Social Bookmarking: Jump to the Top, but Don't Cheat

As a quick side comment, it is important to note that those who try to deceive and cheat the existing systems usually find themselves in a situation that is worse off than they were to begin with. Easy as it sounds, cheating is really quite tempting, especially when dealing with a system like social bookmarking services, in order to attempt to manipulate the system to artificially get your Website to jump to the top.

The underlying problem about the potential for cheating through social bookmarking is simple: if you do find success in manipulating the system, but do not possess the content, much less a high-quality one to really earn a featured placement, you will certainly displease more Web visitors than pull towards you. If your content has ample quality to merit a featured placement, it should rise to the top naturally without any additional effort besides writing and publishing it yourself.

Social bookmarking is already becoming a very efficient approach that savvy Web surfers employ in order to search for the latest information concerning a particular subject. Social bookmarking simply has immense potential in reaching avenues where search engines cannot--by means of "viral" marketing and popular opinion, social bookmarking presents the capacity to discover what is important before any "bot" can spider the Website and rank it among the thousands of sites available out there. Nevertheless, social bookmarking will never replace search engines completely, but as its popularity escalates as time progresses, Web users are rapidly realizing a whole new way to dig up Web pages that they would never discover by any other means.

So take the time today to examine the various social bookmarking services available. There is no harm in trying out something for free. Yes! Fortunately, these services are free until now. Take a little more time to learn about the capabilities that social bookmarking services possess and find out if it suits your needs--in my opinion, it certainly does in a world that more and more relies on the Internet for information and for linkages worldwide. Social bookmarking Web sites offer features that seem to make users on these sites click more and more. One should grab the opportunity that social technologies are now providing. These are certainly here to stay, and there is no other way for their popularity to go but up. Right now is a golden opportunity for you to gain great exposure for your Website if you simply learn how to use social bookmarking services.

The potential power that a social bookmarking offers is truly phenomenal. Information is not only faster to transmit, but easier to find. As the popularity of social bookmarking services grows in due time--and for certain it will--the likelihood of having some users utilize the service for spamming and junk propagation also rises. If ever you intend in taking advantage of the power of social bookmarking, just remember that associated with high gains is a correspondingly immense responsibility. If you plan to induce your Websites and Webpages to jump to the top of the search rankings, be sure to provide high-quality content that the users need. With high-quality content, you certainly provide enticing information, thereby generating you a lot of traffic in return. The point is to not cheat on your way to the top.

Why Search Engines Like Social Bookmarking Sites

Social Bookmarking

A social bookmarking site is a website where many users can manage their own private bookmarks and share their favorite websites or web pages with a community of users. Del.icio.us, the most popular social bookmarking site, boosts over 3 millions of users. The early social bookmarking site itlist.com was launched in 1996, but the trend of socal bookmarking won't make the waves till 10 years later.

Many web surfers have hundreds or even thousands of items on their bookmark list. They often have hard time to find the items they've bookmarked and the idea of an online tool as such bookmark sites are born naturally to help millions of users to better organize their favorite web pages. A social bookmark site does more than that by allowing users to share their favorites with each other.

How Search Engine Rank Web Pages

All major search engines rank web pages by quality score and relevance score. The quality scores are calculated by the links from other page since the search engines don't know how to evaluate page content. The relevance score is calculated by both on-page content and the page content that link to the page. The idea is simple. A link from page A to page B is a vote to page B even though there's no way to know that vote is "for" or "against" page A. The number of links to a page is a good measure of popularity of that page. Assuming we naturally ignore bad pages, link popularity is a good measure of page quality. The problem with current search engines' ranking algorithms is that majority of web users don't know how to or don't want to create web pages. Even for those who've created hundreds of pages, they spend 99% of their time on quality of page content which the search engines will never know or figure it out unless you have a lot of links pointing to that page. They have no interests creating links to whatever good or bad pages. The web surfers of 2007 won't get excited by any sites they found (which was true in 1997). The idea of measure page quality by links is based on the observation of user behaviors ten years ago.

Search Engines Meet Social Bookmarks

If someone has the ability to collect bookmark files from all hundreds of millions of web users and process the billions of links in all bookmark files, the rankings of web pages derived from the bookmarks would be a more accurate representation of votes to the web pages. Of course, this would never happen. The closest thing to this scenario is the links on social bookmarking sites. Three million users on Del.icio.us is a statistically significant sampling of the entire web user universe which is estimated at a few hundred millions. It is reasonable to think that major search engines do consider links on social bookmarking sites a very important factor in their ranking algorithm at least while ranking pages for very popular keywords.

Social Bookmarking: A Paradigm Shift

The worldwide web has become a fathomless ocean of information available at the tip of your fingertips, where ignorance has no excuse. Access to seamless knowledge is easy, but retrieval of information relevant to a certain purpose can put your patience to a test. Where exactly do you start?

In a labyrinth of sites throughout the internet, to retrieve information at will is more difficult than finding a piece of needle among haystacks. Remembering specific location of information that need further study may pose a challenge as well.

Bookmarking was born out of these necessities.

Some people access the internet on "borrowed time" - during a coffee break, in the course of research, or in the middle of a conference session. Information they want to keep either for reference or for keepsake find a special place in the bookmark, the most convenient place to store valuable information while in haste.

Bookmarking can be done on addresses in the internet that you frequently visit. This aids you in locating valuable information, at once. News items you wish to read further, or do lengthy research on, can also be put in this special repository. Bookmarking is highly functional - almost anything can be saved for later.

But there are disadvantages as well.

Ordinary bookmarking in your PC's browser may allow you to save valuable information but restricts your access to this information in your PC alone. Accessing it from an internet café, your school's library or from the workplace is futile.

When you have overloaded your browser with stored information, retrieval may slow down, then you are back on square one - you will be finding pieces of needles among haystacks again.

Don't despair. Social bookmarking is now here.

Social bookmarking has definite advantages and features, alien to ordinary bookmarking. For one, it has gone public.

Social bookmarking is shared by individuals belonging to a similar bookmarking service like Wirefan. It allows them access to their personal bookmarks anywhere, share these among their friends, or boost their collection with additional bookmarks coming from online friends, as well.

In short, social bookmarking transforms the concept of a once-private activity into a progressive interchange of information among people sharing what they find and gather from their virtual existence.

Every bookmark falls under a classification labeled with "tags". Retrieval of select information becomes easier since tags describe what's in store in the bookmark. Organizing and sharing of bookmarks among friends become hassle-free.

Browsing bookmarks belonging to other people, as well as allowing other people to view yours is made possible by social bookmarking, in fact, this feature defines what is "social" in social bookmarking.

Bookmarks do not merely define your preference, they tell your story. Remember, you are what you hold most dear to your hearts. Therefore, bookmark only what is good, fair and inspiring. We are directly responsible for the kind of influence we put on others.

Christiene S.C. Villanueva

Social Bookmarking For Internet Marketers

Social bookmarking is one of the hottest Web 2.0 online trends. The concept of social bookmarking is about 10 years old, but due to its recent explosive growth, it has just now become one of the new internet "buzz words".

It's important for internet marketers to understand social book marking and how it can help them promote their products and services.

So, what is social bookmarking and why is it important to internet marketers?

What is Social Bookmarking?

You are probably already familiar with bookmarking web sites, that you want to visit again, using your Internet Explorer or Firefox web browser. The bookmarks you create to these sites are for your personal use and are stored on your computer.

Social Bookmarking is the next step in bookmarking, where you and others can share bookmarks to web sites you think may be of interest to others. This is done via online Bookmarking services. After you have signed up for the Social Bookmarking service, you will be allowed to register a website, site description and tags (keywords) with the service - this is a bookmark. You will also be allowed to share this bookmark, or you can keep it private (depending on the service). This information is stored by the Social Bookmarking service, and is not stored on your computer.

What is Online Bookmarking's Purpose?

There are really two major purposes behind Web 2.0 bookmarking.

