS. Okay, maybe it's not such a secret anymore, but the right links are definitely the best way to gain the most popularity on the web. The SEO beginner may grab for any link he can get his inexperienced hands on, but you know better than that. You know that the beginner's lack of expertise could very well make him the ultimate candidate for any disreputable link farm. As a website constructed solely for the purpose of increasing the link popularity of other sites, a link farm is a threat to any credible website. Generally, the list of links on a link farm site are totally unrelated - posted simply for the purpose of being posted and increasing the number of incoming links to each individual site. Sure, sometimes these sites post links related to just one topic, but that doesn't make them any more legitimate.

Chances are, you know when you're looking at a link farm, but just in case you're apprehensive, it's very easy to tell. Look for mass links; we're talking pages and pages of links. Maybe they're related links, maybe they're not, but either way there will be plenty. Look for very little content. These link farms are definitely not interested in sharing valuable information. Poor maintenance of a site is also usually an indication of a link farm. To a link farm webmaster, the links are all that matter, so the organization of the site is of little importance. A low page rank on top of these other signs is another good indicator. As long as the site isn't brand new, it could already have been penalized by Google. If it hasn't been removed completely, then it could very well have a low page rank.

Considering the extensive knowledge of the search engines, it seems crazy to think that these link farms could possibly work. And that's right, they don't. Most link farms are hosted on the same C-block and registered to the same company or person. Since the search engines are also registrars, they know the hosting and registration details for every site. The search engines have no trouble tracing every one of these links, which will undoubtedly be traced back to the same owner. So what will they do to you? Not only will the search engines immediately remove the link farms, but you can bet that they'll penalize your site, too.

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Today's tip warns against the dangers of buying and selling LINKS.

An obvious disregarding of the rules of the web, buying and selling links indiscriminately for search engine optimization purchases definitely deserves to be punished. Essentially, paying for links is paying to be popular, and no one likes a cheater. This kind of etiquette never worked in high school, and it certainly won't work on the internet. Think about why people use Google in the first place: to find the most relevant answers to their questions. Say Google allowed its site contributors to pay more money to be listed at a higher position on the results page. Eventually, the search engine would lose all of its credibility because it put price before relevance. Search engines are vital resources, and it's crucial that they be able to maintain their integrity. And this explains why Google's patent on its Adwords PPC ad-serving system is so valuable because advertisers are listed according to the relevance of their ad, not just a big price.

Even the search engines, the self-proclaimed police of the internet, have to play by the rules - just look at what happened to Google Japan. In February of 2009, Google, king of the internet, had to penalize one of its own, Google Japan, when it began paying bloggers to write articles about the "hot new keywords" function at the top of its homepage. It consisted of a list promoting the most searched terms typed on the search engine. When selected, these keywords linked to their respective Google searches. Problems arose when Google Japan hired an online marketing company to create buzz about their new tool, which was already available as a widget to webmasters through none other than the pay-per-post function. Although Google rules the web in many countries, Japan is not one of them. Facing heavy competition from Yahoo's search engine, Google Japan chose to disregard its own rules in order to increase its popularity. Without fail, the almighty Google came down hard on Google Japan. The campaign was stopped immediately, and the frantic apologies began. Clearly, Google Japan's remorseful email was not enough, and the search engine had to be punished. Google imposed a tough PageRank penalty upon the Japanese version of itself, bringing its rank down from a 9 to a 5.

If Google is willing to penalize one of its own, its fair to say that no one is safe. Who knows what havoc Google will wreak on your website if it finds out about any shady business? The search engine could drop your page rank, throw out your links, or ban your site from the index for any given phrase. No matter what Google does, you can bet that your site will feel its harmful effects. The best advice: be honest. Don't purchase shady links, and only link to sites that you've looked at to ensure their relevance and quality. If you're really nervous that a link might be seen as manipulative for the Google ranking system, you can request a rel="nofollow" attribute that keeps the link from passing any parameters. Avoid buying and selling bad links at all costs to allow your website to thrive with a clean conscience.

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Today's SEO tip is about the importance of using discretion in all of your URL writing.

Let's face it - even the most diligent SEO guru has a lazy moment or two. Spurred on by that devilish voice in your head, it takes all of your will power to deny taking the easy way out when it comes to handpicking keywords to put in your URL. What you want to do is throw a few directories in front of your previously existing URL; what you should do is take the time to rewrite the elements that actually propel the page's content. Although that tiny addition to your URL seems completely harmless, you have been warned! True, if the legacy URLs are redirected to the new keyword URL to maintain link popularity and de-index the legacy URLs, you'll probably see no consequences. Sure, your now much longer URL will probably get indexed and therefore be free of any impact, but beware! You would hate to be accused of the ultimate sin: keyword stuffing!

