Your Online Reputation Matters - Watch Your Social Site Friends

There is a lot of frenzy going on right now with people clamoring to increase their exposure online through the use of social sites. It has become an important part of Search engine optimization. Not only are people of all ages signing up for social sites such as MySpace, Linked-In and Facebook, many existing companies are putting up pages at these sites. Bands promote their work and some people have even started businesses on their pages.

Most adults realize there can be consequences to their actions, but there are young people who do not. They tend to look at the social sites as a private area where they can rant about friends, teachers, or bosses. They can post suggestive pictures of themselves or brag about drug and alcohol use. This does have consequences. We are hearing more and more about people who are denied college entrance, passed over for jobs, expelled from schools, kicked off of athletic teams and even arrested as a result of something they put on their MySpace or FaceBook page.
There was a joke going around that said possible credit card or mortgage lenders will check a MySpace page before they check credit ratings. It was a joke, with more truth than the public realizes. Potential employers are looking at the social sites before hiring individuals. Colleges are looking at the social sites to see what kind of character a person has. Law enforcement agencies are watching for serious law breakers. MySpace is not a private world or a private space.

I went to my own MySpace page, which is pretty innocent on its own. I have several bands on there because I like them and I support their efforts, and I have several friends. I am fairly selective and a person doesn't get to be my friend unless I actually know them. I do not have a long friend list. Recently I took a moment to check out the friends of my friends. I did get some shocking surprises. It was time to take a moment to decide what a potential employer may think of my choice of "friends." People can still be judged by the company they keep.

Of course, a lot of the bands have thousands of friends, so those aren't really the concern at the moment. My worry is some of the friends of my friends. I have to admit that some of what I found left a bad taste in my mouth. Friends of friends were strippers, beer stands, bongs, some of whom used racism, discussions of hard-core drug use, and some very objectionable language.
Time will come, and it won't be very long, when a social site will be as important as your reputation outside of the Internet.

Perhaps the time has come to take a look at your social sites and decide if some of the people who are your friends should remain on your page, particularly if you are looking for employment or trying to get into a school. You never know who will check out your page and for what purpose.

Karen Vertigan Pope writes for Ciniva Systems, an award winning Virginia web design company. Ciniva specializes in web design and SEO. Ms. Vertigan Pope is the President of the SEO Department of Ciniva Systems.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Karen_Vertigan_Pope

The Importance of Sitemap in Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization-A lot of people are clamoring to know exactly what it is. SEO is the process of enhancing the presence and visibility of a website on search engine listings. Not only is it a process, it is about the tool required to make the enhancement happen. There are two main types of search engine optimization:

*On-page Optimization

*Off-Page Optimization

When SEO was in its infancy, getting back links to a site was the most important factor. In fact, many books and articles written on the subject will still tell people that getting back links is the only proper way to optimize a website. Back links with proper anchor text, of course.

As search engine optimization has a chance to mature, SEO specialists are becoming aware that using only back links is not at all the best way to optimize a site. In fact, if an SEO is only creating back links, the site is not getting optimized.

In On-page site optimization, there are techniques and tools that are related to your own website and in Off-page optimization, there are items which are related to the other websites. In On-page the old technique was Meta Tag Optimization, appropriate content, Alt tag optimization, proper navigation for the website and much more activities through which changes were made to the website, itself. In Off-page optimization, only back links were created.

Today, optimization is a little bit different. While using the old techniques are still appropriate, creating a Sitemap can be added to the list. Sitemap is something that came in existence a few years ago.

A Sitemap is a graphical representation of the architecture of a website. There are two kinds of site maps. The first is used to assist visitors to a site to navigate the site and the second is done in XML. XML Sitemaps--usually called Sitemap with a capital 'S'--are used by Goggle to gather information about the site.

Sitemap is especially important if your site:

* Has dynamic content

* Has pages with a lot of flash or AJAX

* Is new and does not have many links

* Has a lot of archived pages that are not linked well, or not at all

The use of Sitemap becomes doubly important if the site has pages that can only be accessed through user entry. Sitemap will assist web crawlers in finding and accessing the pages.

Google has a very nice Sitemap tool that will assist in the creation of Sitemap for a website.

Karen Vertigan Pope writes for Ciniva Systems, an award winning Virginia web design company. Ciniva specializes in web design and SEO. Ms. Vertigan Pope is the Project Support Manager at Ciniva Systems.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Karen_Vertigan_Pope