1. The main purpose of Web 2.0 bookmarking is to have people with like interests bookmarks sites that they think would be useful, or interesting, to others who have the same interests. For example, I love fly fishing. Let's say I find a site that contains some great custom-built fly fishing rods for an inexpensive price. I would bookmark that site with one of several possible bookmarking services. I would give the site I'm bookmarking a title, a description and tags (keywords) related to inexpensive custom built fly fishing rods. I would make sure the bookmark is set to public so others could find it, and would then have have created a social bookmark.

Now when people search the bookmarking service, using the tag words used to define the bookmarked sites, they are presented with a list of related sites. Using our fly fishing example above - When someone searches for "fly fishing rods" they would be given a list of related sites, including the custom fly fishing rod site we bookmarked. Most bookmarking services also have a rating system so the most popular sites are at the top of the list.

2. Another great benefit of Web 2.0 bookmarking is, once you have social bookmarked your favorite sites, you can easily find those bookmarked sites from any computer connected to the internet. You simply log into the online social bookmarking service and find the website you bookmarked. This can be very helpful if you have many websites you like to monitor, when you are away from home and you are not at your primary computer.

Why is bookmarking important to internet marketers?

Since online bookmarking sites are generally very popular sites that get a lot of traffic, they have high Google page ranks and are visited often by search engines. Submitting your site to the social bookmarking services, increases the chance your site will be crawled by the search engines. I have seen my sites crawled by Google only one day after registering my site to social bookmarking services.

Submitting to Web 2.0 bookmarking services is also a great way to get one way, incoming, high page rank links coming to your website which helps increase your page rank.

But most importantly, if your website is seen as having value to a group of people, your bookmark can be rated highly and can create a ton of very targeted traffic to your website.

Social bookmarking is growing at a phenomenal rate and if you want to market on the internet, you need to add online bookmarking to your set of internet marketing tools.

Social Bookmarking, Anyone Can Do It - Even You

Social bookmarking is an online tool that allows anyone to easily bookmark their favorite sites into an online archive. The bookmarks can be categorized and even organized with subject tags. By far the greatest advantage of having an online bookmark is that, up until now, when you saved a bookmarked site on your PC; it was only useful when you were using that particular computer. This meant you couldn't easily share or take the bookmarked sites with you, unless you dragged your PC along as well.

Online bookmarking allows you to do all of these things, for example you can share favorite sites with friends, family and even complete strangers. You even can access your bookmarked sites from anywhere in the world, provided that you have Internet access, without dragging your PC along for the ride. This is ideal if you travel or if you use more than one computer.

Never again do you have to risk losing important sites or trying to scribble down sites that you want to visit again when commuting from one computer to another. Even worse, having to search for a site all over again because you don't have access to the computer where your favorites are stored.

Some of the benefits of using a social book-marking site include being able to access sites from anywhere. You can also share your favorites and let others share their favorites with you. When you are exploring other people's bookmarks or favorites, you may find that there are sites that you would like to include in your favorites list as well. You can also get information about popular websites from other users or find out what other people are interested in. Social bookmarks are an ideal resource for bloggers

To add to the usefulness of social bookmarking, you can give your website a boost in the search engine page rankings. The reason that it is possible to boost your search engine ranking by using a social bookmarking tool is because the social book-marking site usually has a very high search engine ranking. These websites are obviously going to attract so many links, traffic and content that it would be hard for the search engines not to notice them.

By being added to the bookmark site, you have linked or pointed to your site from the bookmark site. This means that, in essence, a highly ranked site is linked to you and this will do wonders for boosting your search engine rankings.

Introducing Social Bookmarketing

Marketing a website can be quite difficult and expensive. As technology and the internet advance, new forms of marketing arise. The latest, which I will coin, is bookmarketing.

Social bookmarking allows users to submit a website url to their list. The website url is then viewable on their website and will start receiving traffic almost immediately. There are many different social bookmarking website, from digg.com which is mostly article related, to del.icio.us which is pure url. Submitting multiple times and extensions of the same url to these websites can be considered spam, but one submission is fine.

To maximize bookmarketing, post a link on each of your pages to increase bookmarks sites. This makes it much easier for your visitors to bookmark your site on numerous social websites. The most popular social bookmarking sites are stumbleupon.com, myweb, digg.com, and del.icio.us. Instead of manually placing links to each social bookmarking site, socialize-it.com allows you to place a small piece of code on your website, which automatically creates links to many bookmarking sites.

Our tests have shown that significant traffic can come from social bookmarking sites, namely digg.com and stumbleupon.com. In fact, our test site went from 220 unique visitors per day to over 350.

For more information on this subject matter, visit [http://www.websiteblog.org]

'Social Bookmarking' As An Aggressive and Acceptable Blog Marketing Tactic

Social bookmarking websites are becoming more and more

popular. They allow you to save bookmarks online and

Tag/Categorize them with keywords instead of saving them

as bookmarks in the favorite's list of your browser.

This is particularly useful when your browser based

bookmarks have become unwieldy. It's also help since

you can access your bookmarks from any computer where

you have an internet connection.

I have compiled a list of Social Bookmarking websites from

a number of sources. You can find it here:

[http://www.blogmarketingtactics.com/social-bookmarking/social-bookmarking-top-links.html]

Once you have bookmarked them, you can view them, sort

them by category/keyword as well as see links from others

that have been categorized like yours.

You also establish RSS feeds for each category (tag) that you

'subscribe' to. This alerts you to new links in your areas of

interest. Your bookmark collection/RSS Feed becomes

viewable to others who can also copy your bookmarks to their

own collection. So now you can aggressively promote your

RSS feed to the RSS Directories and Search engines,

syndicate them and make them available to a much wider

audience.

Social bookmarking sites also help you to meet other people

who are interested in the same topics you are and who may

also have knowledge of web resources that you don't.

On Social Bookmarking sites, you first create an account.

Then you bookmark interesting and useful things in the area

of your interest or expertise. By doing so you create a

useful Feed. Once you've done that you intermittently,

(or aggressively), add useful and interesting items, (that

could use additional exposure), from your own content.

Make an honest effort to contribute USEFUL information

and links. This is all about sharing and exposure. Done

properly, you can be as aggressive as you want to be about

sharing information. You can share your blog(s), links to

your informational/resource sites etc. Think about the fact

that when you share links to other's resources, you're also

effectively promoting their content as well.

This is a way you can aggressively and ethically promote

your content and the content of others. I personally

have hundreds of gigabytes of my own information and

information of others, connected to my notebook. In the

final analysis, it's doing me no good what-so-ever just

sitting there. But by organizing it, online, I can help

myself, (getting organized, getting my content exposed,

etc.) and help others at the same time.

If you spice up your feed with too much sales and

marketing related or self promotional stuff, people

can and will easily drop their subscription to your feed.

And instead of gaining good will and doing a service

to the internet community you could get labeled as a

spammer and suffer the consequences.

So while being aggressive is possible and acceptable,

being careful to consider the best interest of the

community is certainly warranted.

Balancing being ethical and providing a useful service

to others with promoting your own content enables you

to be as aggressive as you like. But remember, in the

final analysis, others will make the decision on whether

it's ethical and useful or spam.

Can Social Bookmarking Help Me?

You have probably heard a lot about social bookmarking lately. As a matter of fact, you can spend hundreds of dollars right now just to find out what it's all about. Well, not here. I am giving you this information. I did the research and found this to be a super way to get more traffic to your site. The best news is, it's 100% FREE.

What is Social Bookmarking?

It's a public list of your favorites. Not all your favorites, just the favorites you want to share with others. You can add any website to your public list and retrieve it from any computer. (This is done on someone else's server, not your computer)

When you list a site in your bookmark list, anyone looking for that same type of information can do a search at the bookmark site and find the sites that you have bookmarked. It is like a search engine without all the trash.

When you do a search in a search engine, you get all the sites that have something to do with the keywords you typed into the search box. It is easy to get a bunch of garbage sites that are loaded up with keywords but have poor content on the actual site.

