Website Development

Blogging, or web logging, is a significant form of online social media, having evolved from being simple online journals to sophisticated dynamic pages on which anything from recipes and reviews to breaking news is posted. In fact, some of the biggest stories recently covered by the mainstream media were first broken, or supplemented, by material provided by individuals via their blogs. Blogs have found a role in the corporate world too; for example, companies use blogs as a convenient way for their Marketing Departments to add up-to-date information to the company site without requiring advanced web page coding skills.

When it comes to the blogs of individuals, people blog for different reasons: some people blog to hone their writing skills, others because they are bursting with ideas they want to share with the world, others want an outlet for their creativity, while some may want to showcase their photography or document their travels. Whatever the reason, most people are enthusiastic about their blogs; they do not feel it is one more chore they have to do. I think--overall--most people blog because they enjoy doing it.

In addition to the personal benefits, blogs can also serve a practical purpose: supplementing another website. For example, say you have a website that includes some sophisticated features: it accesses a database, some PHP and JavaScript scripts are coded in the pages, the CSS is just right, etc. The website is finished and works perfectly. Now you'd like to be able to make frequent small updates to the site without having to code a brand-new standalone web page, or risk making changes that could affect the existing pages. A blog serves this purpose nicely; once it is set up, you just have to write the material, post it, and you are done. You could, for instance, make a brief post in the blog to advise visitors what upcoming trade shows your company will be attending.

Another application: say the main website includes several Java applets. Instructions for how to use the applets, some background and history of their development, a chronological record of version updates, etc. can be provided in a blog post, and the main website can direct visitors to that post if they need that information. That way, new users have the option to read about the applets but returning users, who already have experience with the applets and know how to use them, don't have to scroll down, say, two pages of instructions each time they want to use the applets; the main site remains succinct, fast-loading, and focused on the task at hand.

Regardless of the reasons for having a blog, it also yields traffic-building/SEO benefits. These benefits may come from having a link in (i) the Permalinks section of the blog, (ii) the body of a post itself, or (iii) your Profile. I caution readers not to abuse these options. If you include a link to another site in most--or all--of your posts, visitors will recognize your blog for what it is: a blatant ploy to post links to another site while offering nothing of value. If you decide to start a blog, I recommend that you work on it as if it were an independent site, and develop it to become a high-quality resource on its own.

A Preliminary Step to Starting a Blog: Write Several Posts

Many resources exist for blogging; however, before rushing into it, I recommend starting your word processor and writing at least ten blog posts. Save each post as a separate file. If you can't write ten posts, or if you can write ten but then find yourself struggling to write further material, that is a good indication that you will run out of ideas quickly. In this case, you may want to reconsider your plan to start a blog. There is no point creating a blog that will quickly die due to a lack of material; too many abandoned blogs already litter the Internet. On the other hand, if you have no problem writing ten posts, and your creative juices continue to flow, charge ahead!

Writing Posts

I write blog posts in a word processor, and they usually go through several drafts before being posted. I also highlight all the words that are italicized. When the article is ready to be posted, I first copy and paste it into a plaintext editor to strip out all the formatting. Then I copy and paste the article from the plaintext editor into the blog. That way, I don't have to worry about different font sizes or styles being copied into the blog. Finally, I review the article in the word processor and make sure all the right words are italicized (the highlighting in the original document makes this step easy.)

How long should each post be? There is no definite answer. If you ask ten different bloggers, you'll get ten different answers. I think it should be as long as necessary to cover the topic as thoroughly as you think necessary--without losing focus. If you write a draft and then, as you are reading it, notice it tends to ramble and bounce between topics, that suggests breaking the post into multiple posts and dealing with each of those topics separately. My own practice is to try to keep each post to less than five pages (in the word processor), which is about 2000 words. If a post gets too long, readers may get impatient and not finish reading it. So if a post gets too long, consider breaking it up into multiple posts, each with finer focus than the original.

Another tip: if you are planning to send your blog feed out to RSS streams, you might want to avoid the inclusion of special characters or symbols in the post titles. Special characters may not display properly in whatever outlet they are being fed into; the title may look like gibberish. For example, sometimes a hyphen (-) in the title does not display correctly in the recipient page; however, a colon (:) in the title does display properly.

