Independent Digital

Social Bookmarking Traffic Results
By Allan Burns

The results of the social bookmarking experiment I have been carrying out are materialising. There have been some surprising results and some results that have restored my faith in the browsing public. I have been pondering whether or not to release the results as I do not want the spammers to tarnish something that is still relatively pure. But as you can see I finally decided to go ahead and publish.

I have mentioned before that I have been looking at social bookmarking as a way to drive traffic to websites. The idea behind social bookmarking is that you share your favourite bookmarks with others, the idea being that if you found these links useful then others might too. Some social bookmarking sites also allow visitors to rate the usefulness of your bookmarks, this allows the truly useful bookmarks to become the most popular. So in theory spam should be removed by natural selection.
To carry out my experiment I created three articles. Two of these articles were good well researched pieces, whilst the third was self promotional spam, but not too obvious. I posted these articles to twelve social bookmarking sites and then waited for the results. The results were to be measurable traffic to one of my sites.

It was a week ago I started posting the articles so I am still measuring the results but I am able to give you the results as they all point to one conclusion. That conclusion is that social bookmarking to generate traffic does work as long as you are providing genuine, useful, good quality material. If you post self promotional spam no one will read it and it will disappear into the ether where all spam belongs.

Of the twelve sites I posted to the best performing in terms of traffic was Digg. Over a period of several days my site received hundreds of visitors from the good articles and less than a handful for the spam article I posted. Of the other social bookmarking sites the traffic was minimal, even the famous del.icio.us only managed to send a dozen visitors which I was quite surprised at.

The results seem to conclude that Digg is the out and out performer followed a long way behind by del.icio.us and squik. As yet I have had no traffic from the others, that?s not to say that they are not worthwhile as some of the sites were very new. I am going to continue to experiment and will bring you more results as they come in.

Finally I would like to say a big thank you to the guys at Digg for producing such a great site. Not only for the traffic that it produces but for also providing lots of really useful bookmarks. My only criticism is the lack of categories which means that some suggestions are not always well matched although there is a search facility.

Allan is the webmaster at http://www.blogtonomy.com/ where I will show you how to gain traffic to your site.

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Choosing your primary keywords may be one of the most difficult parts of good SEO. It is also, however, one of the most important. When you begin optimizing your website for search engines, you will need to choose one primary keyword or keyword phrase, and four to six secondary keywords.

These keywords are going to be essential later on. You won’t just use them for a single page on your website. Instead, they should feature prominently on each page of your website, in any website-related blogs, in any website-related newsletters, and in any website-related press releases. SEO goes beyond just a website.

With that in mind, look for keywords that will stand the test of time. Avoid keywords that are too general; you want targeted keywords for targeted traffic. But don’t swerve to the opposite extreme; a keyword is no good if it’s something so specific that no one would ever search for it.

Your secondary keywords can be a little more flexible than your primary keyword or keyword phrase. Pick the words people are most likely to use when searching for your product or information. You should ideally have between four and six secondary keywords, but if necessary, pick as many as ten. Don’t go above ten, as too many keywords end up diluting the importance of any of your keywords.

Look for a blend of general and specific secondary keywords. Better yet, make one or two of them keyphrases, such as “handcrafted knit scarves” that blend the specifics of the three words together with the generalness of each individual word.

Once you have your keywords, don’t limit them to just your website. Use your primary keyword phrase every time you link to your website, in blogs, in newsletters, and in RSS feeds. Don’t overlook relevant forum signatures! The right keywords, used in the right way, can be invaluable.

About the Author: For more information visit Orange County Website Design Search Engine Optimization Orange County SEO Simplifying The WEB

Keywords play a great role in how popular (or unpopular) your website is in the internet. Here are three steps for using and picking keywords for internet marketing purposes.

Your website traffic is your business? lifeblood. It is therefore of great importance that you employ all possible measures in order to increase your website traffic. One way to increase traffic is through search engine optimization or SEO.

The key to SEO is to select the right keywords that would drive targeted traffic to your website. The idea is to get visitors who are more likely to be persuaded to become your customers. Therefore, it is very important that you find the right keywords in order to get your target or your niche market.

Search engines are practically driven by millions of keywords, so there is a great need for you to find only the relevant keywords that you would need to make your site relevant to your intended audience. Here are some important points that you have to consider in determining the keywords that would get you noticed by your niche market.

