FreshWebz Web Design & Affiliate Marketing Blog

I’ve recently started using a social bookmarking service & judging by the number of Google Link Alerts I’ve started receiving, it looks like the inbound links are already building rapidly!

Rather than spending ages bookmarking key pages in maybe 10 to 20 social bookmarking sites (& spending hours on it), this service promises to do it quickly & easily, on over 300 social bookmarking sites and at a very low cost! At just 19 cents a submission, with a compensation system built in for submission failures!

It’s a simple 1 minute process; all you need to do after signing up is login to your account and enter the url of the webpage you wish to submit; their system then automatically fetches the required data from the said page (or you can enter the information yourself) and you just need to choose your submission options and make a payment. It’s that simple!

Benefits of Social Bookmarking

• Increased Traffic – As more and more people read your bookmarked blog post/web article and vote for it, the more popular it becomes & the traffic to your site increases.

• Increased Visibility & Branding – Submitting to Social Bookmarking Sites puts your blog/website out there in front of millions of people, increasing your visibility ten notches and getting you more branding.

• Get more Links – Each of these Popular Social Bookmarking Sites see tremendous volumes of traffic on a daily basis, if your blog/website has good content on it, chances are that several of these users will link to your content, thus getting you relevant links which will ultimately lead to an increase in your Rankings in the Search Engines.

Some of the Exciting Features

• Save your Precious Time – Social Bookmarking can really be a time-consuming process with you being required to create an account in each site before submitting your page to them manually. We have made things easy for you, just sign up, enter the page you wish to submit and we do the rest for you, saving you plenty of time in the process.

• Flexible ordering options:

- Submit to the entire list
- Submit to a specific number of sites
- Submit to your saved favourites

• Live Reports to help you track what exactly is being done. The report includes the links to the exact page on the site where you can find your listing.

• Place orders from as little as $5

• Tremendous value for money, at just 19 cents a submission combined with our rewards program, we not only are the cheapest in the business, we also offer you tremendous value for your money.

1. What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking can very simply be explained as a method where internet users can store, organize and manage their bookmarks (sites of their interest) on a public bookmarking site instead of their computers. Not only that, they can also share their bookmarks with their friends or a network of people. Social bookmarking makes the task of saving sites for future reference much easier and more accessible.

2. Advantages of Social Bookmarking

The main advantage of bookmarking a site is the Increase in Traffic. Social Bookmarking sites are used by millions of people around the world and by bookmarking your sites/your blog posts with them, you automatically get access to the large volume of traffic coming to these sites. All you need to do is have your pages bookmarked with the various Social Bookmarking sites and if the content is good then people will surely save and share it with others. As your bookmark is tagged by others or as more people vote, its popularity rises and it moves to the front pages of the category or site. This leads to an increase in traffic.

3. Are these submissions made manually or through an automated process?

All the submissions are made manually by our highly-trained team of submitters. Prior to beginning the order, each site undergoes a review process. In this step our editors check the details of the submitted webpage to make sure they are free from any sort of errors and also write instructions for our submitters to follow while making the submissions to the Bookmarking sites.

4. How do I check where my site has been submitted, do I get a report?

Yes, you are provided with a detailed report on your submissions, which shows you the details of the submissions made along with a link of the final bookmarked url. You are also given an option to download this Report onto an Excel Spreadsheet.

5. How would I know if my bookmark has become popular?

The popularity of a bookmark is determined by the number of users that have bookmarked a link publicly. Next to each bookmark, you will see a number which shows how many people have saved it, shared it or voted for it. If the number is high then it indicates that the your web-page has become popular.

Use the keyword phrase in your title tag

The title tag is one of the most important tags on your Web page. And placing your keyword phrase in the title tag, preferably at the beginning, is very important to get that phrase into the search engines. Plus, that puts your keyword phrase as the link in the search engine index.

Get a domain with your keyword phrase

Putting your keyword phrase in your domain name is a great way to optimize for that phrase so use the keyword phrase in your URL.

Even if you can’t get your keywords into your domain name, you can put them into your URL’s. Search engines read the URL’s and assign value to the text they find there.

Use your keyword phrase a lot, but not too much

The ratio of your keywords to the rest of the text on your page is called the keyword density. It’s important to repeat your keywords in your document, but not too much. Keyword density should be between 3 and 7% for your primary keyword phrase and 1-2% for any secondary keywords or keyword phrases.

