When designing a website you sometimes only have one chance to keep the internet visitor from clicking the back button on their web browser. Whether you are selling a product or offering a service, remember your website design represents your business.
For years, we have been told that when going to an interview you have 10 seconds to make a lasting first impression. There is no difference when designing your website than making the first impression in an interview. You are making a first impression with the internet visitor who has searched for what you are offering in your website design. The first impression can make the difference between in a paying customer or just a visitor to your website.

Here are just 5 simple rules to keep in mind when designing your website.

Rule #1. Limit the use or do not use flashy banners and advertisements at the beginning of you website. There is a time and place for the banners and advertisements.

There is nothing more annoying than clicking on a website to see cartoon characters and advertisements for other products flashing in front of your face. This can be too much for your potential customer. Your customer is there for a purpose and if the blatant advertisements or flashing banners turn them off they may just hit the back button before they find what they are looking for.

The only exception to this rule is determined by the purpose of you website.

Rule #2. Make sure your website design make it easy for the visitor to find the navigation buttons. If a customer has to search for a navigation button to find information about the company or the navigation buttons are not working, the visitor may get frustrated and leave you website.

As a rule of thumb, your navigation buttons should be on the left side of your web page because the majority of people read from left to right. Think about reading a newspaper or a book. You look at the headlines then you read from the left to the right.

Rule #3. When visitors are browsing your site, have a clear indication for the visitor of where they are on your website and how to get to other parts.

You may want to put a link on each page that the visitor clicks to take them to the home page or another page relating to the information currently viewing. In other words do not confuse your visitor or your visitor may just click off the website totally.

Rule #4. When designing your website pay close attention to loading time, the time it takes your web pages to load. You can reduce loading time by reducing graphics on each page. A good website design should load under twenty seconds.

The longer it takes the pages to load the more frustrating it can be to the visitor. People want it yesterday not today and definitely not tomorrow.

Rule #5.
Use a font that is common to all web browsers and easy to read. You have to think of your market. If you are selling a product or service that is used by older individuals you may want to increase the font.

Most of us are not going to get younger and with age, we find our eye sights are not what they use to be.

In addition, different web browsers display fonts differently. Therefore, you want to use a universal font compatible to the popular web browser for better viewing.

Bonus Rule #6. Make sure the information on your website is up to date, and relevant to what you are offering. If your website is selling 32″, LCD Flat Screen TVs you should not be offering products to repair your driveway. I know that is extreme but people want to know they are visiting a website that has up to date information and is relevant to what they are searching for.

These are just a few rules of website design. There are many other things to adhere to when designing your website for optima visitors.

When designing your website look at it from the customers’ or visitors’ standpoint. Would you want to visit this website? Would you want to purchase a product from this website? If you answer “no” then correct the problems.

If you deal with customer service, you need to do as they do. Get out from behind the counter and see what the customers see from where they stand. If you go “ugh”, that is not good and you need to make some changes.

About the Author: Pat Turman is a successful mid-level manager and internet entrepreneur. She co-owned a quarter million dollar e-retail store selling golf equipment for women, runs numerous online businesses, and manages a company with revenues of over a million dollars. She holds a BBA from an accredited University and numerous awards and certificates. www.eznichewebsitedesign.com

To make your web site really pay off, it has to get good web traffic, which means simply that a lot of people are coming to your web site. By checking your web stats you can quickly observe how many visitors your web site is getting and even how many people stay long enough to browse the website.

Programs such as Awstats, a web analyzing program found on most Linux based servers will reveal how those web visitors came to you. Of great interest to most webmasters is the keywords used by visitors who find your site through the search engines. In the past few years a new science called “Search Engine Optimization” (SEO) has evolved into a business model that specializes in making sure your web site gets a strong flow of business from people who look for your niche of goods and services using Google, Yahoo or one of the other big search engines.