Step 1: Study the competition

Is there a room for more? There is a need for you determine if your niche has a room for another competitor and another website. A particular niche may be saturated with too many websites and businesses endorsing their products that, inadvertently, you would always rank poorly in search engines queries.

Studying your competition and your niche size is very important in order to find the right keywords. Unless you are running a well-established website or blog, you should avoid keywords with high rate of search. Most likely, these keywords are used by a great number of your competitors. It will be very difficult for you to rank high in search results.

You should, therefore, carefully examine and study your keywords before anything else. This is very important because your keywords would determine your success in your marketing campaign.

If you find that your niche is indeed saturated, your option is to use more specific keywords. You must avoid general keywords, and instead, break the general keywords down. The goal is to choose keywords that have a minimal amount of competition.

Step 2: Research your keywords

Determine the characteristics of your keywords for your niche. The goal is to find the most pertinent keywords ? pertinent to your business and your niche. This is extremely important in order to get your target market.

If your keywords are relevant to your market, chances are high that by optimizing your site for these keywords (through SEO), your niche will find your website and search engines will credit your website with higher ranking.

However, let me reiterate once more that it is also important that you find keywords that are innovative and unique, which would make your website stand out from all other similar websites.

Step 3: Take time in selecting your keywords

Your keywords are crucial to the success of your website. You should take time to consider and select the keywords that you should use in order to optimize for the search engines.

Check and test keywords using search engines. Google?s keyword tool is particularly helpful in checking out the competition for keywords. You will get an idea on what keywords are oversaturated, and what keywords will possibly help your website stand out and rank higher in search engine queries.

About the Author: David Bain is the founder of the free report “Top 10 Search Engine Optimization Mistakes“. Visit http://www.Top10SEOMistakes.com to download the report today.

by Michael Laleye

There are as many ways as there are ideas to get visitors to come to your internet business blog. In this article we’ll focus on social bookmarking and news websites. Let’s look at 3 and see how they work.

OnlyWire.com
By definition OnlyWire is a social bookmarking service that allows you to submit your articles or blog posts to many social bookmarking websites at once. Social bookmarking allows internet users to classify pages they would like to bookmark with tags instead of keeping them in a bookmark folder on their computer. These bookmarks can then be shared by all online users of the social bookmarking website. The theory behind social bookmarking websites is that if you find something interesting or useful on the web then the odds are high that someone else using the bookmarking website will find it interesting as well.

Social bookmarking websites are very popular with the major search engines, so if your blog posts can be found on these social bookmarking sites they will be noticed by the search engines as well. Additionally, as people bookmark resources that they find useful, resources that are of more use are bookmarked by more users. Thus, such a system will “rank” a resource based on its perceived utility. This is arguably a more useful way to get information than other systems which rank resources based on the number of external links pointing to it.

When you create an account with OnlyWire you’ll be initially asked to sign up for all of the bookmarking sites that OnlyWire will submit your blog posts to. This initial effort will allow OnlyWire to bookmark you blogs on 10 or more social bookmarking sites all from a button installed on your browser’s tool bar. Once you set up your account and are ready to submit a post you’ll simply need to enter the title of the post, a short description, the main keywords that describe your post(tags), and the category that it fits. Over time you will find more and more of your posts ranking in the search engines.

Stumbleupon.com
StumbleUpon works on the same premise as OnlyWire and is also assigned a button on your browsers tool bar for when you are ready to submit your content. The difference with OnlyWire is that there is also a community component so you can add friends to your account and let them see what you’ve been bookmarking and vice versa. You can form networks of people with similar bookmarking interest, and vote on sites that have been bookmarked.

Digg.com
Submitting your blog posts to Digg.com is a great and fast way for quality traffic. Digg was create for people to share content from anywhere on the web. You can create an account to submit your posts which are then read and rated by it’s users. By submitting informative and helpful items you can create popularity and be promoted to the front page. This can create a stream of traffic that lasts a long time and potentially cause your blog to be seen my millions of users. Another advantage of Digg is that all information is equal when it is submitted and only becomes ranked higher by the people who vote for it. If you have a way of tracking the traffic to your blog you will notice visitors from Digg after every submission from people across the globe.

As you can see, there are many ways to get free traffic to your internet business blog. These methods don’t take much time at all and can have a long lasting effect on your blog traffic. Social bookmarking websites are also significant to the search engines which is where most websites and blog traffic comes from. Becoming consistent at using these sites every time you make a new post is the technique will work to get some good traffic to your internet business blog.

