Dev Element

  Integrating multiple social tools via lifestreaming is a powerful new way to harness social applications on the web and build your brand.  Take a look at an easier way to manage and gain exposure for your self or organization.

LifeStreaming your Social Content from develement on Vimeo

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Webmasters these days use a number of techniques to enhance the aesthetics and SEO of their clients sites. They realize that their clients main goal is to have a site that is appealing both to the public and the major search engines. Pleasing both types of visitors will determine the success of a website or blog. One of the tactics commonly employed by web designers to optimize a site is hidden text.

Hidden text is defined as text that is formatted to be unseen by human visitors to a site, but is able to be seen by search engine robots and spiders within the HTML of a site. Back in the 1990s, the use of hidden text was exploited by a number of webmasters. They were using hidden text to increase the keyword density of their sites and boost their positioning in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages). This caused the major search engines to revise their guidelines and view hidden text, in the majority of its forms, as spamming. As you may already know, spamming is the premier reason why sites are removed from the SERPs. However, the limited and legitimate use of hidden text is not considered spam and can actually add SEO value to your site.

Here are two examples of techniques NOT to use to create hidden text:

1. Placing white text on a white background

2. Setting the font size to 0, or a negative number

Here are two examples of ACCEPTABLE techniques to use to create hidden text:

1. Using CSS to place the text off of the screen

2. Specifying an attribute of display:none

***The above techniques are referenced from SEOmoz-read the full article by clicking here

A great example of the appropriate use of hidden text can be found on Dev Element blogs. To maintain the aesthetics of our sites, we hide one line of code, the H2 tag. This tag contains the main keywords of our sites and does help to improve each blogs SEO value. In certain cases a blog owner may be contacted by Google in regards to their H2 tag. Though it may be easy to believe that the problem lies with the text being hidden, in actuality the contents of the H2 tag can be causing the trouble. This happens when a blog that has a high number of keywords in that tag and are irrelevant to the content of the site. While one option may be to remove the H2 tag completely, all a site owner would really needed to do was to reduce the number of keywords in the tag and make sure the keywords used were completely relevant to the site.

It is also important to know that the H2 tag is the ONLY text that is hidden on our sites, keeping our sites well within the guidelines of acceptable use of hidden text. So, to answer the question of to hide or not to hide? Only on a very limited basis and never for the deception of the search engines-that is the answer.

More resources on the use of hidden text:

Google, SEO and using CSS to hide text

Google Okays Hidden Text

Social networks are online communities of individuals who are looking to connect with others for personal and/or business purposes. MySpace and Facebook are two examples of very well known social networks and they serve as a meeting place for millions of people worldwide. Generally, a social network brings people together based on a shared interest or activity. Because of this fact, a social network can be a powerful tool for a business if it is based on your particular product, service, or area of expertise. People will join your social network because they already have an interest in the topic of your site and in turn, they will become a new audience for the marketing of your business.

A social network is a form of stealth marketing. If you create a social networking site that provides useful, relevant information, users will join the site for the purpose of obtaining access to your content and to connect with other members. Because your site will be focused on your product, service, or area of expertise, these users will be your new leads and potential clients without them even realizing it. There are a number of ways that you can utilize the information that you collect about members of your social network. First and foremost, you can market directly to them regarding your business. Secondly, you can sell the leads you acquire to other related businesses. For example, say you are in the business of providing durable medical equipment (DME) to the medically needy. You have a social network with a focus on information about DME. Users have joined for the resources you provide on your site. You market to them about your service but you can also sell those leads to other related businesses like doctors, nursing homes, and home health care agencies. Lastly, as your site gains members, you then become a valuable site for the advertising of numerous products and services through entities like Google AdSense, since your site is now seen and accessed by a volume of people on a daily basis.

Because of the structure of a social network, you can cast an extremely large net for leads and the possibilities are endless for growth and opportunity. Any business can benefit from having a social network as part of their marketing strategy. Facebook alone has a reported 132 million members and is reportedly worth $10 Billion dollars...dont you want to have a piece of that action? With a Dev Element Social Network for your business, it can be more than a dream-it can be a real possibility.

At Dev Element we focus on providing you the Training, Strategies and Solutions to power your online business. Whether you are looking for a quick and functional blog solution or a complete social network tailored to your business needs, our innovative products provide every industry with the tools to create their web presence.

With more than 10 core modules and over 100 fully integrated features, a Dev Element blog can power sites ranging from a personal blog to a large corporate site. We offer automatic site analytics to monitor your traffic and see your results in real time. Our architecture is made up of sections that can be edited and customized. Widgets can be added to multiple sections of your site to bring in dozens of different features and tools to enhance your Real Estate Blog Site. Our widgets make it easy to display your content where you like.

Our Blog Platform:

The Dev Element blog software is a proprietary system that combines ease of use with powerful marketing features. Our blogs run on the most stable, versatile and feature rich platform available. (Our platform is written in PHP5, the only open source scripting language to pass LEVEL2 security tests - WordPress is written in PHP4). Custom form building features allow you to create custom lead capture forms that will automatically email you new leads and house them in your private backend database. Automatically SEOs all content to 100% search engine relevancy by selecting all keywords for you while allowing you to inject additional information in category and custom pages and reconfigure your settings to the recommendation of SEO experts like Michael Gray, Rand Fishkin, Aaron Wall and Stephan Spencer. Full backend, integrated, server side statistics allow you to accurately measure your traffic and search patterns from a single point of entry.

Our Social Networks:

The Dev Element social network allows you to create a community where users can make connections, share ideas and see your brand. We are the only company that can deliver an industry specific social network. By creating a virtual umbrella of content and lead generating blogs, you are able to capture significant market share in your industry. Blog content is easily aggregated from users through the home page of the network from contributors that you decide to feature.

The impact that owning a social network can have on your business is nothing short of huge.

The website as we know it is dead. Blogs have quickly replaced traditional static websites as a content rich, trustworthy and interactive means of communicating to every different demographic on the web.

By keeping a blog interactive, you create a dialogue between yourself and visitors. This allows others to link back to your site and comment on your articles, creating an organic buzz that search engines take notice of.

A trustworthy blog is more likely to be linked to by other webmasters, users, directories and search engines if they include things like a privacy policy or physical address. These signs of quality show that you are a real entity and are less likely to spam or mislead those looking at your site for relevant information. Other items looked for in a trustworthy site are availability, credibility, authorship, external links and legality.

A good blog has a clean layout, content that is unique, insightful and regularly updated and most importantly worth subscribing to. Subscribers are most likely to comment on your content and provide links back to your blog. If you create and maintain a blog that you would subscribe to or visit multiple times a week, you have already taken an edge on your competition. This also helps one of the most basic strategies of SEO by being able to think like a visitor, and what you would search for to lead you to your own site.

Your business is your passion, share it with the world with a blog from Dev Element.