Google and Personalized Search

Early this month Google announced that they would be tailoring everyone’s search results based on their search history even when users are not signed into Google. Personalized results are nothing new on Google. The search giant has been customizing peoples SERPs (search engine results pages) for quite a while already, but until now it only happened when you searched while signed into your Google account. Today, signed in or not everybody gets personal results.

Here’s How It Works

Whether you’re signed in or not, all the searches you run on Google are stored in your browser cookies. This data is referred to as your ‘Web History’ and Google uses it to customize your search results. If you’re not signed in, your Web History is stored for 180 days, then old data is replaced with new searches. If you’re signed in, there’s no time limit and you can manage you Web History. Either way the searches you run and sites you visit will affect your future search experience.

The sites you visit more often will be pushed higher in the search results on related queries. For example if you search for ‘cat food’ and visit www.petfood.com, next time when you search for ‘dog food’ you may see www.petfood.com in top 10 results even if it doesn’t rank there in the general impersonalized search. You can tell that your search results have been personalized by the ‘View customization’ link in the upper right hand corner.

The personalized search results can differ significantly from the general SERPs. I ran a couple of tests searching for related keywords and clicking the same site each time. I also checked this site’s rankings with a rank checker to get a list of impersonalized rankings. In one of the tests a few click-throughs to a site pushed it 26 positions up on a highly competitive keyword. That is from the 31 position on page 4 straight to the 5th spot on the first page in personalized search results (I was signed out).

How Meta Descriptions Can Affect Your Google Rankings

Although Meta descriptions are no longer part of the ranking algorithm they can affect your site’s positions in the personalized search results. Your Meta description is a crucial factor that determines the CTR (click-through-rate) of your site in search results. The more compelling your description is, the more searchers will click it. When they click through to your site from search results this is recorded in their Web History.  Next time they search for a product or service related to your site, it may appear high up in their personalized search results.

Since everybody now gets personalized results, the scope of the effect your Meta descriptions have on your rankings can get really huge. That’s another reason why you should invest some time into testing and optimizing your Meta descriptions.

Meta Description Optimization

There’s plenty of advice out there on writing compelling titles and descriptions, so I won’t go there. Just keep in mind one thing. Google doesn’t always show the Meta description you provide. Sometimes it just compiles a random text snippet from your page that contains the keywords used in the query. But you can easily locate the keywords where your Meta description shows up by searching for them on Google.

In Conclusion

There’s been a lot of criticism coming down on Google for introducing personal search to everybody. Some people are worried about privacy issues. Others don’t like it because the whole concept will help the rich get richer and keep the small guy out of the game. And some SEOs are just whining that this makes SEO success harder to measure.

Lets see what the future brings…

When reading about web hosts on their own websites they all seem to be the perfect host to partner up with. We are of course not that easily fooled and understand that many of them have a couple of weak spots. To ensure that you do not sign up with a poor host it might be worth checking up the following points in advance.

Are there any hidden fees?
Once you have signed up with a web host you would think that everything is in the clear, right? Well, it should be but some web hosts tend to bring up unexpected fees once the contract is signed. Do not accept this – demand a complete report upfront.

Are the features really free?
This is somewhat similar to the point above but there are a couple web hosts that list their “free” features but after 30 days they might start charging you for them. Simply ask them if there are any limits to their services.

Check out the security policies
Checking out a web host’s security policy is important to do as they have much of your personal information. It is also advisable asking them what you will have to do in order to terminate your contract – some web hosts has a “minimum amount” of time that you have to stay with them.

Reseller or real web host?
One of the very first things you should find out is if they are a real web host or if they are a reseller of hosting. If they are a reseller they are themselves purchasing bandwidth and so on from a real web host.

How is the customer service?
Worth trying to find out in advance is the reputation of the customer service. This is easily done at hosting forums or via objective hosting directories. A web host with a lousy support team will do you no good.

Is it easy to upgrade?
Sooner or later you might want to upgrade your hosting account and it is important that you check up in advance whether this is easy to do and make sure that you will not have to pay any unnecessary fees for doing so.

