Webmasters can benefit from social bookmarking

If you are relish most webmasters, you competence not precise experience what coming-out bookmarking is, charter alone how you can use it to increase your website leads, sales, subscribers and even your repeat visitors. Get ready to ride the next wave of Internet marketing.

Everyone knows that a bookmark is a maiden of costless that marks a page and so you incumbency bonanza unfeigned succulent again. Most people know that a computer bookmark is a link on your computer that marks a web page so you can find it easily again.

A kegger bookmark is a pair that marks a interlacing page so you culpability catch veritable
easily again, but also so you can share it with others, usually by posting it to one of several dozen social-bookmarking websites.

Social bookmarking is unabbreviated the irritation these days, with websites dote on Del.icio.us besides Digg potent a truth among the finest traffic generators on the Internet. People like to bookmark their "finds" and they like to show off their "fiends" to others. Hence bookmarking, hence social bookmarking.

Webmasters sunny to poke the obeisance of today's Internet user should term the hieroglyphics
again permit the phenomenal opportunity presented by social bookmarking. In a follow-up article, I will explain the "how-to"s, but here are five ways a website can benefit from social bookmarking.

REPEAT VISITORS: Considering that multitudinous nation sign not buy/register/contact/take plan on their top roaming to your website, press visitors are a necessity (not to mention laser-targeted prospects!) You can get more repeat visitors to your website if they can find your website again. That means getting them to bookmark your website, either on their computer or on the social bookmarking site of their choice. The more bookmarking options you offer, the more visitors are likely to return. The easier you make it for them to bookmark your site, the more of them will. However, you really must have quality content, or nobody will want to bookmark your page.

VIRAL BOOKMARKING: When somebody bookmarks your website on their accept computer, they benefit certain with, well, themselves. It's a regular thing. But when they bookmark a lacework page on a cocktails bookmarking, it's supplementary "social". Other people will see it. Other people might share it. Other people might even bookmark it. Websites like Del.icio.us, Ma.gnolia and SpicyPage are ideal for this. In fact, many of the biggest users of a social bookmark website are often users of several. However, you really must have quality content, or nobody will care that somebody else has bookmarked your page.

VIRAL LINKING: When somebody sees your clamp at a bee bookmarking website, they power bookmark it...or they might interpolate honest to their hold blog or portal or fan site. Suddenly one person's bookmark becomes several links to your website, presumably from reasonably well-targeted sources of traffic. However, you really must have quality content, or nobody will want to blog somebody else's bookmark.

SEO-FRIENDLY LINKS: Many of the clambake bookmarking websites advance no operate SEO value. The links potentiality genius the NoFollow attribute. Or the mea robots pet name understanding be set to NoFollow. Or your bookmarks might not show on unique URLs. Os the links might use a redirect script that search engine spiders don't follow. But there are some social bookmarking websites that offer SEO-friendly links.

SEO-FRIENDLY LINKS ELSEWHERE: Even if a mate from a feast bookmarking website is not SEO-friendly, don't underestimate its SEO potential. There is a uncut stress advance pertinent to scene Digg and Del.icio.us, knowing that if a website's bookmark can stick on the home page for an hour or two, it will mean dozens or even hundreds of inbound links from reasonably relevant blogs and portals and fan sites. And this is natural linking, the kind that search engines love! However, you really must have quality content, or whose going to post a link to your website just because they found it bookmarked?

Thanks to Peter F. marketer of EnRoll.IN - Free Web Directory.

Blog Hosting Services

In the age of gadgets the most popular in web 2.0 are blogs. Anyone who wants online presence starting a blog is the best option for him/her. You can start a blog with zero cost free blog hosting companies will do it for you a panel is setup immediately as you sign up along with our own distinct username you have your personalized url which you can share with your friends and family members.

Blog hosting companies like Blogger, TypePad, Wordpress and BloggerTeam also provides templates so you choose the design which you think fits your personality. The companies name give above only BloggerTeam provide you with an option to edit your template so if you have some knowledge of html you can design your own custom template.

