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.

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’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.