Top Five Social Bookmarking Sites and How They Work

The world of internet marketing is a complex and diverse one. There are several ways to go about it and each way necessitates more than a brief introduction. One useful way to market websites is to participate in social bookmarking sites. Why? It is quite simply because people don’t want to hear a sales pitch from a company. They want to hear a referral from a friend.

Those who submit their links to social bookmarking sites will be providing a referral to friends instead of an obvious advertisement to potential consumers. The difference between the two really just comes down to the presentation. So pay attention to the following top five social bookmarking sites to find out which ones you should participate with and how to use them:

Digg – Only one of the all-time most popular social bookmarking sites, Digg has it down to a science. All you need to do is to submit your URL and hit the Digg bookmarker. You’ll want to write an eye-catching description as well as any other additional information you’ve got (i.e. pictures and videos). It’s arranged according to categories and will be up to the populous to either ‘digg’ it or ‘bury’ it according to their preferences.

Del.icio.us – A close second to Digg, Del.icio.us was bought by Yahoo! not too long ago. Originally, this website helped to bring about the basic concept of tagging. It’s arranged according to the tags posted on your entries as opposed to the topics they cover. For instance, websites that sell baby clothes would be wise to tag their submission with specific items they sell like, ‘crochet baby hats’ and ‘baby headbands’ to be as effective as possible with their submission. Choosing the tags wisely will make all the difference regarding the public’s response to your bookmark.

Reddit – The third most popular social bookmarking site puts all the power in their users’ hands. Everyone rates up or rates down what they find which means the best bookmarks are going to rank. It’s up to each submitter to submit quality content that people will actually vote positively for.

StumbleUpon – This social bookmarking site has its own toolbar that can be installed for free. It relies upon a thumbs up/thumbs down rating system which makes it simple to rank and see others’ rankings. The activity and preferences of each user will have much to do with determining the success of each bookmarked website.

Mixx – Similar to Digg’s format, Mixx simply asks its users to submit their favorite URLs and rate other submissions. Since people like to get other people’s take on things, it’s always best to be as descriptive as possible in the comment sections and description boxes.

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How to choose perfect Keyword for Website or Business

A search engine compares a query term that you submit to the millions of records in its database. The most fundamental elements of any query term are keywords. Keywords are simple terms that are derived directly from a user’s search topic that are used by a search engine to conduct a sorting operation on database records. The most simple query term consists of only one keyword. However, query terms can contain keyword phrases and even sentences. The figure below displays what a simple query term containing two keywords would look like in a keyword phrase.
Selecting Keywords

Keywords are terms or short phrases that describe your company, product(s), or service(s). Targeting keywords are critical to the successful promotion of your website. If you choose the right keywords for your site, you are on your way to Web promotion success. Choosing the wrong keywords, however, could defeat your efforts.

Remember the following points regarding website keywords:

Most people search for word phrases comprised of two or three keywords versus single keywords because they do not want to receive too many irrelevant matches. Do not make the mistake of targeting very general keywords. Typically, these keywords will not make it into a search engine top 10 for your website.

If you pick a keyword phrase that produces 6,548,000 search possibilities, consider some major fine tuning of that phrase. Try to choose keyword/phrases that produce results of approximately 10,000 or fewer hits. Achieve a high ranking in this manner first, then move up to a phrase that produces more hits when you become more proficient at search engine placement.

Choosing the right keyword/phrases for your site doesn’t have to be rocket science. It just takes a little forethought.

How to Select Keywords

Generic Keyword
Keyword Phrase
More Specific

apples
"New York apples"
"Granny Smith apples"

car dealership
"Ford dealership"
"Neptune Ford Dealership"

software
"software sales"
"Quicken software sales"


Write out a short description of your business. Keep what you say focused. Determine your customers demographics (sex, age, income, education, employment, residence, region, hobbies, and recreation).

What do you do? Sell a product or service? Describe such items. Example: you sell accounting software, not just software.

What is your business’s overall objective? How is it unique?

Brainstorm at least 50 keywords and think of as many ways as possible to describe your business and its products. Use two or three word phrases instead of single words.

Include more specific brand names if you sell these products. Legally, you need to put the reserved symbol or trademark symbol after the names when you do mention them on your page.

