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.

I’ve been carrying out a lot of link building on Cashback Shopper as its Google rankings have pretty much vanished & I’m keen to recover them. I wonder if it’s because the site is a white label & Google has decided it’s just duplicate content.

However, a recent ranking check of Bing has revealed that Cashback Shopper has 15 page 1 positions, 5 on page 2 & 5 on page 3, for some of the most popular search terms relating to cashback shopping. This is how the site used to feature in Google, so I hope these positions aren’t just temporary until Bing picks up a market share of searchers.

It’s very frustrating that Cashback Shopper is in no4 spot for “cashback shopping” and “cashback uk” in Bing, but neither phrase is anywhere in Google! I guess I just have to keep trying to find more Google worthy links for the site

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.

Mr Google, Matt Cutts, mentioned at PubCon recently that there are over 200 variables in the Google algorithm & although no-one but Google knows what they are exactly, we can have a reasonably good guess at many of them. In fact, WebmasterWorld have set themselves a challenge to list them all!

Here is what has been included so far:

Domain

• Age of domain
• History of domain
• Keywords in domain name
• IP address of domain
• Location of IP address / Server

Architecture

• HTML structure
• Use of Headers tags
• URL path
• Use of external CSS / JavaScript files

Content

• Keyword density of page
• Keywords in Title Tag
• Keywords in Meta Description (Not Meta Keywords)
• Keywords in header tags (H1, H2 etc)
• Keywords in body text
• Freshness of content

Per Inbound Link

• Quality of website inbound linking
• Quality of web page inbound linking
• Age of website
• Age of web page
• Relevancy of page’s content
• Location of link (Footer, Navigation, Body text)
• Anchor text of link
• Title attribute of link
• ALT tag of images linking
• Country specific top level domain
• Authority of top level domain (.edu, .gov)
• Location of server
• Authority links (CNN, BBC, etc)

Cluster of Links

• Uniqueness of class C IP address

Internal Cross Linking

• Number of internal links to page
• Location of link on page
• Anchor text of FIRST text link

Penalties

• Over optimisation
• Purchasing links
• Selling links
• Comment spamming
• Cloaking
• Hidden text
• Duplicate content
• Keyword stuffing
• Manual penalties

Miscellaneous

• JavaScript links
• No follow links

Pending

• Performance / Load of a website
• Speed of Javascript

Not included, but often focussed upon

• XML Sitemap (Aids the crawler but doesn’t help rankings)
• PageRank (General indicator of page’s performance)

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 recently built the Cheap Event Tickets website & went through loads of free & paid for themes, which I could use on the site, but all of them had formatting problems and just didn’t look professional enough.

I then came across StudioPress ® Premium WordPress Themes which are professionally designed premium WordPress themes and look absolutely superb, but are also optimised for search engines by Joost de Valk, an SEO Specialist whom I’ve mentioned previously on my blog. He has also released 20+ WordPress plugins with close to 1 million downloads in total & lots of nice WordPress tutorials on his blog yoast.com.

The fact that the StudioPress themes are already Search Engine optimised, means half the job is done for you! With installation of the recommended plugins, provided your content is up to scratch, the site will work really well, as well as looking fantastic.

I’m so pleased with how Cheap Event Tickets has turned out & how easy the theme is to use, that I’m going to upgrade to the Pro Plus All-Theme Package, which allows me to use ALL of the themes, on as many sites as I want and also gives me access to any future themes that are released! I’m planning to use the themes to redesign Love Your Pets, to possibly re-develop the My Travel Extras blog & to finally get Web Travel Offers off the ground!! However, I could also use these themes to build sites for clients, so they’re real value for money too!

Some of the benefits of using the StudioPress ® Premium WordPress Themes are:

Search Engine Optimized

Google loves WordPress and most blogs do well in the search engines, but our Themes have been fully SEO’d by one of the leading SEO specialists, Joost de Valk. Our Themes will help your blog rank higher in the search engines and by following our Tutorials and recommendations you can achieve even greater search engine placement results.

Widget-Ready

If you are looking for ease-of-use, WordPress widgets are the way to go. Without having to know how to code, you can simply drag-n-drop to create the look you desire for your blog.

Theme Options Page

Our WordPress themes use a theme options page that allows you to easily customize the way your blog looks. Simply select from drop-down choices what categories you want to display or the number of posts to show and even what size you want your thumbnail images. You can also simply toggle between using a custom image or dynamic text for your header logo area.

Auto-sized Thumbnail Management

There are thousands of blogs and if you want yours to stand out, you must draw attention to your blog and articles. Nothing creates interest better than using images to draw attention where you want it, but image management can be a hassle. Not so in our Themes as we have integrated the use of the TimThumb PHP scrpit that dynamically resizes your images.

Ready for Advertising

Most of our themes are ready for advertising. All you need to do is insert your advertising code, like Google Adsense, Azoogle Ads, Clicksor, or any others, into the advertising widgets and start collecting your advertising revenue.

Comment Functionality

One method of holding your website visitor’s attention is through discussion of your articles. WordPress achieves this through the use of Comments and our themes use the latest features of WordPress including threaded comments and Gravatar integration.

