Saturday, August 30, 2008

Social Bookmarking

You can increase traffic to your website using one of Web 2.0 features i.e Social Bookmarking. It allows users of social bookmarking websites to share their links with other members of site and friends.

For example, if i have a blog on search engine optimization, social bookmarking would allow me to display my link for my content on many of social bookmarking sites available.I am giving you the example of one of the most popular social bookmarking sites i.e Digg.

Since i already have a blog on search engine optimization in hand, I would go to Digg.com and register there through sign up link. I would then provide the URL of my blog in the box asked. Digg allows to create a bookmark including the URL I just copied, the title of the blog post which I'm bookmarking, and a brief description of the content of the blog post.

Now let me tell you how this will help me to bring more traffic

It helps you get more traffic in more ways than one. First of all, these social bookmarking sites are highly ranked in Google. So if you have a new website that hasn't been ranked by Google yet, having your link on these high rank social bookmarking sites will help to increase visibility to your site. You can sign up in as many bookmarking sites as possible.

These bookmarking sites are highly traffic websites with lots of members. Members not only add their own bookmarks, but they can also view other user's bookmarks and add those bookmarks to their account if they found it interesting enough. In other words it allows other users of the social bookmarking website to bookmark your content for you. So your link will be displayed in the web allowing people to click on your web link. Social bookmarking is a must use internet marketing technique.

Other examples of bookmarking sites include:

Yahoo! Buzz
Technorati.com
del.icio.us
Propeller.com
StumbleUpon.com
blinklist.com
Furl.net

Off-Page Optimization

We have been talking about off page optimization every now and then, but what exactly does it mean.
Off-page optimization basically means search engine optimization that are done off the pages of a website to maximize its performance in the search engines for target keywords related to the page content. Examples of off-page optimization include linking, and placing keywords within link anchor text. There are many methods of obtaining links which also fall under the category of off-page optimization. These include:

1)Press Releases- Primary function of a press release is to increase publicity and awareness among people. Back links acquired from this process can help newer sites with faster indexing. Established sites can also benefit from the increase in the amount of link flowing to their domain. Before submitting a press release remember to check the content again and insert your SEO keywords where appropriate; title, first paragraph etc. Also include a link back to your site where allowed .
2)Article Submission- Submit your article in one article site like ezinearticles.com and if your article gets published then go for the submission in as many as article portals.If you will submit just one article to a thousand directories, you’d have a thousand pages linking to your website.
3)Social Bookmarking via sites like Digg
4)Link campaigns, such as asking complementary businesses to provide links
5)Directory Submissions - This is used by most websites as submitting a website to a directory is the most reliable way of optimizing your site.
6)One-way linking - One Way Linking is a type of link building technique where a site links to another site without getting a link back.
For e.g Site A links to Site B
One of the best ways of getting One Way Links is through Directory Submissions.
You can submit your site in different free directories like Dmoz, Yahoo Directory and many others.
7)Reciprocal Link Exchanges- A reciprocal link is the act of exchanging links with another website. To be more clear this means they would place your link on their website in exchange for you placing their link on yours. Link exchange helps to increase the popularity of your website. One thing that most every search engine looks for while determining ranking of your site in serp, is its link popularity i.e no. of inbound links your site has.
8)Three Way Linking- This process involves both One-Way and Reciprocal Linking.For example: Site A Links to Site B, But Site B Links A on Site C
9)Blogging- You can create the blogs with unique content and provide the link to required website.
10)Forum Posting- Nowadays you will find many forums online, where people can discuss various topics & issues, all you need to do is to participate in related forums and put link of your site in your signature.

Keep Content Up-To-Date

Search engines always keeps on searching for new content. Not only your website will grow if you keep on adding something new to it, but also search engines tend to crawl your website more often if they always find something new.

Header Tags & Text Decoration


Headlines of the page not only structures the page content but makes it makes it easy to read. But along with that it should be properly used for SEO reasons also. Search engines tend to give headlines given in between header tags h1,h2,h3,h4 and h5 more relevancy. h1 is the most relevant headline.

Just like the headlines also other text decorations can help search engines identify the most important party of your website. Use strong and em to mark some text where its necessary and also try to create some lists with ul or ol.


TITLE And ALT Attributes

Title and alt attributes are used to describe text-links and images present in the pages of your site. They are used not only for search engine but also for the visitors to your site. They are shown when you move the mouse over links and images. The alt-attribute is shown if the image is not loaded due to some reasons.

Meta Tags

Meta Tags are not considered important any more as they used to be. This is because people have started using them to spam search engines specially the meta keyword-tag . There are still some important meta tags that should be used:

The description-tag is probably the most important META-Tag. It is displayed in the SERPs and you should be careful while selecting it as you will do while you will be preparing the title tag.

Important aspects to be kept in mind while selecting the description-tag:
1) a separate description for every page of your website its own description and do not use same description for the whole website.
2) description -tag is one of the few meta-tags that still positively influences your website ranking, so use your most important keywords in it.
3) should contain not exceed 25-30 words.

The robots-tag is used to tell the search engines (e.g. spiders or robots) what they shall do with your website. Possible entries are index, follow, noindex and nofollow whereas index/noindex tells the search engine whether to index the page or not. follow/nofollow tells them to follow the links or not.

Title Tags: Most Important On Page Element

Title tag is the single-most important tag out of all tags.Title tag is displayed at the top of your browser & is also used as the title of your website in the search engine results page. So you should do some research work and think about the best title that you can give for your page.There are some strategies while deciding upon the title tag.They are:
1)Exact keyword phrase should appear in title tag
2)Phrase for which the page is targetted should appear first in title.
3)Phrases should be used with some variation.

One thing you should keep in mind that each page of your website should have its own title. Secondly it should be kept short and precise and should not exceed 10-12 words.