Social Bookmarking Meets Internet Marketing

Social Bookmarking is Fast Becoming an Internet Marketer's Best Friend!

Social Bookmarking Meets Internet Marketing

Copyright © 2006 Kim Roach, All Rights Reserved

SEO-News

http://www.seo-news.com

The history of the Internet has been categorized by exponential

change. The growth of the Web has been one of the fastest

developments in our history. The companies who lacked adaptation

have fizzled into the virtual dust. However, those who are

adapting their business to the many new online developments are

continuing to thrive.

One of the most recent changes online has been termed Web 2.0.

One of the biggest elements to define Web 2.0 is social

bookmarking: a system that allows Internet users to bookmark a

site without storing it on their local computer. Thousands of

people are embracing this new way of finding information. Unlike

the big, impersonal search engines that currently dominate the

search engine market, social bookmarking sites provide a

friendly, interactive community.

Yahoo, for one, expects social bookmarking to be a long-term

trend. They just recently launched an interactive community

called My Web 2.0. Ebay is expanding their own community with the

recent launch of the world's largest commercial wiki. Digg and

Furl have based their entire business around the concept of

social bookmarking.

So, what is this new technology that seems to be increasing every

day?

Social bookmarking is the process of using a web service to keep

track of your personal bookmarks. This bookmark is "tagged" with

keywords that the user decides are relevant to the content of the

bookmark. Once tagged, it becomes publicly available for others

to tag and explore.

The combined effect of the social bookmarking user base is

extremely effective. Any time that you are looking for relevant

information on a particular topic, you can go to any social

bookmarking site and do a search using tags (keywords) to find

relevant, human reviewed content.

In fact, tagging results are even showing up in the search

engines. If you spend much time at all in the major search

engines, you have most likely seen some search results from

Technorati.

At the time of this writing, Technorati was the number one result

on the MSN search engine for the keyword phrase "tag and ping".

There are a number of ways that you can benefit from this

explosive trend taking place online. Online marketers are

currently using a technique called "tag and ping" to reap a

multitude of benefits from the social bookmarking sites.

Unfortunately, much like spam within the search engines, a number

of people are abusing this technique.

However, you can still benefit if you know the correct

techniques. Just like the search engines, although there are

people who abuse the system, there are still huge rewards for

those who play the game correctly.

Social Bookmarking Can be Used to:

Obtain one-way backlinks.

Announce new pages on your web site and...

Gain free web traffic.

Time to Do Some Research

Before you begin submitting your sites to the social bookmarking

sites, there is some preliminary work that needs to be done. You

must first take some time to research popular tags within your

target market. Just like optimizing for the regular search

engines, the keywords you choose to tag can make a dramatic

difference in the amount of traffic you receive.

Technorati is one of the best places to do tag (keyword) research

to determine what tags you should use with your own content.

To see what tags are popular for your keyword, go to

Technorati.com, click on the Tags button and then do a search for

your keyword (tag). Technorati will then give you a list of

related tags that you could use to categorize your web page

under.

You can do some additional research at ClipMarks

(http://www.clipmarks.com), which allows you to search the most

popular tags in addition to related tags. Simply type your

keyword into the search box and you will be given a list of

related terms that are being searched for.

The third place that I like to tag research is at Yahoo's My Web

2.0. (http://myweb.yahoo.com/). On the bottom-left hand side of

the page you will see a list of the most popular tags. At the

bottom of this list you can click on "view more" to see an

expanded list.

I like to sort the list by popularity. Once you have done this

you can search through hundreds of the top keyword tags.

Setting up Tag and Ping

Once you have completed your keyword research, it is time to

start tagging and pinging. You can set up your blog to tag and

ping your blog posts automatically.

Wordpress is the best tool for tagging and pinging. Below I will

give an overview on how to use tag and ping within Wordpress.

1. Create your blog post.

2. Add relevant "tags" at the end of your blog post.

3. Publish your blog post.

4. Ping social bookmarking sites.

5. Because many of the social bookmarking sites are heavily

spidered, your pages can be quickly spidered simply by being

present in the index.

6. Once you have finished the four previous steps, the social

bookmarking sites will then crawl your blog post and index it

under the tags you have specified.

