Ever been frustrated with sites like Facebook, Myspace and other social networks, but feel that your company or organization could really benefit from being a part of a social network? Does not having control over the ads, branding and other aspects make them not an option, or a bad option?

There is a solution I will already recommend, even before its official launch from beta. I’ve been playing around with a couple installs of Buddypress, along with a couple custom plugins, allowing you to take complete control of your own social network, and offer a place that people can interact with your business offerings. There are other “free” solutions out there already for creating your own social network, but they tend to offer you a freebie version, with limitations, and lock you into buying add-ons. Many have limitations with resources, because the site is actually hosted on their server, instead of on your own. Not to mention, most are not open source, or have anywhere near the following that the WordPress community has.  Buddypress is run entirely on your own server, without any paid add-on limitations, and will change the way people and organizations interact with one another.

Buddypress is completely open-source, and one of the great reasons why WordPress is so great. Projects like Buddypress can arise from nowhere, because of the great extensibility of the WordPress blogging platform.

Buddypress is different than the other software already available, and I feel will be a major player in the social networking realm, as did WordPress for blogging. Buddypress is currently limited to running on WordPress MU, but will soon be released as a set of plugins for the WordPress standalone version. I feel this is an exciting thing, and can only help move WordPress forward as well. Obviously Automattic felt the same way, by taking in Buddypress and Andy Peatling, the lead developer, under its wings.

The versatility and extensibility that WordPress offers, along with a substantial community of great developers helping out, makes Buddypress an option for many organizations, including non-profits, in the need to expand their reach to a larger community-based audience.

I’m sure you will hear much more on this from me in the near future.

One question is always about meta tags. There is still a lot of confusion about them and how they will benefit your website. My answer is usually, “forget about them.” On my list, they are one of the last worries you should be having as a newbie trying to get SE traffic. In most cases, you don’t need them, so don’t waste much time on them. It’s as simple as that.

If you are trying to get more search engine traffic, from my experience, the major factors of SEO in order of importance are:

1. Content – all text, links, headings, bold, italics etc. is most important. Make sure all outgoing links are working and relevant. Use descriptive titles and headings. High quality semantic code that ALL search engines can understand is highly important.
2. Incoming Links from other quality & related websites/pages (good descriptive link text/phrases) to multiple pages, not just your home page. It is very important your incoming links are to multiple pages, not just your home page. Make sure they are unpaid, don’t mess around with link buying and other scams that will just end up getting your site penalized by the search engines.
3. Links with good phrases to other internal pages within your site, and links to other external quality & related websites / pages also. This is number three on the list, but could easily move up to second depending on the type of website. Once again, this deals with your on page content. Link to other pages on your site, and link to other sites, and you will create a better user experience. You will gain trust with your readers and the search engines will award you as well.
4. Title tags (what you see at top of browser when viewing a page, within <title> tags. Use descriptive and appealing titles to insure you get the most people interested in visiting.
5. Meta Description tags that are relatively short and precise, must match on page content. Not all search engines even look at this, so don’t spend too much time worrying about the perfect descriptions.
6. ALT Attributes for image tags. You’d be surprised at how much traffic you can get by simply adding short, descriptive, 3-5 word ALT phrases for all your images.
7. Meta Keywords (relatively few and precise – if you really want to add them, make sure the on page content matches, or you could get penalized. Notice they are last on the list.

There are many things NOT to do also, mainly dealing with trying to trick search engines (including adding false, and too many meta keywords).

If you have limited time for your project, I would recommend working on new content first of all, optimized with the seven most important factors above. Secondly, find lots of incoming text links from quality/related sites. You will not only get new referral traffic, but you will boost your chances of getting a lot of new traffic from search engines.

Do all of these things I’ve listed and I bet you’ll be surprised at the quality new traffic you’ll get. Of course, some of the best traffic is by word of mouth and recommendations from actual people. But, that’s a whole other subject.

On the Southwest Construction Consultant site, a major portion of the functionality is the reservation system. The site needed to be able to have users reserve time slots for home inspections. I was able to find a component called Attend Events that handled this “out of the box”, open-source so I could customize any details necessary, and available for free. There is also a component for Joomla called JEvents that can be used with Attend Events that will show a calendar of all events. In the case of the Southwest Construction website, this was unnecessary, but can be useful for other sites with event organization needs.

Please do not use the Southwest Construction Consultant site for any test purposes, as it is a live site. There are demo pages and support available to you in the Attend Events forum.

The first method is to use the “Optional Excerpt” field when posting and a plugin called DBPostsForCategory. It’s hard to find because the developer’s site (Dhruba.net) has been down for awhile, but you can download it here: DBPostsForCategory.txt. Change .txt to .php.

You can add html to the “Optional Excerpt” field for each post pointing to any image, thumbnail or icon. In this case we’ll point it to a 24×24 icon “myposticon.gif”
The code you’d enter in the optional excerpt would be:

<img src”http://yourdomain.com/pathtoimage/myposticon.gif” />

or you could add a link to your excerpt so the icon links to the post also. You’d use this:

<a href=”http://yourdomain.com/yourpost/”><img src”http://yourdomain.com/pathtoimage/myposticon.gif” /></a>

Next thing to accomplish would be a list of new posts with the images (excerpts) next to them. Upload and activate the DBPostsForCategory plugin and use this code in your template:

<?php DBPostsForCategory :: printAsExcerptItems(1, 5, true) ?>

You can adjust the category using the first number in the array, how many posts shown, and change to false for descending order. So if you wanted to list the latest 10 excerpts from category ID 7 in ascending order you would use:

<?php DBPostsForCategory :: printAsExcerptItems(7, 10, false) ?>

Now, another way to achieve virtually the same thing, but using custom fields you would first need to add a custom field key and a url value pointing to the image. For example:

Key: icon Value: http://www.yourdomain.com/myposticon.gif

Now we have to edit your template with some php to show this custom field. We are going to want to show the post icon linked to the post. So here is the code to achieve this:

<?php $iconfield = get_posts(‘numberposts=10&category=7′); foreach($iconfield as $post) : setup_postdata($post); ?>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><img src=”<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “icon”, true); ?>” alt=”<?php the_title(); ?> icon” /></a>
<?php endforeach; ?>

You could of course show the icons to the left of the post title. You would use this code instead:

<?php $iconfield = get_posts(‘numberposts=10&category=7′); foreach($iconfield as $post) : setup_postdata($post); ?>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><img src=”<?php echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “icon”, true); ?>” alt=”<?php the_title(); ?> icon” /></a> <a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>”><?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php endforeach; ?>

You could of course add any number of custom fields using this method and it can be used in countless ways. All you would need to do to add another custom field is change the ($post->ID, “icon”, true) to read ($post->ID, “CustomFieldKey”, true).

I use custom field in the header to show a list of my latest portfolio items with a custom thumbnail, post title and a snippet of what I contributed to the project. A small bit of CSS styling with either method and you are on your way to making your site a more dynamic and more importantly contributing to the overall look and feel. Let me know if you know another way to achieve this, or if this was useful to you and your site.