Archive for the 'Basics' category

Social Bookmarking Nuts and Bolts

Oct 15 2010 Published by under Basics, SEO

On A Reader’s Point of View

What is Social Bookmarking?

Wikipedia defines social bookmarking as a method or Internet users to organize, store, manage and search for bookmarks of resources on line.

To put it simply, you like a website, and you want to go back to it again as well as share it with friends. But instead of bookmarking it on your computer, you save it on the web because it’s easier to share. There are several websites that offer social bookmarking services, and you can simply choose one that is most ideal for you and your friends.

What Can a Web Browser Enjoy From Bookmarking?

Aside from being able to save websites on your account, you can also send it to your friends easier than just emailing them links. Aside from this, you are also free to browse other people’s bookmarks to see what’s interesting for you to tag as well. Most bookmarking sites feature tags that are recently added and popular. They are also organized based on available categories such as sports, beauty, technology, humor and more.

Social bookmarking sites are also considered as intelligent search engines. You can search for a topic you are interested in, and it will provide you with links that have already been bookmarked by other people. This way, you can be sure the results are always valuable.

How Can Readers Benefit From Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarks are more targeted, and would allow readers more valuable content. If you are searching for something very specific, instead of using the search engine and having to dig through websites, you can use the social bookmarking sites and get specific articles on what you need.

Another reason for the popularity of social bookmarking sites is their display of recently added and popular links. This allows you to get current and quality information every time. For example, if you are interested on the best kindle model, and you get 3 results. The third has 300 votes, the 2nd, 400 votes and the first has 500 votes, you know for sure which article to read, and which has more credible information. This is so much easier than going to a search engine, and deciding for yourself which is the credible article when no feedback is available for you to see.

On a Social Marketer’s Point of View

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is a way to increase the visibility and rankings of a website. It is most popular among marketers because this is one of the most effective ways to get back links, and to drive traffic towards their websites that would eventually increase earnings.
Without a doubt, one of the first ways to start promoting websites is through social bookmarking.

First of all, you should look for a social bookmarking site and register as a user. It would be best if you use the more popular sites like del.icio.us, stumbleupon, reddit and more.

The next step should be to get used to the different bookmarking sites. Different sites have different feels. And so, you should make sure that there are other people who would be interested in your website content aside from yourself. Look for a site that works with your niche.

The last step would be to study other bookmarked blogs and sites that rank high. This gives you a clear idea on what the audience likes. This is especially important if you are promoting specific programs or niche specific blogs.

What Should I Avoid Doing in Social Bookmarking Sites?

1.    Do not spam. Nobody likes a spammer, and this includes social bookmarking users. If you wish to promote your website or affiliate market, it is best to do it the more natural way. Instead of bookmarking on a sales page, you should bookmark sales copies that readers will actually want to read.

2.    Do not sell. When bookmarking, avoid Titles such as “product for sale”. The social bookmarking world focuses more on worthy news. Give them that and you’ll find the votes pile up as well. After which, you will find that if you start getting traffic to your site, sales will soon follow.

Social Bookmarking tricks

Aside from quality content, there are some tricks that you can follow in order to get the best results from bookmarking.
Always choose the best timing. Remember that articles or links that would get more than 25 votes within 15 minutes will rank higher than those that will get it within 2 weeks. So it’s best to present your topic with issues that are based on current events.

Do not open several accounts in one site. Even if the idea of votes may be attractive, voting your own article several times will do more damage than good.

Get help. The best way to promote your blog is when friends support you. The more help you have, the faster your pages will rank.
There are also some websites that make bookmarking easier for marketers. Sites like onlywire allow you to bookmark on several bookmarking sites faster and easier. All you have to do is register for the site, save the logins in the profile, and you can start fast bookmarking soon.

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Mini-Nets, Simplifying the Web

Oct 05 2010 Published by under Basics, SEO

What is a Mini-net when it comes to creating backlinks? In order to fully understand what a mini-net is will take some time, but this should give you a good foundation.

It looks cool and complicated. But, it’s actually easier than you think. mini net sample

Here’s the concept, a mini-net is like when one friend tells you about a TV show he’s watching. And the next day, 4 other people tell you about how brilliant the same show is. And you think to yourself, wow, this show must really be good. What you don’t know is that these five people actually live in the same apartment that has only one television set.

This is actually what really happens with mini-nets.

When applied on your website, you are basically building a network of knowledge across multiple websites. For example John has a website on dog training. So, he creates different blogs on the same topic but on more specific niches like online dog training, dog training collars, dog training camps. So these blogs have specific keywords that they focus on.

Once the first level is established and linked together, a second level of chain is created. These also link together and also link to the first level, thus, creating a net.

Some mini-nets aren’t really as organized as the example. Actually a lot of them look really messed up. This happens when the planning stage came after the execution.