The key to great traffic from a search engine is your “search engine ranking”. When you search for something on the Internet, Google (or your favorite search engine) comes back with lots of web sites for you to consider. Well, experts tell us that the majority of web shoppers use a web site shown on that first page of links that the search engine returns. So if your web site is among that first one or two pages, you have a good search engine ranking and you will see more customers than a business that is way down on page 54 where customers never go. SEO is the science of working with search engines so your web site gets a good ranking. SEO is also a fairly complicated science because it involves how your web site is programmed, the kind of text you have on each page and a good SEO expert has specialized tools and software to monitor your SEO on a daily basis to see how you are doing.

So how do we go about improving our web site’s SEO? A SEO company will have those specialized tools and software resources to do the job right. They understand how search engines work and they can prepare specific suggestions to your web team to improve your search engine ranking. You will also want to make sure the articles you purchase from private label sites or ghostwriter services are optimized for your site’s keywords as well. If, on the other hand, you are outsourcing custom articles to a ghostwriter you can specify the articles be “SEO” ready for your chosen keywords upon delivery. This will ensure your articles will rank well in the search engines.

About the Author: Linda Van Fleet is a freelance author and SEO expert who has been using the power of the Internet to promote online businesses since 1996. Do you need private label articles? We have private label article packages and custom articles for your website content.

Get more sales without spending an extra dime on advertising

Create your own virtual people from SitePal in just minutes and experience the amazing results. SitePal Virtual People greet every single customer in person, answer their questions and help them complete their shopping as if the site owner were there 24/7. Literarily. Result are skyrocketing sales without spending a dime more on advertising. SitePal is proven, highly cost-effective, and easy to set up.

SitePal Virtual People Can:
•    Engage your visitors to take action
•    Deliver messages with influence
•    Assist with visitors questions
•    Speak multiple languages

Results? Increased sales, conversions & time spent on site

How it Works

SitePal gives you can easy-to-use, powerful online editing tool for character creation. Create the look you like and change it as often as you wish. The process is as simple as 1-2-3:

•    Design the character to your liking
•    Add audio through either voice recording or text-to-speech functionality
•    Publish it to your website, e-mail, or PPT within minutes

Developers take advantage of SitePal’s robust programming functionality such as API and Flash features to create and integrate unqiue speaking character solutions into your services.
Visit www.SitePal.com to learn how other businesses benefit from SitePal.

How good is your Web site? Is your Blog up to par?

There are actually websites that will measure the ranking of your website. For those of you that don’t know what page rank is, it’s a tool put together by Google that determines the effectiveness or efficiency of your Web site.

The higher your page rank, the higher your Web site is listed in the various search engines, and that means more traffic to your site. This, in essence, means more people are looking at your site, your products, your services, thus putting more money in your pocket in the form of paying customers.
If more people are going to your Web site then less traffic is going to your competitors’ Web site. Unfortunately most people don’t even know what page rank is but those visitors that do will place your website in a higher esteem than your competitors and feel that your content is much more valuable and insightful.

Now you are probably wondering how page rank determined? And more importantly how do you increase your page rank?. Well, let’s look at the first part of that question.

One way to help determine your page is when another site links to your page with a back link. The more back links you receive from other pages the higher your page rank. It’s a good idea to make sure the back links are coming from sites that have content on the same theme as yours.

This process can get quite involved and a little messy because all back links don’t carry the same weight or force. The higher the page rank that a link is coming from the more beneficial it is in terms of boosting your page rank. So if you get links from a lot of pages with low page ranks it will not have as strong an impact as a few pages with higher page ranks.

Now this is the complicated part: If you have a page that has a page rank of 7 and it is already linked to 10 or 15 other pages then it will not be any more beneficial to you than a page that has a page rank of maybe 3 or so. There is only so much linking that a page can do. It’s almost like the law of diminishing returns, in other words after awhile it begins to have the opposite effect.

Another way to improve your page rank is through the use of web directories. Not only will this increase your page rank but it will also increase the traffic to your site. So if you submit your site to a large number of Web directories you will be able to increase your rank. There are a number of web directories you can submit your website or blog to.

There’s a host of other items that will definitely help you to increase your ranking and the general traffic flow to your Web site. Also if you are curious about the page ranking of your own site you can see exactly where you stand by doing a Google search for page rank. This should help you to find some of the sites out there that measure page rank. Once you find a site all you have to do is put your own URL in the designated box and you will have your answer. A page rank of 6 or higher is very high.