Finding a Home for Your Blog: Self-Hosted or Third-Party Hosted?

Once you are confident that you will have enough material to keep a blog going for a while, and are enthusiastic to get started, your next step is to find a home for it. There are many options to consider. First of all, do you want the blog hosted on your own domain (self-hosted) as part of a website you already own and maintain? Or do you want to use a service provided by a third party (third-party hosted)? Both options offer a wide variety of resources to help you improve the look and functionality of your blog. Let's consider each of these options in more detail.

Self-hosted Blog

If you already have a website, or plan to create one, and would like to host the blog on the same domain, you would be taking the self-hosted option. In this case, you will have to build and administer the blog yourself. Perhaps that is something you want to do; some people want to learn the technical aspects of operating a self-hosted blog. By setting up and maintaining a self-hosted blog, they acquire skills and experience they can put on their resume or include in their portfolio. If you seriously want to become a web developer, it is good experience to have. If a potential employer asks if you are familiar with WordPress, you can honestly say yes, because you have experience from your own blog.

To build the blog itself, there are many resources available. If you want a challenge, you could code the blog from scratch yourself. Alternately, there are many third-party blog packages available that help you get a blog up and running quickly. For example, WordPress is popular. If your web host supports the requirements, the software could be downloaded and installed and you would have a blog up and ready to use immediately. In addition, a wide variety of templates, add-ons, and plug-ins are available to further enhance your site. In addition to WordPress, several other software products are available that make it easy to create a blog, for example, Drupal and Joomla are popular software products. They are CMS software packages, not for the specific purpose of creating blogs--the ability to use these products for blogging is more of an extra.

Another factor to consider: any material posted on a self-hosted blog remains your property. Some bloggers swear that, come Hell or High Water, a writer should never give away their content by posting it on a third-party hosted service. For this reason, they insist a serious writer should always keep their material on a domain they own.

Third-party Hosted Blog

On the other hand, some people do not want to deal with the administrative or technical aspects of a blog. They'd rather jump in and start writing as quickly and easily as possible. In this case, the blogger might prefer a third-party hosting service; no web domain to purchase, no FTP software required, very little technical expertise necessary, etc. All a person has to do is write.

Like the self-hosted route, many options and resources are available for the third-party hosted route. In addition to the software that WordPress offers for self-hosted blogs, they also offer a hosted option on wordpress.com. It is free; a person need only sign up with a user name and password, and can start writing immediately. Like the self-hosted option, many resources are available for enhancing the appearance and functionality of the blog; templates, add-ons, and plug-ins are all available from a multitude of sources.

In addition to WordPress, following are several services that offer third-party hosted blogging: Blogger, Tumblr, and Typepad. Furthermore, many hosting services exist for blogs whose posts tend to fit within a particular field of interest, for example, Edublogs, Research Blogging, and Scientopia. Perhaps you can find a hosting service into which the theme of your blog would fit nicely.

Building Traffic to a Blog

Neither the type of hosting (i.e. - self-hosted or third-party hosted) nor its platform (e.g. Blogger or WordPress) makes any difference in terms of SEO factors or the development of traffic. If the blog offers good content, people are going to read it, visit it, link to it, promote it, etc. On the contrary, if it doesn't offer good content, they won't. If fifty people know about your blog and visit it, changing it from Blogger to WordPress, or vice versa, doesn't mean that suddenly one-hundred people are going to know about your blog and visit it. Likewise, if you pay for an advertising campaign, that additional traffic is going to come to the blog regardless of whether it is on Blogger or WordPress.

Traffic growth can be hastened by the same techniques used for a regular site: getting backlinks, directory submission, guest blogging, commenting on the blogs of other people, etc. Getting backlinks and directory submission are self-explanatory, and those topics have been discussed in previous posts, so I won't discuss them further here. However, I would like to elaborate somewhat on the other two techniques.

Guest Posting

Guest posting refers to the submission of posts for publication on somebody else's blog. For example, you might have an idea for a topic that doesn't fit into the theme of your own blog, but it would fit nicely into the theme of another blog. In this case, you might consider not publishing the post on your own blog but, instead, submit it to the other blog for publication.