Michael Laleye Is A Plug In Profit Site Member As Well As An Authority On Developing Home Based Internet Businesses. Get more Information On How To Build Your Own Internet Home Business. For Internet Business Opportunities To Make Money Online, Visit: http://www.MyAffiliateStarter.com

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by Bruce Swedal

The main benefits you receive when submitting your website to Quality Directories for review are traffic from the directory and a back link that will help your website rank higher in relevant search results. The general rule is that the more quality and relevant links you have, the higher you will climb in search engine results for relevant searches.

The first thing that you need to do prior to submitting your website for review in Quality Directories is to create the submission information. That means anchor text, keywords and site description.

The anchor text that you choose should contain varied keywords that you are targeting to increase search engine rankings with. Come up with many variations of anchor text to be used for different submissions. The text should be relevant to the site and not be too long or it may be considered keyword stuffing and be declined or altered by the Directory.

Your site description should be anywhere from 150 - 450 characters long. Do not use hype or make it sound like an advertisement. Just make it a nice description of your site. Make sure that you use proper grammar when writing it.

For keywords take five of the most important keywords you are targeting and place them here separated by a comma. Some directories may not provide a space for this and whether they do or not is really not all that important.

Article directories can also benefit your directory with link building. Some article directories will allow up to3 hyper links back to your site from the resource box from every article you submit. Often they will also allow for deep linking to pages within your site. The article itself will create content for the back link that is relevant to your website.

There are a few guidelines that you should follow when submitting articles to article directories. First just make sure your article is not already published there. Then make sure there are no spelling or grammatical errors in your article. Fill out all the fields for the article submission when you submit it and select the most relevant category for your articles content.

By using these tips for submission you should be able to use these methods successfully for your link building campaign. They can guide you in the process to increase your acceptance rate with directory and article submissions. As your submissions to quality directories and article websites are accepted, indexed and your link count rises you will see that your search engine results are going to rise proportionally.

Link building is not a quick process, but a prolonged and ongoing process. By staying on task you will be able to attain your goals with a consistent, hard approach.

Visit the Authority Web Directory to increase your websites online marketing presence. Plus, you can read more industry information at the Authority Blog.

Article Source: Articlecrazy.com Free Content

By John Marchle

Generating website traffic and increasing website page rank can lead to big business. The uses of social bookmarking are becoming increasingly popular to aid in this task. The two web applications that are the most used at the present moment are digg.com and del.icio.us.com.

Social Bookmarking

Generating website traffic and increasing website page rank can lead to big business. The uses of social bookmarking are becoming increasingly popular to aid in this task. The two web applications that are the most used at the present moment are digg.com and del.icio.us.com. Both of the sites use the same concept of centralized bookmark management. Lately the main debate seems to be which of the web applications delivers the right type of traffic, which has proven to be the key to a successful blog site. Although Digg and Del.icio.us are similar in many ways they go about presenting the information in a slightly different fashion.

Often referred to as a collection of favorites, del.icio.us is very user friendly and represents simplicity at its best. Basically, del.icio.us is designed to allow you to store and share bookmarks on the web, instead of your browser. The user has the ability to add any favored article as a bookmark to their del.icio.us account, which allows them to access the same bookmarks from anywhere. The website follows a simple to use structure. When many people bookmark the same article, the article makes it to the popular page for millions of viewers to see.

Digg This

On the other hand Digg.com is more of a digital media democracy that places an emphasis on technology and science articles. When an article is submitted to dig.com, other people read the submission and digg what they like the best. Once the article receives enough “diggs”, it appears on digg’s front page which is similar to del.icio.us’s popular page. If the story does not receive enough diggs, or if enough users report a problem with the submission, the story will remain in the .digg all. area, where it will eventually removed. If the article is lame or form of spam, the reader has the chance to bury the article. Digg and del.icio.us are full of interesting material and offer many different dimensions of content available. Both sites can be very beneficial in helping businesses promote themselves through social bookmarking. The key to generating more traffic from digg and del.icio.us is to concentrate on delivering truly useful resources to the readers. If the people value the information in your article, they will be more likely to bookmark or digg what you have to say.

If you’d like more information about this topic, or to schedule an interview with WEB-OP, please call at 480/370-4321 Link Building Services

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By Anthony Gregory

One of the newest places to submit articles that you have written is Digg. This is a huge social network whose readers actually despise anything that looks like marketing. You probably won?t last two minutes on this site, which has a ?burial? feature that kicks overt displays of advertising right off the sight. However if you are very clever about the way you position yourself on Digg you can use it as a marketing tool to bring more visitors to your site and that may mean potential link partners and advertisers. If you are successful at posting writing on Digg then you will likely experience a ton of traffic being brought to your site.