Your name: Unless you are a well known company/organization, it is generally less important to emphasize your name as a keyword.

Do not pick too obscure a keyword phrase, or one that very few people would be searching for. You maybe in the top ten but no one will find you anyway.

Remember a lot of these words can be put in a keyword power combinations. Review your list and sort your keywords by descending order of importance. Do a search on the different search engines and search on these combinations of words. Try combining just two words, then try three-word phrases. These are called "commanding combinations". It will do two things for you: 1) provide combinations which will be searched by customers. 2) offer exclusive combinations which will return only a few listings but will target your prospects.

Use Quotes

Put "quotes" around your phrase. Many people will use multiple word phrases to find products and services. The results can change considerably. The results can change considerably. If you search for "Ford dealership" without quotes, you'll find 29,000+ results. With quotation marks, you'll find only 6,000+. This is because with most of the search engines, putting quotes around the term tells the engine that you are interested in that exact term, not in each individual words in the keyword/phrase. Without the quotes you are telling the search engine to look for each individual word as well as the phrase and this can return results much larger and less relevant. You may want to consider in placing your phrase in quotes somewhere in the body text.

Use Misspelled Keywords

Think of how many people misspell words on a daily (or hourly) basis, and capitalize on those errors. If some of your keywords or phrases are typically misspelled, include them also. If you include the misspelled versions, you may also capture the Web traffic of the bad spellers.

Use Regional Keywords

Are you offering regional services or products? If so, capitalize on this. Many search engine users fine-tune searches by using regional keyword phrases, such as "Maine recipes" or "New England recipes" versus simply using the keyword "recipes." If searching for information regarding the purchase of a Ford automobile, a user may query "Neptune Ford" instead of simply "Ford." More examples are shown in

Keyword / Keyword Phrase
Regional Keyword Phrase

"auto supply"
"Belmar auto supply"

"real estate"
"Spring Lake real estate"

"Ford dealership"
"Red Bank Ford dealership"

Take Advantage of Word Stemming

Some search engines use word stemming, a process in which the engine searches for root words that also include variations of that term. You should utilize this process by using longer forms of your keywords whenever possible.

For example, use "teacher" and "teaching" instead of "teach." Another suggestion is to simply add an "s" to each of your keywords.

When writing your text be sure to include all variations of the keyword for the search engines that do not recognize word stemming.

Case-sensitive keywords

Viewers usually search using all lowercase letters, if they are looking for "New Jersey," they'll type in "new jersey." Be sure that you put proper nouns in lowercase. AltaVista and some other search engines are case-sensitive or partially case sensitive, meaning that they will need keywords with their first letter in capital, "New Jersey" or even in all uppercase, "NEW JERSEY."

When using trademark terms, don't forget the generic name. There have been lawsuits involving words that are commonly used such as "Kleenex" -- the generic name would be "tissue."

Avoid Kill Terms

Kill terms (also called stop words) are very common words that are usually ignored by search engines, such as conjunctions and prepositions. You should avoid the use of kill terms in your keyword phrases.

a
an
and
at
by
for
in
it
of
that
the
to
too
Web
with

This is not a full list.

Search engines ignore kill terms (there is variance among search engines) as a strategy to save storage space and speed searches. Time is saved when the search engine excludes searching for certain small words (meaning it will not "stop" to find them).

Remember the following points regarding kill terms in your Web pages:

if your site contains kill terms in areas where a search engine spider looks for information to index, it will ignore the kill terms, possibly affecting how you are indexed.

if the prominence of a particular keyword in your title is crucial for a particular engine’s ranking scheme, having "the" as the first word in your title could damage your ranking.

if a stop word is part of your site name or title, put it in quotes or devise another name that does not include the stop word.

if you are not sure your word is a stop word, do a search, and if you come up with a statement such as "No document matches your query," you will know that word is a stop word. Each search engine will have their own list so check each one.


Exercise: Writing & Testing Keywords

Track everything you do in your efforts to boost your search engine rankings with a notebook or log file on your PC. Document everything as you proceed so you can determine what works and what does not. Fine-tune your steps and try again.

Your ranking within a search engine may suddenly move up or down; you should understand why. If your rank decreases after submitting a revision, you can analyze your actions to determine why the previous submission produced better results.