The potential benefits of guest posting are: (i) you have created a link to your blog on another blog, (ii) the post fits into the theme of the other blog better than it would fit into your own, and (iii) the other blog may have more traffic than your own. Plus, the admin of the other blog is also trying to promote their blog so, in a sense, whatever they do to promote their blog also helps to market yours. More importantly, you have provided something of value to the other blogger instead of trying to simply build up a collection of cheap links. So, if you have an idea for a one-of-a-kind post on a very specific topic, but hesitate to write it because it would stick out like a sore thumb on your own blog, go ahead and write the post anyhow, ensure it is top-quality work, and then submit it to a blog in which it would be better suited--you have nothing to lose, but may gain some benefits.

Blog Commenting

Most blogs allow readers to make comments about a post so, if you read other people's blogs, commenting is another way in which to draw traffic to your own. Sometimes a link can be added right in the body of a comment--if it is directly applicable to the post. However, more often than not a link cannot be included in a comment; in this case, readers can still find their way to your blog through your author profile. If you have created an author profile that includes your blog URL, and log in to this profile before posting comments, it is accessible to anybody reading your comment, and from your profile, visitors may visit your blog.

I would like to point out that most blog comments are no-follow, so blog commenting offers almost no benefit in terms of PageRank. However, your goal should be to increase awareness of your blog among an audience interested in the topic. Don't spend any time thinking about whether or not comments are no-follow or not. To paraphrase comments made in my previous post, you should be looking for blogs relevant to your own interests and expertise. Then you can participate in a genuine way and provide useful information that is directly applicable to the post. Since other readers of the blog have a similar interest, they are more likely to be interested in your blog; perhaps they would add a Permalink to it in their own blog, add it to their blogroll, or write a blog post that mentions your work. The benefit is that you have made other people aware of work similar to their own. The point to keep in mind is that your goal is to make positive, genuine, contributions to another person's blog, not to spam by making scores of meaningless comments all over the blogosphere.

Before concluding this post, I would like to share an insight I read many years ago:

     "Writing is like having surgery: it is what you do when something
     inside of you has to come out. "

I do not remember the exact words, or who said them, but I agree with the sentiment, and it stuck in my head. If you feel like you are bursting with ideas that need to come out then, by all means, put your thoughts down in writing. Going a step further, making your work public, serves the purpose of sharing ideas, and a blog is an excellent medium for doing so.

In addition to being an outlet for your ideas, a blog can attract web traffic to itself or to another web site and, in this regard, the best action you can take is to make it a blog that people want to visit. If you are happy, stimulated, and passionate, it will come through in your writing; readers will pick up on your enthusiasm and your readership will grow. On the other hand, if you just sit around your room all day, don't stimulate or challenge yourself, aren't passionate about anything that, too, will be reflected in your writing: nobody will want to read you. Blogs can, indeed, provide SEO benefits to a website, but blogs with that as their fundamental reason for being tend to be poorly written and have few readers--in the end, virtually no SEO benefits. SEO motives should not be your main reason for having a blog--any SEO benefit received from a blog is icing on the cake. So, keep feeding your passions: get out, live life, and write about it.

Cheers,

Forum participation is another activity that can generate traffic to your website or blog. First of all, presumably the subject of your website is something that interests you or about which you have some expertise; therefore, if you join a forum whose subject is similar to that of your own site, you will have opportunities to take part in discussions about topics that genuinely interest you. The discussions might inspire a future blog post or suggest ideas for your website which, in turn, can lead to traffic to your site. For example, if you notice the same topics being discussed often, or the same questions being asked repeatedly, you could write an article about those topics or a blog post that attempts to answer those questions. The next time the topic comes up in the forum, you could post a brief response and also direct interested readers to visit your blog post or article for more thorough coverage of the topic.

In addition to any inspiration it may kindle, forum participation also provides the opportunity to interact with people who share your interests, some of whom may have websites or blogs of their own. If other forum members visit your blog and find it useful, they might link to your site as an additional resource on the topic. Perhaps their visitors also have websites or blogs and they, in turn, add a link to your site too. And so on--the benefits would snowball. Now the question arises: How do you share the fact that you have a website with other forum members? The opportunity to make people aware of your site or blog is made available in three possible places: i) in your member profile, ii) in your signature, and iii) directly in the body of a post.