About the Author: Mel Richardson - Coach, Author and Internet Marketer has been recently putting together programs for those that are new to the internet and looking to build an online business. http://www.freeonlinemarketingstrategies.com/

Are you launching a new website? There’s no better time to think about search engine optimization than prior to launching a new site. By giving consideration to your on-page optimization factors, you can increase your chances of achieving top organic search results.

To prepare your site for easy indexing, be sure to follow these basis guidelines:

1. Design your site in html or similar format that minimizes the use of java script and flash. The more complex you make your code, the more difficult it becomes for the search engine spiders to read your content and prescribe the appropriate Google PR to your web page.

2. Make sure that your meta tags are coded properly and include the Robots.txt tag. Many individuals downplay the importance of meta tags. Although meta tags themselves won’t drastically change the organic ranking of your site, they do create the display text users will see when your site appears in search results. If your meta tags are search engine optimized and compelling, you increase the changes of improving click-throughs.

3. Apply the proper tags to your page. H1, H2, and H3 tags are a great wall to call attention to your content and promote your keywords and keyword phrases. Try to use each tag at least once, but don’t force the issues. You want your text to flow and appear normal.

In addition to ensuring that you’ve made your page easy to access and presented text that is optimized, you also want to consider other factors that can help long-term with your SEO efforts. So often, web designers get caught up with on page factors, that they overlook the requirements for establishing a foundation that supports long-term initiatives.

In particular, consider adding pages that you can add to over time that support link building and accessibility for search engine spiders. Be sure to include:

1. An html sitemap and an xml sitemap. Including a sitemap on you site makes it easy for search engines to access all of your website pages and index your site accordingly. Your sitemap should be in both html as well as xml. Although users would not access the xml sitemap, search engine spiders use this version to crawl websites. Additionally, key search engine submission resources like Google’s Webmasters Tools require xml site map versions.

2. Include a partners page. Previously referred to as a links page, the partners page is essential for reciprocal linking. This strategy isn’t as powerful as developing one-way links, but until your site has been assigned a Google PR, one-way links can be difficult to acquire. So begin your link exchange program with a partners page that allows you add or remove link quickly and easily.

3. Submission pages that encourage new content. One of the most powerful seo techniques is the addition of new content. Make it easy for your users to add or submit content to your website. When search engines see new content, they rejoice. Don’t underestimate how important it is to make it simple for your browsers to add or submit content.

When focusing on search engine optimization, especially with a new website, follow the basic ideas outlined above. There are a number of other factors to consider as well. However, you should always start with a strong foundation - a site design that meets basic SEO standards but one that also supports your long range search engine optimization goals.

About the Author: Michael Fleischner is the founder of the The Good Marketing Tips Blog and has more than 12 years of marketing experience. Learn how to improve search engine rankings at http://improvesearchenginerankings.blogspot.com.

SEO is the process of configuring a website so that it has a chance to show up in a search result for a particular phrase. Many of the search engines have a slightly different formula for how they determine these results. Good site structure - as simple as this sounds many people overlook this. Every day we see sites with heavy flash animation, dated frame designs, pages that don’t work and broken links. The bottom line is that if you can’t easily navigate a site without problems chances are the search engines can’t either. And if a search engine can’t go through your site you have absolutely no chance of showing up for a key phrase - no matter how pretty the flash.

Meta-data is geek-speak for the page titles, page descriptions and keywords that you enter for each page. Each page on your website should have a unique title and description that summarizes what that page is about.

I am stunned at how many sites have www.yoursite.com as the page title for every page - that’s wasting prime online real estate.Putting in a page title or description that does not accurately match what the page is about is considered “spamming” a search engine. Relevant content - People seem to understand that good content is really what they are looking for when they search for something. More and more we are seeing sites that have regular updates or blogs showing up higher in the search results than sites which have larger quantities of older, “stale” content on them.

Responsible link building - This is perhaps the least understood part of SEO. In a nutshell search engines consider a link from another website to your website as a popularity vote. Sadly though link building, like keywords and meta-data, have been abused by many site owners with schemes such as link farms where sites are setup simply to house links to other sites. If you would like help with SEO for your website, or other online business needs we would love to hear from you.

