With the release of statistics of the incredible growth of Web2 and Social Bookmarking, it is easy to lose sight of the fact that many people still don’t know what Social Bookmarking is, much less how to use it to increase traffic to their websites. See my previous post where I may have gotten a little ahead of myself.

I was very surprised today to discover that 3 people I spoke with hadn’t heard of Social Bookmarking or Web2 ( or del.icio.us, technorati, digg etc.). Never mind an explanation of delicious’ URL. When I started talking about Optimizing for Social Media, I got blank stares and had to backtrack.
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Anyone that hasn’t heard of outsourcing by now must be either hiding in a cave or not working in the service industry. Call Centers are front and center but it seems outsourcing is spreading to every nook and crannie of the economy. On a recent trip to Manila in the Philippines, a job fair for Call Center employees was held for 65,000 vacancies in Call Centers. Other statistics are just as shocking. India is set to emerge as a $17 billion knowledge outsourcing destination by 2010, states a new industry study. (Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) May 2005 ) Three-quarters of U.S. companies outsourced some or all of their information technology activities in 2004, and that percentage is likely to increase this year according to Global Outsourcing Report March 2005.
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Article submissions used to be the silver bullet of SEO. Hire freelancers in India to produce articles, submit to a zillion distribution sites with keyword rich links in the footer, wait patiently, and voila! Top 10 or top 5 every time!

Great fun while it lasted! A little bit like the early days when running sites through Webposition and stuffing keywords was all it took for a #1 ranking. Not so much anymore. Google has already cracked down on article submission sites, just like they did on directories. Do they still work? Sure, but not as much and the water is trickier to navigate.
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Surveys and statistics released this week show that Web2 continues to explode and Web1 brochure sites are stagnating and getting left in the dust. Consider:

* Blogger.com is the web’s fastest growing service at 528% over last year.

* Myspace.com grew at +318%

* Wikipedia grew at +275%

* Traditional web1.0 sites are losing ground: MSN.com (+1%), AOL.com (0%), ebay.com (-3%), Yahoo.com (+5%) and Google is still positive at +21% but slowing.

The Wall Street Journal summarizes the ComScore Data in New Trends In Online Traffic
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Here is a great plug-in that I have found for increasing traffic from Social Bookmarking sites. This WordPress plug-in automatically bookmarks your site to Social Bookmark sites each time you post, including:

blinklist.com
furl.net
del.icio.us
myweb2
shadows.com
simpy.com
spurl.net
ma.gnolia.com
blogmarks.net
rawsugar.com
smarking.com
linkrolling.com
blogmemes.net
markaboo.com
linkagogo.com
feedmelinks.com

This plug-in avoids spam with a clever option which randomly selects ‘X’ sites for submission, so you aren’t spamming.

Check it out Auto Social Bookmarking

This blog is for people with some understanding of SEO, but not for not for the real professionals.

Most people that I talk to, clients and potential clients, have some understanding of the search engines, but are not interested in all the gory technical details.

In my posts I try to explain technical aspects using terms and explanations that are as simple as possible to give a basic understanding, fully aware that I am frequently over-simplifying.

The technical details are widely available for those that are interested. I would highly recommend these sites if you wish to explore the technical aspects of search engine marketing:

Stuntdbl goes into lots of detail with very informative posts.

Search Engine Watch Forum You have to dig though the forum but lots of details.

Mil slita For the truly technical minded.

I have been meaning to put an FAQ page on my site for a awhile but never seem to get to it so here is a quick FAQ for Search Engine Optimization.

What are SEO and SEM?

SEO is Search Engine Optimization and SEM is Search Engine Marketing. SEO comes from the early days of the net where it was possible to rank webpages by simply stuffing more keywords into the different parts of the page (ie Title tage, META tags, Headings etc.).

Things have changed though! Now there are many factors both “on the page” and “off the page” that influence a pages rank. See below for more discussion of this.
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Lots has been written about promoting blogs which covers the basics, of pings, submitting, creating content people want to read and all that. In this article I thought I would take it one step further and talk about some of the techie SEO aspects of promoting an blog, and specifically, avoiding penalties.

For the basics of promoting a blog, the best article I found was Margin of Eric – Making Yourself Known.

This is the place to start and covers all of the basics.
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Linking is the staple of SEO. Reciprocal links, one-way links, directory links, links from article syndication are all part of a well rounded linking campaign.

With the search engines, especially Google, looking for quality and ‘trust-rank’ for sites, choosing high quality link partners is critical.

So how do you choose link partners?
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Here is an interesting video from www.intralinkinc.com, which explains their Website marketing plan. What caught my eye about this is they are basically describing a content site, and taking a much broader view of marketing than just SEO.

The key point is they start with the content and force the SEO into the content rather than forcing the content into the SEO. The emphasis is on marketing the content, not marketing and then finding filler content to market.

Here is a recap of their 5 point marketing plan.

1. Product Mix. What is the thesis statement for your website? What is the something special about your site that distinguishes it from everything else?

2. Keyword Research — How customers can/are finding your website. Keywords focus on the Root, and the Long Tail. The root keyword might be,
real estate Denver, and the Long Tail would be keywords targeting communities surrounding Denver

3. Competition Level — 1. determine level of SEO required & 2) Normalization — Look at the top 10 results and their content and match it according to the number of words etc.

4. Search Engine Optimization. Force the Search Engine Optimization into the content rather than forcing the SEO into the content. The emphasis is on the marketing and the content.