Link Building And Search Engine Optimization - Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking could be the next big thing in web site marketing since the development of the personal blogs.

Social Bookmarking web sites like http://Del.icio.us, Digg, Stumble Upon and Furl allow their users to create a set of web site content bookmarks. Submitted book marks are organized by content tags, which are arbitrary phrases or words a user can assign to the content they wish to bookmark. This gives the user a way to classify, rank and organize web site content using tags.


The most popular Social Bookmarking web site is Digg. Digg is a relatively new social bookmarking web site and has in it's short time attracted millions of members who daily add bookmarks to all sorts of web site content. Over search engines and other bots, social bookmarking web sites have an intrinsic advantage. Users will choose what content they will bookmark, unlike relying on a program to categorize and qualify content. There is an implied quality in something that someone has taken the time to select.


Users of a social bookmarking web site will read other posters bookmarks and then add them to their own bookmarks if they liked them.. You can even view RSS feeds to see what others are tagging, which is a very cool feature and is a textbook example of a very powerful viral marketing technique.


My own experience and testing shows that 3.2% of all my web site traffic come from social bookmarking web sites, off those 50% come from http://Digg.com, 20% from http://Del.icio.us and the remaining 30% come from various bookmarking sites I am a member of. These sites include Furl and Stumble Upon.


As a search engine optimizer, social bookmarking is another tool I use to promote my web sites. An example would be, introducing a new developed web site. I could wait until Google, Yahoo and MSN found my web site naturally, but that would takes weeks if not months. I could join a link exchange network and exchange links with other web site and have the search engines find me that way. But, then again I would be relying on the indexabilty of the linking web site for the search engine to find me. Or I could add a couple of bookmarks on 3 of the most popular social bookmarking web sites. These large bookmarking web sites are indexed many times a day and the search bots are only looking for new content. Have a bookmark on a social bookmarking web site and could expect to be crawled by the big 3 within hours or at the most, within days.


To successful bookmarker, you need to supply good quality original content. Content that is going to be searched for and will solve a problem the searcher has. There is no point bookmarking content that no one wants. Spamming has become a major problem, but social bookmarking is controlled by it's users. If the content you plan to bookmark is plain spam, the users of the bookmarking web site will just ignore it and move on. Your content will wither away and eventually be dropped out of the social bookmarking web site index.


If you social bookmark properly and supply good quality content, you can expect to gain dozens of quality back links as other bookmarkers, bookmark your content. This technique is a popular tool for successful search engine optimization and the best feature of social bookmarking is that it is free to use. I have not come across any social bookmarking web site that charges the user to use their facility.


Social bookmarking web sites are growing in popularity everyday. Find the ones that best fit the theme of your web site and bookmark with them. But remember, you will only succeed with bookmarking if you have content that is worth bookmarking.

Author :
Steve Szasz
Webseo+Plus offers visitors tried and tested techniques to gain profitable exposure in the search engines. If you want the latest and greatest information about bookmarking, subscribe to our information packed newsletter by clicking http://www.webseo.com.au

Seven Tips for Submitting Articles Online

Incase you want to build an online public relation, ebooks, ezines or online articles can be a great way to achieve it. By showcasing your expertise in the articles you can easily raise your repute and status. Just imagine getting an author\'s box at the end of the article containing a bio, as well as email and website contact information. Don’t you think that back link can be very useful for the traffic of your own website as readers may click-through on your URL to learn more about you or your company? More links improve your search engine rankings. We are sure that writing online has many benefits and it can actually go on and on.

In case you get tempted to write an online articles here are seven great tips you can easily follow while doing it.

1. Develop a tempting title:

80% of people will take it or leave it just after reading your title of article. Better you develop a tempting title, which really interest them to read more about the content, as your title will decide the fate of your article, even if you’ve written a best article in the world, if the title doesn’t appeal them they are never going to read your article at the first place.

2. Make the article informative and useful, and without hype or jargon:

As they say there is a relation of “trust” between author and reader. Don’t let go this bright chance to establish a relation with those who are actually going to read your article. Don’t throw tantrum thinking most readers are of average sense.

3. Keep it focused on a relatively narrow topic:

This is the key you should keep focused on a relatively narrow subject span. That will give you more opportunity to express your self with the command of an expert. Also your reader will not get lost in a broad subject.

4. Keep the length under 1,250 words:

Count this a standard length for an average article; here you are also not going overboard with longer articles and also not depriving your readers with shorter and less informative one.

