Social Bookmarking and SEO Tips

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is Critical to your Success as a blogger, webmaster or youtuber! Without ranking in the search engines, mainly google, you won't get many viewers of your content and clicks on your ads. Don't waste your hard earned money and valuable time on the many SEO resources out there. Don't believe claims that someone can get you on the first search result page of your chosen keywords overnight. This may have been true several years ago, but search engines like Google are highly sophisticated these days and can not be fooled so easily

The bottom line, SEO and Social Bookmarking are VERY time consuming. I've spent countless hours and late nights posting, re-posting, tweeting, updating, pinging, and other ways to market my blogs. There are no shortcuts to good SEO, it takes time, and many of your resources. Before you break your wrists promoting your content, make sure you have it optimized the best you can. I can't be too specific with this because each and every website, blog, or video is different and what title and keyword that works with one won't necessarily translate. Whatever keywords you choose, make sure your title includes the top ones, your body includes a few (Use sparingly, do not keyword cram with a bunch of the same words, you will get labeled as spam) Make sure they are relevant to your work but more importantly to what people are searching for. Also make sure your keywords are not too common but not too obscure, you want to find that hole in content that you can fill.

An Effective well written title is absolutely essential to getting found in the search engines. If your blog is about barbecue and called "The Rack Blog," don't use your the word rack in your title. People searching for information about barbecue foods probably aren't typing "rack" into the search engines. Instead, a title like "Barbecue Food Ideas and Cooking Techniques" might be better. If you absolutely must have the title of your blog in your title, put it at the end of your effective keywords, not the beginning.

Also, make sure to have your keywords be ones that are being searched for. A very helpful resource to help you choose titles and keywords is Google Trends. There you can test out up to 5 keywords at one time to see how the search traffic compares. Also, make sure not to just use the highest traffic keywords. A keyword like mp3 is not necessarily good. There are so many websites that use this keyword that it's what we call saturated. You need keywords that are not too overused and are not too obscure that no one is searching for them. There are exceptions to this rule however, like "Work from Home" is a highly used keyword but is one that there seems to be never ending demand for. Above all, do your own research on this to see what works for your content.

Like I said before, when it comes to optimizing your SEO there are no shortcuts. If it sounds too good to be true, guess what, it is. When you're customizing your SEO you want to consider the following. Take your time and don't "purge links" by doing hundreds of backlinks in one day. By the way, lets define a back link. This is a link on someone else's page that links back to your page. There are different quality backlinks. For instance, a link on a top rated blog will look much better to search engines than a link on Joe Blow's website (no offense to Joe Blow). Also, if you create tons of repetitive links in one day search engines will actually lower your ranking and suspect you of spamming and therefore being less reliable to the searcher. Don't worry if you've done this, I have and I understand it's easy to get carried away and go crazy posting your links.

To rank highly on search engines like Google your link must be seen has highly valuable and reliable information. For example, tweeting your link on twitter is ok you get a few clicks, but it's much, much better if 50 people like what you posted, retweet it and talk about it on Facebook. This is seen as much more valuable to the search engines.

Also, sometimes people get to caught up just submitting their work to search engines. By the way, don't submit your site to Google more than once, it could get you blacklisted. If you don't backlink your material it will never get ranked. As a general rule you should submit to the search engines by using a free resource like Submit Express, and then back link your material slowly but surely.

A the old saying goes quality is better than quantity and even for me I have to keep telling myself that. It's easy to think that working harder will yield more results but it's not always true, you also have to be smart about what content you create, what keywords you choose and where you market your content.

If you're looking to social bookmark, and you should, look at my list from 30 to 1 in my level of importance below. Promote your blogs, websites, or videos increase the quality backlinks to your content and subsequently improve your SEO!

By the way, visit IMAutomator.com to automate your social bookmarking, and it's free to use!

30. Dropjack.com - Pretty basic, limited, you can post bookmarks here.

29. iZeby.com - marginal social bookmarking site.

28. Linksmarker.info - again short on the traffic but good.

27. Karmalynx.com - not much traffic here but easy to use.

26. Dizzed.com - decent social news bookmarking service.

25. Chime.in - like Twitter's younger cousin, you can post keywords and are not limited to such a small post!

24. Netvouz.com - quality bookmarking.

23. Bookmarktracker.com - good bookmarking service.

22. Wirefan.com - great for social bookmarking but again watch it with the overposting, not afraid to ban you.

21. Bookmarkitnow.com - another great one.

20. Tipd.com - financial bookmarks here only.

19. Oyax.com - a social bookmark manager. It allows you to add web sites to your personal collection of links, categorize those sites with tags and share your collection.

18. Pxpf.com - another useful service.

17. Sphinn.com - A niche bookmarking service for marketers.

16. Buddymarks.com - another fantastic bookmarking service, easy to post, easy to manage!

15. Mylinkvault.com - easy to bookmark.

14. Tagza.com - One of the best bookmarking services with usability and decent traffic.

13. Linkagogo.com - cool features, great bookmarking.

12. Jumptags.com - another great bookmarking service.

11. Blinklist.com - Can Easily Upload your links from Delicious!

10. Folkd.com - Is a great tool for social bookmarking with good features.

9. Technorati.com - Good service but a bit painstaking to verify each of your blogs or websites, not for videos!

8. Slashdot.com - Excellent traffic, would have ranked higher but you have to be extremely careful here to not over post or be banned.

7. Delicious.com - Trusted, reliable bookmarking service with a stack feature to group your bookmarks.

6. Digg.com - One of the best for a reason.

5. Reddit.com - if you have a really creative engaging title you can score big with traffic here, beware though, be extra careful not to post more than once every day or so or you could be banned.

4. StumbleUpon - post your link, and people stumble upon your links!

3. Twitter - Invaluable resource for links, best to post during prime traffic times

2. Yahoo! Bookmarks - The number two search engine and a great bookmarking service.

1. Google Bookmarks - Google, need I say more?