What is the overall reputation?
This last point is probably needless to mention but it is crucial that you look up the reputation of the web host beforehand. This is preferably done via web hosting forums and another tip is visiting the Better Business Bureau website where you can get useful information about the host.

While Google’s Matt Cutts has certainly provided a wealth of helpful tips via the company’s Webmaster Central YouTube channel, he is not the only one to do so. Greg Grothaus of the Search Quality Team has posted a video (along with a presentation on the Webmaster Central Blog) covering duplicate content and multiple site issues that webmasters continue to face when trying to rank well in Google.

Greg begins by clearing up a popular myth about duplicate content, and that is that Google penalizes sites for having duplicate content. This is not the case. That’s not to say that duplicate content can’t have a negative impact on your rankings, but Google itself is not penalizing you for it.

Greg says people see messages like the one below and think their content is getting omitted from Google’s results, when in fact it really may just be being omitted for that particular query. Greg stresses that duplicate content is simply a factor on a “by query” basis.

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 20 you already displayed.
If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

“What’s actually happening, is that we’re looking at the query that the user’s doing, and we’re saying that we want diversity in the results we’re going to show a user,” says Grothaus. He says those who think their content is being omitted because it is duplicate, will likely find that if they adjust their query to more specifically reflect the missing piece, they may just find that it shows up in results after all.

Google recognizes that most duplicate content is not created to be deceptive. There are of course exceptions, which are considered spam. Grothaus says even spam sites aren’t being penalized for having duplicate content though. They’re being penalized for being spam. Just like some spammers use bold tags, he says. They don’t penalize people just for using them. And they don’t penalize people just for having duplicate content.

Duplicate Content:
• example.com/
• example.com/?
• example.com/index.html
• example.com/Home.aspx
• www.example.com/
• www.example.com/?
• www.example.com/index.html
• www.example.com/Home.aspx

The above list from Grothaus’s presentation shows examples of URLs that are different, but show the same content. Google will recognize that they’re the same, and will try to pick the right one, (although sometimes they pick the wrong one). Greg says Webmasters are the best people to know which one is best, so it helps to only use one.

You will not be penalized for using more than one, but there are some issues that can arise that may negatively affect your rankings. For one, your link popularity will be diluted. Backlinks pointing to several different URL versions of the same content, will make it harder to accumulate link juice for one URL. Greg says that user-unfriendly URLs in search results may offset branding efforts and decrease usability as well. Plus, with multiple versions of the same thing, Google will spend more time crawling the same content, meaning it will have less time to go deeper into your site, and you run the risk of having content not get indexed.

Fixing the Issues

To avoid such issues, Grothaus suggests using a “canonical” version of the URL, meaning the simplest, most significant form. He says to pick one for each page and link consistently within your site. You can also use the rel=”canonical” link element as explained by Matt Cutts in the following clip: 
Rules for rel=”canonical”

There are rules for the rel=”canonical” link element to consider. For one, it should be used between pages that are on the same domain. It works across different hosts. For example, blog.atomic55.net could suggest www.atomic55.net as a canonical URL, but it doesn’t work across domains. So www.atomic55.net couldn’t suggest www.myemailmarketing.net .

You can use the element for protocols, such as http:// vs. https://, and you can use it for ports. Pages don’t have to be identical, but they should be similar. Slight differences are ok. You don’t have to use the rel=”canonical” link element. It is just another option, or “another tool in your arsenal,” as Grothaus says.

Another option is to make all non-canonical URLs do a permanent (301) redirect to the canonical (or preferred) URL. In addition, in Google’s Webmaster Tools, you can specify www. vs. non-www. 301 redirects are commonly used when moving sites.

Multiple Domains

Lastly, Grothaus discusses multiple domains. This is in reference to when you have content for different audiences, such as by country, language, etc.

There are concerns here. You have to consider your reputation being distributed across multiple domains, and Google will only show what it perceives to be the best page for a particular query.