5. Proofread to ensure there are no typos, punctuation or grammar errors:

You should be very careful about any kind of mistakes as it can put your readers off. Better check it N number of time before you get the full confidence of having a clean and perfect copy without any grammatical mistakes.

6. Ending it:

You should end your article with an author\'s box of less than six lines, complete with short bio, email address, web URL and telephone number. That will help you in many ways including getting your money or back links.

7. Last but not the least:

You should not forget to develop a list of article archives and ezines that publish features on your area of expertise. The more places you can post your article the better result you will observe in near future as a new writer on the block.

source from Articleword.com

Simple Steps to Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of improving a website in order to acheive higher search engine placement. SEO is not a complicated process, it involves mostly common sense. This article explaines the 4 simple steps that will, if followed correctly greatly improve your search engine rankings and help you gain an inital foothold in the major search engines search results.


1 Compile a keyword list: Target the most frequently used keywords on your page. Begin with around 10 keywords. Also use combinations of keywords for example: If your site sells video games and game systems, a good keyword phrase would be: video games and game systems or video game systems. Optimizing the word video games would be pointless because the competition would be so huge most websites will not be found in the search results, taking into account the age of the domain and the number of backlinks that point to a site, which will also dramatically affect search engine rankings. Most searches made by internet users contain keyword phrases instead of just one keyword.


2 Edit your title, meta description tag and meta keyword tag using the keywords from your newly compiled keyword list. The title should contain no more than 10 or 12 words, the description meta tag should contain no more than 150 characters. and the keyword meta tag should contain no more than 200 characters. Insert the keywords into the title starting with your three main keywords, keep in mind the number of words used, try to stay under 10 or 12. Next, edit your meta description tag using the same keywords, location of each word is crucial. Try to keep the title and meta description as similar as possible, not completly dublicated but as close as possible. It might sound a little strange but it works. This will greatly improve your search engine rankings. Stop words are also a factor than can affect rankings. Words such as: the, and, is, in, are, etc. are words that should not be used if at all possible. Removal of stop words is a guarantee of higher search engine placement. The location of your keywords in the title and meta tags will also affect your placement. Also insert all keywords into your webpage moderatly.


3 Use 4 to 6 anchor text links for each keyword, depending on the size of the webpage. Referring back to video games as an example, when editing your page use anchor text such as video games, game systems and so on as links as close to the beginning and end of the page as possible. Keep in mind search engines read a page header first, then starting on the top left reading down the left side, after reaching the bottom of the page the content is read from the center of the page to the bottom. Then the right side of the page is read ending with the footer.


4 Keyword placement: It is essential that all of your keywords are at the beginning and the end of your webpage. Keywords need to be placed in the first 50 words of a webpage. Keywords also need to be placed into the last 50 words on the page. Start with the header of your webpage, use keywords there first. Then place keywords on the left side of your page. Try not to repeat keywords, and do not stuff images with keywords. One keyword per image. Whenever possible use anchor text instead of images.To place keywords at the end of the page, use keywords in the footer and on the right side of the page. Remember how search engines read a page, header first, then top left reading down, center text reading down, top right reading down and footer last. If these 4 steps are followed exactly you can guarantee yourself excellent search engine placement even #1 on Google.


There are other factors which can improve your search engine rankings such as backlinks. When it comes to linking, reciprocal or one way links both are excellent ways to increase your link popularity. One way links however seem to be the way to go because there is no linkback required by you. Meaning no link pages to set up. Directory and article submissions are an excellent way to build quality one way links. You do not need thousands of useless links to gain high rankings on the search engines. Only a handfull of high quality, relevant links are needed to give you excellent search engine rankings. http://www.submit-site.org

source from articlebase.com

10 Sins of Blog Usability

Top 10 Sins of Blog Usability

"Sinning" is an archery term, which literally means "to miss the mark." If you're blogging to establish a two-way dialogue with the world, the "mark" is the optimal reader experience. The following is a list of ten things that can hurt your blog's usability.

10. Sending Mixed Messages

The focus of your blog should be decided before your first post and then committed to. Random blog entries about a melee of topics might work for a personal blog read by friends and family, but is not a good approach for a serious, professional blog. The lifeblood of any blog is in its loyal subscriber base. And readers are more willing to subscribe to blogs that talk about their area of interest on a consistent basis.

If your blog's "personality" includes the odd personal entry, create a separate category for "fun stuff," "random" or other "personal," and think about each post's fit with your target audience before you publish. Or start a separate blog on that topic and cross-link your blogs.

