Social bookmarking is based on the discovery of major search engines that sites that are being updated by users frequently show that these sites have a higher informational value than static sites. The reason is that web users tend to be attracted to these updates and these sites are more personalized compared to others. Sites that are constantly updated with the latest information tend to have a high relevancy, importance and reliability. Hence, these Web 2.0 sites have been given page indexing priorities by these major search engines.

Examples would be those sites offering blogs, Facebook, Myspace, Digg and other social networks and recently the purchase of twitter search results by all 3 major search engines, google, yahoo and bing.

Nowadays, social bookmarking plays a big role in gathering traffic for your site. Although there are many schemes that can be used to maximize traffic, knowing how to social bookmark can be a big advantage especially now that social sites are proliferating among web users. Internet marketing experts currently are making a huge buzz around these social bookmarking tools when it comes to generating traffic for websites.

If you seek to boost traffic for your site, you must learn how to utilize these social bookmarking sites.

To start, visit major social bookmarking sites like Stumbleupon, Digg, Mixx, Technorati, Reddit and similar sites in order to help you in achieving your goals. Create an account on these sites or you may use existing ones. After creating an account, familiarize yourself with the site by exploring it such as reading the FAQ’s and other offers to their users. This will not take too much of your time as most of these sites are very user friendly in terms of navigation.

It would only take several minutes in familiarizing yourself with one website. Knowing what this web page contains and how you can use it at your advantage is the most important thing you should learn.

Now its time to bookmark. You can add bookmarks of any web page, which you think is interesting and useful to you as well as to other users, this is the major difference when comparing your traditional browser bookmarks with social bookmarking.

Add bookmarking buttons in form of tools from AddThis.com or Onlywire.com to all of your pages. Add bookmarking buttons on your homepage, your money site, your sales page and so on. Make sure that these pages are optimized for search engines. Whenever a user visits your sites and bookmarks a page through the buttons, the page gets a vote. The more votes it gets, the higher it ranks in social bookmarking sites, thus sending you more traffic.

You could create numerous accounts and use them all to bookmark your pages but it may soon show a red flag in the social bookmarking community when you are only bookmarking your own pages. This is why you should also bookmark other pages to create a natural bookmarking pattern.

To make this strategy relatively easy and as less time consuming as possible, there are free tools available for you like onlywire.com which will bookmark your page at several bookmarking sites in bulk or semi-automatic tools like socialmarker.com.

admin Social Bookmarking

Online copyright infringement is a growing concern among webmasters. This is easily facilitated by the open nature of the web such that anyone can get free content of another site anytime. While some webmasters are finding ways to constantly create new content, some however just use the free content of other sites without permission. Although webmasters can use major search engines to check whether or not their content is stolen, this tiring and frustrating task wouldn’t stop the duplication of their web content.

If you are worried about this scenario, then it is the right time to make a move and start protecting your web content. You may not feel or see its effects right now but in the long run, you will notice that other people are not reaping the fruits of your hard work anymore by using your content and show up on search engine results instead of your sites. Don’t panic, instead, start a strategy that will protect your work.

Hence, we list 6 things to remember in order to protect your web content:

1. Claim your Copyright. You can register at the United States copyright office within three months from the time you launched your site. This would protect you from any unauthorized use of your content. However, even if you are not able to register, copyrightable materials are protected from the moment of their creation. Hence, you need to gather evidence to prove that the content was yours and that it was used without your permission.

2. Use your Copyright. If you are registered and granted a copyright or if you just want to claim ownership of your published materials, in any case you must place a visible copyright notice on any page of your website. Indicate the date and the name of your firm near your copyright mark. This will serve as a warning to your visitors that use without your permission is sanctioned by the law.

3. Disable right click through Java Script. This will prevent the copying of your content but may lead to annoyance of sincere users who are willing to quote you in their works. Hence, you have to weigh the pros and cons in using this strategy. Also, please note that it will not stop hardcore copycats from stealing your work as it is by no means a bullet-proof protection.

4. Use a website security software. This would prevent other users from seeing your site code. Also in this case, note that a knowledgeable webmaster may be able to rewrite this by using another Java Script function. However, usage without your permission can be minimized by using this method.

