Work At Home Business Blog » Social Bookmarking

What Is Social Bookmarking

Jeff Houdyschell — Sat, 19 May 2007 13:54:25 +0000

If you have been involved with blogging then you probably have seen something about the term Social Bookmarking.

What is Social Bookmarking and what is so special about Social Bookmarking?

Social Bookmarking websites categorize and store ‘bookmark links’. Millions of people are searching for information on these Social Bookmarking sites. So to get traffic to your website you should post links back to your web page on these Social Bookmarking websites.

You will need to specify some tags (better known as keywords) that will categorize the bookmark to your site. Other people can search, and vote for your bookmarked site. Social Bookmarking is very viral and can quickly help generate traffic by sharing links.

Some benefits of Social Bookmarking are:

Highly Targeted Traffic

Since your bookmarks are categorized according to your tags, your traffic will be from those searching for those particular tags (or keywords). They will click on your bookmark link and visit your site.

Fast Search Engine Indexing

Most of these Social Bookmarking sites have high page rank. The search engine spiders visit these sites very often so your links will be crawled almost immediately!

High Search Engine Ranking

Social bookmarking is a great way to generate quality one-way incoming links, one of the main factors to higher search engine ranking. With Social Bookmarking, you can get unlimited ‘keyword’ links to your site. Having more keyword links that are relevant to your site will result in higher ranking

Better Page Rank

With incoming links from high-ranking Social Bookmarking sites will improve your site’s page rank. With a higher page rank, you can link to your sites and improve their ranking too!

Onlywire.com has semi-automated tool that will bookmark a few sites at once but you still may want to bookmark many, many more. You can also visit some of the more popular sites by clicking on the green “share this” icon and the other icons shown below this post.

If you really want to take it to the next level, and automatically signup for the most popular social bookmarking sites, and bookmark your blog posts and web pages automatically then check out Bookmarking Demon.

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Writing And Tagging A WordPress Blog Post

Jeff Houdyschell — Fri, 11 May 2007 14:33:18 +0000

Writing a WordPress Blog post is pretty straight forward. Tagging a WordPress blog post is the extra step to get more traffic, higher search engine listings and page rank.

To get started click Write on the main panel and the Write Post screen opens. Then follow these steps to write your post and tag it using the Ultimate Tag Warrior and Tagalize It WordPress plugins.

Fill in the title box of the new post.
Choose or create a category for your post on the right side under Categories.
You should have check marks in both boxes in the Discussion options panel.
Do not put a password in the Post Password panel! That will keep your post from displaying on your blog. Only those with the password will be able to read it!
Under Post Slug (optional) you can create a smaller URL address for your post in here. If you don’t create a Post Slug your post title will be the URL address. Without a Post Slug your post’s URL will look something like this: www.yourdomain.com/category-name/your-post-title/ Using a Post Slug will shorten the last part of the URL to what you create in the Post Slug box. Try to make it shorter but still relevent to the title of your post
Choose the Visual or Code tab to write your post. Clicking the Visual tab (default) will allow you to type in a “what you see is what you get” editor. The Code tab is for writing in code, you can use this to write or paste HTML or other code into your post.

The WordPress plugins Ultimate Tag Warrior and Tagalize It will play a big role in optimizing your posts and blog.

A tag is simply the term used for keywords in blogging and the above plugins help create and manage your tags as you write your posts.

If you are writing a post about work at home you would want to create a category for the tag work at home and tag it throughout your post. Shown below:

[code]work at home [/code]

The plugins used in this instance do several things.

An optional feature will create a tag for all new categories added, if I set up your blog this will be activated.
The tag will become a hyperlink to the category tagged, optimizing your internal linking structure helping search engine ranking.
They will display your tags on the bottom of your post and can be easily carried into some social bookmarking sites.
They will embed keywords in the code of the post’s page helping SEO.

More tagging options can be used by the Tagalize It WordPress plugin to tag words that pings two popular blog directories Technorati and Ice Rocket. This will alert those sites that you have content about the tagged words. A pretty easy way to get the word out about your blog. Be sure to add your blog to the those two directories also.

To tag Technorati and Ice Rocket use the followin:

[code] Word or phrase for Technorati

[Tag-Ice]Word or phrase for Ice Rocket[Tag-Ice] [/code]

Once you are done writing and tagging your post click Save and Continue Editing, scroll down to look over your post in the Post Preview box, make sure all your tags are properly formatted and closed and scroll back up to make any changes.

Update for version 2.2 – The preview box is not shown on the bottom of the write post screen but a view link is available on the top right side of the write post box, clicking it will preview your post in a new window.

You can add more tags as a comma seperated list directly below the post editor if you wish. Or look up more tag suggestions with the tags (keyword) suggestions tool.

Once you are happy with your post click Publish, if you have the WordPress Plugin Smart Update Pinger installed and activated it may take a few extra seconds for your post to publish while it pings your blog.

After your post is published click (View site) at the very top of the Dashboard. This next step is very important so be sure to click the title of your post to bring it up in its own page.

Using the WordPress plugins Gregarious and or Share This you should now start social bookmarking your post. Scroll down to the bottom of your post and click the green Share This icon. Click on as many of the sites this shows and start joining them.