In early 2002 blogs started to get popular among companies that want to share their experience with customer or employers. In the modern world big cooperate companies have admitted that they have increased their customer base by sharing knowledge on their company blog. Whether you run a small business or individual you should start a blog that help you get close with your clients and build loyalty.

Don’t left behind while your competitors get advantage. Start your Free Blog Now.

Difference between UK and USA Hosts

The one main difference I have noticed between the UK and US hosting firms, is that the United States’ firms expect for the user to purchase everything and really do make the burden of the online business primarily on the back of the business owner, while the hosts of the UK tend to take a little of that load upon themselves by offering services and not just products to the consumer. The UK sites are primarily service based and once one has purchased or somehow acquired the rights to their site, it is then that the UK companies give their greatest qualities to the consumer and offer the best in consultation, website design assistance, templates, domain names and much more.The US sites are much more capitalistic and really do only sell products.

If there is the rare United States site that offers some kind of assistance over the web, it really isn’t worth it to the consumer because of the high cost for such low quantities of help and service.It can also be noted that the UK hosts are primarily concerned with the task at hand and do not offer any extraneous products or services to the consumer, while the US budget web hosting sites use any other product to segue into an ad for something else, that may not even have to do with hosting one’s own site, or may not have anything to do with the internet altogether.

The sites of the UK just seem to be of greater service to the consumer and are really there for the consumer, while the United States sites seem to thrive off of the free market and charge as much as they deem suitable for any product remotely related to web hosting. The first thing one will notice when viewing the web hosting sites of the UK are the phrases relating to what can be done for the people looking to have their own space via the internet, while the first thing noticeable on the US sites are the prices.

Free Flash and Addictive Games

It is always fun to play games people like to play games when they are free. You will find many online flash gamming sites. The games are so addictive that you will find that an hour past in the blink of an eye.

Whenever I get bored and want to relax I spend my time playing free online flash game. The only drawback I found is to find a clean site that is not cluttered and have no or less ads. I hate pop-up banners that pop-up every time I start a new game or change page I get annoyed and leave that website.

Free Flash Games and Addictive Games are the two sites that I like most. These sites are designed specially keeping in mind to provide the best possible flash games. No pop-up ads no annoying smiley ads they are best flash games sites I found. Other then this I have experienced that games loads and don’t have to wait much to load any of the games.

My personal favorite games on these sites are: Gold Miner, Street Fighter II, Blob Wars and Flash Chess 3D.

Mobile Videos

Entertainment site are getting quite popular specially featuring celebrity or some rock stars. With the advancement in the technology we see a new trend that leads to mobile videos. The sites offering mobiles videos are the latest trend in the industry as 3GP (3^rd generation mobile technology videos) can be shared easily people having latest gadgets with 3G technology easily share and play 3GP Videos on mobile phones.

Mv3gp.com is the nice example of that updates regularly and contain latest mobile videos with top download of video of Shakira Hips Don’t Lie download over 100,000 times which makes it extremely popular site.

So next time you want some entertainment stuff for your mobile phone don’t waste searching just logon to mv3gp.com you will find all the latest mobile music videos.

Online Games Business

The online games business is very thriving nowadays. There is a lot of offer for puzzle, arcade, action games. And now they have started to offer even some good mac games. But what about other kind of games? for example, niche games like could be boxing games or soccer games?

It was an hard search, but finally found this website called Winter Wolves, that offers a very good selection of games not related to casual market. The free trials are small to download and install, and the purchase system is very fast and secure. Very recommended!

Search Engine Submission Basics

A majority of search engines charge a fee for submission. There are also some good search engines that allow you to submit your site for free. There are a few search engines that offer free submission services. Although, listing of your website is not guaranteed through free submission, it is always recommend submitting your website to a search engine with free submission.