5. Make use of PDF files in your site. PDF files are password protected files that cannot be copied unless the passwords are recovered. Hence, copying of your content would be minimized.

6. Convert text to images and then use Java or Flash. This would make copying a little bit harder since images embedded in a Java or Flash program are very hard to copy. For sure the online thief won’t spend too much energy in dealing with your content. Of course, you have to weigh the pros and cons since other sincere users may be annoyed by this method and search engines are will not able to index text in images.

These 6 ways may help you to protect your web content from content copycats. It is advisable that you use one or a combination of any of these ways in order to enjoy increased protection of your online material.

admin Web Content

It would be too technical to describe the way search engines work. The important thing to note is that they pick up relevant and information that is useful for web users. A web page will appear in the search results if the search engine determines the content on the page to be relevant to the needs of the user and at the same time the search engine believes that the site is reliable and important. This combination is necessary in order for your site to appear high in search engine results. However, you must remember that although search engines are very technical and take several hundreds factors into consideration when calculating the most appropriate results for any given keyword, you can still influence your search engine rankings by targeting several major ranking factors:

Web Content and Inbound Links

Inbound linking is one of the key factors in obtaining high search engine rankings. Of course, in order to get these links, your web content is the determining factor here. If a lot of sites find your web content relevant, informative and catchy, chances are they are willing to place a link to your content on their sites, since your content may be what is needed by their web users. Unique web content can really be a big factor in order to get a lot of quality inbound links.
Likewise, you can also add links to  sites that you determine to be useful for your website visitors such as those related to your niche.

Web Content Mass

Web content mass means that the more web pages with unique content you add to your site, the more chances you have that your pages are found in in search engine results. More web pages with unique content mean that your website must be a significant resource in the eyes of search engines. Large websites that are updated frequently signal search engines that they are prestigious and reliable. The more content you publish, the more visitors you will attract through search engine results.

Web Content Keyword Optimization

Keyword optimization on each page is very important so that search engines can easily index the page and display it to the search engine use when searching for a particular keyword. If you have a published an article about “winter shoes for men” you want it to show up on top if someone searches for “winter shoes for men” and not on page 10 of search results for “men shoes” which would be highly competitive keyword but page 10 does not bring you much traffic.

Keyword optimization means choosing and focussing on specific keywords and related combinations of these keywords on each individual page. You should learn to use both short and long tail keywords in order to generate traffic. A great tool to find keywords and keyphrases to construct long tail keywords is google’s keyword term suggestion tool.

Keyword Density

Keyword density is about the frequency of the keyword in your content. You must remember that too many occurances of your keyword per page may be considered keyword stuffing by search engines and will have a detrimental effect for your seach engine optimization campaigns.

Keyword Variation

Keyword variation is also necessary so that your site appears also in “non-standard” searches on variations of the keyword.

These are the factors you should remember in order to use your web content to its maximum potential to help you generate more traffic to your website through search engines.

admin SEO, Web Content

Why is article marketing considered so important? This is because article marketing is one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website. It is one of the most reliable and cost-effective ways to drive a targeted audience towards your site.

Articles and advertisements?

The difference between articles and advertisements is that ads run out after a certain period of time but articles stay on the internet in blogs and article directories virtually forever or until they are deleted or buried by new, fresher content. Secondly, ads usually just promote your product or brand whereas articles share information and facts which is more entertaining and valuable for your readers.

What do I write?

Once you start with the planning of your article marketing campaign, think about the audience you will be targeting in each article. Determine a specific group of people and dedicate your article to this group. For example, write about a problem which most of the people in this group are facing.

Suppose, the article is targeting an audience that is keen on learning about playing golf. Golf is a broad field, so from where would you get ideas about specific subjects and topics? There are many articles already existing about golf, browse article directories and blogs about interesting topics and research current golfing trends to understand what people are looking for at this moment. Social media sites like twitter and digg are also good resources to find the hottest topics around your keyword currently.

How do I write it?

As soon as you found an interesting topic, create a catchy title with your keyword in it. I personally prefer lists like “5 Tips For Short Hitters”, “10 Valuable Swing Tips For Long Drives”,  or titles that make the reader curious about the article like “Find Out The Truth Behind Long Drives” , “Pro Swing Tips Finally Revealed” and so on.