It’s easy for everyone to get caught up in obsessing about how to optimise your site & build links for Google, when trying to market through search. That’s certainly a wise thing to do, considering Google totally dominates the search market. But, there are still other search engines that some people are using, so it is wise to make sure your site is performing to the best of its ability in those too!

Obviously the other two engines are Yahoo and Bing and whilst Yahoo is seemingly declining fast, Bing is actually gaining a market share. Furthermore, if the deal between Microsoft and Yahoo goes through, Bing search will be talking over Yahoo anyway. With the muscle of Microsoft behind Bing, you can be sure the search engine won’t be prepared to play second fiddle to Google for long!

However, unlike Google, we don’t hear much about what Bing wants out of a site for decent rankings, but Rick DeJarnette of Bing Webmaster Center has shared some dos and don’ts of link-building for Bing. Not surprisingly, a lot of his advice for complying with Bing’s policies, does not differ too much from the advice that Google would give you. It is however, still always nice to hear what they think, just to clear up any possible confusion.

Like Google, Bing places great emphasis on quality links to determine its rankings. “Just don’t make the mistake of believing it will result in instant gratification. Successful link building efforts require a long-term commitment, not an overnight or turnkey solution,” says DeJarnette. “You need to continually invest in link building efforts with creativity and time.”

What You Should Do!

DeJarnette shared some tips for getting more quality links. The following are Bing’s tips for effective link building (paraphrased):

What You Should Not Do!

DeJarnette shared a list of things that you should avoid in your link building efforts, if it is a good Bing ranking that you are after. Here is what Bing says will get your site reviewed more closely by staff:

“When probable manipulation is detected, a spam rank factor is applied to a site, depending upon the type and severity of the infraction,” says DeJarnette. “If the spam rating is high, a site can be penalised with a lowered rank. If the violations are egregious, a site can be temporarily or even permanently purged from the index.”

Most of the stuff DeJarnette shared is nothing any experienced search marketer is not already aware of, but it can be quite helpful when a search engine itself lays out what to do and not to do, to help webmasters get better rankings.

Why not use one of our link building or Bing Ranking Boost packages to get guaranteed links for your site.

I still hear a number of people talking about page rank, page rank, page rank, when discussing whether their website is doing well, or trying to assess the results of their search engine optimisation efforts. However, page rank became less relevant when Google removed PageRank values from their webmaster centre!

Here’s the statement Google made when they did it:

We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.

However, if this is Google’s position, then why bother updating their toolbar PageRank values? Doing so is only going to create a stir in the webmaster community & cause confusion as to it’s relevance. Surely it would’ve been much mbetter to remove it from both webmaster tools and the Google toolbar at the same time.

It’s also important to remember that the toolbar Page Rank values can be a couple of month’s old, so they’re out of date even after the update & therefore not really relevant to your current ranking position. The recent PageRank update has left many webmasters confused with most reporting major decreases in their website’s ranking in the search results. But if Google’s statement is to be believed, should you really be concerned about it?

If you have a search engine friendly site, the most important issue for your Google search engine rankings are quality inbound links!

Use one of our link building or Google Ranking Boost packages to get guaranteed links for your site

I wrote previously about using article submissions to increase the number of backlinks & traffic to your website.

I’ve been submitting my articles manually, to the top 10 article directories, but this process is very drawn out & complicated by the slightly different layouts & entry requirements of each directory. With thousands of directories out there, although submitting to the top 10, 20 or 30 will achieve results, it will be impossible to do many more manual submissions, which will mean you have to write significantly more articles to get more links.

I’ve been looking at the different article submission websites & software for some time & decided now was the time to take the plunge!

I’ve used Submit2Please’s Article Submission Service in the past, but the charges could be considerable if you have a number of articles to publish:

• $49.95 for 100 PR 3 and above Directories (35+ PR 4 & above Directories & 65 PR 3 Directories)
• $74.95 for 200 PR 2 and above Directories(35+ PR 4 & above Directories, 65 PR 3 Directories & 100+ PR 2 Directories)
• $99.95 for 300 Various PR Directories (35+ PR 4 & above Directories, 65 PR 3 Directories, 100+ PR 2 Directories & 100+ PR 1 & 0 Directories)
• $124.95 for 400 Various PR Directories (35+ PR 4 & above Directories, 65 PR 3 Directories, 100+ PR 2 Directories & 200+ PR 1 & 0 Directories)

Bearing in mind I currently have 7 articles to submit, this is a bit too much to pay!

