Archive for May, 2009

Social Bookmarking Strategy To Promote Your Site

May 12th, 2009

A successful online marketing campaign has to be treated in a more comprehensive way and must include the participation of community. It’s the era of crowd sourcing and democratic marketing. While planning your online marketing campaign, do consider social bookmarking as an important strategy to promote your website.

Possible Bookmarking Strategies that you can adopt to make your website popular

1. Basic Bookmarking
2. Multiple Account Spamming
3. Blogfarm bookmarking
4. Sitemap bookmarking
5. Random bookmarking strategy

Basic Bookmarking:
This is as it sounds. You create one account each in some of the popular bookmarking sites and start bookmarking your favorites. Along with some other informative sites you bookmark your own site.
Some Recommended Bookmarking sites are:
• Digg.com
• Stumbleupon.com
• Deleicious.com
• Furl.net
• Simpy.com
• Blinklist.com
• Spurl.net
• Blogmarks

This is a slow but 100% effective and requires dedicated effort to make your content travel. If your content is good and offers some value definitely people will bookmark and you can see multiple incoming links and lots of tags pointing towards your site.

Multiple Account Spamming
This strategy has an immediate effect on your site but definitely is a spam. This strategy is practiced by spammers who wants immediate short term boost (one day) of traffic. You create multiple accounts using different email IDs and start bookmarking sites. You may see yourself on first page on some of the bookmarking sites but soon your accounts will be banned.

Blogfarm bookmarking
This is one of the oldest practices and has been considered a super spam by search engines but when used wisely it can turn out to be a good strategy to increase crawling rate and indexing.
It is a very effective tactic to get your site indexed. BlogFarm usually involves the linking of related blogs together. You can use it to bookmark the blogfarms! If you try to bookmark 50k pages, you will be easily accused of spamming. The best practice is to link to the 50k pages from your Blogfarms and then social bookmark your Blogfarm. Those 50k pages will be crawled faster.

Sitemap bookmarking
This is a good strategy to bookmark. All your domain names are set to a sitemap and then bookmark your sitemap. The search Engine spider crawl that sitemap and find all the links.

Random bookmarking strategy

This is very good strategy to make good random traffic from bookmarking site.
create small number of account(2 or 3 email account) and bookmark to bookmarking website. After one week then create new 2 or 3 account and submit to that sites. But please handle some care because it’s one of the blackhat techniques also.
This can be understood with following example:

Creating 3 Accounts Each at some of the bookmarking sites:

Digg A, Digg B, Digg c
Furl A, Furl B, Furl C
Spurl A, Spurl B, Spurl C

If we have 3 accounts at each of the above mentioned bookmarking sites, we will have 12 accounts. The 12 accounts can be grouped into 3 categories, Profile 1, Profile 2 and Profile 3 depending upon your target audience, geography or anything that suits your social bookmarking campaign.

Profile 1: Digg C, Furl A, Spurl B
Profile 2: Furl B, Spurl A Digg B
Profile 3: Digg A, Spurl C Furl C

Now randomly choose profile and start bookmarking your sites.

Some of the benefits of including social bookmarking as one of the strategies to promote your site

1) Your content start traveling as it is accessible to all
2) An effective and 100% legitimate way to build links
3) Can see sudden spikes in traffic sent through social bookmarking sites

Matt Cutts Discussing Meta Tags, Snippets, No Follow and More on SEO

May 7th, 2009

Watch out some of the really really helpful videos on search engine optimization. These Videos are collected and placed at one place to help you find answers of some of the Frequently asked but rarely answered SEO questions.

How to Get Better Visibility on Google ?

Matt Cutts Discusses Snippets

Matt Cutts on “No follow”

Should I use underscores or hyphens in URLs?

How do I optimize an e-commerce site without rich content?

Fancy Twitter with Top 10 Celebrities

May 3rd, 2009

twitterLast night I tried to find out some of the celebrities on Twitter and believe me the list is endless. Not so surprising, but exciting to watch the number of followers they have. Well no wonder, the corporate may soon think of tying up with many of them to endorse product through their tweets. So do not be surprised to see your favorite celebrity tweeting about their favorite (read as endorsed) toiletries or a shopping arcade or anything for that purpose. Here is the list of top 10 celebrities on Twitter (that I could find out). I am ranking them on the basis of followers they have currently.