One interesting factor of this to also consider, that may often go overlooked, is that with multiple domains, you’re potentially losing the advantage Google’s tabbed user interface. You know how sometimes search results are expandable and point you to different links within the site? If your content is spread out across multiple domains, you may be missing extra clicks, because Google can’t link to another domain here.

Grothaus explains all of the above and elaborates on each point in the following fifteen -minute video. The information is based on his presentation from the recent Search Engine Strategies conference in San Jose.

For more information on search engine strategies and packages please contact Atomic 55 at 1.877.762.9453.

Why doesn’t site submission move my site to the top?

Getting your site listed with search engines means only that it will be included in their indices. Improving the position in search engines’ result pages is a different task. This task involves optimization of your pages for the targeted keywords, improvement of site link popularity (getting inbound links to your site), ensuring quality (usability, absence of broken links and other errors preventing SE robots from indexing, search engine- and visitor-friendly design) and promotion in social media and advertising.

How often should I resubmit my pages to search engines?

The major search engines have their own search robots that regularly crawl the Web. So, if your pages are already in the index, resubmitting won’t help you improve site rankings in any way.

You have a good reason for resubmitting your site to search engines and directories only if you’ve made some significant changes to its content. But even in this case, don’t resubmit all of the pages — you only need to resubmit the updated ones or just submit a renewed sitemap.

Why do links to my site suddenly disappear from search engine indices?
The numbers reported in “link:pageURL” queries are really approximate, so we recommend that you not worry about fluctuations showing significant decreases or increases, unless they are accompanied by sudden traffic drops.

In case a significant decrease in the number of links is accompanied by reduction of the corresponding traffic referral from the search engines, then you may be experiencing a real loss of link juice. In that case check if the important links sending you traffic and boosting your search rankings still exist, and ensure your site has not been penalized or hacked. Use your Web analytics tools and Google’s Webmaster Tools to identify potential problems.

How can I remove my site from search engines?

If you don’t want your content to appear in the search engines’ indices, you can prevent search engines from crawling your content by using the robots.txt protocol. That will give the robots instructions on which pages they are allowed to crawl and/or index. This method can help you keep new content out of the index and remove the content already in the index (when the crawlers revisit your pages).

However, even if the search engines don’t crawl or index the content of pages blocked by robots.txt, they may index the URLs by discovering references to the excluded URLs in other sources on the Web.

The most reliable way to remove your site URLs from search engines’ indices is to use webmaster tools:

Google URL removal tool
Yahoo! Site Explorer
Bing Content removal request
The delete action usually affects the entire index within 48 hours.

Can Atomic 55 or other  SEO companies guarantee high rankings?
Most good SEOs understand the principles of how search engines work and can implement changes to your site that will positively influence the chances of your site to be ranked high by search engines, but NO ONE CAN GUARANTEE high rankings on search engines.

Some SEO companies provide a guarantee on their services — they may recommend changes to your site and suggest actions to increase the possibility of ranking higher, – but they should not guarantee steadily high rankings, because they do not control search engines. If search engines change their algorithm overnight, rankings may disappear suddenly.

Beware of SEO firms that guarantee high rankings, because if such a SEO company’s promises are broken, it may balk at giving a refund or will suggest other services instead or even become unreachable.

For more information on “white hat” search engine optimization, please contact Atomic 55.

Facebook has begun rolling out a new version of its search feature, which it began testing with a select few last month. Of course, this would be real-time search, in the company’s latest effort to move into Twitter territory. The announcement of Facebook’s real-time search comes hot off the heels of their big announcement about the acquisition of FriendFeed, which comes with a pretty nifty real-time search engine of its own. But that’s a different story.

How important to do you think real-time search is to the industry?  Interestingly enough, Google’s got its own project in the works that looks to have some real-time search implications. The company has announced a search update called “Caffeine,” which among other things is aimed at indexing content faster. “It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions,” says Google’s Webmaster Central team. Perhaps Google can bring some added relevancy to real-time search. Well, Google already indexes content fairly quickly, even more so in recent weeks, as a matter of fact. The faster it gets at doing so, the closer it will get to real-time search, a direction the company has acknowledged that it needs to pursue. Google is still testing the Caffeine update, but it is allowing users a glimpse into it here.