Now, in that article, try to present valuable information and facts that will be helpful for your readers in an entertaining way. For example, construct your article as a how-to article, a review article etc. A how-to article gives users facts and teaches them certain things, whereas a review article creates awareness about good and bad parts of a certain product or service.

In any case, start you articles with an interesting introduction and end with a concluding summary.

Put yourself into the article

After you have done the hard work, it is time to call for action and write about yourself in the author bio or resource box. Tell them who you are, what your areas of expertise and strengths are, about your experience and where your readers should go if they want to learn more about you and your products (add a website URL to your website, blog or sales page and make sure you put the article keyword in the link anchor text to this website!)

Its time to distribute – not!

Finally its time to distribute your article. If you have read this article until here, I’ll reward you now with some interesting information about article marketing. The times where you submit the article to hundreds of article directories for high search engine rankings and lots of targeted traffic are over!

Send your article to school

Grade your article now! Have you done exceptionally well? Is this absolutely killer fresh content? Are innovative news and ideas in this article?

If your answer is “Yes”, give it an “A” and post it on your own blog! Grade A content always belongs on your blog, as it may draw valuable backlinks from other authority sites in this industry.

Your article is written well, you have done a great work, even though there are not really breaking news in the article?

Give it a “B” and search for relevant blogs where you can publish this article as guest poster.

Your article is fine but the content is nothing new and the topic already in discussion for quite a while?

Give it a “C” and submit it to the major article directories like ezinearticles, articlesbase etc. (Note: only the major ones, forget the 100′s of smaller directories) The traffic and links you will get from article directories have the lowest weight in terms of link juice for high search engine rankings.

admin Article Marketing

Every website owner has the same goal in mind: to have high page rankings in search engines and to gain a lot of traffic. This goal relys upon the search engine visibility of their websites which tells how important and relevant their websites may be. A lot of webmasters engage in link building in order to generate visibility and hits. However, some do not know that not all links help them or derive any positive result for their sites. Links are usually votes to your site from the sites that link to you, but some votes are not counted by search engines. Some links may help you in gaining traffic but are of no use for high page rankings. Although a link building campaign helps your SEO efforts, you must understand that some links may be useless for you.

All the hard work, conceptualization and effort will go in vain if you do not avoid links that do not pass link juice. To know why, here are some reasons why some links don’t work in your link building campaign:

1. The page that links to you is not indexed

Major search engines such as Google do not count all type of links on pages they do not have indexed. Google works by searching for potential pages and adds it to the index, hence, working with a not indexed page would seem futile for you. Links become valuable only if they originate from frequently crawled web pages. Hence, you must check in google ‘site:http://www.xyz.com/page-where-my-link-is.html’ to verify that the page is actually indexed.

2. The link is constructed using JavaScript

Java Script Code cannot be read by search engines; hence, the link cannot be appreciated much less noticed by these search engines. For example, blog comments which are using Java Script Code cannot be found when searching.

3. The link to you is nofollowed

This means that the link to you has the nofollow attribute in its link tag. Search engines do not follow all links with the nofollow attribute and do not count these links as votes for your website. In order to check the link status on a certain page, open the source code using Ctrl-U and check the links rel attribute. If there is ‘rel=nofollow’ in the link tag, the link to you will not be counted as vote from this page to yours.

Now that you have read this information, it is in your hand to decide which links to go for. Links that do not pass link juice may be able to get you web traffic but would be useless for search engine rankings. My suggestion is to try to get links that pass link juice if possible, but do not neglect a nofollowed link from a relevant pages which may send some valuable, targeted traffic your way.

admin Link Building

Have you ever wondered why some websites are generating massive attention while others are barely noticed despite being on the internet for ages? A lot of people have their own websites for different purposes but very few actually have discovered on how to maximize the use of their websites. In fact, very few have succeeded in achieving their purpose for their sites. Whether or not their purpose is to derive traffic or to earn money from these sites, the secret lies not only in its content but also in the web design itself.