The great thing about social bookmarking sites is the only sites you will find there are sites that other people have looked at and decided were worth saving for future reference. Real people have decided to save (bookmark) the sites, not robots. Real people also monitor the sites so if trash does get added, it is soon deleted.

The more people who bookmark a site, the more popular it becomes. As an example, lets say you are selling widgets for a really great price. You bookmark your home page on many public bookmarking sites. When someone is looking for a widget, they do a search at the bookmarking site and your bookmark comes up. They go look at your site and decide your prices are so good, they might want to come back later when they need another widget. So they add your site to their bookmarks for future reference.

When someone goes to one of these sites and types widgets into the search box, your site listing will come up in the search. If many people have bookmarked your site, you will be listed high in the search results. It's kind of like a voting system. If you site is good enough to bookmark, other people will want to see what all the fuss is about.

Unlike search engines where all you have to do is good seo, the sites you will find in the Social Bookmarking sites are quality sites that other people enjoyed enough to save. You don't really have to have a good site to get listed in the search engines.

How do you get started?

Do a search for social bookmarking, many sites will come up. Go to each site and register for an account. It's FREE! Once you have your account set up, start listing your site. Make sure you add proper tags to your listing.

Tags are the same as keywords with a twist. These sites will tell you what the most popular searches are on their site. You choose the tags that will work with your site or page and are also part of the popular list. Many of the sites will also offer a spot to write a small description of the site you are bookmarking. Add a description that uses some of your tag words for added benefit.

Building popularity

As with anything that is worth doing, this will take you a while to get it all set up and running smooth but the end result will be very well worth your effort.

Start with one bookmarking site and one page from your site. (Start with your squeeze page and build your newsletter list) Set up your account with the bookmarking site and add your page to the bookmarks. Make sure you use the best tags and description you can. (Check the popularity list on the site) Doing this in itself will help you get more traffic. Now you can go one step further and work both sides of the system.

Add a link to your site that will lead back to the bookmarking site that has your page bookmarked. Ask your visitors to bookmark your site on the social bookmarking site.

My example is below

Bookmark my site at Blinklist.com and access it from any computer, anytime. Create a link to the bookmarking site so your visitors only have to click.

You want to make sure the page opens in a new window so when your visitors are done setting up their account, they will still have your page handy to bookmark.

Next Page

Now move on to the next page. You will want to offer a different bookmarking site on each page. Why? So you can get as many bookmarks on as many sites as possible. Use the same information in the example above but change the social bookmarking site you are promoting.

Won't this look odd to your visitors? No. Most people will ignore the suggestion once they have bookmarked your site. They won't even notice that you have changed the name of the link. They will see, Bookmark my site, and think, "I already did that", and they will move on.

Final Note:

Don't SPAM the sites. Make sure what you are listing is relevant and useful. You don't want to bring traffic to a page that has nothing but links, you will probably get banned form the bookmarking site. Only bookmark your pages that have actual content. Ask yourself if you would truly add this page to your own favorites list? If your answer is no then don't list it.

Harnessing the Power of Social Bookmarking for SEO

As SEO professionals we are constantly searching for ways to get our sites ranked and indexed better.

We all know that backlinks are "life blood" that get a site ranked higher in the search engines.

Black hat SEO experts in the quest to get one way backlinks till now relied on various methods like blog comment spam and referer log spam.

The latest technique is using social bookmarking to get one way back links.

What is social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is utilizing a web service, where users create a public repository of bookmarks pertaining to sites that they like.

The concept of social bookmarking dates back to 1996 with the launch of itList.com, followed by services like Blink and hotlinks and many more. But,the popularity of Social Bookmarking increased with the advent of the most popular bookmarking site till date, del.icio.us.

To the uninitated, these bookmarks may seem like geekspeak, but from an SEO standpoint these can build you a massive amount of backlinks which seem to originate from authority sites.

So how does one go about utilizing these social bookmarking services?

You simply sign up for an account and then post your urls. Each post requires you to enter the url, a title for the anchor text, a short description and of course the tags under which you want your link bookmarked.

A tag is a keyword which acts like a subject or category. Each user "tags" a webpage or image using his own unique tag. An image or webpage may have multiple tags that identify it. Webpages and images with identical tags are then linked together and users may use the tag to search for similar webpages and images.

Most of these services give you a personalized book mark page that has all your bookmarks displayed, and though when you start out the pagerank of your personalized page might be zero, it slowly builds up over time.

An additional important point worth looking at is that each tag page on the site has a pagerank which gets passed on to your site.

For example the page for the tag "advertising" has a pagerank of 3.

Below is a list of various services that you can utilize to boost your page rank

1) http://del.icio.us/ : This one of the most popular of all social bookmarking sites and has a huge pagerank of 8.

2) [http://digg.com:] Digg is a technology news website where users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do. Digg is a site with a pagerank of 7

3) http://www.reddit.com, Page Rank 7

4) http://www.blinklist.com, page rank 6

5) http://www.simpy.com, page rank 6

A great way to get visitors to your sites to bookmark your website is using a neat service available at http://ekstreme.com/socializer/

This service provides a small snippet of code that when added to your site creates a special link on your site. When any visitor clicks on this link they are provided with a large list of social bookmarking sites which they can add your site to.

In case your website is a wordpress blog a similar wordpress plugin called Sociable that can be found at http://push.cx/sociable

Thus, using social bookmarking you can improve the ranking of your website and gain valuable pagerank.

Social Bookmarking... Confused? You're Not Alone

The word is out that social bookmarking is the thing, that

special flavor of the month (or year or decade?), but only

by taking it in small steps have I been able to figure out

some of its ins and outs.

The long and short of social booking is, it is a way to save

your Favorites folder (or portions thereof) online. This

means no matter where in the world you happen to be,

as long as you've got a connection to the internet,

you just log into your social bookmarking account and

voila! at your fingertips are all of the important urls you

might find yourself needing - but without access to -

since your computer is sitting home and you're not.

Now that is a good idea! Saves uploading a bunch of

urls to your domain, or remembering to send them to

your Aunt Sally before you visit, on the off chance you'll

need to remember that special something while you're

away.

(By the by, it's also a quick way to actually use your

home computer. I don't know about you, but my Favorites

folder is virtually useless at this point.)

But, there's even more to social bookmarking then easy

access. You can also share this information with others.

Your friends, family, co-workers, subscribers, whoever,

can easily see what you've been uncovering on the

web and decide, at that point, if it's something so useful

and/or interesting that they, too, would like to access it

easily through their own social bookmarking account.

The logical step from there (since I'm assuming that you

are reading this because you, too, are interested in

new ways to market on the net) is to find a way to tie

bookmarking to your service and/or website.

If this is all new to you, too, head here:

http://del.icio.us/

This is a very popular social bookmarking service.

You'll see numerous urls listed on their main page,

and since we're just getting the hang of this (assuming

you don't already have an account and are way ahead

of my learning curve level), let's practice :)

Beside each of these web page entries are the faint

words "save this."

Put your mouse over the "save this" and click.

If you have an existing del.icio.us account, it will take

you to the log in page for your account (for you

smart ones!). If you don't have an account yet, you'll

be given the opportunity to create one now.

After creating your account and logging in, you'll see

an area on your screen where the url you've chosen

to bookmark is awaiting your description and/or notes

and/or tags.

For our purpose, initially bookmarking our first entry,

you need not worry about this too much at this time.

Give it a description and/or tag that will make sense to

you. You can delete it later.

Hit the save button and voila! You've got the beginnings

of your social bookmarking!

At this point, under your "settings" area (upper right

hand of screen in del.icio.us) you can do any number

of things. Importing your current Favorites folder (or

portions thereof) is available. Explore!

Now that you're on the road to social bookmarking

comes the fun part... telling others what you're doing.

If you have a website, you can easily add (assuming

you do your own webmastering or know the rudiments

of copying and pasting) a "save this page" to any and

all of your important webpages within your site. Use the

"help" link, then read "For Publishers" under the Feeds

and Tools section. That's where you'll find the code.