9. Making It Hard to Subscribe

Because subscribers are such an important part of blogging success, you need to make it easy for users to sign up. Since not all users understand and use RSS feed aggregators like Feedburner and Bloglines (also called newsreaders), offer both email and RSS options. Make them very conspicuous, preferably placing them at the top of your navigation menu and above the fold.

Don't be afraid to "ask for the subscription" at the end of each post as well. Chicklets are mini-icons that make it easy to add to feed aggregators and social bookmark sites like del.icio.us and Netvouz with one click. You can find more information on adding chicklets to your blog with the Chicklet Creator. If you are using free blog software and hosting, it may not be possible to add these extra functions. So plan ahead when choosing your platform.

8. Inconsistent Posting

Now that you have a loyal fan base who are notified of every new post, don't disappoint them with time lags between posts. Pick a posting schedule that's realistic for your time schedule and stick to it. If you can't think of anything to post about, blog about someone else's post related to your topic and include a link back to that post

Will this hurt your own blog to send subscribers away to another blog? No, because you're still offering them something useful in lieu of you posting something. You can also leave a comment or trackback on the other blog that links back to your post which can send traffic back to you. Bloggers often monitor their trackbacks or incoming links through Technorati, PubSub or other services. They might end up blogging about you in return.

7. No Contact Info

Some blogs can pull off the mystique of an anonymous posting. But if your website is for business, it's hard to have a two way dialogue when you make it impossible to contact you. Transparency is fundamental to building trust on the web. And you don't want users to mistake your reputable blog for a "splog" or spammy blog that scrapes content from other sites.

If you don't want to advertise your email address because of spammers you can still enable comments on your posts. Yes you'll still get spammed, that's the reality of the Web. Wordpress blogs come with Akismet anti-spam which does a good job at catching most spam. You usually have the option to moderate comments before they appear on your blog.

6. Not Moderating Comments

Allowing anyone and everyone to post whatever they want in your comments section is asking for spam. Not only is this annoying to your readers, but it really takes down the professionalism of your blog.

5. Excessive Advertising

It's fine to monetize your blog or use affiliate links, as long as they are not intrusive to users and overshadow useful content. When ads appear all over the page and even in the middle of posts, the user experience suffers. Avoid contextual ads -- programs that highlight words in your posts to make them look like hyperlinks, but popup an ad when they are rolled over with a mouse. Just like having items appear clickable that are not has been a usability issue, so is tricking users into clicking on ads or viewing ads when they appear to be hyperlinks.

And if your blog is very new, it's a good idea to wait until you've built up a history of useful posts before running advertising.

4. Not Linking to Posts

When you're referring to something that can be found on the Web such as a news story, another business, person or other blog post (whether on your own or someone else's blog), allow your reader to check out the background info. Linking back to previous entries also builds page strength for those posts and can help you with search engine rankings. But don't be afraid to link off your site, this generosity can help you get noticed by other bloggers. And it's also nice to give credit where credit is due.

3. Dark Background, Light Text

What's been a general usability rule for years certainly applies to blogs. Anything that makes your blog harder to read should be avoided. Remember, it's harder to read online than offline. The worst culprits for eyestrain are white text on a black background, low contrast combinations like black with red and busy patterned backgrounds. And it's a good idea to avoid blocks of red text, even on a white background.

2. No Search Box

Returning visitors may not remember a post that's not intuitive to find through your navigation menu or tag system. Regular readers might also want to find their own comments, so make that possible by placing a search box somewhere in your layout.

1. Hiding Navigation

Most blog software comes with a variety of lovely templates to skin your site. But not all of these templates are optimal for usability. Templates that require users to scroll right down to the bottom of the blog to find navigation are not the best choice. Stick to conventional left column or right column navigation.

One of social media's best gifts to the World Wide Web is the ability to "tag" posts by subject/content and automatically create navigation categories. Users can easily browse by subject, and hone in on all your posts related to a specific topic or microtopic. This also helps users find you on blog portals like Technorati.

You also have the option of displaying calendars, archives and tag clouds which may or may not be useful and can clutter up your page. Keep in mind that with usability and design, less is often more.

Conclusion

Taking some time to evaluate your blog, wearing the hat of your reader, can greatly improve the user experience. Considering what makes a user-friendly blog before you begin blogging helps you plan for optimal usability right from the start.

About The Author

Linda Bustos is the Marketing Director for Image X Media, a Vancouver web design and Internet marketing firm. She also writes for the Smogger Social Media Blog.

source from sitepronews