In order to generate traffic from search engines, it is very important that your content is indexed by search engines and listed in their search results. Even though paying for ads may be an alternative way to rank high on their result pages, it would still be costly for you since you may actually do better than you are doing now with some website design tweaking for free!

Here are a few tips to help you attain higher search engine rankings.

SEO Optimized Templates

Use one of the proven search engine optimized templates for your site which you can download online from various sources for free (search google for “seo templates” or “seo optimized templates” will give you a large variety to choose from). Such templates are not only helpful in maintaining your site but would also save you time as well. You don’t need to be bothered on how to arrange your site as the template would appear on all your entries. This would help you in handling your different sites and you will maximize your time as well.

Title Tag

Make a good title that will serve as your meta tag. Your working title must tell what your page content is all about. It must be interesting and catchy such that it would generate viewers attention just by looking at the title. Remember that the title is the first thing that your visitors see while browsing.

CSS

Use Cascading Style Sheets which is not only convenient to use. This way you could update the look of your site without a fuss since these sheets will be used and updated all at once.

Quality Unique Content

Of course, have a good content. Basically, readers will look into your sites contents first and foremost. The designs and the java scripts may attract visitors but it is the content that would make them stay and return to your site at the same time.

Easy Navigation

Your site must be user-friendly and easy to understand. It means that your site must be easy to navigate and easy to use. Readers get confused if they still have to analyze on how to use your website. They get annoyed if they don’t get what they needed in your website immediately. Remember that your site must not be like a puzzle needed to be solved.

Simplicity

Avoid putting too much pictures and graphics on your site.  Sometimes it irritates readers especially if they couldn’t find what they were looking for on your site.

Sitemaps

Sitemaps would also be helpful to your readers. This way they could see in an instant what your website contains and at the same time it promotes easy navigation.

HTML Compliant

Make use of crisp HTML codes that search engine robots could easily understand. Compliance with the w3 org requirements is also a must. Using software that is not read by search engine robots would only make your site useless.

Avoid Indexing Duplicate Content

If you have a blog or make heavy usage of search engine friendly URLs via mod rewrite, it’s a good idea to create a robots.txt file in your root directory with directives for search engine crawlers not to spider certain directories on your website which could lead to the same content (for example if you post an article into Category A in October, it would come up under category A and October, so exclude one of them in the robots.txt file)

Keyword Usage

Use one of your key phrases per page and fill each page with synonyms of the key phrase. Dividing your website into divisions may also help.

Design Standards

Arrange your website in such a way that you only use max 1000 pixels width so it would be readable by the majority of website users (Date: Oct 2009, this changes frequently so make sure you always go with the current standards. According to w3schools, 93% of web surfers use 1024 or higher screen resolutions) Your website must also be friendly to the eyes such that it must not be too dark or too bright that it’s hard to read anymore. Be sensitive to what your web users need.

admin SEO, Web Design

One of the newest internet marketing tools these days is Twitter. Twitter has become the number one tool for internet marketing gurus and there is no reason why you shouldn’t utilize it too. Through this service, one can connect with innumerable people worldwide by simply posting regular updates made up of 140 characters. As you post short messages, you tend to get your thoughts organized and do some quality writing on twitter. Interesting  and regular tweets get a great following on twitter.

Internet marketing through twitter is as easy as viewing people’s profiles, making new contacts and promoting the product. Regular updates keep people informed about the business and the product. In today’s times, twitter really helps in increasing web traffic to your website or sales page but the key is to know the proper method of drawing traffic. The online reputation of your business increases with the amount of twitter traffic you  attract.

If you want to increase your twitter traffic without spending too much money on other tools and resources then just follow these tips:

1) An interesting twitter theme for your profile is very important. Once you have signed up on twitter and created a profile for yourself, you need to choose an interesting profile theme for your account. With the help of your profile theme, you will find many people who share your interests. Come into contact with such people and start your networking. I personally have chosen one of the optional themes. Its not innovative, but at least its not the default theme. Its important to stand out from other twitter users who just signup, post one twitter message and never return.