In addition, you'll want to share you're newly found method

of communication with others. Get your family, friends,

subscribers, mailing list involved in bookmarking your

small chunk (del.icio.us listing) of the social bookmarking

web.

Then, make use of it! Don't just load it up with junk.

If you're a writer and find interesting writer's resources

add them to your account. If you're a news junkie and

track particular newsworthy items, post those!

As you get more and more familiar with social bookmarking,

you'll understand the importance of "tagging" your

information correctly. According to del.icio.us, your

page goes on the front page (I've yet to see any of

mine though) and also is filed away under sub-indexing

using those all-important tags.

=============================

A LAYMAN'S EXPLANATION OF TAGS:

If you're just bookmarking stuff online for yourself, no

worries, but tags are critical to your marketing social

bookmarking success.

Tags are sort of like mini meta desciptions. Tags cannot

be inserted into a regular html page (don't bother trying

to put them on your website, they won't do anything but

take up space).

Tags are basically equal to metas and content. However,

tags are used in blogs and rss feeds. They are the trigger

words for online feeds to categorize (more or less) what

it is you're writing about and posting. Obviously tying

your words to popular tags will be very important.

http://del.icio.us/tag/ is a huge list of popular and not

so popular currently used tags. My advice would be to

be sure you've got the Google toolbar installed. As you

click on some tags, check the page ranking (little green

bar) on your Google toolbar. That will help you see how

popular (or not) that particular "tag" is... and remember

you don't have to "follow the crowd." You can choose

tags "not so popular." Then, when others pick up on

those tags, you're already ahead of the game :)

In the future, give your tags some very serious thought!

Your tags will brand your own posted entries.

===============================

I'll admit, I've only just scratched the surface so far.

I don't claim to be an expert (that's obvious), but I

do know that with further education and implementation,

social bookmarking as a marketing tool is definitely worth

the effort.

And... like all new things takes a bit of fumbling around

before we get it right.

So ahead! Get started! See where it leads you - the

next brainstorm idea is only a few minutes (okay

maybe hours or days) away! :)

======================================

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Theresa Cahill is the owner of My Wizard Ads. Her

job is to make your online advertising experience

as effective and effortless as possible.

mywizardads.com

To see how I'm fumbling along... My Del.icio.us

Reference: social booking [http://technorati.com/tag/social+booking]

by Theresa Cahill

Copyright 2006 - All Rights Reserved

Social Bookmarking: Traffic Generation through Quality Information Dissemination

Initially, "blogs" were the big new phenomenon when it comes to generating traffic to Web sites and pages. Albeit they still are until now, a new phenomenon is starting to crop its way up to popularity--social bookmarking.

For those who aren't familiar with it yet, social bookmarking is merely an easily comprehensible Web service wherein Web users can surf through the Internet and then bookmark their respective favorite Web sites, electronic articles, digital pictures, and lots more--anything you can link on the Internet is "bookmarkable." Web users do this through their registered accounts through a social bookmarking service they signed up with.

From the point of view of Web users, the advantage of social bookmarking is associated with the fact that they can locate all their favorite stuff on the Internet from one easy navigable location. In addition, they do not have to store "bookmark files" on their hard disk, thereby saving a lot of space.

How these Web users exactly locate their respective saved bookmarks is not so difficult to envision. All they have to do is to "tag" particular sites by means of keywords that are associated to whatever topic the bookmarked site contains. Thus, when the time comes that they want to access the information contained in a particular bookmarked Web page or Web site, all they have to do is type in the "tag" associated to their query. This is just the essential aspect about social bookmarking. Nevertheless, it offers a lot more--one can primarily use social bookmarking to generate traffic.

If the Web user selects their bookmarks to be viewable by the "public," it implies that the entire social bookmarking community as well as the Web will have access to the bookmarked information. Are you starting to see the connection? From a marketer's point of view, let's say that I opened up an account at a particular social bookmarking service and it is ready for me to begin bookmarking whatever it is I want to bookmark. What do I need to bookmark? You guessed it. Of course I would start with my own Web sites and all its Web pages. I am also going to tag pages by means of keywords, which I think is suitable for the content written on the page. Other Web users within my social bookmarking community and the Web would be able search using keywords, thereby rendering the chance for my Web site to be found. Moreover, because I have chosen to have my account "public," then anybody surfing the Internet will be able to find my bookmarks that contains leads to my Web sites and Web pages--pretty neat for soliciting free targeted traffic!

You would totally be in control as to whatever it is you want to bookmark. The unwritten rule is to not "spam" other users with junk found on your social bookmarks. People use social bookmarking services to locate information. Hence, simply give them what they need and in return you gain free targeted traffic, which in turn could potentially make you some sales without costing you a dime. With search engines proliferated by a lot of junk and spam these days, people are starting to resort to other means for locating the targeted information they are looking for. This is where social bookmarking communities come into play and where you can benefit, provided that you follow the rules.

More and more social bookmarking services are popping up because of there ability to easily locate targeted information by simply using tags making it easier for Web users to search for the information they need. Social bookmarking can be a potentially powerful means of targeted traffic generation. But as the "Spiderman" movie adage goes, "With great power, comes great responsibility."

What is Social Bookmarking for Newbies

In social bookmarking a person stores lists of internet resources that they find useful. They are often on a particular network where people with similar interests can view the lists and add their own lists. Social bookmarking sites are also a way for those who work in a particular field to network and share information with each other.

There is no single way of engaging in social bookmarking. Resources are often categorized by a user defined keyword or tag. Keywords and tags are essential if you want internet search engines to pick up and rank your work or site. Most sites have a facility whereby users can search for resources through the use of a particular tag - the resources are then ranked by the number of users who have bookmarked them. Social bookmarking sites will also search for related keywords and clustered keywords. This makes a users search for a particular resource easier - it also gives them access to resources similar to the one they were already looking for.

Social bookmarking sites are becoming so popular that most of them are no longer restricted to the simple sharing of resources. Users have the ability to rate and comment on resources that they have found. They can also import and export resources to and from the site. Some sites give users the option to write notes on the resources and review them there are also groups and forums that enable social networking. In social networking users share other information in addition to the resources they have bookmarked - these forums can also take on a purely social aspect where users can communicate with each other on various issues.

Social bookmarking has advantages over other ways of sharing resources as they are easier for many of the search engines to find. When people use social bookmarking sites such as technorati they often find that the traffic to their website goes up. When traffic increases then the site goes up in Google's ranking system. This means that when someone is looking for a resource in your area and it has been bookmarked in this way it is more likely to show up on a search. This means increased visitors to your site and in many cases an increase in revenue.

There are various solutions available to automate the process. However, you must be very careful not use any "black hat' methods at the very least to your websites that you want to keep around for a while. There is Tag Automator and Sean Wu's application. Both of these are using a back door. There are also scripts out there that can help you sign-up and submit in a semi-automated fashion, where you are actually coming in through the "front door". The best solution that I have found is SBS-Auto which is totally white hat and is an actual software. The developer has researched the phenomena for several years and is offering an education as well as the software.

Using Social Bookmarking Buttons Easily For Massive Traffic Benifits

Blogs are amazing and that’s been stated and proved over and over again. You can go to [http://www.texlinkads.com] which is a site that allows you to buy links. As you can see, blogs are the top selling sites so if you have a good blog with excellent content, you can sell text links for quite a bit of money.

To use social bookmarking is to boost your traffic ten fold with almost no effort. Many people think they have to go to one of the social bookmarking sites, join, and then add their button to your site but this will take forever. Having that button on your site is good because people coming to your site and add you to their bookmarking list but if they are not a member of that site, they will not add you.

You will need to add tons of different buttons which takes a lot of time. There is a way you can automate the process to add many different buttons all at the same time. This can be done on a few sites. Some sites have created scripts that allow you to add your site to all different sites.

In addition, you can also add your blogs RSS feed. You will want to create an RSS feed if you don't have one already. RSS feed allows people to be instantly notified of new posts so make sure to use them.