Syntactics, Inc. is now hiring for:

SEO Manager
(Cagayan de Oro City)

Responsibilities:

The SEO Manager’s responsibility is to lead and manage all SEO related activities for all clients. Activities include on site optimization, link building, content coordination, submissions and other activities. This is a tremendous opportunity for someone with 2-3 years SEO experience. Meant for an aggressive SEO specialist who understands all facets of conducting an SEO campaign. The successful candidate will be someone who can help take our clients rankings to the very top of the major search engines.
We are looking for someone who has a documented record of success managing SEO campaigns at all levels (enterprise level sites and smaller, static sites).

  • Once a new client has been signed, the SEO Manager will be responsible for ensuring the campaign gets off the ground and stays on track through its life cycle.
  • Coordinate with internal team members to accomplish SEO tasks
  • Manage all aspects of technical SEO for new and existing clients: Keyword research, competitive analysis, baseline reports, title/meta tag creation, content optimization, link building,and others
  • Utilize multiple tools to arrive at sound decisions on which way to take a client’s campaign.
  • Utilize analytics (e.g., Google Analytics) as feedback for a client campaign.
  • Implement SEO management best practices into company procedures to make entire process more efficient.
  • Communicate with clients about specific technical details of their campaign
  • Participate in monthly client meetings and update clients on progress and activities
  • Relocation will be provided for successful applicant.

Requirements:

  • Candidate must possess at least a Bachelor’s/College Degree in Computer Science/Information Technology, Business Studies/Administration/Management, Human Resource Management or equivalent.
  • Required skill(s): Search Engine Optimization, Search Engine Marketing, PPC Marketing.
  • Required language(s): Filipino, English
  • Preferred language(s): English.
  • At least 2 year(s) of working experience in the related field is required for this position.
  • Preferably Assistant Manager / Managers specializing in IT/Computer - Software or equivalent.
  • Full-Time positions available.
  • Applicants should be Filipino citizens or hold relevant residence status.

To apply, visit http://ph.jobstreet.com/jobs/2008/9/default/20/1991307.htm?fr=L

It’s been two years since I started working at home and leave the employment world behind, and I realized I am earning 3 times I earned when I was yet an employee 2 years ago, and it is still growing until now. I have friends and colleagues who also works at home who can testify that. Rechelle is one on the list, a working mom, literally she is because she is working in-front of her computer while baby setting her son at home. She doesn’t need to get dress for office uniform or get stuck on traffic jam on busy streets in the morning. She is a freelance Web editor and Blogger. She gets the job done without having to leave home, an arrangement that works well for the young single mom like her. “I get to spend time with my one-year-old son while I earn.” Rechelle said.

If you want to make a difference in your life by earning dollars while you are sleeping, travelling, hiking, shopping, why not apply to Work From Home - Make Money Blogging and Make Money by Blogging. Experience what we experience and get paid by working at home or anywhere you want as long as you are online.

SAN FRANCISCO - Anna Patterson’s last Internet search engine was so impressive that industry leader Google Inc bought the technology in 2004 to upgrade its own system.

She believes her latest invention is even more valuable—only this time it’s not for sale.

Patterson instead intends to upstage Google, which she quit in 2006 to develop a more comprehensive and efficient way to scour the Internet.

The end result is Cuil, pronounced “cool.” Backed by $33 million in venture capital, the search engine plans to begin processing requests for the first time Monday.

Cuil had kept a low profile while Patterson, her husband, Tom Costello, and two other former Google engineers—Russell Power and Louis Monier—searched for better ways to search.

Now, it’s boasting time.

For starters, Cuil’s search index spans 120 billion Web pages.

Patterson believes that is at least three times the size of Google’s index, although there is no way to know for certain. Google stopped publicly quantifying its index’s breadth nearly three years ago when the catalog spanned 8.2 billion Web pages.

Cuil won’t divulge the formula it has developed to cover a wider swath of the Web with far fewer computers than Google. And Google isn’t ceding the point: Spokeswoman Katie Watson said her company still believes its index is the largest.