Public Profile

Many forums offer members the option of creating a Profile, in which members can share some information about themselves, for example, interests, location, a favorite book, a website URL, etc. When other members of the forum wish to know more about you, they can go to your Profile, note the website you have listed, and visit it. (Keep in mind that this information is public, so do not share anything in your Profile that you wouldn't mind sharing with the whole world.)

Signature

A signature is a short phrase that members can create that is automatically appended to the bottom of their posts (they can usually be disabled on individual posts, if it is not wanted on every post). Signatures offer a convenient way to automate the process of adding a standard close to each post—one that may include the URL of your site. For example, I have a signature similar to the following in some of the forums in which I participate (note that the blog title is usually hot-linked to the blog URL):

Cheers,

Duncan
Website Development Blog

Body of Post

The opportunity may arise for you to include a link to your website in the body of a forum post. If your website provides information directly applicable to the topic being discussed in the thread, you can add a link to your website right in the post. This opportunity does not present itself often and, when it does, you have to be sure it won't be identified as spam; otherwise, the post will be deleted immediately and your forum membership may even be terminated by the administrators. This point should be stressed: before including a link directly in a forum post, be very sure it is directly applicable to the topic being discussed.

Note that not all forums offer all three features and, even if they do, links in forums are usually nofollow--so they provide no benefit in terms of PageRank. Links in a Profile or Signature usually have the nofollow attribute attached to them. Links included directly in a post almost always have the nofollow attribute attached to them. Very few forums allow links without the nofollow attribute. In any case, do not focus solely on whether a forum's URLs are nofollow or not; instead, your primary consideration should be raising awareness of your site among your target audience: (i) members are precisely the people you want to know about you and your website, and (ii) other visitors to the forum are brought there by an interest in the subject of the forum (which the forum administrators are also working to promote).

Join a Relevant Forum

Internet forums exist for just about anything. For example, say one of your hobbies is fishkeeping; you have a few aquariums in your home, have been keeping fish for several years, are very interested in the hobby, have gained substantial knowledge about the hobby, and have created a website about fishkeeping. Now you want to find forums pertinent to fishkeeping. You could start with a Google search:

Search 1: fishkeeping forums or
Search 2: forums about fishkeeping

Alternately, you could use some of Google's advanced search capabilities; most forums have the term "forum" in the URL, so you could do a search as follows:

Search 3: fishkeeping inurl:forum

Going through the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), you could then find forums that are most appropriate for you. Perhaps you are interested in a particular type of fish, say, betta fish. You might refine your search and find the Bettas4all Betta Forums. Perhaps you are particularly interested in one aspect of keeping betta fish, say, breeding bettas. In this case, you might find the Betta Breeders Forum. Refining your interests further, maybe you would like to interact with betta breeders in a particular geographic region, say, Canada. In this case, you might want to join the Betta Breeders Canada Forums. The point of this example is to illustrate how closely forums can be matched to your own interests and/or expertise regardless of how specialized they are. There is no justification for joining random forums with the intention of making scores of near-meaningless posts just to drop your link all over the place; that is a deceitful practice. Instead, find a forum relevant to your interests and join that forum. Then participate with meaningful and informative posts that also yield traffic to your site.

Consider a scenario that goes counter to the advice given above: say you join a forum whose theme is dissimilar to that of your site, for example, an astronomy forum. Your lack of knowledge in the field of astronomy would limit the contributions you could make, the numbers of posts you make would be few, and you would be perceived as being not very knowledgeable on the topic. Most importantly, the number of members who also have an interest in fishkeeping would probably be significantly less than what would be found in a fishkeeping forum--the result being that few members would visit your site.

To summarize, forum participation is an activity that can effectively generate targeted traffic to a website or blog. In addition to the immediate and direct benefits, such as the posting of your link in the forum, the secondary benefits are equally--or even more--significant: the opportunity to be genuine in your participation, the creative stimulus, and the potential for like-minded visitors to promote your site through their own work. By joining an appropriate forum, specifically, one whose subject is similar to that of your own site, the probability of getting visitors is higher than if you join a forum whose subject is dissimilar. In conclusion, done properly, forum participation is an excellent method of making your site or services known among the audience most likely to be interested in the subject.