You may research words for five different search engines. Put in the keyword "real estate" and see the different terms that people search on. This is a great tool to work with. Now put your keywords in and obtain a listing for a keyword/phrase, from the most popular query to the least popular. Some keywords may not be relevant, but it will help you to brainstorm. You will find other handy tools there also to use.

Another great place for looking up keywords: Word Tracker they have a database of over 40 million results that is updated every 2 hours. Enter a phrase that describes your business or service, and you'll see how many people are actually searching for that keyword.


Describe your business in detail for your own benefit. If you do not have a business, fabricate one, or describe what you are trying to do with your website. Seeing this description in writing may help you discover aspects of your business that you might have otherwise overlooked or not included in your promotion strategy.


Visit the AltaVista (http://altavista.com/) search engine or Google (http://google.com/) and search for your top keywords and keyword combinations. Look for power combos--those specific keyword combinations that return a limited set of websites when searched.

How many websites/Web pages did you find for your top five keywords?

Remember that you may not want to pick a keyword or keyword combination that has a large number of Web pages competing for the top ten positions. Instead, you may choose to pick keywords/combinations where you would have a fighting chance of succeeding to the top.

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First Steps in SEO for beginners

Today Internet has become a potentially source of huge earnings and so businessmen who normally operate "offline" try to expand their business to new sphere. In most cases these people first become overwhelmed by the number of new terms and information. Usually they become bombarded by offers and spam messages from people who call themselves SEO experts and offer tremendous results within short time. In order not to waste your time and money on a service with doubtful quality, read this article first.

Let's start with several questions to people who are new businesses. What do you expect from SEO? Do you want to use it because you want to see your website on the top page of search engine listings? Or would you like to know what people want and seek in products like yours and want to apply SEO because it's known as a mirror of people searches?

If your primary aim is to become #1 in your field, think again prior to starting. Today search engines use complicated algorithms that involve multiple factors and it is, in true, unlikely for any new business to become high rated by search engine within short period of time. You will have to wait and, maybe, you will have to wait for a long time. Are you prepared for this?

I may suggest you have seen so many "super offers" that promise to make your website popular and "defeat Google", but believe me, these are nothing but marketing tricks that have one aim – make you open your wallet and pay. If you purchase one of such programs, most probably the only thing you get will be some basic SEO knowledge that can be accessed online for free and, maybe, a couple of tricks got from blogs devoted to SEO.

In general these "super programs" are nothing but a waste of money. Search engines like Google have crews of talented programmers who work on the same problem – how to make sophisticated search algorithms and better crawl websites. Even if some individual programmer finds out a "gap", it will be closed pretty soon.

So you may wonder there's no way to become top ranked within short time. No, there's one way and it implies spending money. This means you should participate in paid listings. Sign up for Google AdWords program, select your keywords, set up highest winning bid and your website will appear at the very top and in right column of search results that include your keywords. It sounds simple, but there are several problems that must be mentioned.

First, not all businessmen have sufficient funds for such Internet campaigns. If you just start your business online, most probably you're ready to spend some cash, but you'd like to escape serious investments. Second – people who use Google often know where paid advertisements are located and they expect to see paid service or product there. That is why people usually prefer clicking the results of organic search first.

So now let's move back to the question posted below. SEO is really important for new businesses because this is the only way to make search engine pay attention to things you offer and they may be pretty close to the products wanted by your potential customers.

The points that will be important for beginners:

- Proper keywords. Find out what people type in their search engine bars when they try to find a product similar to the one you offer. Make sure you use these keywords in your content and most important one is present in your domain name and titles.
- Check your sitemap. It should be well-organized and provide error free data. Check inner linking system. It should be simple, but effective.
- Someone has told famous "content is king". Today this phrase is still very true. Content rich in keywords wins. Do not turn your website into a bare price list. Each product should have a description between 300-700 symbols. Note images are good for people, but search engine robots cannot index information on pictures, so try to create a combination between images and text.
- Incoming links and outcoming links. When you post links to other websites, be careful. Post links wisely and preferably to related websites. Avoid numerous links to unrelated ones as this may cause lowering in the rank. In worst case your website can be considered as spam by Google.

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