If you have just the Gregarious plugin you will see a group of icons below your post. The same goes here, join as many as you can.

Now everytime you make a post be sure to click the post’s title to show it on its own page and click on the Gregarious and or Share This social bookmarking icons and start bookmarking your post.

This post was inspired by the Authority Black Book written by Jack Humphrey. If you are serious about your blog then you need to check out the Friday Traffic Report for free blog marketing and Web 2.0 promotion tactics.

About the Author:
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Jeff Houdyschell provides proven income opportunities, ideas and information for the best work at home jobs, visit: http://www.eSmartJob.com

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Guide To Social Bookmarking

Jeff Houdyschell — Tue, 08 May 2007 20:10:09 +0000

Your mother, if she did her job right, taught you everything you need to know about how to get along in the world and how to get ahead in it. When we were kids, we thought these rules were silly, but later we learned her advice was pretty valuable. In honor of Mother’s Day (May 13), we’ve put her wisdom to work in online business marketing.

Mom’s Top 10 Steps To A Good Online Reputation

1. Put Your Best Foot Forward: As recently as a year ago, when things were newer, more experimental, a presence on MySpace only was fine. Not so anymore. You have to be everywhere, treating branding in the online world the way you would in the real world. Most social bookmarking networks allow you to set up a profile page for free (the ones that matter most do anyway). Create your online persona (a polite one), then clone it as necessary.

2. Make Eye Contact: Just like in the real world, wallflowers don’t get noticed. The wallflower is most likely an incredible resource – it’s just that nobody knows her because she doesn’t put herself out there. Be a participant by commenting, inviting, giving. Show up at your new neighbor’s door with a gift. It always goes over well – just remember to button your blouse.

3. You Are a Reflection of Your Mother (Company): Nobody likes a poorly kept lawn except the lazy bum that lives behind it. Maintain your public face on the social networks, shine your shoes, crease your pants, embrace your OCD. It may not be your homepage, but it is a home away from home. Maintaining several of these online presences is work, but so is business.

4. Keep An Open Mind: There’s an appropriate cliché for every situation – all your eggs in one basket comes to mind here – but I prefer my grandfather’s chestnut: “You drove your ducks to a damn poor market.” Poetic, that man was. For a long time it was search, search, search. Before that it was email, email, email. But now you need to integrate your campaign. Search is a staple, a pillar of your online campaign, but we also know that Wikipedia ranks consistently number one in the SERPs. That means you need a Wikipedia page, too. Note: YouTube also ranks well.

5. Become Necessary: Viral marketing is tricky, difficult business. But maybe it doesn’t have to be. Maybe if you realign your approach to reflect what you, as an individual enjoy, instead of being a salesperson, you can find a more intuitive connection with what the public wants to see. It’s often been said that a salesman sells himself more than the product. So if you want to make linkbait, think about what would cause you to bite first. If you look at your viral attempt and see more corporate talking points than linkable material, it’s time for a do-over.

6. Like the People that Like You (Even If You Think They’re Annoying): Barack Obama’s campaign people did something brilliant, and followed up with something not so brilliant. That makes it a great case study. An Obama fan set up a MySpace page and soon attracted thousands of friends. Instead of competing with his biggest fan, Obama endorsed the site as the official MySpace campaign headquarters. That was the brilliant part. After the page “got too big” for the original operator, the campaign crew took staged a coup to wrest control of the page from their biggest fan. That was the not so brilliant part, even if politics is mean by nature.

7. Watch Your Mouth: Again with the clichés that still hold true – if you don’t have anything nice to say, then don’t say anything at all. Steve Rubel learned the hard way that stream-of-consciousness blogging can have you saying something you wish you hadn’t. Transparency doesn’t mean total access.

8. Don’t Be a Fake: Who do we dislike most in civilized society (aside from the violent)? Liars, cheats, and thieves. We don’t like them because we view them as betrayers. That principle applies online, too, when your network discovers you’re not what you say you are. And the mob’s wrath is one that is hard to endure. Ask Edelman PR about their Wal-Marting Across America campaign.

9. Mind Your Manners: Mom’s favorite Bible verse still applies: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” Commonly referred to as the Golden Rule on Earth, in Cyberspace, manners and etiquette are becoming increasingly more important. People are getting angry about anonymous drive-by (rude) commentary, salesy and useless comment spam (spam in general constitutes harassment in some form)…the list of ethics and etiquette violations is a long one, so it’s probably best to ask yourself: Would I appreciate this if it were done to me?

10. Stay Hip. Right now, MySpace, Facebook, Wikipedia, and YouTube are essential, but they’re still relatively new. Few really saw SecondLife coming as a virtual marketplace. Still yet, only the early adopters are talking about Twitter. But change online is swift, and the smart marketer keeps up with what’s hot. The last thing you want to do is look outdated. Just don’t sell out your core identity in the process.

While that’s just ten guidelines out of many, Mom always had one rule that ruled them all: Use your head, dodo bird! This is a thinking man’s game. Indeed it is. Good luck with your campaigns.

About the Author:
Jason L. Miller is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.