Cheers,

Another technique to develop links to your site is to submit your website URL to search engines and directories. As stated in the previous post, the more links to your site, the higher your site will rank in search listings, the more traffic it will get. Like everything else in SEO, the benefits won’t become evident overnight but--over time--positive effects will incrementally materialize.

Creating the Submission Material

Before submitting your website URL to a single search engine or directory, one important preliminary task is to prepare the information you plan to use in your submission. Thousands of web directories exist, and more are being created all the time, so instead of re-typing the same information thousands of times, prepare the information beforehand in a plaintext editor and save the document. Consider my ongoing--fictional--example about “XYZ Webhosting Company”. In the document, I might save something similar to the following:

Title:  XYZ Webhosting

Website URL: http://www.xyzwebhosting.com/

Description:
XYZ Webhosting is a high-quality webhosting company that provides hosting for a variety of needs: shared hosting, dedicated hosting, VPS, etc. and hosting packages on Linux and Windows servers are available options. etc. etc.

Keywords 1: hosting, web hosting, webhost, webhosting, VPS
Keywords 2: hosting webhost webhosting VPS

Some points to note:

1. The title includes a targeted keyword. In many cases, the title becomes the anchor text of the URL in the directory listing, so choose carefully.
2. The description includes one or more keywords.
3. Two versions of the keyword list have been created: one comma-separated and one separated by blank spaces (some directories require a keyword list in the different formats).

Once the material has reached the point that it includes all the information I want it to, and has been thoroughly edited into a well-written paragraph, the document is saved as, say, “dir_sub_material”. Having this document saved and available every time I want to do some directory submission ensures that I am using good-quality material, spelling and grammatical errors have been corrected, proper keywords are included, and it doesn’t have to be re-typed many times (possibly introducing typos into the submission material). Then, when I submit to a directory, it is simply a matter of copying material from the document and pasting it into the appropriate fields of the directory submission page. Directory submission is an ongoing task: over the course of months--or even years--working from your version of a backed up document like “dir_sub_material” will save a lot of time.

Search Engine Submission

Once the submission material is ready to use, the first submissions I recommend you make are to search engines. Approval of a submission to a search engine can take a long time. So, instead of doing other SEO activities first, and then submitting your website URL to search engines, and then waiting years for a reply, do it first. Get this task out of the way early and then forget about it. After you have submitted your website URL to search engines, move on to your other SEO activities. In the months--or years--to get a reply from the search engines, you will have been productive on other website marketing activities.

Following are links for submission directly to the two major search engines:

Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/

Bing: http://www.bing.com/webmaster/SubmitSitePage.aspx

Also, less well-known search engines are blekko and DuckDuckGo.

I also recommend looking for audience-specific search engines. Many search engines exist that target a particular audience and it is often easier to get a site listed in some of these search engines--if your website is relevant to that particular niche--than it is to get into the big, general, search engines. There are search engines specifically for sites based on geography (e.g. – for Canadian websites, or topics of interest to Canadians) or audience interest (e.g. – students, academia, etc.).

Phil Bradley has an extensive list of search engines: http://www.philb.com/

In fact, he has a list of over 200 country-specific search engines:

http://www.philb.com/countryse.htm

If your site is of particular interest to people in a specific geographical location, submit it to a country-specific search engine; sometimes administrators of those search engines want to help local webmasters, and so they are more accepting of your site than would be, say, Google.

Alternately, if the purpose of your site is to attract visitors with specific interests, submit it to search engines that target that specific audience. For example, consider the following:

Sweet Search (for students):  http://www.sweetsearch.com/

Oolone (returns site page previews):  http://oolone

Ice Rocket (a search engine for blogs):  http://www.icerocket.com/

DeepDyve (for academic publications):  http://www.deepdyve.com/

Furthermore, at following links are posted lists of search engines that may be relevant to you:

Top Online Engineering Degree, "50 Coolest Niche Search Engines You Never Knew Existed":
http://toponlineengineeringdegree.com/?page_id=146

About.com, "The Search Engine List":
http://websearch.about.com/od/enginesanddirectories/tp/search-engine-list.htm

OnlineUniversities.com, "100 Niche Search Engines Every College Student Needs":
http://www.onlineuniversities.com/blog/2010/02/100-niche-search-engines-every-college-student-needs/

In addition, there are two excellent sites that present much information about search engines: Search Engine Watch and Danny Sullivan's Search Engineland.