After getting inquiries about Cuil, Google asserted on its blog Friday that it regularly scans through 1 trillion unique Web links. But Google said it doesn’t index them all because they either point to similar content or would diminish the quality of its search results in some other way. The posting didn’t quantify the size of Google’s index.

A search index’s scope is important because information, pictures and content can’t be found unless they’re stored in a database. But Cuil believes it will outshine Google in several other ways, including its method for identifying and displaying pertinent results.

Rather than trying to mimic Google’s method of ranking the quantity and quality of links to Web sites, Patterson says Cuil’s technology drills into the actual content of a page. And Cuil’s results will be presented in a more magazine-like format instead of just a vertical stack of Web links.

Cuil’s results are displayed with more photos spread horizontally across the page and include sidebars that can be clicked on to learn more about topics related to the original search request.

Finally, Cuil is hoping to attract traffic by promising not to retain information about its users’ search histories or surfing patterns—something that Google does, much to the consternation of privacy watchdogs.

After making so many bold promises, Cuil got off to a rocky start Monday as its computers were overwhelmed by curious Web surfers. As of late Monday afternoon, even simple search requests were still being greeted with this message: “No results because of high load.”

Cuil is just the latest in a long line of Google challengers.

The list includes swaggering startups like Teoma (whose technology became the backbone of Ask.com), Vivisimo, Snap, Mahalo and, most recently, Powerset, which was acquired by Microsoft Corp. this month.

Even after investing hundreds of millions of dollars on search, both Microsoft and Yahoo Inc have been losing ground to Google. Through May, Google held a 62 percent share of the US search market followed by Yahoo at 21 percent and Microsoft at 8.5 percent, according to comScore Inc.

Google has become so synonymous with Internet search that it may no longer matter how good Cuil or any other challenger is, said Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner.

“Search has become as much about branding as anything else,” Weiner said. “I doubt (Cuil) will be keeping anyone at Google awake at night.”

Google welcomed Cuil to the fray with its usual mantra about its rivals.

“Having great competitors is a huge benefit to us and everyone in the search space,” Watson said. “It makes us all work harder, and at the end of the day our users benefit from that.”

But this will be the first time that Google has battled a general-purpose search engine created by its own alumni. It probably won’t be the last time, given that Google now has nearly 20,000 employees.

Patterson joined Google in 2004 after she built and sold Recall, a search index that probed old Web sites for the Internet Archive. She and Power worked on the same team at Google.

Although he also worked for Google for a short time, Monier is best known as the former chief technology officer of AltaVista, which was considered the best search engine before Google came along in 1998.

Monier also helped build the search engine on eBay’s online auction site.

The trio of former Googlers are teaming up with Patterson’s husband, Costello, who built a once-promising search engine called Xift in the late 1990s. He later joined IBM Corp, where he worked on an “analytic engine” called WebFountain.

Costello’s Irish heritage inspired Cuil’s odd name. It was derived from a character named Finn McCuill in Celtic folklore.

Patterson enjoyed her time at Google, but became disenchanted with the company’s approach to search. “Google has looked pretty much the same for 10 years now,” she said, “and I can guarantee it will look the same a year from now.” - AP

WHAT IS SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

Social bookmarking is a service or process that allows internet users to store, organize and share their bookmarks. When you find a website that you like, you add a backlink to that website on your social bookmarking account. This allows other users to view that link and visit the site as well. For an example of this, just check out one of the most popular bookmarking sites: http://del.icio.us

HOW DOES IT BENEFIT ONLINE MARKETERS?

As an online marketer, our main goal is traffic.

There is benefit to us on several levels:
1. First we get some direct traffic from people clicking on our bookmark and going directly to our web page. This is usually won’t be a huge amount of traffic in most cases, but is very targeted. Also every once in a while we get a site that will take off and become very popular from this alone.

2. The next benefit is an increased potential for fast search engine indexing. When we post our bookmark on a bookmarking site, it will be displayed on the front page. Now these pages are usually a very high PR, ranging from PR5 to PR7 or PR8. What this means is that Googlebot and other search engine spiders visit this dozens of times each day. When it does, it will find our links and start to index site immediately.