So when you see a mini-net that looks too complicated for words and think you can’t make one, chances are, you can make one better.

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SEO Basics: Off-Page Factors Cont.

Jul 05 2010 Published by under Basics

Getting links back to your website is the name of the game.

But, how do we get links to our site without running around posting on every forum we can find and submitting to every single directory?

Yeah, that doesn’t sound much fun.  Granted, we still need to do some of that type of work, but it isn’t the type of linking that’s going to be the highest leverage.

What we really want to do is very simple.

Marketing!

The absolute best way to get links on the internet is to develop good content in the form of articles, blogs, press releases, free software.  By simply creating something that your customers will find interesting.

Once we have this piece of killer content, we then need to go about marketing that content to article directories, news papers, and other blogs.

Since our article will have links back to our website in it, every time we get it picked up by another venue we are not only creating links to our site but also attracting new customers that read our content.

If we do our job properly, and the content is absolutely killer, you’ll also notice that it starts to get picked up by other venues across the internet.

With the development of social bookmarking, it’s entirely possible to have a single article that you have marketed to 15-20 websites generate hundreds of links to your site.

I’m currently in the process of testing several different submission services and directories, I’ll give you a list of my favorites once all my testing is done. :)

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SEO Basics – Off-Page Factors

Jun 19 2010 Published by under Basics

Basically, off-page factors can be boiled down to one main concept.

Backlinks

A backlink is any time a hyperlink from a page not inside your own domain points to one of the pages on your website.

Backlinks are what you’ll find so many SEO companies talking about. “We can get you 1000 links in a day!” Yeah, great… For those of you that have dabbled in SEO or are even reading this blog because you are looking to hire an SEO company, I have some important news.

Don’t fall for the bait!

While backlinking is extremely important, I need to take a moment to reshape what you may already know about getting links or make sure if you are new to links that you get some good information upfront.

Rule 1: All links to your pages are NOT created equal.

Getting 1000 links in a day can be entirely worthless. If you’ve been following along with my posts, you’ll know that getting links from pages that aren’t even indexed by the search engines can be largely useless. Every link pointing to your site does two things. It gives you Authority and/or Reputation.

Authority is when you have a link from a website that has a high amount of PageRank.  Reputation comes in the from what that link says in the anchor text.  Having good link reputation in both your on-page and off-page SEO can have a significant impact on your rankings.

That said, a link passing you no Authority (because the page it is on isn’t indexed) and no Reputation (because it just has www.example.com in the anchor) will be almost entirely useless for your ranking efforts.

Rule 2:  Be natural and be honest with your link building efforts.

Here’s a quote directly from the help documents from Google Webmaster Tools:

“Your site’s ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity. However, some webmasters engage in link exchange schemes and build partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. This is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact your site’s ranking in search results.”

I’m sure you’ve thought; “What if I just make a bunch of websites about my market place and have them all link to me?” or “Isn’t there some automated link trading system I can use to just pass links back and forth with every other website?”

Let’s pause for a moment and think about what the internet is.

…

The internet is basically trillions upon trillions of links.  These links are the backbone of how we move around the internet, how we get from one page to another.  Wouldn’t it stand to reason that “messing” with the whole premise of the internet would be frowned upon?  You bet!

If you engage in excessive link trading, building external pages to just spam links on, or several other “black hat” methods.  You will ultimately be caught and slapped by Google and the other search engines.

It may not happen instantly, but our goal with SEO is to create traffic to our website in the hopes of building an actual business.  I’m not sure about you, but I would want all the hard work I’m going to put into my business to get crushed because I decided to take a less than desirable way to get my traffic.

If you develop good content and have good marketing, you can build links on the internet quickly, effectively, and naturally.  People will link to good, engaging, and relevant content.

These are what I consider to be the two main points to understand before starting any link building campaign for a new website.  These two simple rules can save you hours, days, and even years of time… not to mention the potential millions in lost sales you would experience from having your traffic basically disappear overnight.

Next time we’ll talk about a few other rules that I like to consider before starting my link building process, but that aren’t necessarily rules that would ruin your website if not followed.

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SEO Basics – On-Page Factors

Jun 17 2010 Published by under Basics

On-page factors when talking about SEO is much more than just what words appear on your page.

Let’s discuss.

I’m going to start by going through my basic check-list that I use when looking at a new website.  This is by no-means my complete list, but it’s what I use to gauge things initially.

1. Tracking – Make sure you have some sort of tracking installed on your website.  Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools are a great start.  If you do not have a way to track your progress and results, then you are essentially going to be putting in lots of hard work without any way to know if it’s paying off.  You could spend weeks continuing to optimize a specific page or keyword and never know if what you are doing pays off.