With regards to Facebook’s own search, the company’s Akhil Wable says, “You now will be able to search the last 30 days of your News Feed for status updates, photos, links, videos and notes being shared by your friends and the Facebook Pages of which you’re a fan. If people have chosen to make their content available to everyone, you also will be able to search for their status updates, links and notes, regardless of whether or not you are friends. Search results will continue to include people’s profiles as well as relevant Facebook Pages, groups and applications.” Just search like normal, and then use the filters on the left side of the screen (on the results page) to adjust your results to view by people, pages, groups, apps, events, your own friends, etc. I would speculate that at some point, this real-time search functionality would incorporate more of what FriendFeed brings to the table. Searching FriendFeed gives you access to real-time results from all kinds of social networks – whatever the service’s users are sharing. Facebook could bring masses of people into the mix on that front, and make it far more useful as an all-encompassing real time search engine. We don’t know what they’re going to do with that yet though. Facebook does say that FriendFeed will continue to operate independently, but it will no doubt become integrated into Facebook in some capacity. As far as Facebook’s new search feature, the company reminds users that if they don’t want their stuff to show up in other people’s search results, they can adjust thier privacy settings accordingly. They’re still in the process of rolling the feature out, so you may not be able to use it just yet, but rest assured, it’s on the way.

For more information on social optimizing and internet marketing stratagies please contact Atomic 55.  1.877.762.9453

We all know that search engines are very important for the success of a website. Almost 85% of new internet users find good websites by using a reliable search engine like Google.

Search engines like Google fight to index thousands of pages of content found on the internet in the right order depending on several characteristics.

Search engine algorithms may vary with time but you can ensure that you have a website that is filled with SEO optimized, original content so that your page ranks as high as possible on the search results.

The following explains best 5 tips about SEO optimizing your web page:

Appropriate landing page

Apart from finding a great niche and product, it’s also necessary to have a targeted landing page to encourage paying customers. And one great tip I’ve found is that to ensure your landing page does not sell anything at all!

  In fact, it should give a valuable resource away for free like a niche e-book, newsletters, mini-course and even tele-seminars that will educate the customer about the value of your product. Not only does it raise customer awareness but it also encourages customers to buy what you will eventually show them!

Fresh content

Fresh and new content updated daily is one way to ensure that Google keeps returning to your page again and again. Once the search algorithms are trained to realize that the content on your page changes daily and is completely original you are more likely to see your website higher up in page rankings.

SEO optimizing!

You also have to ensure that the content is SEO-optimized. This is possible by using Keywords that are recognized by search engines as related to your product.  To speak to us about optimizing your website for Google, please call 1.877.762.9453

In fact, it should give a valuable resource away for free like a niche e-book, newsletters, mini-course and even tele-seminars that will educate the customer about the value of your product. Not only does it raise customer awareness but it also encourages customers to buy what you will eventually show them!

Fresh content

Fresh and new content updated daily is one way to ensure that Google keeps returning to your page again and again. Once the search algorithms are trained to realize that the content on your page changes daily and is completely original you are more likely to see your website higher up in page rankings.

SEO optimizing!

You also have to ensure that the content is SEO-optimized. This is possible by using Keywords that are recognized by search engines as related to your product.  To speak to us about optimizing your website for Google, please call 1.877.762.9453

One tactic might include filling your content with an average of 2% of Keywords per page of 100 words. That means your page should run an average of 10 Keywords in a page of 500 words. Do not put in more than that as search engines tend to classify high keyword pages as spam or duplicated content.

Create a lot of internal links where a single article links to another archived articles in your blog or the site itself. This will increase site recognition and page rankings.

Keeping them simple

Don’t flood your site with complex codes like Flash, Ajax, etc. Of course, the site will look great but this just tends to slow down your site and as a result might prevent search engines from crawling and indexing your website properly.

