Iconarchive.com offers a nice collection of social network icons. The license model includes commercial use, which is quite rare.

I have to say i really dislike this script. It’s one of there ready made scripts that you can easily install and get running. But to be honest, how often do you use a script unmodified? If you are used to Drupal, the documentation and community support for Boonex Dolphin is a nightmare. Sometimes you don’t have a choice for picking the right script. It’s more what the customers wants. Actually there is nothing in Boonex Dolphin that can not be done with Drupal.

Anyway, here is my hack:

I found out that there is no way to change the metatags in Boonex Dolphin other than a global setting for additional pages other than profiles. That means all the metatags are the same. That’s an SEO nightmare. I call it a hack cause it’s bad style programming. But it’s quick and easy. So here is what you have to change. There is just one file involved:

/inc/design.inc.php

Basically we are creating a case condition. Depending on the requested URL we will display different metatags. These metatags are hardcoded in that file. As i said it’s just a hack. Ideally there should an admin interface for storing the metatags in der database.

Find these lines and replace them:

case ‘meta_keywords’:     $sRet = process_line_output( getParam(“MetaKeyWords”) ); break;
case ‘meta_description’:  $sRet = process_line_output( getParam(“MetaDescription”) ); break;

What you want to do here is to hook another case condition inside the two cases. For the keywords it would look like this:

case ‘meta_keywords’:
switch( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] ) {
case ‘/page1.php’: $sRet = ‘key1.1, key1.2, key1.3, key1.4, key1.5 ‘; break;
case ‘/page2.php’: $sRet = ‘key2.1, key2.2, key2.3, key2.4, key2.5 ‘; break;
case ‘/page3.php’: $sRet = ‘key3.1, key3.2, key3.3, key3.4, key3.5 ‘; break;
case ‘/’: $sRet = ‘keyword frontpage, keyword frontpage two’; break;
case ‘/index.php’: $sRet = ‘keyword frontpage, keyword frontpage two‘; break;
default: $sRet = process_line_output( getParam(“MetaKeyWords”) ); break;
}
break;

As you can see the conditions for ‘/’ and ‘/index.php’ will result in the same output, thats because it’s they same frontpage. As a default you leave the original values. So when none of your conditions will be true, it will use the default function. That happen when all the profile pages get called. Same thing you want to do for meta_description.

Google started a service for adsense ads in feeds. That’s a really important move, cause most bloggers have more feed reader than website reader. And you always need to make the decision to publish the whole feed to please the reader or just an excerps to lead the people to your blog and maybe get some ad clicks from them. Now you can publish your whole feed and integrate your ads. Conversion should be quite nice, specially at the beginning and as long as it will not be used too much. The feedreader is still almost adfree with plays to your advantage.

Bad news is that you can not automatically connect your adsense and feedburner account. you need to send an email to adsense, so it might take a while to activate it. better be quick.

The meta description of your websites is very important for the click through rate to your site. Ranking alone is not enough to make people choose you instead of the other nine frontpage ranked websites. You need to write an excellent copy to attract clicks.

But that short copy snipped should not be too good at the same time. Don’t tell your visitor all the information they looking for. They might not need to come to your site at all. I think this is an aspect often overseen.

Here are two examples, a good and a bad one.

The Good: There are many great translation websites with a very huge database of word pairs. Sometimes there’s only one meaning of the word you need to be translated. It would easily fit into the snipped. Instead of doing this, your could better advertise yourseld and some extras like a free translation software.

The Bad: To stay with the same example, here is a very bad snippet design. So “elevator” means “Fahrstuhl”, “Lift” or “Aufzug” in German? Okay, thanks, bye. Why should i click on the link to find the same information, together with probably lots of ads? They are ranking number one for my sample search, but the CTR must be horrible.

Here is another example of bad idea snippet design. Lets pretend your are looking for some funny flash games. An effective way to look for ‘free’ software is to use “keyword rapidshare” in Google Blogsearch. All you wanna find here are rapidshare links to download the game. Lets say we are loking for “Apple Pie rapidshare“, so we will see these Blogsearch SERPs. At least for e the second result is very neat. I found the Link already inside the snippet. That safes me time to find it on the page.