These scripts are found on all different sites and since I don't want to specify one over the other and let you search for yourself just type in " blog Chiclets" or "social bookmarking buttons" in Google and you should have tons of results for yourself.

Social Bookmarking - Promoting Your Web Site With the Newest Marketing Trend

As webmasters we are always looking for new ways to increase the number of visitors to our web sites. When it began, social bookmarking was just a way for users to categorize and keep track of all of the web pages they liked. It did not take long for Internet marketers to realize that this could be very beneficial to them as well.

The way it works is a web site visitor registers with one or more of the social bookmarking sites and then they simply click a button which saves that site to their bookmarks much like Internet Explorers 'Favorites' and Firefoxes 'Bookmarks'. The advantage to this technique goes even further and creates a vote of quality, which is then stored in the database.

The bookmarking sites keep track of the number of votes made to each page. The more votes you have for a specific page the more it will show up to their visitors. A few days ago I was reading a thread in one of the more popular Internet marketing forums about how one guys site was on the front page of Digg. He claims from the time his site reached the front page one day before he had tripled quadrupled his profits.

Just imagine if your site had so many votes that it appeared on the front page of all of the major social bookmarking sites. You would probably be earning more money than you would know what to do with.

This technique has grown at a very high pace in the past year and I believe it is one that will stick around for the long haul. Those that jump aboard will reap massive benefits and those who do not will just be left behind.

One thing you can do in order to take advantage of this great new trend is to vote for your own sites. You can register with all of the well-known sites and start voting. Just remember you can vote for every single page on your web site and that will get your site going. If you do this regularly others will start to see the many votes and vote for themselves.

Many software developers are realizing the benefit social bookmarking has to web masters so they are creating some really great scripts. Most of these scripts are a little pricey but well worth the investment. If you look hard you just may find an extremely valuable script that will implement the benefits of social bookmarking to your web site at a very low price.

Social Bookmarking

This article will explain what social bookmarking is and how it can benefit your website. Social bookmarking is a method of Social Media Optimization or SMO, which will also be explained.

Some major social bookmarking websites will be referenced as examples of how to submit your article, blog, or comment to the sites. You will understand how to use social bookmarking as a device to network and draw traffic to your website. Finally some proper techniques will be described in which to optimize your article for the social bookmarking sites.

Social Media Optimization Social bookmarking is an online advertising method classified under Social Media Optimization or SMO. SMO fits under many web 2.0 websites for an in depth article on Web 2.0 programming please visit http://www.gameznstuff.com/blog/?p=15.

Search Engine Optimization or SEO is optimizing for the search engines using such techniques as building link popularity. With SEO you are catering to robots and or spiders from search engines that crawl your website which index and classify a ranking for you site depending on various factors such as getting out of what is know in the Google world as the sandbox, a waiting period by Google to be index then ranked. Another is keyword density within the content of the web page you have to beat a certain percentage to be number one. Even how long you have been on the Internet is a factor in search engine

placement. So with this factors, Search Engine Optimization can be a slower method to get visitors or traffic to your website if your goal is to get high keyword placement with the search engines, especially with Google.

Social Media Optimization or SMO is advertising to obviously the social media. Thus the quality of the content becomes a major factor in getting ranked within a social bookmarking website. With social media optimization there is no focus on how many times a keyword phrase is used on a website, you don't have to wait to get ranked or get out of a sandbox and they don't care how long your website has been up. The goal here is to impress other people, live humans rather than robots, as would be the case with search engine optimization. So social bookmarking is to tag, bookmark, share, digg, etc. with other social networking sites. To read more about social bookmarking please visit the blog at blog.prosperlearning.com/ecommerce/?p=19

Delicious The most obvious example of what social bookmarking is for the site delicious the address of which is del.icio.us. Delicious is a social network directory. This is how it works with your local browser you have the ability to add to your favorites or to bookmark a web page depending on the web browser you have on your local machine. The restriction here is that in order to access your favorites or bookmark you save you have to be on your local PC. This causes a problem if you are on a business trip and you need to access a particular web site you have saved on your local computer but have forgotten the web site address. With a social network directory you are able to retrieve the given web site you need from any machine that you can receive the World Wide Web on. Another feature is tagging, in order for Delicious or other social bookmarking directories to produce the most accurate results needed, you need to make sure to tag all your stories you bookmark. Because social bookmarking directories are searchable tags work as keywords needed for individuals to find the result they need. Because with other tag your story and other tag their story and so forth the method of tagging helps to reduce the problem of spamming which processes more accurate result, basically the result you want. To read more about Delicious and how it work please visit blog.prosperlearning.com/ecommerce/?p=17

Digg Digg.com goes beyond just being a social bookmarking site but it also incorporates the elements of blogging and syndication. Here you can submit websites, blogs, stories, comments, and articles in the Digg community. The thing here is you don't submit the entire website, blog or story you give a sentence or two summery of the story then it is link to the actual website, blog, story and so forth, so it create a direct link in an of itself to your site or blog. Within the Digg community users will dig a story a give it a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Obviously the more thumbs up you get the best rank you will be in the community, if you get too many thumbs down you will be put into a dig all area and if not dug within this area your article or blog can be and probably will be removed.

The following is a perfect example of the benefits of creating a quality article and submitting it to a site like Digg.com. Go to Digg.com and do a search for Ubuntu Tutorials, then revise the search to include "from all time" and "sort by most digs" The article entitled "Ubuntu Tutorials" has around 980 Digs with it which obvious mean it is quit popular in Digg. Keep in mind the 980 digs are direct and don't take for account How many time the article was dug by the 980 other people whom originally dug the site. As a result the owner of the article has been receiving more the 1,000 unique visitors a day from the article submitted to Digg alone.

Here is a list of more social bookmarking web sites.

1. http://www.blinklist.com

2. http://www.blinkbits.com

3. blogmarks.net

4. http://www.connotea.org

5. de.lirio.us

6. fark.com

7. feedmelinks.com

8. http://www.furl.net

9. http://www.linkagogo.com

10. ma.gnolia.com

11. http://www.newsvine.com

12. http://www.netvouz.com

13. http://www.rawsugar.com

14. reddit.com

15. http://www.scuttle.org

16. http://www.shadows.com

17. http://www.simpy.com

18. smarking.com

19. http://www.spurl.net

20. tailrank.com/share

21. http://www.technorati.com

22. wists.com

23. myweb2.search.yahoo.com

Techniques to get your story, article or blog optimized for the social bookmarking sites. You must first create the story used for the social bookmarking web sites. The key is to write a quality story that is informative and actually give useful and desired information to the readers. Because if you don't write a quality story that story submitted will not last long with social bookmarking directories. Another technique that actually helps you with the search engines is to deep link your story. Deep linking means using your major keyword phrases to link to appropriate web pages on your web site. Doing so will help build link popularity for you web site you're trying to get ranked with the search engines. To see a great example of deep linking please visit

sc.prosperlearning.com/tpls/internet/library/eComMod_28_final_v2.0.pdf

Then you tag or bookmark you story or blog or whatever you wrote to make it available on the social directory for other to view it. Last but not least make sure you repeat this process at least a couple of time a week to improve you chance and gain popularity on social bookmarking sites, which in turn helps to draw traffic to your website.

Secrets of Tagging and Social Bookmarking in 2007

Uses of Tagging and Social Bookmarking in 2007

Social bookmarking has become an immense force for both in internet marketing as well as www world. There are a few bookmarking sites out there but for the purposes of using them for internet marketing we are going to focus on a few of the more popular such as Del.icio.us, Furl, Digg, Spurl, blinklist, reddit, yahoo, google, newsvine, socializer, Magnolia, Stumble upon and the one which everyone love, Technorati.

Let me give you a short and simple definition of what is social bookmarking? Simply, it is a way for people to bookmark their favorite places (i.e. their favorite websites) online instead of on their own personal computer. The main difference in this method is that instead of having your favorites sites saved in folders on your own PC you have saved them online under certain 'tags' or 'tagging' or simply 'keywords'. In addition you can also set multiple tags for an item. For example if it were a jokes site you may have 'funny jokes, blonde jokes, free jokes, short jokes, political jokes, cartoon jokes etc.'

