Best Practices : Social Bookmarking

Internet has always been a great place to do business in; with social bookmarking it has just gotten better. People from around the world are bonding on these websites.  

Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. Bookmarking, on the other hand, is the practice of saving the address of a Web site you wish to visit in the future on your computer.

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website. Social bookmarking opens the door to new ways of organizing information and categorizing resources.

Few best practices listed below :

• You must create an account on various social bookmarking websites that interest you. Ensure that your nickname remains the same on all these websites. You easily make an account on StumbleUpon, Digg or any other social bookmarking site and quickly start adding links.

• Give priority to those websites that attract high traffic. Check out their enrolled membership numbers. That will give you an adequate indication of its popularity.

• Don’t submit every page of your website, one after the other. Most sites aren’t keen on this and users may see it as spam. Instead, submit the valuable content and blogs or article you may have on your website. Include photos from the webpage as well.

• Concentrate on building your reputation in your chosen area of expertise. Start interacting with other members. Make sure that you export your personal bookmarks to those social bookmarking websites.

• Look out for some other relevant services. You can promote each other’s products that way. This method is called cross-social bookmarking.

• Once you start submitting your content to these social bookmarking sites, you can start following other users. Developing a presence on these websites will help your visibility and the visibility of your content. Users can “like” or “vote up” your content on some sites, suggesting it to their followers. Once you get the hang of a few of these sites, you can start exploring others!

• Take care in adding tags of your most relevant keywords in order to make the link easy to find within the site. Social Bookmarking helps to increase sales because it increases the number of visitors to your site and provides another way for potential customers to find your content.

• Organize your tags well. Try and keep them simple. That makes it easier for the other users to find you. Your bookmarks should leave a trail that they can follow to locate you.

Best Practices : Directory Submission

Directory submission is one of the off page optimization method used for building the marketing plan for your website. However, the main goal of directory submission is to create backlinks to a website. In turn helps to get targeted traffic towards your website and improves the search engine rankings.

What exactly you do in Directory Submission???

In a directory submission, you place your website details (like website URL, Title, Description, Meta tags and many other details) into the most appropriate category and sub-category of the directory. The directory will then check the content of your website before it will be listed. Once published, your website will have a link back from that particular directory in its appropriate category so that customers can find you more easily. 

What are different types of Directory Submissions??

Basically, there are two types of directory submissions.

• Automated Directory Submission – It is done with software.
• Manual Directory Submission – It is done manually by human.

It is very well agreed that, the task of directory submission requires more time and effort. It is time consuming and therefore many people take help of automated submission software. However, manual submissions are proven to offer more beneficial results than automated submission. 

What are the benefits of Directory Submission?

• Back links: Generating back links are the major benefits of web-directory submissions which in turn results in more traffic flow towards a website.

• Indexing: It ensures guaranteed search engine indexing. Search engines crawl through the links, add the site pages to their index and ranked them accordingly. If your website’s link is discovered on the directory site, the spiders will follow the links to your website, thus results in increasing the visits and indexing in the databases of search engines.

• Anchor Text: Directories allow links to the site with keywords describing your site. Therefore, search engines rank the site higher than other for the given terms. Hence directory submissions using keywords as anchor-text will boost your link reputation.

• Save Cost: Most directories are free to submit to. It therefore makes business sense to submit to as many directories as possible.

Relevancy is extremely important in directory submissions; otherwise, it will be a waste of time and effort. As there are many rules and regulations when it comes to directory submissions, and you need to make sure that you are following these rules otherwise you may find your submission being rejected, or in spam, not being listed in that directory at all.

Best Practices : Image Optimization

Image optimization is nothing but optimizing your images to make them more search engine friendly. We can minimize the download time and save bandwidth by using thoroughly optimized images i.e. most compressed yet visually acceptable image in the proper file format.

If a user is made to wait for more than 10 seconds, he is most likely to hit back button on the website, or he may click on content that’s loads first instead of waiting for the entire page to load or he may leave your site entirely. Bandwidth costs money, and if you are using large size image without optimizing them, you are going to wastes a precious bandwidth that will end up costing you money, customers or both.


Important aspects of Image Optimization :

Alt Text

Alt tag help search engines to know what your image is about and to understand images better and rank them. For e.g., <imag src=”kids dancing.jpg” alt=”Kids Dancing”/>

File Size

You should make the image file size as small as possible without sacrificing the quality. You can use an image editing program to make your image a desired size. Do not let your browser resize a large image to look smaller. When you have a large image, and input height and width tags on that image to make the image smaller, people load the large image first, and then the browser resizes it.

Anchor Text

Always use descriptive anchor text that describes the image. If you are linking images with a text, anchor text will help your images ranked for particular keywords.

File Name

Always make sure to give a descriptive filename for your images while uploading them. Using keyword-rich words in your image filename is important for helping search engines determine relevancy.

Captions

Image captions are also very important as they are one of the most well-read pieces of content on your entire site.