Now that you have a general overview, let's go into the process

in-depth.

Tags are simply links that are formatted in a way that

allows social bookmarking spiders to recognize them as tags.

Whenever the social bookmarking spiders see these tags, they

immediately start munching the content to index it on their site.

Technorati.com gives complete instructions on how to set up tags.

Here is an excerpt from their help file

(http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html) :

" <a href="http://www.yoursite.com/blog/[tagname]"

rel="tag">[tagname]</a> The [tagname] can be anything, but it

should be descriptive. Please only use tags that are relevant to

the post. You do not need to include the brackets, just the

descriptive keyword for your post. Just make sure to include

rel="tag".

The example above links to Technorati but you can link to any

web page that ends in a tag. In fact, if your blog supports

categories, you can even link to your own blog.

The social bookmarking sites will pick up and index your blog

post even if you don't link back to them. The key is simply

knowing how to set this up. To do this, you will need to create

tags for your blog. Here are some examples:

<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/blog/social+bookmarking"

rel="tag">social bookmarking</a>

<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/blog/tag+and+ping" rel="tag">tag

and ping</a>

<a href="http://www.yoursite.com/blog/web+2.0" rel="tag">web

2.0</a>

Quick Note : Any tag that is two words or longer should have a

"+" symbol in between the words. Never include spaces when

creating tags.

In order for this example to work, you must create blog

categories for each tag. So, for this example, you would need to

set up a category for social bookmarking, tag and ping, and web

2.0.

For each of the categories that you have setup within your blog,

you can automatically create a tag for them whenever you create

your post simply by assigning that particular post to that

category.

Once you have submitted your post, you will see a number of

categories at the bottom of the post to indicate which categories

your entry has been posted to. These are your "tags" and they

will be indexed by any social bookmarking site that you add to

your ping list.

Setting up Your Ping List

On that note, let's expound on the idea of the ping list. To set

up your ping list within Wordpress, go to "Options" and then

click "Writing". When you scroll to the bottom, you will see a

box that will allow you to add your very own ping list. Within

this list, you will want to add all of the social bookmarking

sites that accept and crawl blog posts. For a complete list, go

to:

http://3spots.blogspot.com/2006/01/all-social-that-can-bookmark.html

There is no sense in creating all of your tag URLs by hand. If

you are using Wordpress, you can set your blog up to do this

automatically. You can do this using SimpleTags

(http://www.broobles.com/scripts/simpletags/). SimpleTags is a

WordPress plugin that allows you to easily generate Technorati

tags at the bottom of your blog entries.

To be truly successful in the social bookmarking community, you

must be an active participant, not just a leecher. Be sure and

bookmark other sites as well wherever you decide to employ a tag

and ping strategy.

Predictions for the Future

Some people believe that tag and ping will lose its

effectiveness because of people that abuse the system. However,

I believe otherwise. While people who abuse the system will

certainly start to see diminished returns, I believe that those

people who use this system correctly will be able to benefit for

many years to come.

Social bookmarking is not a trend that is simply here today and

gone tomorrow. With major players like Yahoo joining in, you

can bet that social bookmarking has a hopeful future.

When used effectively, social bookmarking will bring you one-way

backlinks, free traffic, increased exposure, and eventually sales

from a long-term effort. Just like your search engine

optimization, you should take a natural approach to social

bookmarking. This technique goes way beyond getting traffic. This

is a long-term strategy that can help you to acquire quality

inbound links and gain high search engine rankings when used

appropriately.

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Kim Roach is a staff writer and editor for the SiteProNews

(http://www.sitepronews.com) & SEO-News (http://www.seo-news.com)

newsletters. You can contact Kim at: kim@seo-news.com

This article may be freely distributed without modification and

provided that the copyright notice and author information remain

intact.

STOP!!!!I have been a full-time internet marketer for three years. During that time I have tried, tested, and failed at hundreds of Internet business opportunities. Then I finally found an Internet marketing business model that has provided me with a full time income. Take a look at the products that provided me the business model that I use to make a living online.  I'm sure these mentors will help you the same way they did me.  Take a look at Mark Recommends!!

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