Clifinar avatar on Lively

I made a clifinar avatar. I don't really know how much avatars influence seo, but I would really like to test it. So, Google have this new feature called Lively, a social 3 dimensional world. Members can talk with other avatars they see on rooms they visit, or visitors to the room they have created. I created an avatar and opened a room in this virtual world. The room is called clifinar. I called my avatar clifinars, because for some reason, the name clifinar was taken. I have no idea who took it before me, but lucky him!
You can see the room on this post, and you are very welcome to visit it.
There are some really cool and funny features on Lively. You can, for instance, add furniture and drag them, change clothes and looks. But, the most intersrting feature is the ability to add a wall mounted screen to your room and show Youtube videos, photos, or just post a link.
I took me time to understand how I can make my avatar walk and how to add furniture and links, but after a few minutes I got the idea. There are already user guides for Lively. Some include screen shots and are very helpful.
The big challenge for everyone who wants to use this tool as a marketing tool, is to make people visit your room and not other rooms. I don't know yet how can I invite avatars to my clifinar room, but I have the whole weekend to test it.

Clifinar favicon

Today I learned how to add a favicon to my clifinar blog on blogger. Favicons are the little icons that appear next to the web addresses, like the one you see above. When you visit some sites or bookmark them, these icons will make these URLs much more noticeable. These are “Favicons”, a shortcut for “Favorite Icons”.This is quite fun and easy actually, and I think it looks great. I started with designing a template. I used Adobe flash to create a logo that I think brings the clifinar spirit. The logo is a Big colourful "C" (guess why!) on a yellow background. I wanted something shiny and happy, so this is why I picked these colours. I then saved it as a GIF file. When adding a favicon, you must save it in an icon format: .ico.

There's a really nice website that does ir for you - favicon from pics. You get your image in an icon format and then you can use it for any purpose. But, this is not everything. blogger will not let you upload the file from your hard drive or Blogger root directory. So, here comes the tricky part. The file needs to be hosted somewhere on the web. I used Google Page Creator for hosting my image, and found it quite easy to use. The file was stored under a directory that looks like this web address: http://yoursite.googlepages.com/youricon.ico. Your “yoursite” is your Googlw account name, and “youricon” is the file name for the icon. I Copied this URL and added a bit of a code to the clifinar blogger's HTML.

Under the title tag that containes:

data:blog.pageTitle/

I added a link refernce:

of your the icon file' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/vnd.microsoft.icon'

and that was it.

I refreshed the page, and saw the new cool clifinar favicon. I am really satisified with how it looks.

Here it is on a big scale:

You can tell me your opinion becuase I'd love to hear some comments.

New Clifinar optimization tips

Some new Optimization methods:
Use bold tagging: Use the tags around some of your keywords on each page. Don't use them everywhere the keyword shows. Once or twice is enough. Example - Clifinar.
Deep linking: Verify you got links coming in to as many pages in your site as possible. This tells a search engine that your content is important. It is recommended to link to only to the homepage, but also to internal pages of the website. You can see this in the clifinar post.
Multiple domains: If you have several issues that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. That is because search engines generally record only one page per domain for any given search, and you probably be happy to have more than one page indexed. Also, directories usually accept solelyhome pages, so you can get more directory listings by having a few more domains. You can see an example for this in clifinar on word press and hubpages.
Have several pages of articles connected to your site's topic. Choose a different search term for each article you upload. You can see my article on ArticlesBase and also on Articleset.

Clifinar link tips

Clifinar Linking Methods

Here are some ideas of how to promote keywords like I did with "clifinar":
1. Anchor text of interlinking website pages should include relevant keywords and not “click here”.
2. Make sure all links to all pages on the site work, and you don't get errors when clicking on them.
3. Create a tree-like/organization chart linking structure with the smallest number of clicks to reach any particular page.
4. Internal site linking - use appropriate links between your site's pages. Add links between sub categories.
5. Linking out to external sites - only link out to relevant, information rich content sites. It is not recommended to link to sites that do not add value to the user experience.
6. Write and publish articles using keywords in titles to industry publications.
7. Engage in blogger PR and online media relations with relevant industry online web sites .
8. Submit your site to major directories and use social networks and micro-blogging like Twitter to promote your keyword. In my case - clifinar.

Good luck!

Clifinar SEO strategies

Making your web site or blog attractive to major search engines is a key factor for asuccess as a web site developer or owner:

Top-left-down keyword optimization strategy
You only need to take a few steps for a successful keyword strategy campaign:
Keyword selection: Decide what your pages offer. Then determine which words your potential readers would use to search for your page, and create content based on those words. I chose clifinar as the main keyword for my blog.
Keyword optimization: Apply these keywords to the appropriate pages (around 5% of the selected keywords per page is the recommended amount) and insert from the top left, and then down. Be sure to use these keywords on your page structure: title tag, headings, description, and more.
Essentially the closer to the top left your keywords are placed, the more weight search engines like Google gives to them. Users will initially view your site the same way the search engines spider do, so emphasizing keywords (like clifinar) from the top-left-down is a great web site practice. In order to implement this keyword strategy, put your keywords near the top of your page.

Search engines give strength to title tags, and they love headlines – especially H1 and H2. So take the key phrases that you’d prefer to be ranked for, and create paragraphs and titles that contain your keywords.

Pushed to the second search result

My clifinar blog lost its position to a hub page. I still didn't give up and making some efforts to return to my favorite spot.
After talking to another competitor I started to understand that this competition is not pure seo. It invloves things that are related to personal connections with website owners in order to get valuable links. I am playing this game in exactly the same way, but this leaves no space to other clifinar players who have lots of motivation, but no friends with websites owners who can link to their site. At this stage it seems that other web marketing actions have less power than links. You can see that the first two results in this game have many sites pointing to them.
In a real seo case, this would not be the case. Getting important links to your site usually don't have much with personal connection. Link exchange programs work on different rules, and also quality content is much more significant.
As I alreasy wrote, I play the game exactly like others do, but I am not sure this is the way seo in a real competitive environment work.

Clifinar 2 days on top in a row

It has been two interesting days in which I tried to maintain my position and obviously succeeded. I have done a few small activities and got a nice link from a blogger friend.
You can also see my cool clifinar press release that came out yesterday and was already indexed. Those PR's have significant power. It is important to know which one to choose, and I recommend talking to a professional before doing this.
The search results are now a bit different from a week ago. Some pages like squidoo and propeller were pushed to the bottom results and some even to the second and third pages. A week ago they were on top positions. Amazing!
Right now I have 225 links to my site according to Yahoo's site explorer. I am trying to find more links to clifinar, but it's not getting an easier. I hope this week will continue like it started. More updates - soon.