3. The final benefit is an increased authority. Because Google considers many bookmarking sites to be trusted, authority sites, any direct link to our website will increase the power and importance of our site as well. Understand that this is different from indexing. Getting a site indexed simply involves getting search engine spiders to visit the site and log the pages into the search engine’s database. Increasing a site’s authority and trust will improve where the site will be in the search engine listings. Will the site be # 1 or site # 10,001? If Google has two sites for the keyword “dog houses”. Which will be #1 and which will be #2? Well, of course, the site with the most trust and authority will be #1. With Social bookmarking, Google will find our web page from a link on a very high PR, trusted site. This is the “best scenario” for building trust and getting a good search engine ranking.

HOW TO SOCIAL BOOKMARK
The actual process of bookmarking is quite simple. You simply create an account at the bookmarking sites, log in and then add your bookmarks. When adding your bookmark, you enter keywords (called tags) which categorize your bookmark and allow others to search, view and vote for your bookmark. Here’s a list of some of the top bookmarking sites. You can sign up and use any of these services for free!

http://blinklist.com
http://furl.net
http://del.icio.us
http://shadows.com
http://simpy.com
http://spurl.net
http://blogmarks.net
http://ma.gnolia.com
http://blogmemes.net
http://scuttle.org
http://de.lirio.us
http://smarking.com
http://backflip.com
http://looklater.com
http://wink.com
http://connotea.com
http://markaboo.com
http://linkagogo.com
http://feedmelinks.com
http://rawsugar.com

SEEMS TOO SIMPLE, WHAT’S THE CATCH?
There are two major bookmarking downsides you should be aware of:
1. It’s time consuming. If you have more than a few small websites, then logging into each bookmarking service and adding your web pages and relevant tags will take time. Lots of time. If you have websites with hundreds or thousands of pages, you will want to submit thousands of bookmarks. Not only will that take a long time, if you are not careful you can be labeled as a spammer… which leads us to #2.

2. You could be accused of SPAM. Even if you have all good intentions and are not a spammer, adding too many bookmarks to your account too quickly or adding too many bookmarks from a single website will get your account banned as spam. Bookmarking websites want to see their service used, but not abused. Trying to save time by adding all of your website bookmarks at once may save some time, but they do not like it!

SO, IS IT STILL WORTH IT?
Despite these points, the benefits of bookmarking far outweigh the negatives. To alleviate some of the time consuming work, there are several bookmarking tools that attempt to automate the process and allow you to bookmark your pages much faster than simply doing them all manually. Some of these are free tools and some will cost you. In the next part of this report, I will cover these tools along with their advantages and disadvantages.

BOOKMARKING TOOLS

I have divided this section into two parts, FREE and PAID tools and/or services.

FREE BOOKMARKING TOOLS
!Delicioso! Social Bookmarking Power Submitter
http://www.tagtooga.com/pg/delicioso

This is a totally FREE Windows application that allows you to submit your bookmarks to 8 different bookmarking sites in a semi-automated manner. To use, you must manually enter a list of URLS, then enter a title and tags for each URL. The software can gather your tags and titles by crawling your URL, but if you have more than a few pages to bookmark this can take a while and possibly crash your PC! Once all the data is entered, You click SUBMIT and the software submits the bookmarks

• NERD FACTOR: Beginner. Requires the ability to install software on PC.
• IDEAL USER: Those who have only a few pages to bookmark a month.
• ADVANTAGES: It’s free.
• DISADVANTAGES: Takes too long to set up large numbers of pages. It submits all the bookmarks to each site at once. So if you have 1,000 bookmarks you are basically just dumping them all into the bookmarking site around the same time… which is basically SPAM.

OnlyWire
http://www.onlywire.com

OnlyWire is a FREE online service that allows you to add a bookmark to 20 bookmarking sites from one account. So instead of logging into each bookmarking account separately to submit your bookmarks, you just log into OnlyWire and they will submit the bookmark for you.