2) Once you have a good network, around 50% to 70% of those who follow you on twitter will start reading your updates. When you reach a point where you have around 20 followers, make sure you update at least twice a day. Sometimes I don’t really know what to write, also I don’t want to write just some uninteresting stuff. Luckily there are free tools which help you to post relevant messages for you for free. For example, you can add the blogs you frequently read to twitterfeed.com and they’ll post these blog post entries to your twitter account as soon as new posts come out.

3) You have to keep adding more and more content from the other social networking sites such as Flickr, Facebook, blog posts discussing related topics etc. Having interesting updates will keep your followers glued to you. Interesting updates will also interest your followers and it will increase their interest in you and your business, thus generating the required traffic to your site.

4) To make your twitter profile more interesting and appealing to your friends and followers, add more than just text updates. You can add videos or pictures that will grab visitors attention and make them recommend your twitter profile to others.

admin Twitter

Search Engine Optimization is the method of increasing traffic towards a website by the generation of better rankings in search engines using legal website optimization techniques.

Listed below are the important keys for a strong SEO campaign:

1. Keyword density is important as it is one of the components search engines consider when analyzing and determining the relevancy of a page. If you have a large text on your page but your main keyword only appearing once within the content, search engines may not be able to clearly verify the message you are trying to convey on this page, even though their algorithms have significantly improved over the years. Keyword rich content still satisfies the search engines and also gives easy to understand information to your visitors.

2. With 1) being said, you also need to make sure that semantically related words appear throughout your text. Both, the existence of semantically related words and your keyword density, help search engines to determine the relevancy of your page. What are semantically related words? For example if your content is about “sport shoes”, then semantically related words like “athletic shoes”, “sporting goods”, “fitness footwear” and other related words enables search engines to index the page correctly without the main keyword “sport shoes” being duplicated dozes of times on the page.

3.    Your title tag must be catchy to attract attention – keywords or phrases which define your content should appear in your title tag. Remember, a great title tag should be clear, short, meaningful and relevant.This gives the reader a concept of what the page contains.

4.    Make use of the head tag, ex. < h1 >< /h1 >. Search engines have the awareness of the importance of <h(n)> tag in comparison to those in the < p > tags.

5.    Content first is the motto. Place your main content as early as possible on your website so that it is easy visible and accessible for your readers.

6.    Place a description including your main keyword for that page in your Meta Description tag. The meta description is is often used by google when displaying your page in their search engine results.

7.    Building quality inbound links to your website is important as most search engines emphasize on the popularity of your page in their rankings. There are two kinds of links which are helpful to your purpose -1- those that have the same type of keyword phrases as yours does and 2- those which are found on websites and blogs which are relevant to your content.

8.    Outbound links are those references which you give to your readers. These links provide you security and give relevance to you and your website and make your venture a credible idea.

9.    Link popularity is important as it gives you 3 advantages, namely:
Enhanced search engine ranking, complete indexing and increased traffic to your site.
When doing link building, keep following rules in mind:

- Source page: The content of the page, where your link is placed, should preferably be related to your page’s content.
- Anchor text: Make sure that the main keyword is placed as anchor text in the link
- Quality over quantity: A link from a relevant authority website in your niche may be worth more than dozens of links from different web directories.
- Link maintenance: when exchanging links, verify that your link partners are still linking back to you on frequent basis.

10- Using the ALT attribute in images is a good idea. They should be short yet descriptive.

11- Use formatting to make your site complete. Updating your site regularly with fresh content to make it sticky for your visitora and for search engine spiders to visit and crawl your site often.

admin SEO, Web Design

Do you dream of making money with your website and your own niche on a low budget? Your dream may become reality, provided you have a great niche and a proven niche marketing plan. Try to follow these 7 fundamental steps to achieve success in your niche.

1- You have researched your niche, and it shows you major potential. Competition is there that keeps you on your toes, however too much of will get you down. Especially when starting out on a low budget, a better idea is to aim for a sub-niche within the market. Many people are getting this wrong. They want the whole cake instead of a piece and end up with nothing. Dive deep into your market to find a superior, exclusive and profitable niche for your product.

2- An overload of unnecessary information clogs most of the newbies when they look for avenues to make money online. Don’t get bogged down, keep your focus to specifics until you understand the market and can use this knowledge to commercial use.

