For very new sites, an extensive bookmarking campaign is also a secondary route into the search engine indexes. Again, there are similarities with link function as a bookmark paves the way for search engine spiders to enter into a site they have not previously indexed.
With the more bookmarks you can collect seemingly having a direct impact on the perceived quality of the site in the eyes of the search engines, consider adding these bookmarking tools to your marketing mix…
1. Blinklist: ‘Blink’ your favorite sites and create your own ‘blinklist’. This mini site collates all of your favorite online destinations with simple tools to sort, describe and search through saved sites. Participate in the online community to establish not just your site but other web properties such as your company pod casts, videos and blogs as respected resources.
2. Faves (formerly Blue Dot): Save web pages, multimedia content and news items and share with the wider community. As seen in Information Week, The Wall Street Journal and The Observer. The Active Topic Groups tool is a great barometer of current interest and can be used as an indicator of the kinds of pages you should be bookmarking on your own site to draw the most interested traffic.
3. ClipClip: Cut, copy and paste the best bits of the web. Great for sharing multimedia content such as images and video. Pitched as an online scrap book, this is a unique take on bookmarking and a great tool if you have a particularly visual product.
4. CiteuLink: Academic in nature, use this bookmark facility to store white papers. If your company commissions research or surveys, CiteuLike can be used to share the findings with like minded individuals and built a cerebral buzz.
5. ClaimID: Every thought your true persona has somehow been missed by the world at large? This site allows you to manage your online identity or that of your business by collecting together any web page that mentions your name in one central spot.
6. Content Pop: A collection of online communities created and voted on by users. Can be used to position your product offerings within niche interest groups.
7. De.liro.us: Cutting the web down to size this bookmarking site is part of a larger effort to create a local search engine for every US zip code. Great for particularly localized offerings such as coffee shops, bars and restaurants.
8. Delicious: one of the original bookmarking sites and still one of the best. Owned by Yahoo this is essential link fodder for any business. Allows you to categorize and share web pages across any number of interest categories. Many sites have reported increased search engine rankings and huge leaps in traffic as a result of considered Delicious use. Keep in mind good practice tagging and descriptions for the best results.
9. Diigo: Acting as a virtual highlighter, this site acts as both a research tool and knowledge sharing community. Again, this is particularly appropriate for those businesses with factual knowledge to share.
10. Digg: A hugely powerful tool with massive traffic driving capabilities. Most suited to technology related sites and stories.
11. Folkd: Website and browser extension tool billed as a social web service to enrich your surf experience. Pulls together recommendations, observations, tags and comments and connects them to web pages and topics. Use with individual web pages, news items, videos and blogs.
12. Furl: Extremely popular site capable of driving a lot of organic traffic through its hot topic picks. Has many uses with bookmarks organized into lists. Great for comparison shopping.
13. GetBoo: An open source social and private bookmarking project.
14. ListerLister: A social list building community where you can create, add to, and vote for both lists and the items added to them. Uses collective intelligence of members to share favorite products, places and pages.
15. Mister Wong: With portals in six languages and more than 4 million visitors per month, Mister Wong knows a thing or two about social bookmarking. Organized into sections like ‘video’, ‘art’ and ‘business’.
16. Mixx: Mixx your own web blend with this increasingly powerful bookmarking site. News, Business and Local categories can be used to drive traffic to your site.
17. Multiply: Over 11 million people are members of this social bookmarking site which calls itself secure and family friendly. Share all manner of media via personalized web pages.
18. Netvouz: Public and private bookmarks following a tried and tested formula with favorites organized into folders and tagged by keyword.
19. PlugIM: A user driven internet marketing community. Submit content, share articles, comment on projects and promote your favorites to the front page.
20. Simpy: Social bookmarking service that lets you save, tag, search and share your bookmarks, notes, groups.
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Kids in High School are making thousands of dollars a month with Adsense... Housewives, Retiree's, Mom and Pop's who've never made a dime on the Internet have created full time incomes by simply placing AdSense Ads on their web site or blog.
Then you have the "Super AdSense" earners. We have all heard of them... the Elite few who are on track to make half a million dollars a year or more promoting AdSense sites.
Do not be mistaken though... these people are not building like your Mom and Pop's do. They have systems in place that create sites for them... people who build sites for them... they have outsourced and automated many of the tedious tasks such as posting to blogs and searching for keywords.
While most people cannot emulate everything these Super AdSense earners do... many of them you can.
Here are 7 Required Steps you can implement today to copy their success.