Arranging the Keywords can make or break a website!

Start strong by adding your keywords in the first paragraph and the very first line and the first line of the last paragraph. Search engines like this as it makes it easier for them to classify the article, site and content.

Try to use lateral semantic indexing where you use the same keywords in the form of plurals or related variations. The more the number of variations you put in, the better the page ranking.

The most important factor about proper search engine positioning is to contact us professional company to guide you through this process and support you over the campaign.  Contact Atomic 55 now, to get some assistance.  1.877.762.9453

The days of heated disputes about the importance of a site theme have gone, but the new era suggests the need for revised approaches. It also introduces new tools that help you understand if a particular theme is maintained well across your site. Vertically themed sites have always served Google well and they are still preferred by all of the major search engines. The perfect presentation of information assumes a correct and logical division of data that is centered on and unified by the main topic.

Like most webmasters who constantly update their site content, if you are concerned that your original theme has been diluted by posterior additions and might no longer be playing first fiddle, then see our recommendations below. These will help you evaluate quickly whether the site theme you’ve chosen is prominent enough for both your human visitors and the search engines.

1. Create a sitemap that contains page titles to see if your site’s structure and the keywords included in the titles deliver your main idea capably. You can do this by contacting Atomic 55 to generate an HTML map for your site and review the titles. We will analyze if the keywords facilitate a visitor’s perfect understanding of what your site is about? Are they related well to your general theme? On a side note, this process will also help you identify and correct any incorrect or repetitive titles.

2. If your site is not particularly large, you can create a text file that includes all of your important content. Use a tag cloud generating service, such as those available at http://www.tocloud.com or http://tagcrowd.com/, since these will allow you to conduct a quick, visual test of the idea search engines will get about your site content. If you see that your main keyword phrase is captured as the largest and boldest of the words, then you are on the right track. The same test can be applied to each of your important individual pages as well as the logical site divisions that share the same subtopic.

3. Pay attention to the word pattern the tag cloud generator produces for your site or page. Here, it’s important that it form a well-defined profile of the related words. The more closely related the keywords, the better chance you have to achieve top rankings in the long run.

Although internal links are not as important as outbound links to produce an immediate boost in rankings, the anchor texts of those internal links are certainly powerful enough to maintain the theme of a site. The best part is that you can manage these links yourself any time you choose.

4. Analyze your internal link structure to ensure that the site’s pages link properly to the important optimized pages. For this, you can contact Atomic 55 to examine the Internal Links report from Google Webmaster tools, or Yahoo Site Explorer. Additionally, your auxiliary pages should include proper anchor texts that link to your optimized pages wherever it makes sense – both for your site visitors and search engines. You can also use Web CEO’s Editor (the “Links” and “ALTs” tabs under “Web Pages”) to view and edit the anchor texts of your links and the alt texts of your image links.

5. Finally, you can use other Google Webmaster tools from “Your site on the web.” These utilities will help you see the keywords Google found on your site as well as the links and anchor texts (separately) to your site. Alone, however, these do not provide sufficient analysis to allow you to obtain a proper understanding of the information about your site that Google considers important.

For all of your search engine positioning needs, please contact Atomic 55 – 1.877.762.9453 or info@atomic55.net

Webmasters and SEO gurus have been scratching their heads for a few weeks now trying to figure out what has been happening to Google’s SERP rankings. After scouring blogs and forums for the last few days, it would seem that there is no real consensus. In fact, it seems that no one is willing to even speculate much as to what is happening. To date there has not been any official word from Google. We all know that Google does not announce their algorithm updates, much to the chagrin of webmasters everywhere.

The buzz recently on several blogs and from our own data demonstrates significant changes in PageRank and wild fluctuations in websites SERP. The last big news we did hear from Google was the June 16th 2009 announcement from Matt Cutts blog on PageRank sculpting where he discussed changes to how Google treats link juice when there are nofollow links. But that’s another blog topic altogether so if you like you can read the full post here: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ pagerank-sculpting/ so it may be that the nofollow·attribute has been rendered useless for sculpting PageRank. But then, PR sculpting was never really the intended function behind nofollow; it was merely convenient side effect.

