Jun 18

Many new Web 2.0 sites like del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Digg and many more allow users to add and categorize links to their favorite websites. This allows you to store your favorite sites on the Internet instead of just in your web browser so you can access them from anywhere. It also allows you to share your favorite sites with the entire world so others can benefit from the great sites you’ve found.

Most of these Web 2.0 sites allow you to “tag” a website page with various words that describe it. This eliminates the need to have a defined category structure like a typical website directory would have and allows you to categorize a website with whatever words make the most sense to you. (Hint: YOUR KEYWORDS!)

What makes social bookmarking sites so powerful is that the search engine spiders absolutely love them!

A search spider’s job is to scour the Internet in order to find and index all of the web page links it discovers. So it makes sense that these spiders will put a lot of emphasis on sites that contain lots of links about web pages that users feel are important. The more users that have the same site listed in their bookmarks, the higher the ranking the search engines will assign to it.

The tags are the real key though. Search engines determine what a particular URL is about based on the words that people use to link to it. This is why if you do a search on Google for the phrase “click here” the top 3 results are usually for Adobe Acrobat, Apple Quicktime, and Sun’s Java. Many sites distribute their content in one of these formats so they often have a sentence that says something like: “To open this file you will need to have Acrobat Reader installed. Click Here to download it.” The hundreds of thousands of links to Acrobat with the words “click here” give it a #1 ranking for that phrase even though those words don’t have anything to do with the product and they don’t appear anywhere on the web page.

So what this all means to you is:

1)      The quickest and easiest way to get your website pages to rank on page 1 of the search engines for specific terms is to bookmark them on ALL of the social bookmarking sites.

2)      Use the keywords you want to rank for as the tags for the bookmark. 

3)      The more sites you bookmark it on the better. Vary your keywords and descriptions slightly on the various sites so it appears natural.

4)      Don’t just bookmark your site. Add other related sites as well so it looks natural.

Social Bookmarking is a very tedious process though and takes a lot of time. As a business owner it’s probably not the best use of your time and it’s best to outsource it to someone who knows how to do it and doesn’t mind doing it for a lot less money than the value of your time. If you need help finding a reputable company to do this for you, just let us know and we’ll gladly help you out.

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May 11

One of the major keys to dominating your competition is to have as many listings as possible on a search engine result page.

 

For example, if you do a search on Google for my main keyword phrase: nc internet marketing you’ll likely find that out of the 9.5 MILLION results found, at least 5 of the Top 20 results are either my main company website (Cybermedia Marketing) or other business profile pages about my business. The top 2 are for my main website, and 3 are on other local website directories.

Having this many results for your core keywords creates a position of authority that is very difficult for your competitors to match:

1)      It positions you as the expert in your market and the most logical choice. If you own 25%-50% of the top 20 listings for your given keywords while your competitors only have one listing (if any) you’re surely going to dominate.

2)      It forces your competitors to have to spend money on Google Adwords in order to show up on Page 1 of the search results at all. That is, if they’re even smart enough to know what Google Adwords is – which we’ll cover in Secret Tactic #5.
(Note: you’ll see my paid ad listed as well which I buy just to dominate the page even further, but I obviously don’t have to.)

3)      The more websites you have ranked on the search engines and the more links you have pointing to your main website, the more likely it is people will find you elsewhere on the Internet as well.
This is why the internet is called the World Wide Web and that’s exactly how you should look at it from a marketing standpoint. You want as big a WEB of sites as you can create capturing visitors and leading them to your main website. Just like the image on the cover of this book.

There are too many different business profile websites to list here but we’ll give you one of our favorites that almost always gets a Page 1 organic ranking if setup properly…

MerchantCircle.com – Merchant Circle is a great website to list your business on not only for the direct traffic the site gets but also for the love that Google seems to give it’s business profile pages.

You’ll notice that it’s my 4th ranking in the image above and it even beats out the long established local business portal Citysearch.

MerchantCircle also has some great social networking features that allow you to meet other business owners in your area and nationwide. This creates a great opportunity to find and develop relationships with new potential business partners, vendors, and customers.

One word of caution though… a lot of these local business portals make their money be selling you ads, enhanced listings, or by offering to manage your search engine advertising for you on the major search engines.

We’ve typically found the enhanced listings to be of little value and the ads usually don’t get a whole lot of clicks. And you certainly don’t want them managing your paid search campaigns. Paid search is best left to experts who are paid based on their performance and know how to manage your campaign correctly in order to generate actual leads, not just clicks.

 

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