Now you have a basic understanding of social bookmarking, so moves onto tagging. Tagging is an act of bookmarking a site or a web-page with one of the services and a tag is nothing but a keyword. Here are some samples that you are into 'horticulture' and you find a really great site on 'horticulture', you could 'tag' that site with the tag of 'horticulture' as well as others and then share the page from your chosen bookmarking service with others. This is the way that tagging is used by the general public to share sites with each other.

When it comes to the use of social bookmarking and tagging for web promotion or internet marketing you can place tags on your on site which are then crawled and placed in the social bookmarking directories and search engines and you can also tag on your own 'authority site network' that you have created or associated on one or more of the services which is a method strongly espoused by Sean Wu of Tag and Ping.

To utilize the tagging on your own site or blog you will need to use a blogging platform such as Movable Type, Wordpress, or Blogger. I can not recommend using Blogger for business purpose due to their censorship. Blog have a built in functionality which allows you to on the alert the major blog directories of new posts when you create new one. And the whole process is referred as 'pinging'. You can place your tags like:

[a href='your url' rel='tag']Internet Marketing[/a] (instead of & "",I used here []& '') Or like this: [a href='your url' rel='tag']website promotion[/a] which will link back to page for website promotion.

Now, once you have done this and you publish the post it will notify or 'ping' the social bookmark services and article directories that you have set up in your admin area. The benefit of doing this is that it gets you high PR backlinks from right sites which will greatly help in the PR of your own site.

Remember before tagging the popular keywords because that you will have more competition from other bloggers. My suggestion is to mix up high competitive

key-phrases along with the longer phrases so that your blog will stay more visible.

And place this code in your head tag especially for yahoo so that when crawlers visit your site, they find rss feed properly. Place this HTML tag between your part of your web page

In conclusion, there are few tips important to understand:

1. It is important to remember that mix up high competitive key-phrases along with the longer phrases so that your blog will stay more visible.

2. It is suggested to use this technique completely SEO ethical way and use your tag properly.

Social Bookmarking - What is It?

Do you have an account on (http://) del.icio.us?

What! You say to yourself, that is a crazy name and it does not even look like a valid name for a website. Well, it is a real site with an Alexa rank of 123 which is in the stratosphere for web site rankings.

Let's use old, dependable Wikipedia for a definition of del.icio.us:

"The website del.icio.us (pronounced as "delicious") is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. The site came online in late 2003 and was founded by Joshua Schachter, co-maintainer of Memepool. It is now part of Yahoo!"

A social bookmarking site is one where you can establish an account and store your favorites. You can make these bookmarks private for your own use, or make them available to anyone on the Web.

You have your favorites listed in folders on your browser, but that information is available only to you on your home computer. If you open a bookmark site (and there are many others in addition to del.icio.us), you can share these bookmarks with any reader on the Web.

Why do this? One reason is that you can access your bookmarks from any computer with an Internet connection so you can get to your bookmarks when you are traveling.

However, the major reason is to help build traffic to your websites. Use of bookmarking sites is a way to create links back to your websites and help generate traffic. There are numerous bookmark sites and you can set up bookmark files on as many as you want, all of which create the links back to your websites.

The best way to learn about social bookmarking is to open an account on del.icio.us and learn about the site. You definitely need to know about it and how to use it to your advantage.

Social Bookmarking And Site Promotion

Firstly let's all get up to speed and cover social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is the process of storing you bookmarks or (websites added to your favourites) on a publicly accessible website. This allows people to essentially store their favourites on a website which will be available wherever they are and whatever PC they are accessing the internet from.

Social Bookmarking sites are predicted to make huge gains in popularity in the near future as the boom around user generated content increases and the internet increases in size making finding quality sites harder. Yahoo acquired del.icio.us in December 2005 and they have experienced a 300% increase in their user base since then which shows the growth of these sites.

So now to the main point, can social bookmarking sites be used for website promotion? In an attempt to stop marketing and promotion SPAM most social tagging sites have implemented the now famous nofollow attribute tags (like Wikipedia) meaning no link popularity can be passed on from these sites.

However despite the attempts to prevent any link popularity and SEO benefit being gained, there are still some great benefits to be had by submitting websites to the social plethora of social bookmarking sites. Most enjoy good search engine ranking and appear high up on a huge amount of search terms, this can provide some excellent search engine visibility by population for listings with your sites links.

This provided with searches from the bookmarking sites can provide some good traffic. This can work especially well if used in conjunction with link bait or viral marketing, as a sites exposure increases exponentially as it gets more "bookmarks".

The increased traffic and search engine listings can increase brand awareness and can be especially useful when launching a new site. So despite the nofollow's social tagging sites can yield some very impressive results especially when used in conjunction other SEO and link generation methods.

Look out for the next article which will explain how best to go about submitting to social bookmarking sites and what content to use for maximum benefit.

Two Squidoo Or Not To Squidoo?

Squidoo works a lot like my brain.

It allows me to go off in a lot of directions at the same time. Yes I am ADD. I can build lenses(is that the plural of lens?) on Bicycles, cell phones, web hosting and or multiple lenses on each subject. They will all fall under the umbrella of my lenses but I can also easily link my lenses together that are on the same subject.

Building Your First Lens

It can be confusing it is simple and you will get the hang of it. You don't need to understand everything on your page to begin with, that will come in time.

This page is really simple and I built it to show how simple it is to get started on Squidoo. So you can follow along with my description go to http://www.squidoo.com/TacoSalad/

I signed in to Squidoo

I clicked on "build a lens"

I typed "Taco Salad" in the "My lens is about:" go to step 2

I put the dot on "I want to get the word out on ----" goto Step 3

Pick URL I put in "tacosalad"

I clicked on "Food & Cooking" and then put the dot on Yes my lens is family friendly.

The best keyword for my lens is "Taco Salad" I put in taco recipe ,taco meat delight, best taco dinner,

This is not really important these actually will be the meta tags for your article just put in some words you think someone might search for your page with.

Then copy the security word.

Then click at the top of the arrow.

your page is already named.

In the introduction put in a couple of sentences about what the page is about.

Now go down to the Test/Write Module and click "edit". I put in The Meat Recipe and then went on to explain the meat recipe. If you click on the arrow next to the edit button you can move the line below the line that is currently below your line. I moved the Guestbook line to the bottom of the page.

Add another Text/Write Module

I clicked on add modules because I wanted to add another text box. Text/Write Module didn't show so I clicked on next page.

I then clicked on add text/write module twice.

I clicked "Save" and it took me back to my page.

Move your Modules

I moved the guestbook down below the two write modules and wrote the rest of my article. Click on the Down arrow on the Module Bar.

Add Titles

When you open a module and don't change the title you will get the default title to that module and it will look strange. As you finish a module click on save. When you are done click on Publish. Your first page is done. Please if you found this starter lesson helpful leave me feedback--I would be honored if you sign my Guestbook.

The modules you do not use will not show up on your published page.

Except for Guestbook.

Article Marketing and Getting Paid

Squidoo is getting great ratings from the search engines so far. This is another twist to the article marketing twist Squidoo shares Site revenues with the article authors. If you are an avid article submitter this could become a significant extra source of income.

Using Squidoo Strategies

In my previous article I discussed how to use a Squidoo lens effectively as a marketing tool by ensuring your lens is optimised around your chosen keyword. In this article I am going to discuss how you can use a series of inter-linked lenses to increase your traffic and therefore sales potential.

In my previous article I said you needed to think at all times as though your Squidoo lens were a landing page and optimise it in much the same way as you would for an AdWords campaign. Well...it is now far better to have a mini-site behind your landing pages for Adwords, right?

Well let's transfer that thinking into Squidoo.

Now a lot of marketers are doing fairly standard stuff with their lenses. Throwing up a lens on the subject or product and adding links from there to relevant merchants, etc. Now this will work...but it may also put off a lot of visitors as being a bit too hard sell.