Developed for Localization

A new feature for StudioPress themes is that they are being developed for localization. This means that you can now translate these themes into your own native language! Currently the Agent, Church, Education, Lifestyle and Streamline themes have this feature, but we will be updating all themes to include this as quickly as we can.

PSD Files Included

Another way to attract visitors to your blog is through the use of great-looking graphics, which the StudioPress themes have. Many members have a design-look in mind and to make it easier to change the graphics we provide the Photoshop Document (PSD) files of the graphic files we use.

Lifetime Support

Need help fixing a problem or making a minor modification to your theme? Let’s face it; technology doesn’t always work as smoothly as we all want. So, if you need help, our support is world-class and our team consists of over 20 moderators from all over the world, who provide solutions and help to our 12,000+ members, many of which help other members.

WordPress & Theme Tutorials

Whether you are looking to get up to speed with your WordPress knowledge or ready to get your brand new StudioPress theme working, our tutorials will teach you what you need to know.

Approved Designers

Maybe you are a busy businessperson or don’t want to spend the time creating your website blog. We provide a list of talented, freelance WordPress designers/customizers that you can hire to provide you with the look you want. Many of the blogs in our Showcase were created by these creative people.

With Microsoft bringing their new search engine Bing to the fore in recent months, it’s interesting to know which engine actually provides the best results.

Recent statistics show that a considerable number of users HAVE started to use Bing, with Statcounter reporting that Bing has overtaken Yahoo! as the number two search engine in the U.S! But do the users stay there & what are the results like? Could they be better (i.e. more relevant) than Googles?!

Most people will quickly dismiss the idea because Google has almost been seen as the only search engine for such a long time. But, if you were subject to a blind test, an unbranded comparison between Bing, Google and Yahoo! – would Google still come out on top?

There’s a great new tool that’s available to test this for yourself: http://blindsearch.fejus.com

Type in a search query, hit search then vote for the column which you believe best matches your query. With each search you’ll be presented with 3 unbranded columns of search results and you simply pick which one you think is most relevant to your search term. The columns are randomised with every query.

The goal of this site is simple, to see what happens when you remove the branding from search engines & how you’ll perceive the results without knowing where they came from!

After you choose, you’ll then be told which search engine provided the results. Try it with a number of searches, keep score & see which search engine came out on top! You may be surprised!

I’ve tried a few searches myself & have to say that Google provided the WORST results each time!!!! Out of the usual 10 results, they had more irrelevant entries…..for example, online mature dating sites actually produced an adult dating website & dating website review sites amongst the top 10, rather than online mature dating sites which, after all, was what I was searching for! Yahoo actually returned the best results in my test searches, but it will be interesting to know what results other people get!

It seems that the proposed relationship between two of the worlds biggest search engines, Google & Yahoo!, is all over.

Google has pulled out of the deal due to ongoing concerns from the Justice Department on the fairness of the deal and Google’s belief that it was a case not worth fighting.

This is what David Drummond; Google Chief Legal Officer had to say:

…after four months of review, including discussions of various possible changes to the agreement, it’s clear that government regulators and some advertisers continue to have concerns about the agreement. Pressing ahead risked not only a protracted legal battle but also damage to relationships with valued partners. That wouldn’t have been in the long-term interests of Google or our users, so we have decided to end the agreement.

Read more from David on the outcome.

Unsurprisingly, Yahoo! is not happy with the news; here is an excerpt from the press release they issued:

…Google has terminated the advertising services agreement the companies announced in June. Yahoo! continues to believe in the benefits of the agreement and is disappointed that Google has elected to withdraw from the agreement rather than defend it in court. Google notified Yahoo! of its refusal to move forward with implementation of the agreement following indication from the Department of Justice that it would seek to block it, despite Yahoo!’s proposed revisions to address the DOJ’s concerns.

So where does this leave Yahoo!, with the chief exec under mounting pressure from shareholders? The major loser from the decision is Yahoo! The deal promised a revenue opportunity that the search engine desperately needed. It was a glimmer of hope for Yahoo!’s shareholders who have been bitterly disappointed over the last few years. In fact, the ink was barely dry on announcements that the deal was off, when Yahoo!’s head Yang rekindles Microsoft acquisition talk with the comment “To this day the best thing for Microsoft to do is buy Yahoo.”

Talking at the Web 2.0 summit, Jerry continued with:

…I don’t think that is a bad idea at all…at the right price, whatever the price is, we are willing to sell the company…We were ready to negotiate, we wanted to negotiate a deal, and we felt that we weren’t that far apart. But at the end of the day, they withdrew and they since have been very clear about not wanting to buy the company.

Well, that was then and this is now. There’s no denying the worlds finances have changed radically from when Microsoft walked away from Yahoo! acquisition talks.

Yahoo! really has its back up against the wall, and with its share price about 25% lower than it was when the offer was made, it could be a good time for Microsoft rekindle discussions.

Neither of the other “major” search engines are making any real inroads into Google’s ascendancy on their own, so combined, they could possibly offer some serious competition.