A search would turn up many more search engines and related resources; in fact, I discover more all the time without actively searching. I encourage you to find niche search engines--into which your site would be appropriate--and submit to them.

Directory Submission

Once you have submitted your website URL to all the search engines which you think are appropriate, it is time to move on to the main task: directory submission. Similar to my advice for search engines, there is one submission I recommend you make before proceeding to other submissions:

Open Directory Project

This directory is huge and well-known. However, like the largest search engines, it is hard to get a site included in it and, even if a site is accepted, that acceptance can be a long time coming. So, submit your website URL to it early in your SEO activities and then move on to other tasks.

The process for submitting a website to a directory is similar for all directories:

1. From the main page, navigate to the appropriate category, and sub-category if necessary. Try to navigate to the lowest, most-specific, category into which your website would be appropriate.
2. Click on the button or link for submitting a website for listing in that category (usually it is called “Suggest Link” or “Suggest URL”).
3. Enter all the required information for your website submission (copy and paste from the “dir_sub_material” document you created earlier).

Several ready-made lists of directories are available, for example, Web Directories List and Best Web Directories. Like the advice given above for search engines, I recommend looking for and submitting your site to niche directories, directories into which your site would be appropriate based on geography and/or intended audience. Your site has a much better chance of getting accepted into a niche directory if its topic fits nicely into the theme of the directory, than it does if submitted to a general directory. So, if you are, say, a German webmaster, make sure to submit your site to a German directory, whose unstated goal may be to increase the exposure of German sites.

Another bit of advice I’d like to offer: spend time in webmaster forums; a few are listed in the left column of this blog, under the "Favorite Links" header. Many of the larger webmaster forums have sections in which the administrators of new directories can announce those new directories. By keeping an eye on these forums, and submitting your site to a new directory immediately after it is announced, your submission has a very good chance of getting accepted. The reason for this is that the administrators of new directories are usually anxious to get their directories populated, so (i) they are not as strict with requirements; and (ii) submissions are often accepted without having to pay a fee or provide a reciprocal link. When a directory becomes better established, and its traffic and PageRank increase, the administrators often stop accepting free submissions, or submissions without a reciprocal link, and become more critical when vetting submissions. So, keep an eye open for the very newest directories and submit to them right away.

I also suggest visiting the Info Vilesilencer site. This site’s raison d'être is web directories; it presents much information about them: how they are used, links to other resources, and lists of hundreds of directories. The site administrator, who goes by the nom de plume Dan Jensen, does a thorough job of vetting the directories on his lists for their SEO aspects (i.e. – Are they quality directories that filter spam listings? Do listings in the directories use the “no-follow” tag? Is submission free?  Etc.). This site also features forums in which further information is exchanged--including a section for the announcement of new directories. For the reasons stated above, this forum is an excellent place to watch for the newest directory announcements.

To summarize, if you explore the resources mentioned above, you will discover many directories, lists of directories, websites, and forums, and you will be lead to even more resources relevant to directory submission activities. In fact, many more search engines, directories, and webmaster forums can be found by searching; the ones listed above are just a few examples of what is available. The forums, alone, are excellent resources: they are sources of the latest information and provide an up-to-date exchange of ideas. Directory submission is a task that will keep you busy for years (if you don’t lose interest before then), and is a part of doing thorough SEO work.

Cheers,
 

My previous two posts covered techniques that could essentially be done independent of other people: on-page SEO factors, creating a link to your site from your social networking account, and adding links to social bookmarking sites. However, there is only so much you can do on your own. Unless you are content to have your site remain obscure--and with very little traffic--you really have no choice but to involve other people: you are going to have to make link requests of people.

The first and easiest step that you can make in this regard is simply to ask your immediate network of contacts: family, friends, classmates, co-workers, colleagues you may know from a club or sports team, etc. If you know anybody with a web site, a blog, or an account on a social media site (like Facebook), simply ask them if they could add a link from one of their pages to yours.

