Posts Tagged ‘social bookmarking’

How does social bookmarking work for SEO?

Friday, August 20th, 2010

Social bookmarking is a way to save your favourite web pages online on social bookmarking sites. By social bookmarking you can save links that you want to remember and access them from any computer, anywhere in the world and share them with other people. Bookmarks are usually stored with tags or categorized according to content etc. Now social bookmarking has become so widespread that it is looked upon as the ‘alternate search engine’.

Social bookmarking has become essential for search engine optimization of a website because it is fast becoming the preferred vehicle for searching the internet. Search engine spiders are software, used to locate and classify information whereas in social bookmarking all classification is done by humans. As someone comes across an article, blog or a website and bookmarks it, it is stored with similarly tagged web pages. Since the content has been scoured by a fellow human, the segregated information so collected under different tags offers a more concentrated result of relevant content when one types in the search keywords.

Social bookmarking is a great medium for SEO of your website but the trick to doing it correctly is to get others to bookmark your site/blog. Bookmarking your own site is against SEO ethics. What you need to do is to make your webpage really interesting and add a ‘Bookmark me’ button to each page. Once a page or website gets bookmarked, it becomes a strong contender for high page rank, because search engines really trust social bookmarking sites.

Your website becomes very visible once it is socially bookmarked because browsing social bookmarking sites is becoming more and more popular and the chances of your website being found increase manifold. The more your website is visited the more back links it builds, thus compelling the spiders to put the website in the 1st search engine result page.

Each Social Bookmarking site is a hub of different types of activities for e.g. Digg and Propeller are social news sites for current affairs, TechNet is for IT professionals, Del.icio.us, Simpy and Backflip are some other popular bookmarking sites. So for successful SEO of your website by social bookmarking, select the appropriate sites.

To make social bookmarking easier, you can use social bookmarking tools like ‘AddThis’ and ‘ShareThis’. They are integrated into a website by using a web widget. AddThis allows a visitor to your website to bookmark a page through popular sites like Facebook, Myspace and Google bookmarks. Similarly ShareThis lets a visitor share any content including photos, text across sites like Digg and Facebook. These tools can be used on any site to drive traffic and enable your website to go viral. Customized versions are available for leading blog publisher sites including Blogger and WordPress.

Just as manual directory submission is preferred for directory submission, social bookmarking too can be made more effective by manual submissions. Indiscreet submissions can do more harm than good and expose the website to the risk of being banned as spam. Social bookmarking can be a great SEO technique if employed correctly.

Importance of keyword research and analysis for SEO

Thursday, July 8th, 2010

Internet marketing is becoming a powerful medium to advertise online and offline businesses these days. Internet marketing crosses geographical boundaries and gives businesses a global appeal and wider audience. Various search engines help millions of user everyday to find exactly what they are looking for through their search engine sites. As users’ type in the words to be searched (better known as keywords) on the search engine site, the search engine goes through billions of pages in its database and gives various pages a score based on the relevance of the page. The higher the score of a webpage, higher is it ranked while displaying the result. Businesses, on the other hand, use something called as “Search Engine optimization” which relies on keywords to get higher rank for their websites. If the keyword used by a business for search optimization does not match the one used by the search engine, their chances of ruling the virtual world are almost over. So these keywords can turn out to be deal maker or deal breaker in the online market.

So if you are looking at tapping the online market you need to spend some time in doing “Keyword Research” on your own or you can outsource SEO needs to a well reputed affordable SEO service expert. Keyword research is a process that helps to find appropriate keywords which describe your business well and increase the overall ranking for your site. But keyword reach is not the only thing to look out for. Even if you do come out with some great keywords and get a higher rank for your website you may end up a loser. This may be because the area for which you are becoming a high ranker during web search is actually not your area of work, so you actually are not reaching your target customers. Thus, appropriate keyword research and analysis of relevant traffic via Google adwords and other ranking tools can greatly help in reaching out to your target customers. Only when the traffic reaching your site is of potential customers, i.e. people who are actually interested in your product, will you be able to convert them into real customers. An SEO search engine submission agency can be of big help with their professional knowledge and wide experience in locating the right keywords for your website optimization.

As there are so many businesses out there which offer similar services, keyword research becomes all the more critical. With so many businesses operating along the same lines they tend to use the same keyword for their search engine optimization. So even if you use a high ranking affordable SEO service keyword, your chances of actually ranking high might be slim since your competitors will also be using the same word. So proper research needs to be done to see how good are the ranking chances of using a specific keyword among the competitors.

Another thing to keep in mind is which country or region you are targeting. Some keywords which rank higher in some areas may not work well in another area. Also you need to concentrate on the spelling and local usage before deciding on a particular keyword.

Optimizing your website with relevant keywords, directory submission, social bookmarking and press release distribution among other things might just be the catalyst for your online business to take off with a big bang. Thus, whether you choose to outsource SEO to another agency or do it in house is a choice you can make; but to opt for search engine optimization or not is not a choice, it’s a MUST!

How does social bookmarking help in search engine optimization of your website?

Thursday, July 1st, 2010

Let us start by understanding what actually is. Social bookmarking is a way by which you can save your favorite link and later access it from any place which has an internet connection. But how do you actually do it? Well there are a lot of popular social bookmarking sites like Digg, BlinkList, Reddit, Diigo, Propeller, Mixx, Google, Mr. Wong, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, Simpy, Backflip, Delicious, Newsvine, Connotea etc. where you can register and save your link for later access.

Are you wondering how this type of social networking helps you with SEO of your website? There are quite a few advantages of social bookmarking. It is a very good platform to get directly in touch with your potential customers and make an impression on them, that too with very little effort. To do that, you can start by opening your account with some social networking site and then bookmarking one of your website articles in it. To generate quality unique content for your website you can outsource SEO to an affordable SEO service company that can provide keyword rich content relevant to your field of work. Once bookmarked, your article is readily available to all the online audience for free. If it is interesting enough it will be picked up by many readers and the link forwarded to their contacts. Not only that, but interested readers might even link back to your website if they consider your website worth linking to. So you will generate lots of traffic and free backlinks to your site. This is what is called viral marketing and it is a great organic traffic booster that eventually gives you higher rankings in the search engines. Though the direct traffic generated by this method may only last for a short time, but what is important to note here is that you generate long term indirect traffic too. The people who bookmarked your article will be interested in your area of work and if you keep on churning out quality engaging content there are chances that you will get lots of repeat and permanent visits from your readers. Some of them may even be potential buyers and customers, leading to an increase in actual sales and profits via social bookmarking.

Another thing which is very important in social bookmarking is the quality of your content. If your content is of good quality, unique and interesting it will be bookmarked by many which in turn will increase your credibility and popularity. The more popular you become higher will be your listing among various social bookmarking sites. Also your listing will be still higher if different users across various networking sites access it rather than only one user accessing it again and again. Since ranking is based on the quality and popularity of your content, this data is used by search engines as well to evaluate your rankings.

Thus social bookmarking is quite an effective way of generating traffic and backlinks which eventually will help you in getting a better ranking among various search engines.