In this post I’m going to talk a bit about social bookmarking and SEO. A lot of people ask me whether or not social bookmarking can help your search engine rankings and the answer to this question is “yes”, but only if you do it correctly.

Social bookmarking is defined by Wikipedia as a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet. If you have ever posted your link to one of your blog articles with Digg you have social bookmarked it.

Social Bookmarking has a number of SEO advantages:

• You may get a backlink when you bookmark a page on your site (I say “may” because some bookmarking sites use “nofollow” in their backlinks).
• Bookmarking a new page or a new blog post on your site can help get that page indexed in the search engines quickly.
• Most social bookmarking sites allow you to use tags. You can list your target keywords in these tags and this can help your ranking for these keywords

It is very easy to bookmark your blog articles or web pages to multiple social directories with one click. For example OnlyWire  allows you to join numerous social directories and then bookmark your blog article by logging into your account and posting your title, description and tag keywords. SocialMarker is a similar site, buty with a higher number of social bookmarking sites listed. It also allows you to choose between sites that use “nofollow” and don’t use “nofollow”

When you write a new blog article or web page and bookmark it you can also help yourself out by utilizing some basic SEO techniques.

To keep it simple what you want to do is choose a specific keyword phrase for the article you write about. If you target longtail keyword phrases, which are phrases of three or more words, you increase the odds of ranking higher on the search engines as these longer keyword phrases tend to be less competitive.

The easy way to set this up is to include your keyword phrase in the title of your blog post. You should then also include it in the first and last paragraphs of the article before you publish it.

When you go to bookmark the article you want to tag it around that keyword phrase. You should include those again in the title and in the description for additional emphasis.

Search engines spider large social sites such as Technorati, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Simpy and others multiple times per day. By bookmarking your article in these directories you are creating valuable back links to the new pages on your site and you have a chance of receiving visitors from these social sites (expecially if your post is interesting or controversial and other people bookmark it).

If you follow these tips for social bookmarking and SEO you will see a greater return for your efforts in terms of search engine rankings and traffic.

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Once you have done your keyword research and chosen your keywords carefully, the next stage in achieving a higher search engine rank is optimizing your website.

For maximum traffic you should aim to optimize each page on your website for a different keyword phrase and you should make sure that the keyword phrase that you pick for your home page or the main page of your website gets a good number of searches per month.

Here are the main places on a web page that you should put your keywords when you are optimizing your website:

• In the <TITLE> tags – this is the text that is displayed along the title bar of your browser
• In the Headline tags - especially the <H1> tag
• In the ALT attributes of images – mention your keywords in one or two of the alt attributes of any of the images on your page
• Through out the body of your web page – ensuring that your keywords are mentioned at the beginning, middle and end
• In the anchor text of links – if you have any links to this page elsewhere on your website try to make sure that the anchor text (clickable text) has your keywords in it.
• In the <META> tags – although the main search engines no longer use these tags for ranking, you may want to mention your keywords in the keywords tag and in the description tag. The description tag is used by Google and other search engines to display a summary of your site when it is displayed in the search engine results.

Optimizing your website doesn’t have to be a complicated process – just make sure you mention your keywords in all of these places. At the same time, don’t over do it as keyword spamming can have the opposite affect! 

Taking an extra 10 minutes to do this when creating a new website can mean the difference between lots of traffic and no traffic.

Remember when working on your SEO that it pays to spend a good amount of time concentrating on your home page and researching the keywords for it. However, you shouldn’t stop there…

Here is my strategy for multiplying my traffic. I get so much more traffic from my sub pages than I do from my home page.

At least once per week I do the following:

(1) Choose a topic

(2) Research keywords for that topic. I am currently using Wordtracker to shortlist my keywords and the Google keyword tool to check the search volume.

(3) Find a good keyword phrase. I want something that has at least a couple of hundred searches a month, but not too much competition. The keyword needs to be less competitive than the one for my home page.

(4) Create a page about that topic and include the keywords in the filename, the <TITLE>, the <H1> tag, throughout the body, in the alt attributes and so on. If you don’t know how to create a new page on your site, a blog post will do. Put the keywords in the blog title and 2-3 times throughout the blog post. Monetize the page with a link or information about your product or service, or at least one affiliate program, or adsense, or a newsletter optin.

(5) Link to that page from at least one other place on your site e.g. home page, blog or menu. I usually link from the home page and one of my sub menus.