The next step is to expand your link requests beyond your immediate network of contacts. In your web surfing, you may have come across several sites similar to yours. If not, they are easy to find by doing a search. In any case, investigate those sites and see if they have a resources section relevant to your web page. Then contact the administrator of those sites and ask if they could put a link to one of your pages on that resources page.

You should also investigate websites that can be considered competitors of your own web page. For example, if your web site is about webhosting, do a Google search for “webhosting” and find out what sites come up for the search term “webhosting”. Let’s say one of the top websites on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is the website for “XYZ Web Hosting”:

www.xyzwebhosting.com

(Note: this company name is fictional. I just made it up for the sake of this post. I don’t know whether or not a company by this name really exists)

Now investigate why this site ranks so highly in the SERPs by doing a link search; after all, pages rank high in Google because other pages are linking to them. You can do this by entering the following in a Google search:

link: xyzwebhosting.com

Google will then list pages that link to xyzwebhosting.com.
(Of course, in your case, you’d enter the URL of the page you are investigating, not xyzwebhosting.com).

Go through the list of pages linking to xyzwebhosting.com and see what kinds of pages they are. Many of them might be web pages of individuals, for example, students, teachers, hobbyists, etc. In many cases, the link to xyzwebhosting.com may be on the page of a hobbyist who has no loyalty to “XYZ Web Hosting“, but simply included a link to xyzwebhosting.com in a generic “Favorite Links” section of their website. If you contact the webmaster, and make a request, he or she might be willing to add a link to your site too. Always be honest, polite, and professional when you make the request. They will either say yes or no; it is pretty cut and dry.

You should repeat this process for all the keywords for which you want your site to rank highly. The more links to your site, the higher your site will rank in search listings, the more traffic it will get. This work of cultivating links to your site is the core of Search Engine Optimization (SEO); the next several posts will continue this exploration of techniques for building links to your site--all part of the overall objective of SEO.

Cheers,

Once you have your page(s) ready to receive visitors, and search-engine friendly, the next step is to get visitors to your page. Building up a consistent stream of significant traffic to your site requires a lot of effort and time, and there are many aspects to this task. The next several posts will describe how to achieve this goal. I have divided this work into the following smaller tasks, ranked in order (I believe) of sophistication: social bookmarking, link requests, directory submission, forum participation, blogging, article writing, and offline marketing. The first four of these tasks have been grouped together in a general “200” level of development activity because I believe these activities are the quickest and easiest way to get links.

Social Media

Today, almost everybody with Internet access has a Facebook account. If they don’t have a Facebook account, perhaps they are a member of one of the many other social networking sites such as MySpace, LinkedIn, Friendster, etc.--many such sites exist. In fact, an extensive list of social networking sites is posted on Wikipedia, but even that list is not complete.

If you are already a member of one of these sites, making the world aware of the existence of your web site is as simple as including the URL on your “Profile” page. And, if you are on Facebook, you also have the options of “Sharing” a link, or creating a “Fan page” which can include your link. As your network grows, more people will visit your page, see the link to your web site, and potentially visit it.

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is another first step you can take to promote your web site. (In addition to the benefits of promoting your site, social bookmarking sites do provide a practical service. Personally, I like their convenience--your links are available from anywhere--as well as their practicality--they are a back-up in case your computer crashes.) Many social bookmarking sites exist on the Internet. The biggest and best-known are probably Delicious and Diigo, but there are hundreds of others. For example, here is one page that lists several social bookmarking sites: Social Bookmarking Sites List. Furthermore, web developers frequently post on the topic in their blogs, for example, here is one from Caroline Middlebrook. A web search would turn up many more similar services.

Note that in addition to general bookmarking sites, several specialty bookmarking sites exist that target particular audiences. For example, the goal of Brainify is to be used by students for bookmarking pages relevant to their studies (registering for a Brainify account is free, but users must sign up for an account with an email address from an academic institution). Depending upon the purpose and topic of your web site, you might find a social bookmarking service into which your site is particularly suited. In any case, social bookmarking is a good way to raise the profile of your site; I recommend creating accounts with one or two online bookmarking services, and bookmarking your site on them.