1) http://twitter.com/TheEllenShow

the-allenshowWith 1,301, 548 Followers, The Ellen Show stands at the top of the list. The famous talk show hosted by Ellen DeGeneres. On 1st May, The host got a double-whammy surprise while celebrating the 1,000th episode of The Ellen DeGeneres Show, as Oprah Winfrey unexpectedly popped in, not only offering her congratulations but setting a date for the duo’s much-hyped cover of O magazine.

2) http://twitter.com/britneyspears
britney “Fancy a Twitter with Britney”. Who would not like to read the tweets from the sensational Britney. No wonder, she has 1, 292, 871 followers. Her last tweet as I could see written on April 29th at 7:31PM “My friend gave me a pair of shoes called Tom’s-I love them! If you buy a pair, he donates a pair to a child in need-what a great cause!~Brit”

3) http://twitter.com/barackobama
barrackobamaYes, the 44th and current President of United States is on Twitter. It is his way of communicating directly with the Citizens. Not a bad idea. His popularity also can be roughly gauged with the number of followers he has. Currently he has 1,058,189 followers, which definitely is increasing every day. Interesting enough to know about his another ID on Twitter with “RR” in Barack http://twitter.com/barrackobama. In this ID his profile states President of the United States of America.

4) http://twitter.com/jimmyfallon

jimmyfallon

It doesn’t have to be late night or Saturday to be with Jimmy Fallon. You need to sign in with your twitter account and start following the Famous actor and comedian to know what he is up to at present. If you join Jimmy today on Twitter, you would be among one of the 889, 965 followers of Jimmy.

5) http://twitter.com/the_real_shaq :

shaqontwitter“Very quotatious, I perform random acts of shaqness” . That’s what the Bio of Shaq on Twitter says. Followed by 877, 176 people, he is one of the most quotable athletes of all time and the dominating player in the History of NBA . He believes “Life is too short to be in a hurry”.

6)http://twitter.com/RyanSeacrest
ryanseacrestGet official tweets from Ryan and his producers about the radio shows, American Idol and breaking news from Hollywood! He is being chased by 850,321 people.

7)http://twitter.com/mrskutcher

demimooreWell Mrs Kutcher may not be so enticing but what about Demi Moore? KutcherYes, we know you know Demi Moore. But please say a big Showbiz Shed hello to Mrs Ashton Kutcher on Twitter. Who is, of course, the gorgeous Demi Moore followed by 824,900 people.

8) http://twitter.com/oprah
oprah797, 442 people currently look for twitter updates by Oprah. According to some assessments, she is one of the most influential woman in the world, best known for her self-titled, multi-award winning talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind in history.

9)http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong
lancearmstrongHe won the Tour de France a record-breaking seven consecutive years, from 1999 to 2005. He has survived testicular cancer, a tumor that metastasized to his brain and lungs, in 1996. He also runs a cancer foundation that says “we unite people to fight cancer believing that unity is strength, knowledge is power and attitude is everything”. Lance ArmStrong is followed by 769,031.

10)http://twitter.com/perezhilton:

prezhiltonontwitter

Perez Hilton is the creator and writer of one of the most famous websites PerezHilton.com – Hollywood’s Most-Hated Web Site! And he also loves music – a lot! He is being chased by 739, 619 twitters.

What Next on Twitter to Entice all of us?

May 1st, 2009

A new survey report by Nileson (March,09) confirmed what we all knew that Twitter is at the top of five fastest social networking platforms growing by 1,382 percent from last year. Twitter users have increased From 475,000 unique visitors in February 2008 to 7 million in February 2009. Nielson also reported that unlike other social networking platform that the largest age group on Twitter was not college students or teens, but adults from the ages of 35-49.This group comprises nearly 42% of the site’s audience at 3 million unique visitors.
twitter_Demographcis

But this was all on the brighter side.

Nielson again came up with a report on Twitter last month. “Twitter’s audience retention rate, or the percentage of a given month’s users who come back the following month, is currently about 40 percent,” reports David Martin, vice president of Primary Research for Nielsen Online. This simply means 60% of the users or 3 out of 5 twitter users fail to return in the following month.

Martin did compared two other biggest social networking sites MySpace and FaceBoook growth period with that of Twitter and found their retention rates were twice as high. Martin writes “When they went through their explosive growth phases, that retention only went up, and both sit at nearly 70 percent today’.
social_network_loyalty

The low retention rate is actually a roadblock to twitters success in long run and Twitter must plan something enticing enough to make its new birds flock back to nest at regular intervals. Or else the most talked about micro-blogging platform’s sustainability is questionable.