Digg is all about user powered content. Everything is submitted and voted on by the digg community. After you submit content, other people read your submission and Digg what they like best. If your story is popular and receives enough Digg vote, it is promoted to the front page for the millions of visitors to see. So how can you turn this into an SEO tool?

The first challenge is to get people to give a Digg vote to your posting. This means having an article on the top page or linking to someone who has a story on the top page. However even after you manage that you need to have a fantastic title and summary or the savvy, marketing hating readers on Digg may not even glance at any URL that is attached.

The main way that Digg can be part of a good SEO strategy is in driving a lot of traffic to your site quickly by getting in the top ten read articles on the first page of the site. This creates the kind of buzz and credibility for your site that just cannot be bought using keyword articles only.

Anthony Gregory is a SEO and Website Marketer. He can be contacted at: Sales (at) Brilliantseo.com

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Biodiesel
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By M. Jones

1. No matter how many times you blog it, Digg is not a fair democracy. Bigger sites, that already have more visitors and who post a ‘Digg’ icon after a post will get far more votes than a site of lesser traffic. Their story also carries more weight and people are more likely to vote it up like sheep anyway. It is a popularity contest.

2. People are being banned left right and centre for pedantic little reasons, e.g.DotmySpot.

3. You get next to no benefit of submitting someone else?s article.

4. Traffic is good, but Digg traffic often crashes the site or sends the bandwidth bill through the roof (not on blogger blog as they are free). I am not offering possible solutions, just highlighting the problems.

5. You cannot prevent an article of yours being submitted by someone else. This wouldn?t usually matter, but if you wrote an article a year ago which is now out of date, and someone just submitted it, you would look like a damn fool.

6. There are arguably better sites for the same job - I wont mention examples because I don’t want to start a war between them?

7. Digg traffic rarely clicks on ads, and so does not equal advertising dollars.

8. Many of the posts are totally off topic of Digg. This wouldn?t be so bad but some actually make it to the front page!

9. You can’t Digg an article without logging in.

10. “Digg may remove any Content and Digg accounts at any time for any reason (including, but not limited to, upon receipt of claims or allegations from third parties or authorities relating to such Content), or for no reason at all.” For no reasons at all!? What?s all that about!

Visit my blog at http://matt608.blogspot.com (Successful Online Money Making !) for advice down to earth advice about making money online, especially from blogging.

Matt Jones

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By Jimmy Mcgrath

I know a lot of bloggers around the world seem to think technorati is one of the top or if not the top blogging tool for exposure, but to me it seems like a mostly one sided affair.

Technorati get much more out of your service than you do out of theirs, for example if you use their in-text keyword or linking service - How exactly does this benefit you? To my knowledge few people use technorati as a search engine to actually find blogs or content. It now seems to be dominated by webmasters rather than users. It?s rather the case that people are referred TO technorati from people who use their tools and then those people find other blogs than people going to technorati first hand to find content and blogs.

It could be more of a traffic losing tool than a traffic promoter. Sure you will be listed on their database and keywords will be stored - Wow! that?s it? The probability that you will get traffic from them is very low. The probability that you will send them traffic is very high (especially if you use keywording).

As for SEO I doubt technorati adds anything to your sites popularity, indexing returns nothing on google and other top search engines.

So why do people continue to use what seems like a ?one way? service. I?m afraid the ?name factor? is in effect once again. Similar to other social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us, simpy, flurl etc, submitting to these sites is not likely to bring you any traffic and do very little for your websites popularity. The fact is you are doing more for them than they are doing for you. Digg is the exception where their indexing system seems to be much better for search engines and this could do some good, or over-exposure, bad, for your sites popularity.

So why do people continue to submit to these sites? Because everybody else does, it seems. What I like to call a ?web trend myth?, where a service is so hyped and well known (hence the ?name factor?) that bloggers and webmasters think that the service must do something good for their website whereas in reality webmasters and bloggers are doing more for the ?myth? sites.

Jimmy McGrath of Affiliate Programs Cash has been an Internet marketer / advertiser for the last 5 years, working for various companies and now freelance. In the last year he has been researching the advertising and marketing strategies of internet entrepreneurs. He is also a cross-culture educational expert and has lectured at several universities across Canada and the USA.

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