Remember the Squidoo community exists to provide a focus (lens) of interest on a particular subject or hobby so a better strategy would be create two inter-linking lenses:-

1. A 'hobbyist' lens

2. A 'sales' lens

The first lens 'making sausages', is a general lens about sausage making in general with pictures, articles, etc. But it has a link to 'sales' lens 2. The second lens is much more sales orientated, pre-selling your chosen product or products.

In this way 'casual' visitors to lens 1. can be gently nudged towards lens 2.

Now let's expand that idea. What if we think of our first lens 'making sausages' as our 'home page'. Now we can expand the idea and create 'hobbyist' lenses for 'making english sausages', 'making german sausages' and 'making italian sausages' all linked to our original lens.

We can now add multiple 'sales' lens related to those sub-niches.

We have now, in effect, created a 'website' in Squidoo by using multiple inter-linked lenses which gives us cross selling opportunities that do not exist with a single lens.

So, to sum up...whilst an individual Squidoo lens is a valuable marketing tool, creating a series of inter-linked lenses increases the potential exponentially.

In my next article I'll discuss using Squidoo strategies further to increase the potential of your lenses...so look out for that.

Digg Algorithms Explained

Like Google, Digg and other social bookmarking sites don't offer official algorithms to display the results on the front page. But I analyze the algorithms of these bookmarking sites, in particular digg.com, which you find logical and convincing.

It's not just that you submit a link to these sites, and you'll expect result on the front page. Please, understand their algorithm, which is semantic in nature, and works on the pattern of 'collective intelligence of human beings'. 'Referral' is given heavy emphasis in their algorithms, which is deemed as Vote. The more number of user bookmarking a site, the higher is the ranking and vice versa. Make sure your site should not be 'buried' lest it would be spammed.

So what counts finally is the rapidity of votes. If your site gets larger vote in terms of higher number of bookmarkings, your site will definitely be on the top of the result page. For each category, digg has set minimum limit of bookmarkings. If a site crosses the limit, result appears on the first search page. For 'Technology and sub categories', for instance, about 50 diggs are required while 'Gaming and sub categories' require 30-40 diggs.

In fact, it's almost difficult to say the exact number of diggs required to ensure a good search result yet the search results appearing on the digg are believed to have highest number of bookmarkings.

Give a thought over the results of del.icio.us. It heavily relies on the 'Quantification of Votes' to display the result. The 'inverted pyramid' results of the site can be well understood. A site with highest number of votes gets the top position while sites getting lesser number of votes get downward positions on the search result page. Though digg's method of displaying results is somewhat different from del.icio.us, but I think its algorithm based on 'collective intelligence of human beings' is more or less the same like del.icio.us.

Digg, in order to trick analyzers, displays results not on the Yahoo's del.icio.us pattern, but follows its own discretion. However, I guess its algorithms must have been similar to del.icio.us, and other bookmarking sites.

It's still to be verified if digg looks 'server' into account while measuring the votes or just a single factor of 'referral'. If it takes the former in its algorithm, it becomes Herculean task for marketers to get the top positions on the front page. But, if it takes the latter, here lies the advantage of marketers to ask their team to digg a particular site to increase number of votes and thereby influence the ranking on the front page.

Mere submitting a link to hundreds of bookmarking sites don't guarantee the highest number of hits and traffic. Select a few popular sites, and ask people to digg or bookmark on a regular basis.

Here are my suggestions to increase traffic through digg and other popular social bookmarking sites.

1. Ask friends or anyone you know to digg your story/website if they can.

2. I don't recommend having more than one Log in ID to trick digg for increasing number of votes. This may not work if digg takes server address into account while measuring the votes.

3. A site with highest diggs (votes) appears on the front page even though it gets a few buries. It takes more than 15-20 buries for a site to drop its ranking on the top page of digg.

4. Also, write comments on the link you submit. Digg may look at the negative comments and consider the site as 'SPAM'. So, abstain from writing any negative comments. Ask your friends/networks to write good comments for better rankings.

5. Approach a community of your interests within digg or other social bookmarking sites and share your experience with them. You digg their sites and so do they.

6. While digging a link, always remember to write an exciting and powerful title, and description, enough to receive higher CTR. The yellow marked on the tags (you look for) verifies that digg emphasizes tags incorporated into title, and description.

7. It's always advisable to give some unique tags (your keywords) while submitting the link. Your title and description must contain the tags. Although you have privilege to give tags on your own, it's always better to do some research on popular tags as per the theme of your site.

8. Last but not the least, endeavor to build huge online and offline social networks. So, socialize your approach to sell your products/services through social platforms web 2.0 has offered to us without misuse.

Social Bookmarking 103

Social bookmarking is a way to for users to store lists of Internet resources that they find to be useful for them. They can be accessible to a public or a specific network of people. They are stored by category, tags, or randomly. Some social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks that are associated with certain tags and ranks that other users have bookmarked them with.

The implementation of keywords by some groups allow for easier access by grouping those with similar words together and in relation to other keywords. Social bookmarking has grown to become very popular and with that services have been added. It offers more than sharing bookmarks, but readers and viewers can share rating, comments, can import and export, add additional notes, reviews, email and website links, feed subscription, create groups, social networks, and much more. They are a way to store, share, search links, and classify information.

Social bookmarking has become somewhat of a small circle of friends and family online that share the same interest. It can provide information specialized to one subject or books, music, videos, map locations, coupons, parenting information, great school information, and more can be found. Social bookmarking reminds me of an online community to share information with others. It serves as a center hub to locate subjects, information, and ideas from others who have the similar concerns and needs you do. It helps in finding information without having to "search" for it. There are many social bookmarking on the Internet finding one today and see what you can learn!

4 Ways to Make a Profit With Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking may be very profitable when handled professionally. For a profitable social bookmarking you can use following 4 ways -

Add social bookmarking links to your website - Put the links to social bookmarking on your website. So, you will have some of the visitors of your web site to your social bookmarking pages. You will get reciprocal visits by the visitors of your social bookmarking pages. People will love to get search result easily and they will like to get additional resources by informational emails. Profitable social bookmarking is possible by linking and network creation.

Get more traffic - Use methods to get more traffic for your bookmarks. When you get your site bookmarked by a reader, you increase the chance of a return visit to your site. When you get more traffic you can earn more. More traffic will make your bookmarking a profitable social bookmarking job.

Make it popular - Get more votes, more visits and become popular. Add different bookmarks in different categories to cater to different people. Categorize, classify and make a network of them. Create a network of the users who visit your bookmarks. If you are popular then you will get more traffic and when more traffic will come to your listings, you can earn more profit from the advertisements and affiliate programs.

Make it a search engine - Use the social bookmarking site as a search engine. This will help people to do the search instead of the web spider of the search engines. People would love to search themselves for the accurate information. Thus you will get more visitors and user. Make it a network for your listings. This facility will help to create a profitable social bookmarking service.

Social Bookmarking - Fast Social Bookmarking

The latest method to receive one way back links today is through social bookmarking. With social bookmarking, a web service is used where you create a public repository of bookmarks to sites that you like.

This is a concept that started in 1996 with the launch of itList.com and has today become popular with the advent of the most popular social bookmarking site till date, del.icio.us.

To use social bookmarking, you have to sign up for an account and post your URLs. Each posting needs a URL, a title for the text, a short description and the tags for bookmarking your link. So use unique tags on your webpage for identification purposes. Identical tags are linked together so that the same tag is used for similar web pages and images.

Social bookmarking services provide you with bookmarks; save these bookmarks to electronic resources using a web browser for better social bookmarking. You find that if you classify, index or categorize your bookmarks, using user-defined tags, you are sure to do better in social bookmarking.

Joining a social networking site, and sharing your bookmarks publicly or with other members interested in the same product will bring better results to your social bookmarking. It is important to do some research when using social bookmarking by looking for other users having similar interests and resources tagged to your resources.

