Social Networks – perhaps you’ve heard of them before, but are not quite sure what they are. Why is it that the “seo experts” just love using social networks to help their sites get “top rankings” in the major search engines?

Social networking is the online grouping of individuals into specific groups or niches, like real estate activities or home business entrepreneurs. Social networking becomes interactive, whereas Social Bookmarking is really just creating a library of links or letting others know they should visit some content that you have bookmarked a link to.

Just like Social Bookmarking, the search engines love Social Networks.  Sign up for some high profile social network sites and it will boost the page ranking of your business website and blog, not to mention the direct exposure you can get from the potentially millions of people that may read your profile.

While there are a number of social networking websites that focus on particular interests, there are others that do not. The social networking sites without a main focus are often referred to as “traditional” social networking websites and usually have open memberships (e.g. MySpace, Facebook).

This means that anyone can become a member, no matter what their hobbies, beliefs, or views are. However, once you are inside this online community, you can begin to create your own network of friends and eliminate members that do not share common interests or goals.

Social networking is based on the premise that people should both express their individuality and meet people with similar interests. This approach means that social networks will allow you to set up profiles, friends, blog posts, widgets, and perhaps something unique to that particular social networking website — such as the ability to ‘poke’ people on Facebook or high-five someone on Hi5.

When you join a Social Network you will find the following sections you either need to set up or should get active in.

Profile: This is the section where you set up your “About Me”. Profiles contain basic information, like where you live, what you do, how old you are, and in some cases personality questions (e.g. Social networks dedicated to a special theme like music or movies might ask questions related to what kind of music you like).

Friends: This where you can make friends with people and this is one of the major ways to develop business contacts.  Friends are trusted members of the site that are allowed to post comments on your profile or send you private messages. You can also keep tabs on how your friends are using social networking, such as when they post a new picture or update their profile. Friends are the core of social networking.

Groups: Almost all social networks allow you to use groups to help you find people with similar interests or engage in discussions on certain topics. A group can be anything from “real estate bloggers” to “People Who Like Cats” (which rules me out of that group) to “Marshall Tucker Band Fans” to “seo experts”. Groups are a way to connect with like-minded people, a way to identify your interests, and a way to gain exposure for your business.

Many Social Networks also have other neat features that can really boost your exposure on the Internet and help you get “top rankings” for your business.

These include:

• Blogs – where you can create your own blog entries,
• Discussions – for creating interaction between users,
• Widgets – where you can customize your social networking profile with web widgets.

Social Networking is fantastic for meeting people with similar interests and is a very effective business technique for business entrepreneurs that are looking for more sales leads and customers.

When you set up your Social Network sites you will be setting up backlinks to your business site, which the search engines love and also gaining direct exposure to potential customers.  This is truly a fantastic “low cost seo” tactic for “getting traffic” to your site and getting “top rankings” with the major search engines.  “Seo experts” love this strategy and you should too!

Here are just a few of the top social networking sites:

• http://facebook.com
• http://myspace.com
• http://friendster.com
• http://bebo.com
• http://hi5.com

And the list goes on and on.

HINT: Just like Social Bookmarking, you can use Onlywire and Ping.fm to simplify your social networking efforts. Once you set up Onlywire and Ping.fm you can syndicate your content and articles to the web’s top social bookmarking and networking sites with a single button click. Go to http://onlywire.com and http://ping.fm and sign up for your free accounts.

Setting up your Social Networking empire can take a lot of time (a lot more than setting up your Social Bookmarking network) but is well worth it in the long run.  If you need some more info on Social Networking and Bookmarking give me a call. I offer a variety of services to business owners whereby I will set up your Social Bookmarking and Networking spider web. My conversations are on the house.

BIG HINT: Sign up for either RoboForm (www.roboform.com/php/land.php?affid=m1953&frm=frame10) or LastPass (https://lastpass.com/) to help you manage all the Usernames, Passwords and demographic data you will need to enter when you sign up for all the Social Bookmark and Networking sites.  Either of these tools will make your job a lot easier.  Both offer Free versions.

