Even if you aren’t prepared to ‘go web2′ completely there are a few things you can do that will start the ball rolling and modernize your site. Here are some suggestions:

1) Start adding content. A blog with new articles every day or few days is ideal, but most people don’t have the time to invest in either writing that much content themselves, or supervising someone else to do it. You can still add content though on static html pages, and include a link to the new articles on the front page. Everyday or a few times a week is ideal, but if that is to frequent to keep up with, try once every 2 weeks.

2) Add Social Bookmark menus. Social Bookmark sites like del.icio.us.com, technorati.com and digg.com are growing at a phenomenal pace and are a great source of targeted traffic. These menus usually come with blogs, but there are stand alone JAVA social bookmark menus that can be installed on any HTML page. See AddtoBookmark.com.

3) Add you own articles. Jump start the process by opening an account with 6 or 8 Social Bookmarking sites and add your own articles. Be careful not to SPAM — add your own article once.

Keep adding content and it will pay off with more traffic and better targeted traffic.

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.

So I thought I would back up a bit and start off with some basic information and in future posts, build on this initial understanding.

First, if you have a website, the essential information about Social Bookmarking sites is they are new phenomena that can increase traffic to your website. You can get people visiting your website, certainly within days, and sometimes within hours.

So what are they and how do they work?
Social Bookmarking sites are websites where everyone shares their favorite sites to build up a huge collection of favorite sites about different topics. The site listings, like search engine listings are searchable by keywords, and also by tags.

Tags are like keywords, except you get to choose them, and there aren’t any rules. They are for you to help remember where you put something!

The interesting thing about Social Bookmarking sites, is they top ranking site for a search is the site the most people have voted for, not the result of complex algorithms.

How much traffic do Social Bookmarking sites get? A LOT! Here are some sites and their Alexa rankings:

Del.icio.us 139
Technorati 207
Digg 85

and all 3 are on TIME magazine’s top 50 coolest websites.

How can you get started?

1. Familiarize yourself with what is out there. Here is a quick list:

Technorati
blinklist.com
furl.net
del.icio.us
myweb2
shadows.com
simpy.com
spurl.net
ma.gnolia.com

Visit these sites and do searches that relate to your website and see what people are adding, and what people are interested in. On some sites, like Technorati, you will see a list on the right hand side, Top Tags, which tells what is popular. On the interior pages, Technorati will also give a handy graph with the number of mentions of your keyword or tag in the last 30 days. If you click on the graph you will see a larger graph where you can see the number of searches for your keyword over 30, 90, 180 and 360 days. This is great marketing information.

2. How do you fit in? Once you know what is out there, and possibly what some trends are, start planning content that will fit in. Write articles that will fit in and start submitting.

Take your time on creating your content — the extra time will pay off. If you content is good, people will click through to your site and they will be interested in buying what you have to offer. Be personal and speak from experience. My personal preference is for content that contains a bulleted list of actionable advice. Give tips and suggestions that someone can use right now.

3. Tags & Keywords. Tags are very impportant. Before submitting you may want to look at other articles and websites in your subject area and make a list of what tags they are using.

3. Track everything. Keep a log of what articles you submitted where. Watch your website stats and see what is happening.

4. Wash, Rinse, Repeat!

More info at Pandia.com

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* 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

Here’s what it means for small businesses with websites:

1) If you don’t have a blog, better get on it. The party is in full swing. If you have a website now, think about converting it to a blog.

2) Content, content, content is the name of the new game. It is all about personal opinion, and ultra-specialized information from experts in their niche. High-quality content floats to the top of the pile. If you can’t write or don’t have time, hire someone to produce content for you. Be prepared to supervise though!

3) The days of hiring a web designer and then hiring an SEO company and then sitting back are long gone (if that was ever a reality). Start thinking about how you can update your site with new information at least twice a week.

4) If you are looking for an SEO/SEM company, ask to see their marketing plan for Social Bookmarking and content creation.

5) Use Multimedia. Audio podcasts, and shared videos online are key to marketing Web2.

The web has always changed, and this is just another change and evolution. Nice to see the chaotic, personal expression aspect of the web winning over the attempts to control and regulate.

Opportunity still abounds online, with more opportunities than time to implement them.

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

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.


Techie SEO considerations.

Dup Content on Blogs
Google is extremely vigilant detecting and penalizing duplicate content in their search engine results, with often unwanted side effects.

When you make a post on your blog, a page is created for that post with the full text. In addition, the full text of the post is added to a Category page, and also to an archive page. That makes 3 copies of the same text on your site. When Google’s indexing spider (Googlebot) crawls your site, it notices 3 identical pages and assumes that you are trying to pad your content by repeating yourself 3 times.

2 Levels of penalty, SERP filters kick in. One, the allegedly duplicate pages are penalized. The other penalty or filter is trickier. Googlebot takes the total amount of content on your site, and then checks to see how much of that content is duplicated on your site, or elsewhere on the web. If the percentage of content on your site is duplicated elsewhere, Google concludes that your site may be lower quality and may not be of interest to Google’s search/browsers.

The whole thing is a LOT more complex than this but this is a good way to think about it. In fact there is no magic percentage or threshold, but rather a long list of ‘signs of quality’ which Google’s algorithm calculates to assign rank.

The Fix

A discussion at Webmasterworld gives the code to place in the HEAD of header.php.

Also, WordPress Support recommends the same code to fix the issue of dated posts being indexed, and the page disappearing.

Post Regularly and Post Often! — keep going and don’t slow down! It WILL pay off! If you can’t or don’t have time to write the posts yourself, hire a writer.

Some Useful SEO Plugins

Jerome’s Keywords

Allows keywords to be associated with each post. These keywords can be used for page meta tags, included in posts for site searching or linked like Technorati tags.


Social Bookmark Creator

Add social bookmark links to your blog.

Auto Social Poster – automatically submits to social media sites. (A MUST have!)

This is one of the best. This plug-in replaces the built-in ping (works? doesn’t work?) with a function that pings only when you publish not when you save.