1) Starting today... treat your AdSense business like it is a REAL business and track what you do.
Begin tracking what you are doing that works... as well as what you are doing that does not work. This will keep you from making the same mistakes over and over, and you can repeat the steps that have worked in the past. As simple as this step seems... most people do not know the reason(s) to their success or failure.
2) Utilize the latest tools and software available.
The Super AdSense earners are not any smarter than your average person. I know many people think they are... but for the most part, they are regular non techie people.
They are smarter in one respect though... they use the latest tools available to them to automate most of the tasks involved with researching and creating sites. They use the latest keyword, site creation and search engine optimization tools available. The tools they use are their secret weapons.
3) Quit chasing the Mega Dollar keywords.
You cannot compete with the search engine experts who create sites for the $80 payout keywords. You may get lucky every now and then... but in the long run, you are better off building sites for the low to mid range payout keywords. The competition is less, and your chance of success is much higher over the long term.
4) Choose broad niches and break it down.
Choose a broad subject as your main theme (lets use computers for an example). From there... break it down into as many sub niches as possible.
Using Computers as the example... you could build sub niches/sites like laptop computers, computer hard drives, computer keyboards, etc, etc. You could literally build hundreds of sites around one major theme and stay totally focused. Once you have exhausted every possible sub niche of that major theme... choose another main theme and repeat the process.
5) KISS
Keep your sites easy to navigate and forget the fancy graphics that distract your visitors attention. Unless you are just building AdSense sites for the fun of it and to impress your friends... the purpose of having the site is to have people click on one of the ads, right? Then keep the site layout simple... dump the scrolling banners, dancing chickens and colored scroll bars... they are distractions.
6) What is the purpose of your web site?
Your web site cannot be everything to everybody. If you have a full fledged ecommerce site, with products for sale... links to other products, it is not a good site for AdSense. If the primary focus of the site is to sell products... let it do that.
Do not distract or confuse your visitor with to many options or choices. The best AdSense sites are AdSense only content sites that sell nothing. They are sites that "Tell"... not "Sell."
7) Be consistent.
This is not one of those deals where you build one site and you are done. Refer back to Step #4. You must continuously build in order to be successful.
Think of it as planting a crop that you will harvest in a month or two, and the sites you build are seeds. Once the seeds have grown and matured... you will reap the harvest. The more seeds you plant... the larger the harvest.
To sum it up... utilize the tools available to automate as much of the process of building sites - doing research and building keyword lists as you can. This alone will help keep you organized and on track. Be consistent in building... treat it like the business it is and you will reap the rewards of your harvest.
Andrew Daum is the Publisher of the New Traffic Tools Newsletter. You can subscribe by visiting his web site at; http://www.newtraffictools.com and receive updates when the latest to be released traffic building software is available.
SEO is an acronym for "search engine optimization" or "search engine optimizer." Deciding to hire an SEO is a big decision that can potentially improve your site and save time, but you can also risk damage to your site and reputation. Make sure to research the potential advantages as well as the damage that an irresponsible SEO can do to your site. Many SEOs and other agencies and consultants provide useful services for website owners, including:
- Review of your site content or structure
- Technical advice on website development: for example, hosting, redirects, error pages, use of JavaScript
- Content development
- Management of online business development campaigns
- Keyword research
- SEO training
- Expertise in specific markets and geographies.
Keep in mind that the Google search results page includes organic search results and often paid advertisement (denoted by the heading "Sponsored Links") as well. Advertising with Google won't have any effect on your site's presence in our search results. Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in our search results, and it costs nothing to appear in our organic search results. Free resources such as Webmaster Tools, the official Webmaster Central blog, and our discussion forum can provide you with a great deal of information about how to optimize your site for organic search. Many of these free sources, as well as information on paid search, can be found on Google Webmaster Central.
Before beginning your search for an SEO, it's a great idea to become an educated consumer and get familiar with how search engines work. We recommend starting here:
If you're thinking about hiring an SEO, the earlier the better. A great time to hire is when you're considering a site redesign, or planning to launch a new site. That way, you and your SEO can ensure that your site is designed to be search engine-friendly from the bottom up. However, a good SEO can also help improve an existing site.
Some useful questions to ask an SEO include:
- Can you show me examples of your previous work and share some success stories?
- Do you follow the Google Webmaster Guidelines?
- Do you offer any online marketing services or advice to complement your organic search business?
- What kind of results do you expect to see, and in what timeframe? How do you measure your success?