I happen to like Delicious, so let’s consider an example using Delicious.
Signing up for an account is free and easy, and once you have an account you can save your bookmarks online.

The general routine follows (after you have logged in to your account):
Enter a page’s URL.
Give it a title, if you don’t like the one automatically assigned.
Give it a description, or include some notes to yourself, if you don’t like what has been automatically assigned.
Give it some appropriate tags.
(Note that all bookmarks you save on Delicious are public by default unless you check the option to keep a bookmark private. You have to log in to your account to view your private bookmarks.)
Save it.

Repeat this process to save a few of your favorite bookmarks and save a link to your website. I recommend saving a few pages that are similar in topic. When you are saving the URL of your own page, remember to try to include one or two of your target keywords in the title and description. Be accurate and honest, but try to get a keyword or two in there somewhere.

A few aspects should be noted.

First, if you saved a URL that other Delicious users have saved, Delicious will indicate this fact by including the statement “X saves” over the title of the URL, indicating that X number of Delicious users have saved the same URL. For example, say one of your favorite sites is the Web Hosting Talk forums (http://www.webhostingtalk.com/). If you bookmark this URL, Delicious indicates that this URL has “1457 saves”. In other words, 1457 Delicious users have bookmarked this URL. Also note that the statement “1457 saves” is hot linked; if you click on it, you are taken to a page listing the users who have bookmarked that URL, as well as a list of their tags. You can then click on a user name and view their saved public links. You can check out all of them, or you can focus on the links that the user has tagged with tags in which you are interested. It is a great way to discover sites that are similar to your own.

On the other hand, suppose you have saved the URL to your site, which is brand-new and nobody else knows about. In this case, Delicious includes the statistic “1 save” over the title of the URL, meaning, so far, you are the only person to have saved this URL on Delicious. However, the tags you have assigned to this URL may already be in use by other users. Using the example from above, say I had tagged the Web Hosting Talk URL with the tags “hosting” and “webhosting”. If I click on my “webhosting” tag, only my bookmarks to which I have assigned the “webhosting” tag are listed; however, at the bottom of the page is a hotlink giving me the option to “See all links tagged webhosting”. If I click on this hotlink, I am taken to a page listing URLs that have been saved on Delicious and assigned this tag, ordered by number of “saves”. This is another way to see what other bookmarks Delicious users are saving with the same tag. Or to investigate some of the “related tags” that Delicious presents.

The key observation to be made here is that this process works in reverse. Other users may not know about your site, but if they save a URL with the same tag as you, they may take some time to investigate what other URLs are bookmarked with the same tag, leading them to your bookmarks--and your site. So tag your bookmarks carefully; they should be descriptive, accurate, and have enough general appeal to bring other users to your bookmarks.

Another reason to carefully tag your bookmarks is to ensure that they appear in tag searches. Again, if nobody yet knows about your links (and, in turn, your website), users may still be lead to them when they do a tag search. At the top of every Delicious page is a “Search” option. Users are much more likely to perform a search for pages tagged “webhosting” rather than “cheap-hosting-in-Canada”, or something like that. Such a tag is too specific to have much interest, and the odds of such a tag bringing traffic are small. So put some thought into the tags you assign to your bookmarks.

One other aspect of social bookmarking which I would like to mention before concluding this post is that if you succeed in making your site popular to the point that many Delicious users bookmark it, it may be featured on the Delicious front page--which leads to much additional traffic. It is a goal for which to aim.

To summarize, social media and social bookmarking offer the opportunity to create the first links to your site and, with them, traffic. Both of these methods are completely under your independent control; you do not have to go through another person and the results are immediate. Unlike directory submission, forum participation, and article writing (all of which will be discussed in subsequent posts), neither method requires the approval of an administrator, editor, or moderator. The independence, the ease, the immediacy of results, and the potential of driving significant traffic to a site, are all features that make the employment of social media and social bookmarking sites good first steps in the promotion of a web site.

Edit (14 December 2011):
Since making this post, I have also come across another list of bookmarking sites:
http://www.social-bookmarking-sites-list.net/social-bookmarking/800-social-bookmarking-sites.html