All that Google employee, John Mu cared to say when answering a customer’s inquiry as to why his site had suddenly dropped in PR with no apparent cause was:

“Hi Radoslav
You have a nice-looking site . As far as I can tell, it looks like the change in Toolbar PageRank for your site is only due to some technical quirk and not something that you need to worry about.

Cheers
John”

Barry Schwartz (AKA “Rustybrick”) then pointedly asks:

“John, is the PR ‘Technical Quirk’ somewhat widespread?”

There was no further reply from Google. The post is available at the Google Webmaster Help forum.

Unfortunately, when a person’s website goes south in rankings for no apparent reason, people do notice and do worry about it. So unless Google opens up a bit we are left scratching our heads as usual, trying to figure out what is going on.

The following thread gives another vote to the possibility that Google is replacing PageRank value with site trust and/or domain authority: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020335.html. This is also one of many threads where users are expressing frustration and beginning to consider trying the new alternative to Google, Bing. Watch your back Google.

There have been some major experiments this year from Google that were relatively short lived and those are fine. We all expect to see the occasional wild results for a weekend every few months along with quarterly PageRank updates. The June PR update was enough of a surprise coming so close on the heels of an update late in May: http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/020273.html. The update itself is not too shocking. What is interesting is that this is happening so soon after Google’s last update and the fact that garbage results and rapid ranking changes have been coming steadily for weeks now. It’s about time Google lets things settle down before more people get the bright idea to give Bing a try.

Here are some direct comments from the forum members at webmasterworld.com:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3943981-4-30.htm

“It has been my observation “followgreg” (a username) when the SERP’s get like what you describe above this is what [Google] wants to happen so the Review team and Matt’s team can put the necessary data in place that will deal with what your describing. It is easier to review a site when they are on page 1 versus page 200 and [Google] knows what filters were relaxed that would allow for the “New” 1st page ranking to pop up. I myself don’t see the polluted SERP’s as your describing but then again I am not in every sector and can only look at the nitches I am working under.”

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/3943981-2-30.htm “and right now it looks like all sets of the results include some trivial and penalized and junk .edu pages rising into the top 50, along with some long-neglected good ones. This used to happen all the time with updates — shuffle things up, the poop rises, then it gets flushed, and things settle down. We haven’t had an update in that format in a long time, but it seems clear we are in the middle of whatever is changing and not the end.”

We can analyze the SERP’s, collect all the data we can find, and listen to all of the “buzz” we like, but at the end of the day we are still at the mercy of the “Big G”. It is not unusual for Google to conduct their more aggressive algorithm changes at this time of year, but it is unusual to see so much experimentation so close together taking so long. With there being no official word coming from Google, it’s hard to do more than speculate on the changes that we can observe. We all certainly hope that things stabilize soon and we’ll continue monitoring changes in the rankings.

But until Google decides to straighten things out can anyone say “Pay-per-click”? I knew you could…

So how does the widely varied public opinion on the matter line up with search results?

I am willing to make an educated guess that Google is experimenting with website trust and authority in their algorithm (and perhaps plenty more). However, as complaints from the forums echo Google’s search results seem to be rather bi-polar these last few weeks.

We have well established sites being outranked by new sites and by sites with very few backlinks. Also by sites using black hat techniques and unfortunately we see some established and often very trustworthy white hat websites simply dissappearing from the rankings altogether. At the same time we have literally day old Craigslist posts ranking in the top results. Some .edu and .gov sites have flown to the top while others have plummetted.

How often do you see day old pages rank near the top for competitive search terms? If “trust” has that much of an effect on a new page’s rankings it’s likely that “trusted” sites will dominate the rankings with every new page of content flooding out the competition and reducing their ability to gain trust. I hope the minds at Google have their sober thinking caps on and not their beer hats. But so far there seems to be little consistant rhyme or reason since we have some trusted sites dissappearing and others dominating in the SERP’s.