Of course this is a Blogspot blog, and as far as i know you can not define the description metatag. Maybe most people would not copy the url out of the text and paste it in the adress bar. But i think you can see my point in this example.

So make your site description very atractive to the visitor. You have to see it ike a small advertisement. Tell them than they find something special or free stuff on your site. But don’t give away they key information they are looking for. They will have no reason to come to your site anymore.

Bait your visitors, but keep them hungry.

People love to get stuff for free. That has always been like that and will probably be a fact for the future as well. Give people stuff for free and they will return link to your site. So if you feel like you know a lot of stuff to a single topic, why not write an ebook and publish it for free? Instead of writing a blogpost every day. take a break for a week or two and write an ebook. With the same content more structured and in more detail, you can gain links and reputation. The reason why people link to you is the same psychology as people return a favor, or you get invited back from someone you previously asked to come to your own party. It’s rooted deep inside our behavior as social individuals. Putting content in an ebook instead of blogpost makes them appear more physical that ust content on a website, although technically it makes no difference if a text is delivered as html in a browser, or pdf as an downloadable ebook.

if you are really clever you manage to put affiliate links into that book, and earn money with your free ebook. Ebooks will spread very quick. If you manage to insert affiliate links in that book you  can consider to sell them really cheap on ebay. But that will not gain links for you.

Other freebies can be free screensafers, photoshop brushes, iconsets or whatever your website audience might like most.

I read about this psychological technique in the amazing book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Get it if you wanna know more about this and many more tricks.

Sometimes ideas to make a successful website are just the combination of other already proven concepts. Youporn did it by melting Youtube and x-rated porn into one service. The traffic to this site is so enormous, that it currently ranks number 28 on alexas top list for websites in the us.

Now a german service did the same with the sexification of the ebay idea. The website provides a platform where users offer their sexual services for hard cash in an auction sell.

One ad reads like this:

Alone at home at always broke! Hi, as a university student the money is always short, but the free time is big So i said to myself … hey, why not try something new and combine business with pleasure! That said, done, so here i am! Celine, 22 years, slim and a beautiful beginner that like to try new things

Some of the offers are obvious professional hookers, some might really be part time prostitutes. Is that the longtail of prostitution?

Screenshot

Visit gesext.de (NSFW from here on)

WordPress 2.6 got a new amazing feature. A small bookmarklet lets you start a popup window that fills out title and sets a link to the page you wanna blog about.

My guess is that many bloggers will use this feature on a regular basis cause it really safes time in the workflow. This is the first time that a huge amount of bloggers gets the link preformated. WordPress takes your title as an anchor text, so now it’s more important than before to put your most important keywords in the title first.

So this is not really a tweak to improve wordpress 2.6 itself, but to be prepared for the new 2.6 features.

Sometimes even an easy or medium keyword is hard to rank for if you want to promote a new site. The page just doesn’t have the trust needed to get recognized by Google. If you think a little bit outside the box you can find a way to rank for easy to medium keyword combination i a very short time frame. Use other peoples website to get where you want to be.

One way to do it is to find a strong forum in your niche. Lets say you offer coaching for avid express video editors. Why not go and look for a forum where video professionals talk about software and technology. Most forums have job sections where you can post your service offer. Don’t rely on private mails only, as visitors have no access to that communication unless they register. So post your website, email address and maybe a phone number plus whatever contact you want people to use. Now you have your personal mirosite on a trusted domain. Usually these microsites rank very well just seconds after you post them if you are lucky and find a very trusted forum. They tend to loose ranking with the time, so find relevant sources to send links to these posting can help to keep the ranked. Of course you might get very valuable leads from users of that forum as well. Besides Forums there are many other websited that enable the creation of microsites, such as portals with job section or business directories. Best to do a quick search for your keys or similar expressions and see if there are potential websites that already have google trust. Of course the long term strategy should always be to get your own site on a top spot.