Social Bookmarking

Digg, Technorati, Reddit, Del.icio.us, Fark, Furl, even Netscape. Web 2.0’s largest trend has created over 1,000 of this new breed of “Tagged News sites.” On them we mere

humans share our online bookmarks with each other, and on the latest incarnations, we vote them up and down against each others to point out which ones are the most interesting or useful.

These tools are great, and their power is staggering at times… But all they do is essentially just use humans to duplicate Google’s work to the same end!

Why would we go through such trouble? Because computer algorithms still just don’t “know” their resources the way humans do. Having another person select a website and “tag” it as relevant to your keyword is much more intuitive for us to find resources with. It has its problems too, mainly when combining keywords, but overall it’s becoming an extremely popular way for people to find other websites.

SiteMaps

Both Google and Yahoo! let you write a “map” of your website and submit it to them, so their spiders will know in advance exactly what to go index and how often. This has nothing to do with your website’s “Sitemap” page, those are for a human being’s eyes, although technically those make it a little easier on the spiders as well.

Google’s spider map is commonly a file named “sitemap.xml” that must be placed on the main web directory of your server host. Google demands that it be written in the XML language, which looks a lot like HTML except for a few other commands. Don’t worry, you won’t have to write a single line of code for this. There’s an excellent free tool coming up in a minute to write these for you.

SEO

Search Engine Optimization is big business. The number of companies out there providing SEO services is quite staggering, and it’s growing every day. Does that mean it’s too difficult to do all by yourself?

Not at all. It’s very involved, and it will take a little time and ongoing effort, but it’s not rocket science, and you can even do everything you need to organically Rank #1 in all major search engines by yourself, all for free.

When I opened my SEO Services business in 2004 I only had experience working with my own websites before that point, and I learned VERY quickly one last, very important thing about SEO… 

It’s personal.

If you pay a big company to optimize your website for you, as opposed to you learning how and doing the optimization yourself, then you’ll never be able to rank as highly. Another company cannot have the very discreet knowledge of your businesses’ keywords and market that you had to learn the hard way.

Safelists

An often dismissed way of advertising online is by using a Safelist. It’s named that because you have to agree not to report the flood of emails you get as spam… So the emails you’re agreeing to use is therefore “Safe” from spam accusations, no matter how many come in each day. I normally get a few hundred emails daily just from the three accounts I mention below… Way more than I or anyone else is planning to read through.

Safelist’s major problem, which everyone agrees is substantial, is that no one really reads these emails. Conversion rates (people actually clicking a link in one of the emails) are down in the toilet around 0.0001%.

RSS – (Syndicated Content)

There are actually many great uses for RSS, which stands for “Really Simple Syndication.” Website Publishers & especially Blog owners should use RSS feeds in their pages to give fresh, on-topic

content to their readers each day without having to lift a finger. Alternatively, they can offer their own RSS feed to other webmasters so that those other sites can publish their site content elsewhere (with a link back to their site, naturally.)

Your visitors will like having the fresh industry news there at a glance. I know that I certainly appreciate my Yahoo! news start page portal, which is nothing but 50 RSS Feeds all crammed together.

Press Releases – (A subset of Link Building)

Much like Article Marketing, writing and submitting press releases can be an incredibly effective way

to get attention to your website or cause. 

However, not just any informative article will do for a press release; these are meant to go to the News agencies of the world… So your submission has to be at least a little newsworthy & time-sensitive.

Many businesses apply this tactic by hyping up their product launches, writing a press release about the release of their upcoming product that is factual but implies that the launch is quite a newsworthy event where they are located.

PodCasting

There are free places online for people to actually download MP3s on any subject. Naturally, you can also upload them for free.

Many people are audio-centric and prefer to learn by listening on their iPods, usually so they can

multitask or not be bored during a commute. Giving them free content is an excellent way for your name and relation to their favorite subject matter to be presented.

Much like how an article works, effective PodCasting depends on your content being interesting enough for them to want to download it, but at the same time, you must include your sales message and of course end it with a “Call to Action” that motivates the listener into following up in some way such as visiting your website.

It’s true that this rarely results in many links back to your site, and if your content is interesting enough, the best you can hope for is for fans to pass them around to each other by word of mouth… Certainly no benefit for link-building.