Luckily we had some old SERP analysis notes from June where we had a close look at one of our clients top 5 competitors for their targeted search term on Google. We decided to compare each against the current search results since Google’s latest “technical quirk”. Here’s the rundown according to Yahoo’s api and our analysis:

Former #1 website – PR 4 landing page, PR 5 root domain.
1700+ external inbound links, 800+ internal backlinks. Almost one thousand of these backlinks are from a handful of what appear to be allied sites. A significant number are from various blogs. Strong root domain with almost 5k external inbound links. Now ranking at #2.

Former #2 website – PR 6 landing page, PR 7 root domain.
Less than 100 external inbound links, over 15k internal backlinks. Root domain has 140k+ external inbound links and 16k+ internal backlinks. Very strong root domain and what should be a high trust name. Much of the page’s ranking comes from the internal backlinks from the root domain and other pages on the site. Now ranking at #5.

Former #3 website – PR 4 landing page, PR 7 root domain.
5k+ external inbound links, less than 100 internal backlinks. Root domain has 130k+ external inbound links and 16k+ internal backlinks. Not only is this an extremely strong domain, its brand is a household name across North America. Not only would I trust this site based on its name and reputation, but I would say the incoming links are as organic as they come. Strangely this website no longer ranks anywhere in the top 300 results.

Looks like Google is making some changes, but that is nothing new…

For more information on Search Engine Positioning Strategies that true online results, please contact us 1.877.762.9453 or info@atomic55.net

Someone sent me the question “Why Social Bookmarking? ” And I thought to myself: “Um. Why not?” Since I’m not really sure what they meant by that, I’m going to assume that this person mean “Why should I use social bookmarking in my business?” – with a full understanding of all the risks associated with “assuming”.

I figure that if you’re reading this, you have that question, or a similar one. There are three reasons:

1 – More links

2 – More traffic

3 – More credibility

More links are always a good thing. Think of links as the road traffic that moves through the web. If there are no roads to where your business “lives” online, namely your website, it’s far less likely that the visitors you want will end up getting to you. That’s true whether you’re talking about search engines or links from other sites.

Search engines use a mysterious cross between the number and quality of links to your site in their determination of whether you should be number one or number 701 for your desired keyword. In addition, the “nicer” the road, the more traffíc will flow through it – think of an authority site linking to your site as a highway that leads directly to your site, and one from a reciprocal link or link exchange scheme as a back street in a sketchy neighborhood full of potholes. Improved traffic, also good.

From social bookmarking, this traffic is often targeted. Through tagging, the description someone writes, or the title they assigned to your link, the person who discovers the submitted link on a social bookmarking site knows exactly where they’re going, and why they’re interested in getting there. It’s like seeing the cover of a magazine on a rack. That’s what pulls them in, they see a headline – and to get to the story they are compelled to take another action. The more credibility thing is a bit harder to explain, so we’ll go with another analogy.

Let’s say I made a movie and I thought it was fantastic. If I hadn’t met you before, and I tell you, “hey, I made a kick-ass movie, come see it!” – you may come see it, you may not. It depends more on how much time you have and if you’re interested in that kind of movie, or even how nice of a person you are, than my opinion. Why? Because I’m the one who made it, so you can’t know whether to trust my opinion, at least in relation to how much YOU might like it. Of course I think it’s great, but I have no way of knowing whether you will. Now, if you knew me and my taste, and how alike our tastes are, you may be a bit more inclined. So if I’m, say, Michael Bay, and you liked my last movie, and my new movie is on the same type of thing, you might go see it based on the trailer alone. You know you’re taking a gamble but it’s a safe bet.

Now watch this. Your best buddy, the one who likes all the same things you like, the one you hang out with and trust the most, calls you on the phone and says: “I’ve just seen the best movie I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I have to see it again. When are you free, I’ll come pick you up.” The only thing that could make that deal sweeter is if your friend has also said “My treat.” At least as far as recommendations go, the person who knows what you like the most is likely to be the person whose advice you’ll follow.

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