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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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

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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