Social media sites are popping up all over the place at a rate that defies the imagination. The trend is non-stop, so you can sit on the sidelines and watch or you can get involved and use them to your benefit, perhaps on a truly social basis or to promote your business.

With the hundreds and hundreds of “social networks” and “social bookmark” sites available, how does one make sense out of them and how to use them? From a business perspective, it is a fact that the major search engines love the social networks. As a result, you can use social networking as part of your “low cost seo” strategy for getting “top rankings” on the search pages and subsequently driving traffic to your website/blog/business.

There are many, many strategies for how to start using social networks and bookmarks sites for SEO and getting traffic purposes. The following video shows one basic strategy that anyone can do, although it does take some time and effort.

So enjoy the video and I would love to hear your perspectives and insights.

[kaltura-widget wid="he351ij6vg" width="400" height="365" addpermission="" editpermission="" /]

The Power of Blogs for “getting targeted traffic” – “low cost seo” Tip 6

If you don’t have a blog, you are missing out on a huge opportunity. Simply put, blogs open up doors for you to certain aspects of web promotion, and make it a lot easier to rise up in the search engines and get “top rankings”

Blogs are one of the most successful ways of expressing oneself one the Internet. The whole concept of blogging revolves around the need to express ideas, share opinions, spread news, promoting products or to simply have fun. A blog is actually a small individual web page more like a diary that you keep online.  The beauty of blogs is that they are easy to update and allow the blog owner to easily publish links, photos, videos, documents and more.

Blogs often receive more traffic than other web pages. Why? The answer lies within the way the major search engines work.  Search engines like fresh and high quality content. This is the main benefit of blogs and why they often rank ahead of normal web pages.

Blogs started out as web diaries but have taken on other dimensions, one of which is the commercial aspect. I’ll give you an illustrative example here: let’s say you you’ve started your own home business promoting an internet based business opportunity like Infinity 100 (http://infinity100.teamwork10.com).  A blog about Infinity 100 and why it is
such a great business opportunity would meet the requirements of other people who share your interest and it is also a great promotional tool for the development of your business.  (Disclosure: I am was an affiliate with Infinity100.)

Therefore, web marketing and the need to easily and informally communicate with others fits right in with blogging.

If your main website isn’t a blog, you should consider adding one, such as: http://mywebsite.com/blog//

By adding a blog to your website you will be able to draw traffic towards your actual website.  Plus, most blogs are free.

You can set up your own self-hosted blog or you can get a free blog at wordpress.com or blogger.com. (For now, we won’t go into how to set up a blog.  We shall cover that in future tips.)

One of the great things about WordPress blogs, especially self-hosted ones, is that there are many plugins that you can install (also free) that will further enhance your blog. This makes it possible to do things like notify the search engines when you have posted new content, automatically bookmark your post to the social bookmarking and networking
services, create a community of subscribers, setup future posts to go live automatically, and more!

ACTION ITEM: Get a Blog in your area of interest and start publishing.

Why Commenting on Blogs Works for “getting targeted traffic” – 05

There are many ways to get targeted traffic to your website or blog and one of the more popular methods is to find blogs and blog posts related to your topic or business niche.  Then you enter comments for each appropriate blog post that you find.

I’ve always been an advocate for being an active blog commenter because it can play an important role in your overall online marketing strategy.  It can help in “getting targeted traffic” for many reasons, not just SEO.  (Although it is an extremely effective, “low cost seo” tactic that many “seo experts” use.)

By taking the time to comment on blogs, even one or two comments per day can lead to extremely positive results such as reputation building, expert positioning, and the building of inbound links (even if the blog you are posting comments on uses the “no follow” attribute in their comment fields).  Commenting on blogs is therefore, more of an indirect way of getting “top rankings” with the major search engines.

One of the neat things about blogs is that are not a one-way conversation between the site author (blogger) and their audience. Commenting on blogs allows readers to continue that conversation, feel involved, offer their opinions, and to start a debate, etc. When readers visit a blog they like to see a vibrant community with a lot of post comments. A lot of comments show that the blog is active and thought provoking.

When you meaningfully participate in a blogging community, you are creating meaningful relationships with people who can send you significant traffic.