So, I started to look around for services or software that promise to submit to a large number of sites at a reasonable cost, whilst making sure that the submissions are valid & not classed as spam by either the directories, or Google.

Apart from the dodgy looking article submission software packages for $37, there seems to be a consensus of opinion around the following:

• iSnare
• Article Marketing Automation
• Article Marketer
• Ultimate Article Wizard
• The Phantom Writers
  

I was drawn to Article Marketers & Ultimate Article Wizard out of these, mainly because The Phantom Writers is another pay per article plan, iSnare seems a bit too cheap (my opinion on cheap services has been clouded by my recent experiences with 1and1 & Tiscali!) & other users have suggested that AMA only gets your articles out to about 30 sites.

I was originally put off UAW as it costs $67 per month & it seems that you have to spend time using it to rewrite your articles using what is known as “spinning”. Content (article) spinning involves taking an original article and using it to generate 10’s or 100’s of new unique versions of the text & these “spun” versions of your article are submitted instead. Each of these new articles presents the same ideas and concepts as the original, but expressed in different ways. Whilst all are readable and grammatically correct, each is different from the others in terms of the words on the page and therefore unique in Google’s eyes.

The importance of “spinning” your articles will depend on whether you believe that the backlinks from duplicate articles are being disregarded by Google, when Google’s duplicate content filter is treating the article submissions as duplicate content! If this is the case, then it seems pointless to submit your articles to any more than one site for link purposes, but of course, there is the side issue 0f site traffic that your article could generate. There seems to be some debate as to whether this is the case or not, with some people saying it does & others saying it doesn’t! Here’s the part of Google’s duplicate content policy that seems to say it does!

If you believe that each time you submit your article you need to use a different title, different summary, different resource box, and different article body, then perhaps the extra cost of UAW is worth it. However, I’ve also found a free spinner system called Jetspinner that I’m signing up to, which will hopefully allow me to carry out this process for nothing. Then I can create dozens of versions of my articles & submit them to all the directories instead!

Jetspinner also advertises its own article submission service called Jet Submitter (which also costs $67 per month), but as I’ve already signed up with Article Marketer for 3 months use (cost $79.95), I’m going to have to use it for now. If I’m not happy with it, I may switch to Jet Submitter & use their combined tools, but I’ll use this time to submit as many articles as possible, on all of the topics covered by my affiliate websites & see if it makes any difference to their links & rankings!

I’ve started working on writing more articles & getting them submitted to various directories. This is a time consuming process, but appears to be one of the few effective methods of getting decent, quality links pointing to my sites.

Although this whole writing process doesn’t come naturally to me, it’s surprising how quickly I’m now reaching my 500+ word target each time. But 500+ words in themselves are not enough; ensuring that the article contains combinations of the keywords & keyphrases you want to target is vital, as this content then shows that your site is relevant to those searched for keyphrases.

But are article submissions worth the time & effort? Once registered with an article directory, manual submissions take around 10 to 15 minutes on average to login, format and submit properly. Obviously, the writing of the article is a separate issue & can take a couple of hours to research and write. However, once the article is written, it can be re-submitted to a number of directories, withi only minor adjustments.

The more directories you submit your articles to, the more exposure they will receive & more links will be detected by the search engines, but you will need to make at least 10 submissions to get a reasonable exposure for your articles, adding up to a couple of hours per article!

To make the most of my time I have to make sure that the article directories I am submitting to, are able to bring me as many visitors and backlinks as possible. I am going to try to do at least 10 manual submissions for each article, so it’s important to choose those directories wisely. The only two ratings easily available to web users to judge the quality of websites and web pages are its Alexa Rating and Google PageRank. Both are not conclusive and often do not reflect the true authority or traffic of a page. But since there is nothing better, I will stick to these two figures when deciding if a directory is worth submitting to. Of course, one must not forget the power of themed sites. If you have a choice between a general directory and a directory focusing on the article topic; it’s better to choose the latter.