3- Understanding your customer’s needs and requirements are a must for any entrepreneur. You must also know which types of customers are interested in your product. Your product should have something that is different from other products, to carve a niche. For this you need to come up with an extensive, clear, yet easy to understand and to the point benefit list so that your website visitors can understand exactly what you are selling.

4- You must understand your market very well and absorb its language and culture to be able to reach your customers with ease. Your communication skills have to be great.

5- To build up on 4.), you have to be fluid in the market language, for example use specific keywords. Some keywords you locate may be very competitive but if you dig deeper you may find profitable, less competitive keywords which you want to target. These will get you the profits. Check out some of the big sellers and their product names in your niche, find the keywords they are using and use keyword tools like google’s search term suggestion tool to find more keywords that they may have left out.

6- The product or service you are selling in your niche must be up to date and your service should be exemplary for a buyer. Just diverting web traffic to your site doesn’t win you customers. The service and quality of goods does. This way you get to make permanent associations for a lifetime and your one-time buyers turn into regular customers.

7- Buyers who order on the internet are picky, read a lot of reviews and information in order to get a complete idea of the product to go ahead and buy from you. Give them proper details as the market is competitive and to keep your customer with you by giving quality service. You could write an e-book or a report to send to the prospective customer as freebies. You can also submit your E-books and reports to websites so that they can be found on the internet. Your visitors may gain more trust if they have read information about you and your products on 3rd party sites before coming to your website, just ensure that whatever you do send is sensible and of excellent quality.

admin Affiliate Marketing, Web Marketing, Web Traffic

Have you ever had this feeling? You’ve spent a lot of time on the development of your products, put them up on your website, spent time or a nice budget on promoting your website and people start visiting your site. You wake up each morning, view your sales stats and everytime all you see is a frustrating 0. In many cases, the probem is the sales copy.
Try following important measures and look forward to more positive results:

1. When you are putting up a sales page about your product, a good idea is to give some freebies to the person who has read it as a promise of more valuable things to come from you in the future. Make sure to add a P.S. at the bottom end of your sales copy, to attract customers and summarize the positive effects of the product or offer free bonuses and refund guarantees there.

2. A free e-book is a good idea to give out from your website or in an ezine article about your product, to gain more web traffic to your site. It will have a threefold effect: of increasing readers of your articles, more sales as well as increasing the web traffic to your site.

3. If your products just don’t sell yet but you have people visiting your website from your promotional efforts, don’t waste your visitors. A single website can generate income from a variety of sources, for example by selling space for advertisements or you could also join affiliate programs to generate more income.

4. Selling is an art and creating a customer for your product is a bigger art. Do this by generating a positive mood in your ad copy with complimenting your visitor. This will build up trust and they will be much easier to convince to buy your product.

5. You should not keep creating new services or products just because you are not selling your existing ones, as creating a market for each new product is going to be tough. If you have done a decent promotion and get people to your website, focus and spend time optimizing your sales page rather than on developing new products. Do so only if you are sure of the buying temperament and inclination of the customers towards everything that you sell.

6. Be prompt in seeing the orders through and sending them. This is very important. Be with your customers all the time from A-Z, treat them like a part of your family, you’ll decrease refunds rapidly if your customers feel close to you. Additionally, make sure to guide the customer to a page saying ‘Thank you ‘and also advertising your other products there without being too spammy.

7. Selling just a few products is a more sensible option in comparison to having too many products to sell on your site. A very large range and variety could get your buyer confused and snowed under, resulting in you losing him.

8. Free stuff always attracts an individual’s attention. Always ensure that your website comprises of this as well as material promoting your product. Even if the visitor doesn’t read all the written part, the highlighted products offered for free may get him to stop in his tracks.

9. You could conversationally remind your visitor that you are also human and care about their correct choices. You could put up a photograph or have a short write-up of yourself and your family. Remember, your customers are family.

10. Adding credibility to your product and brand image is an added advantage for you. Do so by putting up a ‘Contact Page’ on your website giving your on site visitor an easy and convenient opportunity to contact you.

Please send me your comments if you have more ideas to optimize sales pages and if these steps have worked or not worked well for you.

admin Affiliate Marketing, Web Design