When you enter a blog comment you are also entering your name, email address and website.  So if your comment is interesting, readers may click on your link and visit your blog or website.  Your comments may also get re-tweeted, get social media votes and even bookmarked.  This is the way that content spreads and is the way you get real traffic that actually matters.

Do not spam your comments! If you try leaving a comment like “Nice Blog, Check out My Website” it is NOT going to get approved by the blog owner and will not be posted. The key here is to show the blog owner that you actually are interested in their blog and want to contribute towards it.

If you really want to make the most of your time, only focus on blogs that have Google page rank. This is a nice way to gauge the quality of the blogs you come across.

TIP:  To start out, find 5-10 related blogs with high page rankings and become active in them.  Don’t try to become active in too many blogs at one time as you will spread your efforts too thin.

Getting “top rankings” with Article Marketing

Issue 01 in our – Getting “top rankings” Series

If I were to recommend just one traffic generation strategy, it would be a toss up between video and article marketing. But for now I am going to go with article marketing because it is easier to get started with. There is a reason why article marketing is so popular – it actually works!  It is also a very “low cost seo” tactic – in fact it shouldn’t cost you a dime.

Article marketing is where you write articles about your niche or topic and you then submit them to article directories.  At the bottom of each article (usually in the Resource or Author box) you write, you are allowed to insert a link or two that links back to your website.

There are thousands of article directories that have “top rankings” with the search engines and by you having your articles and links on them gives your site some huge advantages.

And, once your article is published in these high ranking directories, other bloggers, etc. will see your article and may publish it on their site or blog.  This creates even more back links to your site.

Thus, it is quite common for just one of your articles to get you several high quality backlinks.

There are many ways to publish articles.  You can post them one at a time to the directories with “top rankings” or you can use automated tools that will publish to dozens, even hundreds of directories.

To start with, I do not suggest that you submit your article to every article directory you can find – instead just stick with the top few.  Hold off on submitting to more than five to 10 directories until we teach you about how to spin articles, how to avoid duplicate content penalties, and some of the article submitting tools available.

Here are some for you to consider.  Or, you can go here for a list of the top 50 article directories.

• http://ezinearticles.com
• http://goarticles.com
• http://searchwarp.com
• http://articlecity.com
• http://isnare.com
• http://buzzle.com
• http://goarticles.com
• http://helium.com
• http://articledashboard.com
• http://ideamarketers.com
• http://amazines.com

For those of you that are ready to use an automated Article Submitter, I use and recommend Magic Article Submitter. It is very inexpensive, easy to use, and comes with a 90 day guarantee.

Okay, that’s it for today.  Now go write an article of at least 500 words and submit it to five or so article directories.  Change your titles for each site and make sure you use your keywords in the title of your article.  It is also a good idea to try and make each article somewhat unique so they each appear as original content.

Please read the Article Submission guidelines for each of the directories because they will not publish your article unless you follow them.

Next up we will be discussing Social Bookmarking.

Getting “top rankings” – Series on How to Get Targeted Traffic

Introduction 00

Welcome to the kick off issue on how to get traffic to your business website and blog and get “top rankings” with the search engines.  (You do have a website and blog, don’t you?)

In this series I am going to be sharing with you dozens of great ways to drive traffic to your website(s).   The more traffic you get the more successful you will be.

Please don’t get overwhelmed with all the tactics that I am going to show you, and don’t feel that you must use every single technique I show you.  In fact that might be a little bit of overkill.

I suggest that you create a folder on your computer to store all these tactics in so you can refer to them later.  As you receive new tactics take action on them, now, rather than later.  Most of the tips are very easy to do, they may just take a little effort on your part.

Before we start with the techniques, I need to set a foundation for you and cover some general concepts about traffic generation.

The techniques you are going to learn and use will often drive traffic to your business website/blog in two different ways:

1)    you can receive traffic immediately from the method used directly through the links that you obtain, and

2)    the back-links you receive by using these methods will help your site get higher rankings in the search engines, which will result in a lot of organic traffic.

It will be nice great to take advantage of the immediate traffic you can get from many of these techniques, but if you are in this for the long haul, your main priority should be in getting as many high quality links to your site/blog as possible.  This will ensure that your site performs better in the search engines.