The current Top 10 article directories (by Alexa Ranking and with a Page Rank of around 5/6) are shown below & these are my starting point for any article submissions:

1. ezinearticles.com
2. ArticlesBase.com
3. buzzle.com
4. helium.com
5. webpronews.com
6. goarticles.com
7. searchwarp.com
8. articledashboard.com
9. articlealley.com
10. articlesnatch.com

However, there are some restrictions placed on articles by these directories; for example, buzzle.com insists that their articles are unique & not reproduced on any other directory, so you will have to write a different article just for this site. Some, such as ArticlesBase.com may apply “nofollow” to the article links, so you won’t benefit from an inbound link.

EzineArticles.com and Buzzle.com can bring you a lot of traffic, GoArticles.com brings you backlinks, and ArticlesFactory.com PageRank. You can even earn money from your articles by publishing them on Helium!

If you don’t have the time, or are not able to write articles by yourself, there are many content providers and ghost writers who can provide articles & then other services that submit them to the directories for you. I have used some of these services myself in the past, but I think the old adage of “you get what you pay for” applies, as I have not been impressed with the cheaper offerings I have seen so far!

I am considering using some more expensive services in the near future, but the cost does vary wildly; from $5 per article (for very poor offerings), to the most recent quote I had of £100 per article!! I think something inbetween will be more in my league & will blog about any that I find particularly useful/value for money.

I’ve decided to switch supplier for my mobile phone offers website despite actually making a couple of sales through it at the start of the year.

The site appeared to be not working properly for some time; it had lost the custom text & meta-tags that I had added to the site & no responses were forthcoming when I wrote to the support team. As a result, I wasn’t sure that the site was even functioning properly & I decided to leave it whilst I worked on other projects. Going through the posts on the A4U forum, it seems a number of other people have had the same problems with non-payment & no replies to their enquiries.

I decided to send mobileshop.com an invoice for the outstanding monies & have received a reply from their accounts team to say that the money will be paid. So anyone with money due to them from this program might want to send their invoice to lisa.hartley@valuecomparison.co.uk. Value Comparison seems to be converting previously retail sites into comparison sites & would be a company I would like to deal with, if they actually answered any e-mails, or replied to postings on A4U!!

I have a broadband comparison domain that I would like to use & the laptop comparison site would also be useful, but if the company ignores its affiliates, what is the point? To be fair, my enquiries up to now have been with mobileshop.com, so maybe contact with Value Comparison directly will have a better response. Will let you know!

In the meantime, Mobiles4Me has now switched to the e2save affiliate program & I am now promoting the site again, through link building for now & possibly with a blog soon.

It’s nearly been a month since I blogged on here, mainly due to the amount of web design work I am doing.

One project is for a home security company, www.guardedhomes.co.uk, offering ipCCTV, gates, railings, shutters, safe rooms & the like, another new(ish) recruitment firm, as well as 3 home page mock-ups for another well-established recruitment company, not to mention a local escort agency!!!! On top of that, I’ve had a few other enquiries & just never seem to have the time for blogging at the moment. When I actually get paid for some of this work will be interesting though O

I’ve not been able to do much work on Cashback Shopper, or My Travel Extras recently & absolutely NONE on Love Your Pets or UK Shopping Spree & really want to redesign My Travel Extras to be less cluttered & more Web 2.0, but will have to wait for a quiet spell I guess. Once I get paid, I want to promote my dating sites a bit more I recently bought a number of new domains, but guess they will also have to go on the back burner for now: cheapcarhirealicante.com, webtraveloffers.com, travelcheapinfo.com, cheapsmallbusinessbroadband.co.uk, scifigoodies.co.uk, findmegaydates.co.uk, findmelesbiandates.co.uk, plus I wanted to try to resurrect easylolly.com for some sort of financial site.

On top of this Ei42 have just launched in the US, so I’ve been link building for www.cashbackshoppers.biz, in the hope that I can get some more interest in this, but think this is going to need some articles and forum postings to get anywhere…..I did start writing to schools asking them to consider joining as a way to raise funds for their school, but haven’t had the time to carry on.

Maybe I have my fingers in too many pies & am spreading myself a bit too thin, but we’ll see.

First, here’s something you probably already know…

Achieving top rankings in ANY search engine in 2009…Is All About Getting More Links From Other Sites.

The reason is simple: Modern search engines place a huge value on links. The more links you have and the better quality these links are, the higher you’ll rank. If a site is linking to you, they are essentially casting a vote of trust. And the more “votes” you have, the more trustworthy your site is to Google, which naturally translates into better rankings.