• ADVANTAGES: Simple. All you have to do is create an account.
• IDEAL USER: Those bookmark only a small number pages each week.
• ADVANTAGES: Requires no installation of software. It’s FREE. They also have an API.
• DISADVANTAGES: You are using a third party service to submit your bookmarks so you are subject to their submission rules. Submitting a large number of bookmarks on a regular basis would get your account cancelled and IP banned. You cannot delay posting, so when submitting large numbers of pages, you run the risk of looking like SPAM.

Sociable
http://push.cx/sociable
This is not actually an automated bookmarking tool. It is a Wordpress plug-in that displays quick-links to some bookmarking sites. when your blog visitor clicks the link, they can then bookmark your blog post if they so choose. What I have found is that these types of plug-ins aren’t very effective in getting visitors to bookmark your posts. It’s very rare to see any benefit from this plug-in. I will also add that there are many, many plug-ins that perform a similar function as sociable. You can find many here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Plugins/Technorati

• ADVANTAGE: Allows your blog visitors to easily bookmark your blog post.
• DISADVANTAGES: You are relying on others to bookmark your pages. Rarely used. Visitors must still log into their bookmarking accounts manually to bookmark the post. Unless you provide some exceptional content, most will not.

Socializer
http://ekstreme.com/socializer/
This FREE online bookmarking service allows a webpage visitor to easily bookmark that web page by displaying quicklinks to 40+ bookmarking sites. It is very similar to Sociable, EXCEPT it allows the visitor to bookmark a web page instead of a blog post. Like Sociable, visitors must still click each individual link, then log into their bookmarking account and bookmark the desired page.

• ADVANTAGE: Allows your blog visitors to easily bookmark your blog post.
• DISADVANTAGES: You are relying on others to bookmark your pages. Rarely used. Visitors must still log into their bookmarking accounts manually to bookmark the post. Unless you provide some exceptional content, most will not.

Tag Generator
http://www.evilgeniusmarketing.com/ice/tag-generator.cfm
Like Sociable and Socializer, this is not an automated bookmarking tool. This script generates a quick-link to the bookmarking sites. So if a visitor chooses to bookmark your website or blog post, they can do so easily.

• ADVANTAGE: Allows your blog visitors to easily bookmark your blog post.
• DISADVANTAGES: You are relying on others to bookmark your pages. Rarely used. Visitors must still log into their bookmarking accounts manually to bookmark the post. Unless you provide some exceptional content, most will not.

PAID BOOKMARKING TOOLS

Now at this point I’m sure you now realize that just because something is free doesn’t mean it’s actually worthwhile to use. The paid tools are divided into server side tools and windows applications.

WINDOWS APPLICATIONS
There are currently at least 4 paid windows based bookmarking products. I will not name individually, but they are all fairly similar so I will just discuss them all here. They are somewhat expensive and have several things you must consider before even thinking of using them:
1) They run on windows. Normally that should be enough there. MAC users are out and you are almost guaranteed run errors, system freezes and crashing. Not much of a time saver.

2) They are charging you an upfront fee AND a monthly charge to use the software. Now there is absolutely no reason for this except for the fact that they want more money from you.

3) None of these tools are totally fully automated. In fact, most are no better than the free tools I reviewed earlier. Why? Well all of them require you to manually enter your bookmarks and manually enter your tags for each bookmark. What exactly is the point?

I have 1,000 bookmarks to submit, I will spend hours manually entering each bookmark URL and then manually entering tags for each of those URLS! And then running the software to submit each bookmark! And I’m paying for this? The only thing these Windows based tools have going for them is that some of them can automate account creation at each bookmarking site. This can save you some time if you have tons of accounts to create (such as a spammer would). BUT if used too aggressively, bookmarking accounts will see this as spam, ban your IP and all accounts created with that IP. So still want auto create accounts?

• NERD FACTOR: Beginner. Requires knowledge installing software on PC.
• IDEAL USERS: Small website owners and beginners who don’t mind dealing with PC software and its issues, and can afford a monthly usage fee.
• ADVANTAGES: Automated bookmarking account creation.
• DISADVANTAGES: Can be seen as spam if bookmarking large numbers of sites at once; monthly usage fees; runs on your PC; limited scalability; semiautomated.