2. Spider-ability – Are your pages causing the search engine spiders any problems?  You can find out easily through the Google Webmaster Tools… install it on your website, enough said.

3. Text Links – Do you have footer links at the end of your pages that point to the main category pages on your site?  These are extremely important in helping the search engines know what you feel is important on your own site.  Why should they think it’s important if you don’t.  You want to use text links to point to the pages you want to rank, and you want those links to use your keywords right in the link itself.

4. Title Tags – Do you have your keywords in the title tag?  Great, does the title make any sense for potential customers? Stuffing a bunch of great keywords into your title tags can really help your rankings, but what if the title just under yours is far more attractive and unique.  You’ll miss out on a lot of clicks by confusing the searchers with hard to read or sloppy titles.

5. Descriptions – Do your descriptions use your keywords and have a clear call to action?  This is your chance to really entice someone to choose your link over the ones around it.  Be unique!  You’ll also want to see if the search engines use your description, or make one up by pulling content from your site.

6. Javascript and Style Sheets – Make sure your javascript and style sheets are in external files.  Having all of that extra code on your page will cause the spiders to treat your content as less relevant because it appears further down the page.

7. H1, H2, and other text styles – By including your keywords in the actual headline tags and other styled text such as bold or italics. This is always a good idea for SEO.  However, be sure that your headlines are compelling.  You don’t want people to hit the back button, so make sure you are engaging your visitors.

8. Broken Links – Search engine spiders hate to run into broken links.  The entire internet is defined by links, it’s the only way to get from one place to another.  By having broken links on your website you are in essence slapping the entire internet in the face… so don’t do it.  Check your links often and be sure to fix broken ones as soon as possible.

That’s my basic checklist for getting started with on-page SEO.  As I said before, this is not an exhaustive list.  However, implementing these basic ideas on your website can often have tremendous effects in markets that aren’t very competitive.  I’ve seen pages that simply do those steps and jump from a page 8 listing to a page 1 listing in a few weeks.

That’s all for now!

Best,

Jeff

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SEO Basics – Getting Up To Speed

May 13 2010 Published by under Basics

As I was writing about the beginning stages of competition analysis yesterday, I started to realize that someone new to search engine optimization (SEO) might need a little bit of a foundation to really understand the steps we’ll be taking as we move forward.  It can be difficult to read a post about keyword research without an understanding of the fundamental factors that go into ranking on the search engines.

Let’s take a moment an go over what I believe are the 5 main factors to a good SEO campaign.  I’ll be brief for now and really focus in on each factor as we get to building our website.

1. On-Page Fact0rs – Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, H1 tags, the content on the page, site structure and internal links.  Basically, you want the keywords you are trying to rank for to appear in all of these areas.  Keyword density, I believe, does not play a major role in your rankings.  The  keywords should appear in your content, but above all, your content needs to be relevant and natural.  Being natural will also improve the user experience and possibly increase sales response.

2. Inbound Links – Links pointing to the site from other web pages.  Inbound links should be text and not images for maximum benefit.  You want your keywords to be linking to your site, not your business name or product name (unless that’s what you want to rank :P ) There are tons of ways to get links for your sites, and you should use most of them.  Again, it’s important to be natural.  Running around and smearing links in comment boxes all over the web will NOT significantly help your rankings.  You have to have a healthy mix in the types of links you are generating to your site.

3. Size/Age – The age of your website does play a roll in how well you rank.  Older sites typically beat newer sites with the same optimization campaign.  The size of the site also plays a big roll.  Since we have control over the links on our own site, we can in essence control what pages the search engines view as the most important.  More pages = more control.

4. Authority/PR – Page rank is a common term for how much “weight” your site has with the search engines.  It’s a number between 0 and 10 that increases by a power of about 8.  Eight PR 1 pages = One PR 2 page.  Page rank is passed evenly between all links on a page.  Therefore, a link from a PR 4 page with 1,000 other links on it may not help us as much as a link from a PR 2 page with 3-4 links.

5. Visitors – Yes, the people visiting your site have an impact on your search engine rankings!  If the search engine sends a user to your site and they instantly hit the back button, then the search engine will assume that your page wasn’t what the person intended to find and therefore shouldn’t be listed for that search result.  The search engines have ONE goal.

A good user experience!

Would you use Google if you couldn’t actually find relevant content when you searched?  No, you’d probably switch and try another search engine.  Keeping searcher’s happy is the number one goal of search engines.

As such, your click through rate from the search engine results page (clicks divided by views), time on your website, and number of pages viewed all have an impact on your ranking results.

This all ties directly back to why we are spending so much time on researching keywords, thinking about keyword relevancy, and finally analyzing competition.  You want visitors that are actually looking for your product or service, and the search engine actually wants them to find you!

Targeting relevant keywords and developing relevant content for those keywords vital to a successful SEO campaign.

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