(6) Social bookmark the page.

(7) Write an article about that same topic, but make it different from the page that you added. I post my article using Submit Your Article with article leverage. In half the resource boxes I use only a deep link to this new page and in the other half I include both a link to my home page and a deep link. I put my keywords in the anchor text too.

(8) Repeat for a new page…

This technique works better than trying to squeeze lots and lots of keywords into your home page.

In most of my posts I have concentrated on different ways to get a better search engine rank.

Today I’m going to talk about how not to get a better search engine rank. It is good to know what you need to do to improve your search engine ranking, but what about what you shouldn’t do?

 (1) Hidden Text- some websites use underhand techniques such as making massive lists of keywords on their pages, but making these keywords the same color as their page e.g. white text on a white page. These keywords are invisible to a human visitor looking at the web page, but they are visible to the search engines. Search engine ranking alogorithms are highly complex, so to thing that they can’t spot a simple technique like this is niave. Search engines could potentially penalize your website for using hidden keyword tricks.

(2) Keyword Spamming – this is similar to the above, but this time the keywords are not hidden. Some webmasters think that stuffing as many keywords as possible throughout the page and the meta keyword tags will improve their ranking in Google and other search engine rankings. The truth is that this could end up having a detrimental effect on your ranking. Take a look at the keyword density of your main competitors and aim for something similar to them instead. It is also useful to note that the major search engines don’t really pay much attention to the meta keywords tag, so if you are using this on your page you don’t need to put more than 4 or 5 keyword phrases in there.

(3) Too Many Links – don’t list too many links on a single page. The Google Webmaster guidelines suggest having less than 100 links on a single page. It is also good practise to ensure that you link only to high quality sites as you could be penalized for linking to “bad neighborhoods”.

(4) Using Flash Intros – some websites have fancy flash intros. Although these can sometimes look nice, they will not do anything for your search engine rank. Search engines cannot understand flash and graphics, so if you must have a flash intro, try to ensure that you also get some text on the page with your keywords in there as well.

(5) Submitting your Site to Search Engines – although this one is likely to do you no harm, it won’t help either. The way to get a good ranking in the main search engines is with good, keyword rich, fresh content and lots of high quality backlinks to your site. I have another blog post on why you don’t need to submit your site to search engines.

(6) Using Other Peoples’ Content – this is one of my pet hates, as I have had people steal my website content a few times in the past. Aside from the fact that this generally infringes copyright laws, it is not going to help you get a better search engine rank. You have a much better chance of getting a high ranking with fresh, unique content.

(7) Javascript or Graphical Based Navigation – When creating a menu or a way to navigate your website it is best to make this text based. Search Engines do not read javascript and cannot see the text that may be on images or graphics. If you have to have a javascript or image based menu, ensure that you also have a text based menu on the same page.

You have probably already heard of reciprocal linking, where two websites link to each other for mutual benefit, but what about three way linking?

Three way linking can easily be explained in the example below:

 You have three websites – website A, website B and website C.

• Website A links to website B.
• Website B links to website C
• Website C links to website A

As you can see, there is no direct reciprocal link here. Each website is linking to another website, but getting a link back from a different website.

The reason for doing this is because reciprocal links can easily be detected by search engines as “unnatural” links, therefore you won’t get as much benefit from a reciprocal link as you will from a one way link. Doing a three way link exchange makes this look more natural as site A is linking to site B, but getting a link back from site C.

If you decide to use three way linking as a strategy for link building I would recommend only linking to websites that are related to your own website and ensuring that your backlink is coming from a site that is also related. By related, I mean the same theme. So don’t link your home business website to someone’s dieting website.

How do you set up a three way link?

It is easy to set up a three way link if you already have two or more related websites of your own. You can email a webmaster and propose a 3 way link exchange. The disadvantage of this is that it is a manual process and it can be difficult to keep track of your links and be sure that the other webmaster has kept his or her link to your website in place.

Another strategy is to use a three way linking service such as 3 Way Links. This service allows you to automatically set up three way links with other websites. All websites are manually reviewed so you don’t need to worry about linking to bad neighborhoods.

Three way linking is definitely a strategy that you should consider using as part of your overall linking campaign along with other methods such as article distribution, forum posting, directory submission and press releases.

Visit 3 Way Links for more information.