SERVER SIDE APPLICATIONS
These are bookmarking tools that run on your server. It doesn’t matter if you are a MAC or PC users, these don’t run on your PC. There are several benefits to this, but the most important is speed, reliability and scalability. No matter if you have 1 bookmark or 10,000 these tools can handle the load. They run 24/7, and you don’t have to worry about it crashing your PC or sucking up your PC resources.

Auto Social Poster
http://www.AutoSocialPoster.com
The Auto Social Poster is the first (and only) totally automated social bookmarking plug-in for Wordpress. It allows you to automatically bookmark new blog posts on over 24 different bookmarking sites. Once you set it up, it can run hands free. All you need to do is simply post to your blog as you normally do and the plug-in will do the rest.

Each time a new post is added to your Wordpress blog, it will bookmark that post to specific bookmarking sites or even a random bookmarking site. It will also add the random number of tags that you specify. Once completed you will receive a report via email.

Click here to watch a video demo:
http://www.autosocialposter.com/asp.html

• NERD FACTOR: Intermediate. Requires minimal knowledge of Wordpress and FTP.
• IDEAL USERS: Avid Wordpress bloggers who want to make sure they get their new content bookmarked without having to tinker around with bookmarking manually.
• ADVANTAGES: Allows you to fully automate the bookmarking of your new blog posts. One time purchase fee allows use on unlimited blogs. No monthly usage charge. Free Updates.
• DISADVANTAGES: The only disadvantage this plug-in has is that it only works for Wordpress blogs. It does not bookmark your website pages or posts from other blog platforms.

RSS Bookmarker
http://www.RSS-Bookmarker.com
RSS Bookmarker is a fully automated server side script that allows you to automatically bookmark pages of your website slowly. Imagine being able to slowly drip pages of your websites into bookmarking servers like simpy and furl over the course of weeks or months! You don’t look like spam and SE’s see that this as slow, NORMAL activity. It’s all controlled on a niche basis. You create a niche, select which bookmarking sites you want to post to from that niche and then enter your RSS feeds. The server side tool will then slowly post entries from your feeds to those selected bookmarking sites. This tool doesn’t dump all of your web pages into a bookmarking site at once like every other bookmarking software out there. It automatically submits your pages at pre-set intervals… hands-free. You set it and it runs on auto pilot. How it is different from the Auto Social Poster? Well the Auto Social Poster only bookmarks WORDPRESS BLOG posts. This RSS Bookmarker will bookmark any website that has an RSS FEED.

Check out a quick demo video here:
http://www.mass-automation.com/autobookmark/video/bookmarker.html

Don’t have an RSS feed? Don’t worry, this tool also comes with a totally separate script called the RSS FEED GENERATOR which spiders your website and creates an RSS feed for you.
• NERD FACTOR: Intermediate. Requires knowledge of FTP and setting up MYSQL Databases.
• IDEAL USERS: Any website owner that has lots of pages to bookmark and wants to get into bookmarking without wasting lots of time.
• ADVANTAGES: It’s totally automated and designed for large scale use. It can slowly drip thousands of pages, hands-free. If you have hundreds of websites that you need to bookmark, then this is YOUR SOLUTION.
• DISADVANTAGES: Requires your own server or shared server to run.


CONCLUSION

Social bookmarking is still in it’s infancy. As it’s popularity increases, we will see more and more people jumping on the bandwagon. To spread the word, feel free to redistribute this report to others who want to get started with social bookmarking. If you have any comments or questions, please don’t hesitate to post them on our forum at http://www.mass-automation.com/forum/

Here is some other great reading for those that want to learn more about folksonomy and social bookmarking:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking
http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/ELI7001.pdf
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/april05/hammond/04hammond.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folksonomy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tag_%28metadata%29

Kind regards,
Mat Heller
http://www.massaccountmanager.com
http://www.rss-bookmarker.com
http://www.autosocialposter.com

© 2007-2008 Interactive Gambit LLC. All rights reserved.
http://www.Mass-Automation.com

Brought to you by http://RSS-Bookmarker
You may freely distribute and share this report in its entirety.
No part may be copied, removed or redistributed individually.