Alternative Site Promotion: Social Bookmarking, Blogging and Digg

At SEOCog we often conduct experiments to see what trends are really working out. Most recently we investigated social bookmarking to promote your main site and blog, blogging to promote your main site, and Digg to promote the worthy posts in your blog or any articles you have written.

We checked out a number of start up and seasoned websites offering social bookmarking, and we have decided that del.icio.us and Digg are the only ones worth the effort. Their inbound links for your site are PR8, and you can receive a "relevant" link for each "tag". What you want to to is sign up for del.icio.us and save every interesting page in your website with tags and description text describing the page. Then when you blog also save every individual entry, tag and describe it as well. If you have friends who want to help have them do the same. Having too many of the social bookmark buttons on your site and posts doesn't help any, I think it rather looks spammy and desperate. del.icio.us is the #2 bookmarking service behind Digg.com.

Digg.com as we've already stated is the #1 social bookmarking service, and it tends to pull a little more mature crowd than del.icio.us does. Inbound links from Digg are PR8 also. The links are a little harder to earn, however industry wide they are considered more worthy. You go to Digg, sign up for an account and begin "Digging". I suggest you submit a "news story" for every intersting blog entry or atricle you create. Use a link or button to the URL of your Digg story for viewers to vote for or "Digg" it. The easiet way to get the link to your Digg story is to hit the "email this" button after creating it, the permanent link is in the email body.

Got Blog? Well if you are serious about promoting your site or product online, then I suggest you do. There are many different sites that offer free blogging software, I have found BlogSpot to be the easiest and highly effective. It can't hurt that it is owned by Google, they always seem to rank and index their own stuff better, but thats another story. BlogSpot has a great layout control panel and easy posting software. There are some things to do when setting up your Blog. This is about removing the "nofollow" tags installed in your new Blog. There are many widgets and directories you can trade links with and subscribe to, here are some guidelines. Trade links only with relevant sites and Blogs, use widgets sparingly as they slow the page down, submit your only to directories that are PR4 or better, check them here along with some other interesting site information. Your Blog is still a webpage and need the same SEO care as any other so read our DIY Guide to Page Mechanics. When you set up your Blog, if you are using it to promote your existing website try to keep in the same color scheme, and the top column position should contain a link/button to your page with anchor text like "home" or "main". This lets users know for certain the sites are affiliated, builds trust. Post everyday, use a video at least once a week, and get a Technorati favorites button.

The interesting thing about all these items, it that any average internet user can promote their site effectively this way even if they paid a designer to build it.

How about some results? Lets take the Cog Blog for this example.
See how the combination of these elements can be sucessful in the market's current trends.
It was born on 6/1/07 and it's Technorati Auth is already 6 and has 45 backlinks 29 above PR 4. Look at this search for "seocog blog" 10 pages in Google of our stuff. I have seen a 23% increase in traffic for the sites I maintain that we started promotional Blogs for.