See how high a page on 43t can rank for the term social networking websites in the search engines

If no one links to the page, it will not work;so please come on, you linkers! Don’t be so unlinky, read the other entries and get linky dinking!

Social networking websites in 2006

Social networking websites like 43t have grown substantially during 2005 and 2006. Sites like myspace, friendster, faceparty are just a few of the well known Social networking websites out there today, and it isn’t showing much sign of a slowdown either. New sites are appearing daily, youtube.com a year ago did not even exist. Today it boasts of a userbase of some 500 million users! Incredible to say the least! The wiki referenced lists 75 of the most popular and doesn’t even touch on other forms such as forums or dating websites or individual blogging sites, or mass blogging sites like blogger. In short, social networking and the internet seems to be a match made in internet heaven, an estimated billion users worlwide can’t all be wrong!

So what is it about these social networking sites that make them so popular?

Humans are Social Animals

Perhaps one obvious easy answer is that we are social creatures! Simple huh? Humans like to interact with other humans..duh! Social networking websites enable people to interact and share ideas, photos, stories, news with a whole host of people from a diverse range of geolocations and communities. The world is made smaller and things that would be otherwise difficult to do say 10 or 15 years ago are now relatively simple. The growth of the internets user base has been driven by a combination of new technology, affordability of access and commercial usefulness. Its educational value is unparalled, answers are at our finger tips; knowledge available to all takers. Communities have sprung up all over, reflecting the bricks and mortar world that we inhabit. There are forums about practically everything topic known to man, full of dedicated enthusiasts. Individuals have become standard bearers for their passions, bloggers blog about anything and everything, each one with a micro or macro audience.

Social networking websites fullfill a need

So what are some of the reasons why people do this? Why dont they just go out and do these things in a church hall? Some do sure, but for others its not that simple for them to do of course.Some might live in isolated communities that give little opportunity for human contact and interaction. Others may feel socially isolated for different reasons; an impairment or lack of opportunity to mix socially, low income, illness etc. Some might just enjoy spending an hour or so a day, journaling but enjoying the feedback they get too.Some might not even like meeting real people preferring this safer, take it or leave it medium.

Its certainly the case that for many of us, living in time poor or economically restricted environments full of targets and deadlines and obligations that our opportunities for getting out and interacting in any meaningful, continuous way with a wide range of people is in many ways substantially reduced by our circumstances. This for me, is one of the reasons why social networking websites are so strong and pervasive. People want them, people need them even, just like they need to let their hair down, go to work, get a hug, be told that they matter in this big thing called life. Sites like these fill a need that people have, people love to communicate and feel that they are part of something. Where else can you so easily have multi-stranded conversations that can spread out over days, weeks and months of sustained multiple viewpoints and opinions from a culturally diverse global audience; full of attitudes that are both very different, yet remarkably similar, where you can intervene and interact instantaneously?

Yup, there aren’t too many are there.

Your opinion on Social networking websites?

So, whats your take on social networking then? Why do you use 43t? Do you think I’m bang on the money? What have I missed lots knowing me ;-)? What would you add to the mix?

If you do reply 1 then please do try and use the term social networking websites in your post. It will help keep up keyword density and keep the page on topic too. If you have a blog or a website with a links page then please also consider linking to this page with the anchor text ‘Social networking’ or ‘Social Networking Websites’

Cheers and thanks for reading :D

^{1 see for context}

Are powered by link juice. Link juice I hear you say! WTF is link juice. Well, lets take Google for example.

Google sends out little programs that ‘spider’ the web. These programs are known as bots. One of Googles bots is named Googlebot. This is the user-agent name it provides when it hits a webpage. Most websites keep server logs that record hits and requests for information.

A typical web server access log on an Apache webserver would look a little like this.

crawl 66 249 66 12.googlebot.com 06/Dec/2006:02:39:07 +0000] “GET /find-hotels.php?searchterm=Bideford HTTP/1.1” 200 3443 ”-” “Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html

This shows things like the page requested,request method the user-agent, the time, the date, the size of the file.

When a page is ‘spidered’ the various words and html tags are in effect captured by the spidering bot and stored in a database field. The information is then processed. A score is applied to various keywords and phrases within the document which helps the algorithm determine the webpages relevancy for a search engine user query.

The Google algorithm is shrouded in a dark cloak of secrecy but can be loosely categorised by using 2 main examples. These consist broadly of

1. On page content:

The content and structure of a web page can be outputted using a variety of methods. One popular method is HTML, or hyper text markup language. The elements of the language enable developers to place words inside certain tags, usually conforming to the W3c standards. A <Hn> tag for example will markup text as a heading element. A Bold _<b> tag or <strong> tag will embolden words to give a visual emphasis. Search engines will look at the placement, frequency and markup of words and determine a score based upon whatever weight they apply to the varying elements and frequencies.

As the web has grown and the numbers of websites and pages have increased, a way had to be found to separate the wheat from the chaff. Search engines need to know more about a page or site than is presented by the webmaster/coder. One of the ways in which it achieves this is by looking at external or ‘off page’ factors.

2. Off page factors:

We all know that web is full of hyperlinks. People write and point to all manner of subjects. Some might link to a good hotel website. They will use relevant words to point towards the site/page they are referring to. Search engines and SEO’s refer to this way of linking by using the term ‘anchor text’. Anchor text is loosely related to the <a> tag which is used to create the link. Anchors can often be found throughout a webpage and can be named and pointed to, thus enabling deep and precise linking to anywhere within a document. Search engines like this, because it helps them more effectively score documents. The theory goes that if 100’s of people from 100’s of different locations (websites) are linking to the same page, using similar text(anchor) in their links, then there is a very strong likelihood that the page in question is more likely to be about the topic it describes than a page that did not have so many links. Greater relevancy, and trust is bestowed upon the page as a result, meaning that in any subsequent search query that page has a greater total score than other similars and is returned to the person using the engine, above other pages of similar content and structure. Not perfect, but a useful and objective way of determining wheat from chaff.

As said previously, this was all well and good to a point, but then along came the SEO or search engine optimiser, who realised that through this method he could relatively easily manipulate the search engine results to push his own, or the pages of his clients to the top of the search engines. The search engines call this approach spamming and have developed all sorts of smoke and mirror tactics to reduce or stifle the efficacy of such an approach. Search engines apply penalties to websites that have in their view, ‘pushed the envelope too far’.

Anyways, there’s a brief little background into how webpages are accessed and scored by search engine spiders. There really is a whole lot more to it than what Ive described! It really is a massive topic that I can’t do justice to here.

What I’d like to do is to see if I can get a page here to rank highly in Google MSN and Yahoo for a given keyword. Not too competitive (it just wouldnt work) but something relatively so.
See, I think that 43t is probably quite a ‘trusted’ source. It has lots of links ‘in’ from a multitude of blogs and web servers spread across the planet, so isn’t exactly seen as some big island of spam. Its full of unique content and is visited daily by 10,000’s of users.

So without further ado provided I get enough people to play, I propose to create a page about um…social networking and see if and how long it takes to break into the top 50 in Google. If you want to help, then cool. I’ll be creating a page soon that will talk about, yup, you got it, ‘social networking’. All you have to do is link to it from either your own 43t pages, maybe write a post about what Im doing, spread the word kinda thing, or better still link to it from your own blogs/websites.

If you are interested in playing, please indicate here :D

Watch this space for further instructions…