Basically, the more links a site has pointing back to it (aka back links), the better it is going to rank with in the search engines.  Therefore, most of our traffic generation methods are going to focus on obtaining high quality links to your site using “low cost seo” or free methods.

Don’t worry, this will not be as hard as it sounds!

On a final note, it may be very tempting to go out there and get as many links as you can, as fast as you can.  This may actually hurt you! Slow down and take a methodical approach. The search engines like to see you get links naturally over time.  When they see hundreds or thousands of instant links to your site they suspect something is not natural and will  penalized you from getting “top rankings”.  Try to shoot for getting around or under 10 new links a day, just to be safe.

We will get started in the next issue, so stay tuned.

How To Get “top rankings” with Search Engines Using RSS Feeds

RSS is one of the popular features to hit online publishing in recent years and bloggers and content site owners love it.  But what exactly is RSS?

RSS or Really Simple Syndication, is a file format used by publishers to make their content readily available to others in a format that can be universally read and understood. RSS allows publishers to “syndicate” their content to distribution lists with hyperlinks. RSS has actually been around for quite a while, but with the increased use of spam filters and online blogging, it has quickly become the choice of bloggers and ezine publishers who want to get their messages out to their subscribers. Not much attention, however, has been discussed about the advantages that using RSS provides for search engine optimization.

Search Engines Love RSS

Many “seo experts” (Search Engine Optimization) believe that sites optimized around themes or targeted topics, where all the content corresponds to a particular subject or set of keywords, rank better and get “top rankings” in the search engines. As an example; if your website is designed to sell soccer balls, all the content on your site would be focused around soccer and soccer balls.. The major search engines like Google definitely seem to prefer tightly-themed pages and will give those sites “top rankings“.

But where does RSS figure in all this?

RSS feeds, are most commonly obtained from news feeds or blogs, and most often correspond to a particular theme or topic. If you used some of these highly targeted RSS feeds on your site you can increase your site’s content without having to write any content of your own. It’s really kind of like having someone else write content for you and feed it to you – and all for free!  Now that’s a “low cost seo” approach if I ever saw one.

How does RSS improve my Search Engine “top rankings”?

There are three primary reasons why using content from RSS Feeds provides irresistible content for the search engine spiders.

1. RSS Feeds Provide Instant Themed Content

There can be hundreds, even thousands of publishers of RSS feeds that are specific to a particular topic. Since the feeds they provide have highly targeted content, they could contain several keywords that you want to rank highly for. (Hint: search for RSS feeds by the keyword(s) you want to promote.)  Adding content containing these keywords helps to get Google to tag your site as one with pertinent and relevant content.

2. RSS Feeds Provide Fresh, Up to Date Content

RSS feeds from the larger publishers are updated at regular intervals. When publishers add new articles/content to the feed, the older articles are dropped. These content changes immediately update your web pages with the new RSS feed content as well. Thus you are constantly getting new, relevant content for your site visitors every hour or day.  It really is a “low cost seo” approach.

3. RSS Feeds Yield More Frequent Spidering

One neat thing that happens as a result of adding an RSS feed to your site is that the Googlebot (and other Web-Bots) may visit your site daily. To these web-bots, your pages that have an RSS feed incorporated into them make the web-bots think you have a good page that is being updated daily. The web-bots, in their judgement, may rate the page as worth visiting daily. This means that you will have your site being indexed more frequently by the Web-bots and any new content you add to your site will be discovered much faster.

How Can this benefit the Owner of a Website or Internet Marketer?

Google and the other major search engines tend to index pages at the beginning of the month. If you publish new content to your site and you miss that update, you may need to wait until the next month to see your content indexed. But, since your site has RSS feeds and a constant flow of new traffic, your site gets indexed more frequently. Thus, the chances of your content getting indexed quickly are much higher.  This could be important if you are marketing new products or information that has to be provided on a timely basis.

But, the biggest advantage may be that fresh content is loved by the search engines and you will get higher rankings from them, which translates to more traffic to your site.

RSS offers you a way to get “top rankings” on the search engines using a “low cost seo” approach.  You can do it yourself and you won’t require the services of “seo experts“.