The best way to avoid keyword stuffing is to keep it simple. A URL of four or five words that sounds natural can be perfectly normal. I would warn against using a URL that looks like this: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2009/feb/23/honda-formula-one-bernie-ecclestone-richard-branson-jenson-button-bruno-senna-mercedes-benz, (yes, this is actually real). First off, it's just too long. No one would ever physically type a URL of that length if they saw it in print. Second, it looks spammy! A URL like that combined with this particular site, itself, is constantly losing credibility. Not only are almost all of The Guardian's URL's typically like this, but its articles are full of pointless and annoying links. Generally, it's very easy to associate these over-stuffed and obnoxious URLs with a lack of value. Is sacrificing quality really worth a few measly SEO points? Make sure to consider keyword proximity and density before writing your URLs to avoid sacrificing the integrity of your website. Stick with keywords and leave out the junk - adverbs, adjectives, pronouns - think about exactly what your target audience is looking for and what they would type into Google to find it.

Here are a few examples of search engine friendly linking, which is really easy to do when use a content management system that enables you to just type in the keywords you want to use in your URL, and it creates the links for you. (Btw, you would not believe how many ecommerce sites still use links with SKU numbers instead of model names).

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Today's tip for copywriting tactics related to search engine optimization goals will cover what to do with LINKS and how they appear on your site. On my own site at Magmall.com for example, where we sell magazine subscriptions, you can see that there is a clear linking hierarchy in terms of using color and size to set links apart using the ecommerce platform from Adrecom.

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So this morning i got an email from my CNET subscription about Facebook's recent announcement that you can set up a keyword rich Facebook vanity URL to be used instead of (or in addition to) your alphanumeric web address for Facebook. SEO companies are running faster than the angriest bulls in Pamplona to build portfolios of Facebook accounts with keyword rich URLs. Here's the post I got: Facebook's 200-plus million members can now customize the URLs to their profiles. This is a move that will help Facebook profiles get better traction in search engines, potentially upping traffic--and give people-search sites a run for their money in the process. For brands whose "fan pages" are a crucial part of Facebook's marketing and advertising strategy, it'll make their pages easier for people to access without needing to click around much. But there's fine print! "Think carefully about the user name you choose. Once it's been selected, you won't be able to change or transfer it," a blog post by Facebook's Blaise DiPersia read. Need help figuring out what to do? So i visited my Facebook account and lo and behold there was an invitation to add a vanity URL. So i chose www.facebook.com/jasonciment. Now though i run a web agency, where I offer through our Los Angeles office web site design, search engine optimization and web software services for a CMS and an ecommerce shopping cart software platform, PLUS I still have a magazine subscription service, i still chose to make my vanity name my personal name instead of a keyword rich vanity URL like www.facebook.com/magazinesubscriptions (which by now probably someone just snatched). here's my recommendation to Facebook. Stop the insanity. PROHIBIT keyword rich vanity URLs. Don't allow common names to be registered. Since when does someone's personal name sound like a noun. Next time I meet someone who says his name is web design, I'm checking my shot glass for some milky residue because I must be drinking something funny. Here's my second recommendation to Facebook. if you want to allow the registration of common nouns, then setup a separate directory just for "business" use and call it www.facebook.com/business and put all the common nouns in that directory. this way people will be able to distinguish a real PERSONAL facebook account from a company's account. Now since Fcebook is probably not going to follow these recommendations right now - though let it be recorded forever in the web sphere that i am the first one writing this idea on a Sunday morning in 2009 - if you are interested in taking advantage of the fantastic opportunity this presents for search engine optimization purposes, then find someone who has registrered their facebook accoutn befpre May 31st and have them give it to you so that you can get the keyword rich vanity name before it is taken. Hey! maybe Google, Yahoo and MSN will do the right thing and absolutely ignore the keywords in the URL's and really screw with the SEO companies who don't miss a beat (me included).

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I just found this free software related post related to Seo Quake - Busby Seo Test Tool | Freeware Dowloads Software [BETA ....

This software product was tested in the Softpedia labs on: 11 June 2007. Softpedia guarantees that SeoQuake is 100% CLEAN, which means it does not contain any.

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