With today’s Google and Yahoo, it’s also the clickable part of the link (also known as “link anchor”) that counts. Meaning, if you want to rank well for a specific keyword like “blue widgets”, you need more links with “blue widgets” in their clickable part.

Now, this all is fine, but the critical question most webmasters are struggling with is:

Where Do I Get High Quality Links And How Many Do I Need Before I Rank #1 For My Keywords

The fastest and easiest way to answer this question is by analyzing a competing website in your niche that already ranks very well.

Understand this fundamental principle, and you will be smarter than 95% of webmasters out there who are forever stuck on page 27 in Google because they are walking in the dark. Do not work harder when the solution is to work smarter, and do NOT reinvent the wheel by trying to figure the whole thing out by yourself.

You see, most super-successful webmasters who profit from the search engines don’t claim to understand exactly how Google and Yahoo work. But what they do understand, is how to look at the top-ranked sites in these search engines, draw legitimate conclusions as to why they rank so well and copy the best to make their own sites succeed.

Professional Optimisation Consultants Charge Upwards Of £2,000 For This Kind Of Research!

But! SEO SpyGlass enables you to secretly (and ethically) spy on your Google and Yahoo competition and see exactly why they rank better than you. Just launch SEO SpyGlass, and in a matter of minutes you will know everything humanly possible about why ANY site ranks well.

With SEO SpyGlass, you’ll know the answers to the critical questions any webmaster wants answered:

• Where to get high-quality links to one-up the competition and rank better for my keyword searches?
• Exactly which anchor texts (the clickable part of the link) should I use to outrank my niche competition?
• How many links it’ll take to propel my site to the top of the search engines… and get a ton of laser-targeted (and free!) traffic which translates into sales?

For the advanced folks: SEO SpyGlass will reveal the entire link building strategy of your competition, and tell you exactly why they rank well in great detail. Here’s what kind of an insight scoop you can expect from SEO SpyGlass:

• The total number of backlinks your competitor has (yes, today’s search engines place huge value on links.)
• The Google PageRank of every backlink (see how important these links actually are to Google.)
• The Alexa Traffic Rank of every backlink (uncover your competitor’s biggest traffic sources.)
• The total number of PageRank 0 to PageRank 10 backlinks your competitor has (mirror these numbers, and you’ll be able to beat your competitor’s PageRank.)
• The total number of backlinks coming from the same IP addresses (are your competitors buying site-wide links? Should you do the same? Let’s find out!)
• The exact anchor texts and anchor URLs your competitors are using (anchor text is one thing you must implement right to rank well. Find out which anchors work for your competition!)
• Your competitor’s anchor and title keyword density – which is how many times a given keyword appears within the anchors and titles of their links (you will need to mirror these numbers if you want to one-up your competition.)
• How many of your competitor’s backlinks come from forums and blogs (are they tapping into social media for traffic and links? Find out with SEO SpyGlass!)
• How many of your competitor’s backlinks come from homepages of other sites, rather than internal pages. (This is often a dead giveaway of paid links. Oftentimes, you can even see how much they are paying per link!)
• Whether or not your competitor has backlinks from DMOZ or the Yahoo! Directory (these directories are so authoritative, you will get a rankings boost just from a single link from them!)
• The exact link value of every backlink your competitor has (see how valuable each of their links is)
• The exact age of every Website linking back to your competitor (see if they get links from established, authoritative sites.)
• Plus much, much more!

Download your copy of SEO SpyGlass now!

A web directory is basically an organised index of Web sites.

If you own a website and do any kind of online promotion, you should already know the importance of backlinks for search engine rankings and website traffic. Getting links to your site is important for getting visitors and getting listed higher in search engines, with 80% of Google’s ranking believed to be taking this into account.

Web directories can be a great way to build links with just about any budget & bid directories are the latest type of web directory to come about. A bid directory is an organised directory of links sorted by bid amount; the higher the total bid for a link, the higher up it is listed in the directory.

Just like a business might list their company in the Yellow Pages, a website owner can add their link to a bid directory & by spending more on their link, they control how much exposure the link gets.

Usually, the highest bidder on the site takes the “link leader” position, and gets a sitewide link, or other special benefits from the directory owner. This will often result in competition between link owners that keep bidding to maintain the highest spot on a directory. Since link owners can add to their bid at any time, they benefit from having full control over when and how much they spend.