Black Freebies

Black Freebies is a new yahoo group, created to keep African American Web viewers in the know about free stuff online. Free downloads, games, software, information, contests, give aways, etc. The best part about this site is that most of the content IS Black Stuff, made by Black Folks, made for Black Folks, or useful to Black Folks. Feel free to join and share.

Black Freebies: http://blackfreebies.msoyonline.com

Problogger.net

Great site!

Black Clipart

Multiple Shades of You Online just added new and improved listings of African American Clipart. Find more websites than you thought existed that feature African American Clipart, African American Stock Photography, African American Sticky Content, and African American Graphics Tools.

Here is a preview of the MSOY Black Graphics list:

1. Original Black Clipart Images on msoy
2. Black Dollz Clipart on msoy
3. iStock.com: African American Clipart
4. Yahoo! Avatars: Create Your Own Black Clipart
5. Search Google: "Black Clipart"
6. Free African American Clipart
7. iStock.com: African American Stock Photos
8. Icons of Color: Ethnic Icons
9. Black Superhero Icons
10. African American Comic Strips Online
11. Black Clipart Links
    

For these and other Black Clipart links click: African American Clipart Links

One Search Engine Savvy Sista

Dedicating more of my time to researching Search Engine Optimization is enlightening and nerve wrecking because I’m figuring out to make my website ranking better, I’m understanding how I made my website ranking worse! First off, for those of you who love the design aspect of web development, don’t get blinded by the fun stuff! The growth of my website thus far has been completely backwards. I started off on the design, forced myself to enhance the content, and now finally I’m taking the time to evaluate the structure. Had I started my site the other way around my hit crowds would be infinitely greater than they are today. Before you get bit by the design bug, clearly develop your site’s foundation which should include – clear navigational links from your home page, content specific title tags on every page, and keyword dense content.

If your web development process has been as backwards as mine, here are a few tips to move up in the ranks.

1. Find out if you are indexed on Google and yahoo by doing a search for your site. If you are listed, be sure to click the link that says something like “More from this Site”, so you have see how many of your pages are indexed in each search engine.
2. Find out what your page rank is. Before you can improve your status, you need to know what it is.
3. Create a Google sitemaps account, create a sitemap, and submit it to Google. Sitemaps help Google find pages on your site that it might have missed, or can not access from your home page.
4. Your home page is the key to any WebCrawler’s door. It should content a good direct links to the additional pages on your site that you want search engines to see. If your homepage includes these links, you will have a better chance of these pages getting crawled by search engines.
5. I personal have read and can state from experience that a blog helps improve your visibility. Create a blog, blogger.com being a good service to use, and include direct links to pages on your site. Then submit your blog’s RSS Feed to Yahoo (http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request). Once Yahoo starts to crawl your feed it will find links to your site and also crawl those pages!
6. If there are any terms here than you can not understand, do a Google search and find out more information. The more you research SEO the better your chancing of increasing the number of pages you can get indexed.

Here are a few articles to look into:

Top Ten Search Engine Ranging Factors (posted on Search Engine Smarts)
1. Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Links
3. Keyword Use in Document Text
4. Accessibility of Document
5. Links to Document from Site-Internal Pages
6. Primary Subject Matter of Site
7. External Links to Linking Pages
8. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
9. Global Link Popularity of Site
10. Keyword Spamming (not doing it)


Also read: 21 Top Reasons Why Your Webpage May Not Be Indexed by Search Engines

Web Things I learned Today

1. Rather than use an online Google Site map Generator, it's better to download a Generator tool and edit your sitemap locally. Having taken the time to review my first sitemap.xml file, I now see that half the pages I was giving google to crawl were not the pages I wanted listed in the Search Engine!
2. I'm getting into taking my meta-tags seriously, and now make sure that every new html page I create has a descriptive, keyword dense title, which is great. Only one thing I forgot to do.... update my old pages! I'm sitting here thinking that some google conspiracy is over looking my webpages and all the while all my webpages have the same generic title "msoy online://web projects for people of color." I'm smacking myself as I go through webpages thinking, why didn't I include a more specific description of the content in the title! Oh how slowly we learn.
3. It's going to take alot more that hope to get people to visit my search engine. Equally important to making my site accesible to African American online viewers, is making my site crawlable for google, yahoo, and all search engines galore. It's slowly starting to sink in that I have to take the time to analyze my stats, formulate relevant keywords, and master Search Engine Optimization - a term I didn't even know existed till a few months ago.
4. Reading really IS fundamental. Had I took the time to better understand web development five years ago, my online visibility would be infinitely better than it is today. Creating a great site is more than just designing a great site. One must understand what it takes to be at the top of search engines. There is no sense is laboring over a site than your ideal audience will never find.

Bigs Tings for Two Thousand Six

I'm a young old G in this web game. After five years of playing around on msoy I've decided to take this B-otch straight to the digital top, so I'm doing my research and making some changes. 2005 ended with the development of several new msoy original blogs, one of my favorites being sistaweb, one of many new places for me to edu-tain (educate and entertain that is) I hope some one out there is keeping an eye out on msoy and taking notice of my progress. The New Face of msoy is just a small part of all that I have in store for this year. If you haven't already done so sign up to the new MSOY Web Community (e-Blocks), which is going to be like myspace.com meets yahoo.com for black people.