Archive for social media sites
You would be amazed at the amount of social networking and community software tools that are on the market today. The immense popularity of MySpace, Facebook and YouTube has encouraged many people to create their own online community. Community sites are expansive in topics, ranging from sites such as dating and video sharing to pets and video games. Below are just a few of the many options that exist for online communities:
Social networking sites
Social media sites
News publishing sites
Dating sites
Blog sites
Video sharing sites
Photo sharing sites
What Type of Hosting Do You Need?
Web hosting plays a huge role in the creation of these types of community sites. Such a website requires an added dose of power in comparison to the typical website. However, what it requires the most is a scalable environment that supports the growth of the community. As your site increases in popularity, it will attract more users, which means it will be populated with more pictures, videos and possibly other interactive features. This tremendous growth means that the average shared hosting package may not suitable for the needs of your community. You have to consider critical resources such as disk space, bandwidth, RAM and CPU, all of which impact the overall performance of your website. While you might be able to pull this off on a shared hosting platform from a technical aspect, your community could be the one to suffer from slow loading pages and sluggish performance.
A dedicated server makes for one of the most reliable ways to host an online community. This type of hosting will give you the scalability you need and dramatically reduce the occurrence of performance issues you would endure on a shared server. The problem is that maintaining a dedicated server can be very complex and expensive. Leasing the server can run you upwards of $100 per month – and this is just for an unmanaged service. If you choose to run your community on a dedicated server, keep in mind that you will be responsible for updating the operating system and web server software in addition to managing all the applications and security mechanisms it requires. This is something many people simply are not equipped to deal with. For this reason, you should strongly consider looking into a service provider that specializes in community hosting as they are more likely to have the unqiue environment you require.
Conclusion
A community site can be very beneficial, but only when choosing the right web hosting solution. Before heading out to look for a service, take both the present and future growth into account when factoring in your requirements. Think about the features you need, the type of content and media you plan to host, and the volume of traffic you anticipate. If you truly want your community site to be a success, don’t hesitate to ask prospective web hosts questions and find out exactly how they can suit your needs. This will make it much easier to find the ideal solution for your online community.
Establishing link popularity can be very time consuming, especially when it comes to sending out requests. However, this is a critically important aspect of SEO and something that must be done if you truly want to maximize your potential. While you never want to just sit back and do nothing, asking people to link up with you is not always the best idea. Instead of spending time asking for links, sometimes it pays to think outside the box and use more innovative approaches to reach your goals. Here are a few tips that will make your link building campaign much easier:
1. Get Active - You can learn a lot by playing an active role in the online forums and groups relative to your niche. If you become popular in these communities, people will seek your advice and want to link to you.
2. Article Submission – One of the most effective ways to create quality links is publishing articles on a large variety of websites. This could be information sites, social media sites, ezines or even article directories. Try to focus on sites that service your market, make yourself familiar with the type of content that is published, and modify the style of your articles accordingly.
3. Publish a Newsletter – You can also use a newsletter to build good links to your website. You can encourage readers to link by letting them know if they enjoyed the newsletter, they can link to the permanent version of the content located on your site. Do forget to include the URL.
4. Publish Great Content – This is not necessarily new, however it works just as well as any of them. By publishing great content on your website, people will be more likely to want to link to you. Great content is well written and most importantly, delivers excellent value to your visitors.
5. Award Sites - An innovative way to get yourself some quality links is to submit your website to award sites. You would be delighted at the number of people who have had success with this method.
6. Get in Good with Online Directories - There are several online directories that accept volunteer editors. This will allow you to submit your own personalized reviews of many sites, as well as your own. This also gives you the chance to better understand your market.