Right now it seems for Microsoft the price is right – for Yahoo!, they’re desperate to sell!

This month, the Google Webmaster blog published an article, in which Google’s Maile Ohye officially explained what it takes to get a high ranking in Google’s search result pages.

Inbound links are important but content is even more important

Google’s Maile Ohye writes the following about inbound links in his article:

“Inbound links are links from pages on external sites linking back to your site. Inbound links can bring new users to your site, and when the links are merit-based and freely-volunteered as an editorial choice, they’re also one of the positive signals to Google about your site’s importance.”

Nothing new here! If many related websites link to your site, and if these links look natural, this will help your rankings on Google a lot.

However, links are not the most important ranking factor & he gives a concrete example:

“Let’s say I have a site, example.com, that offers users a variety of unique website templates and design tips. One of the strongest ranking factors is my site’s content. Additionally, perhaps my site is also linked from three sources — however, one inbound link is from a spammy site.

As far as Google is concerned, we want only the two quality inbound links to contribute to the PageRank signal in our ranking. “

The website’s content is mentioned as one of the strongest ranking factors. The inbound links are additional. That makes sense; it’s the content of your website that really tells Google what your website is about.

If you want to get a high ranking for the keyword “used cars in essex”, but your web pages are about microwave ovens, then you won’t get high rankings for that keyword.

For that reason, it is very important that you optimise your web pages for the keywords for which you want to get high rankings, before you try to get links from other sites. This optimisation should also be an ongoing process as keyword popularity may vary over time.

Google analyses over 200 ranking factors

According to the article in Google’s blog, Google analyses more than 200 signals (we call them ‘ranking factors’) to specify the position of a web page in the search results:

“Given the user’s query, over 200 signals (including the analysis of the site’s content and inbound links as mentioned above) are applied to return the most relevant results to the user.”

It’s a simple two-step process

Apparently, getting high rankings on Google is a simple two-step process!!

1. You must optimise your web page contents so that Google can find out what your website is about. Optimise your web pages for your keywords so that Google knows that your website is relevant to these keywords and your topic.
2. Other websites must confirm that your website is about that topic. That’s what inbound links are for.

Hmmm, we all knew that didn’t we? So why is it so hard to do then?!!!!! ;o)

If you’re selling products and services that are related to a special area, it is crucial that your website gets found by people that are looking for it. One of the easiest ways to get found by people that live in your area is to optimise your web page titles for your product & location.

What is the web page title?

The title of a web page is the text that is written between the tags in the HTML head code of a web page, is displayed in the web browser window when someone visits your website and it is usually used as the linked text when your website appears in the search results.

Why should you use optimised web page titles?

The web page title is one of the main factors that Google, Yahoo and other search engines use to rank web pages. A good, relevant, informative web page title greatly improves the chances of getting high search engine rankings for your product/service.

The web page title is used by the search engines as the bold linked text on search result pages. That means that it should be clear, relevant, concise and appealing, so that web surfers will be drawn to click on it.

How to write your web page title so that it gets better local rankings

If you optimise your web page titles correctly, they will both increase your search engine rankings and attract people from the local area & those looking for your products/services, to your website.

You’ll benefit from targeted traffic and targeted traffic leads to more conversions i.e. sales. Here are some things that you can do to improve your web page titles:

Include the name of your business, important keywords and your city in the title of your homepage:

FreshWebz – Affordable web design in London and Essex

Depending on your business size, change the order of these items. Well known businesses should list their company name first. If your business is new then it’s usually better to list the keyword first:

Affordable web design for small businesses: Freshwebz in London

People are probably looking for a solution to their problem (web design) instead of your actual company name. Instead of your town, you can also use the name of the greater area if your service is available in that area.

Use a different title tag for every page. This is important! The title should reflect the content that can be found on the page, so it’s less effective just copying the homepage title to every page. For branding purposes, the titles should contain your company name and a popular keyword for which you want to be found on search engines:

FreshWebz: Search engine optimisation & SEO services in London and Essex
FreshWebz: Web design Portfolio – websites designed for recent clients
FreshWebz: Contact us for an affordable quote for your new website design

Use short web page titles. Short titles are much easier to read for web surfers. Do not try to stuff your title with keywords in the same way that you wouldn’t stuff your page content with keywords. It is much better if your web page title is highly relevant to one keyword, than somewhat relevant to many keywords. If you want to optimise your website for different keywords, optimise different pages for different keywords.

Do not use special characters in your titles. Avoid symbols and other special characters wherever possible. They might not be displayed properly on all computers and your website listing might look strange in the search results.

If you change your web page titles as described, your website will get better rankings on search engines and it will be found by people looking for your products/services & who live in the right area. By getting more visitors for one topic, you will improve the overall ranking of your site & so improve your position for other search terms.

Unfortunately, the web page title is not the only element that influences the position of your website in the search results of Google and other search engines. If you want to make sure that your site appears in the top 10 results, you should optimise all factors that are needed to get top rankings. FreshWebz can offer your website guaranteed Top 10 Google rankings for your desired keywords in the natural listings.