- What's your experience in my industry?
- What's your experience in my country/city?
- What's your experience developing international sites?
- What are your most important SEO techniques?
- How long have you been in business?
- How can I expect to communicate with you? Will you share with me all the changes you make to my site, and provide detailed information about your recommendations and the reasoning behind them?
While SEOs can provide clients with valuable services, some unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to manipulate search engine results in unfair ways. Practices that violate our guidelines may result in a negative adjustment of your site's presence in Google, or even the removal of your site from our index. Here are some things to consider:
- Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue.
Amazingly, we get these spam emails too:
"Dear google.com,
I visited your website and noticed that you are not listed in most of the major search engines and directories..."Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for "burn fat at night" diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators.
- No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.
Beware of SEOs that claim to guarantee rankings, allege a "special relationship" with Google, or advertise a "priority submit" to Google. There is no priority submit for Google. In fact, the only way to submit a site to Google directly is through our Add URL page or by submitting a Sitemap and you can do this yourself at no cost whatsoever.
- Be careful if a company is secretive or won't clearly explain what they intend to do.
Ask for explanations if something is unclear. If an SEO creates deceptive or misleading content on your behalf, such as doorway pages or "throwaway" domains, your site could be removed entirely from Google's index. Ultimately, you are responsible for the actions of any companies you hire, so it's best to be sure you know exactly how they intend to "help" you.
- You should never have to link to an SEO.
Avoid SEOs that talk about the power of "free-for-all" links, link popularity schemes, or submitting your site to thousands of search engines. These are typically useless exercises that don't affect your ranking in the results of the major search engines -- at least, not in a way you would likely consider to be positive.
- Choose wisely.
While you consider whether to go with an SEO, you may want to do some research on the industry. Google is one way to do that, of course. You might also seek out a few of the cautionary tales that have appeared in the press, including this article on one particularly aggressive SEO: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2002002970_nwbizbriefs12.html. While Google doesn't comment on specific companies, we've encountered firms calling themselves SEOs who follow practices that are clearly beyond the pale of accepted business behavior. Be careful.
- Be sure to understand where the money goes.
While Google never sells better ranking in our search results, several other search engines combine pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results with their regular web search results. Some SEOs will promise to rank you highly in search engines, but place you in the advertising section rather than in the search results. A few SEOs will even change their bid prices in real time to create the illusion that they "control" other search engines and can place themselves in the slot of their choice. This scam doesn't work with Google because our advertising is clearly labeled and separated from our search results, but be sure to ask any SEO you're considering which fees go toward permanent inclusion and which apply toward temporary advertising.
- What are the most common abuses a website owner is likely to encounter?
- What are some other things to look out for?
- owns shadow domains
- puts links to their other clients on doorway pages
- offers to sell keywords in the address bar
- doesn't distinguish between actual search results and ads that appear on search results pages
- guarantees ranking, but only on obscure, long keyword phrases you would get anyway
- operates with multiple aliases or falsified WHOIS info
- gets traffic from "fake" search engines, spyware, or scumware
- has had domains removed from Google's index or is not itself listed in Google
- requests your FTP account information or root access to your server
One common scam is the creation of "shadow" domains that funnel users to a site by using deceptive redirects. These shadow domains often will be owned by the SEO who claims to be working on a client's behalf. However, if the relationship sours, the SEO may point the domain to a different site, or even to a competitor's domain. If that happens, the client has paid to develop a competing site owned entirely by the SEO.
Another illicit practice is to place "doorway" pages loaded with keywords on the client's site somewhere. The SEO promises this will make the page more relevant for more queries. This is inherently false since individual pages are rarely relevant for a wide range of keywords. More insidious, however, is that these doorway pages often contain hidden links to the SEO's other clients as well. Such doorway pages drain away the link popularity of a site and route it to the SEO and its other clients, which may include sites with unsavory or illegal content.
There are a few warning signs that you may be dealing with a rogue SEO. It's far from a comprehensive list, so if you have any doubts, you should trust your instincts. By all means, feel free to walk away if the SEO:
If you feel that you were deceived by an SEO in some way, you may want to report it.
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) handles complaints about deceptive or unfair business practices. To file a complaint, visit: http://www.ftc.gov/ and click on "File a Complaint Online," call 1-877-FTC-HELP, or write to:
Federal Trade Commission
CRC-240
Washington, D.C. 20580
If your complaint is against a company in a country other than the United States, please file it at http://www.econsumer.gov/.