Make periodical checks on the popularity of a resource by finding out how many people had bookmarked it; this helps you decide if you are using the right tags for social bookmarking. Syndication of resources links using RSS is also a good idea to improve your social bookmarking which in turn improves the ranking of your website to give you a better page rank.

Social Bookmarking - Essential Ways to Earn Money With Social Bookmarking

Generally, the social bookmarking process involves putting a mark on a site that you find very useful. This mark then gets to be a list of all "marked" sites. This list becomes accessible to all having the same interest or at least find it interesting. With this whole concept, it is clearly visible how social bookmarking is used to earn money via advertisement or marketing. The question now is, how effective does your social bookmark list is? I have enlisted few tips that you can use to ensure efficient social bookmarking.

* Make your bookmarking crawl. The whole idea is very simple. When a person who visited your site socially bookmarked your site, it means that your site is open to all. The tendency then for other people who visit other sites where your site is socially linked, the higher the chance that your site will then be bookmarked by other visitors. By this, your site continues crawl with the other sites.

* Make your visitors repetitively visit your site. Of course, no matter how few these visitors are, if they visit your site time and time again, traffic with your site is inevitable. To drive them from coming back, make sure you give them all the reasons to. Give them the material they want. Write good and bookmarking is at hand.

* Utilize other resources like submitting your site to another list of social bookmarks. Well, at least, you can be assured that your site continues to be linked with other sites by means of this.

* Track and monitor the progress of your site's bookmark rank. This is ensuring that your site continues to expand its being socially bookmarked. Now, if in any case that it is not progressing, at least you know what to do.

Social Bookmarking - How to Go About Social Bookmarking?

As there are lots of websites on the internet, it is not possible for any one who wants to find some relevant information regarding any topic to search all of those websites. The internet book marks can solve this problem for you a bit by book marking the more important sites for you. Social book marketing is a way by which the internet book marks can be shared. It is done through the internet. The service of sharing the book marks is web based. Social book marking is done by keeping lots of links on a website. The links present on that website are shared, classified and stored on web sites. The technique generally belongs to the internet but it can also be used on the intranet.

Folksonomy technique is basically used to classify these links. Generally people store those links together at one place which they find useful in relation to a particular search. This search can be of interest to others. Thus the social book marking websites support the spread of knowledge and research in this way. It suits the websites to be in such social networks. That ensures that they will become search engine favorites. This is one of the most important benefits of the social networks. The biggest disadvantage however is the fact that there actually is no set of keywords which can be considered standard in this case. Thus it is too open ended an effort. Thus social book marking can be or cannot be considered as a worth trying effort.

Ways To Make Money Online With Squidoo

I've had the pleasure recently of getting involved with Squidoo, which is a Web 2.0 site that allows you to create small web pages packed with brief information about your sites, products, and services. If you are looking for ways to make money online, you might want to start with Squidoo.

The reason I suggest starting there is that if you visit Squidoo's website, you can do a free search for various topics - anything under the sun - and find short web pages with brief overviews of what you are looking for, and do this all for free.

It is like a mini search engine really where you can find information on the latest and greatest celebrity news, or new ways to make money online. You can even find information about future events, launches, and promotions. If you can't find what you're looking for, you can always start your own lens on the topic that interests you.

What is a lens you ask? When you look through a microscope, you get a magnified image of a mass of cells for example. When you look at a lens on Squidoo, you are looking at a magnified image of someone's topic, all concentrated together in a single web page.

It's free and incredibly easy to set up a lens on Squidoo. You don't have to know any HTML - they do it all for you, and your lens can be set up within minutes, after which you will quickly discover how easy it is to get traffic via Squidoo.

If you are searching for ways to make money online, you can do it with Squidoo. Not only can you search for information you want, but you can create a lens and promote your own products and services - either your own products or someone else's through affiliate links. If you already have a website, you can link your lens to your website for additional traffic.

There are a few ways to make money online with Squidoo. Not only can you promote your own or other people's products, but you basically get your own site setup by Squidoo that already comes with Google AdSense ads on it. You don't need to do anything other than take a few minutes to create a lens, and you could be earning extra money through Adsense!

Another way to make money online with Squidoo is to use the "modules" they provide you when you set up your lens. At a first glance you may not understand how the system works. You are free to delete modules they provide, such as their eBay module, and their Amazon.com module. Why would you want those?

I wondered the same thing, until I found out that you can carefully choose keywords for your Squidoo lens, type them into the eBay module they provide, and see what products come up for auction at eBay. Once you've done that, Squidoo kindly updates your eBay auction list every 6 hours, and you have the opportunity to make money online if anyone clicks those eBay links that are linked to your lens!

It's not a greedy system either. You have the option of donating all, or portions of what you make by people clicking the ready-made links on your Squidoo lens to charity! There is a growing list of charities to which the money can be donated too, so this is a fabulous system for giving something back.

Heck, you can even decide not to donate to charity and pocket the cash yourself through your PayPal account for additional extra income in your pocket!

With Squidoo, it's easy to rise in the search engine ranks, particularly Google. If you create a lens and share it with others, and get your friends or other Squidoo group members to add your lens to their favourites list, and rank your lens, you will achieve a high lens rank quickly. The higher the rank, the more potential there is to make money online because others will find your lens quicker.

As you can see, Squidoo offers ways to make money online by providing an almost ready-made portal to promote your products and services, to promote other people's products and services, to share information, rise in the ranks, and make money from AdSense and online auctions. You can't beat this method, especially because it's free!

Social Bookmarking Secrets

In the last couple of months more people have started using

social bookmarking sites. Bloggers have realised that if

they get a home page listing on a popular social bookmarking

web site like Del.icio.us they can get thousands of

visitors in one day to their web site. Now if you think

about it how many articles would you need to write or how

long would it take do search engine optimisation on your

web site to get that kind of ranking? If you were to spend

money on ppc those amount of visitors could cost you

thousands of dollars. Let me go through some tactics that

will help you to get your web pages bookmarked on popular

social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us and story sites

like Digg.

Let me briefly explain the difference between a social

bookmarking site like Del.icio.us and a story site like

Digg. On a social bookmarking site you will bookmark sites

that you like according to tags. If other users of the

social bookmarking site are interested in your tags they

may also bookmark your bookmarks. On a story site like Digg

you will submit a story and voters will vote and rate the

story.

The important thing with web sites like these is to create

valuable content that people will want to link to. On a web

site like Digg you can get your story on the home page if

more than fifty people vote for your story within twenty

four hours. Here are some tips that you can follow to help

get you on the home page of Digg. You need to have an

attention grabbing description and title. You also need to

create valuable content that is current. Old stories

generally do not have any appeal unless you have a unique

twist to them.

If you use social bookmarking sites and story sites

correctly you can get a lot of free traffic within a couple

of days. This is actually more viral and powerful than

traditional marketing and you get thousands of visitors.

8 Key Ways to Social Bookmarking

Choose a network - Select a social bookmarking network. Select it carefully after proper research. A popular social bookmarking network will be better for you. You will have more visitors to your pages in such networks.

Sign up - Join he selected social bookmarking network. Sign up for it and use its benefits. See the rules and follow them to avoid any future problem.

Start tagging - Tagging will help you to provide the network with useful information. Start tagging the websites you visit. This will make you popular and known in the network.

Add social bookmarking links to your website - Add social book marking to your site to get visitors to those social bookmarking sites. Also reciprocal links to your website from those social bookmarking site to your website will help you in getting traffic.

Make it popular - Make your social bookmarking site popular among the readers. Bookmark important and interesting information and allow readers to use them. The more useful you are the more popular you will be.

Make it a search engine - Social bookmarking pages and sites can work as search engines. They work better than a web spider in getting the effective and specific information.

Submit your site to social bookmarks - Submit your social bookmarking site to social bookmarks. This will help you to get more visitors to your bookmark site.

Help your visitors to repeat visit - Help your visitors to come back again to your social bookmarking site. Allow them to bookmark your site. Bookmarking will help them to visit you again.