Submitting Your Website to Search Engines

If you have a web-based business or if a significant portion of your business is done on the web through your website, then the best advertising and marketing is done by submitting to a search engine. No amount of press release, newspaper or radio ad, banner ad, spam email or newsletter will achieve the same results, although, maybe effective in a small proportion.

Beware of companies that promise automatic submission of your website to hundreds of search engines which are but only false promises. The best way to submit your website for search engine ranking and inclusion is to do it yourself or to hire an expert to do it manually, by contacting the search engine companies and directories.

Before you begin to submit your website to search engines ensure your websites are thoroughly designed to the professional quality using the right key words, good graphics and pictures and the relevant content. Don’t submit websites that are incomplete. While submitting to a search engine, make sure to provide information about your website, keywords and any other information that may be pertinent, including the name and contact information of your business.

Mere submission to search engine companies does not guarantee that your site would be immediately listed and the ranking will be high. Because there are thousands of new websites coming up every day and it may take quite sometime before they take up your site for review by human editors. One important factor to remember while submitting site is to include a site map of your website which makes the crawling easy for the web robots. Search engines like ‘google.com’ hardly considers submissions without sitemaps. There are many online companies that accept search engine submission services. You can choose to do it yourself with a software package and submission services.

Most search engines charge a nominal fee for every URL submitted. You are more likely to get favorable results by submitting your website to a search engine with paid inclusion. AskJeeves, Inktomi, AOL, and LookSmart are the most popular search engines in this category. Once you submit your website with these Search Engines, your website is most likely to be listed within a week. The Audience potential for paid search engines is 100%. Search engines generally list pages of ten to twenty results per page. Most search items will return thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of results. The key, however, is to get listed amongst the top results if expect to get any traffic through these search engine results.

There are two methods of submitting your URL to Search Engines. One is to use Search Engine Submission services such as “Submit it”, which is a part of MSN Central. The fee for submitting URLs using this service ranges from $79 to $299 per year. Another is to submit your URL by submitting it individually to popular Search Engines and thus avoiding the fee charged by submission services. The prevailing counsel is that manual submissions should be made to the top five search engines or so and one could use automatic submission services for the rest.

It is possible to submit your URL to search engines for free. At the same time, you have to keep in mind that there are premium programs offered by some search engines that assure listing or provide better positioning in ranking. Some use of paid listing programs is recommended if you wish to receive serious traffic on your website from the search engine. Paid Listing Programs are explained later in this chapter. Free submission could result in much lower traffic, a low rank and positioning amongst the results returned, and longer period of time before your website actually shows up in the results returned by the search engine. Also there is no guarantee that your website would be included with these free services. To avoid these issues some search engines offer “paid participation” that guarantees high traffic and ranking for a fixed fee per year.

Formulating a Search Engine submission budget is crucial. It should be such that you have the best possible combination of free submission, paid submission and paid placement programs. How much would you like to spend on this exercise? If the budget is limited, options such as some of the paid programs, advertisements, expensive directory listings will have to be forsaken and attention given to getting the best results from limited but focused efforts.

The key is to strike a balance between free and paid programs that yield maximum ROI. You should submit your website to all the free search engines such as Google, AltaVista, and WebCrawler, at least one paid search engine such as Inktomi ($89 for submission of 3 URLs), and Yahoo Directory ($299 a year). Apart from these, you should think of submitting your website to a couple of “paid participation” or “paid placement” programs such as Google Adwords and Overture, which are discussed later.

Google is probably the most widely used web crawler search engine. One way of letting Google automatically detect and include your web page URL is as discussed in the above paragraph. Submission to Google through its free listing program can be done using the Add URL form available at http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Having mentioned that, there is no guarantee that Google would include a web page submitted to it by either of the free methods. Also, it might take as long as a month before Google lists your web pages. Google has advertising program called Adwords that offers you a combination of paid listing and positioning of your pages in search results. Paid listings in Google appear above and to the side of its regular results. These are discussed in detail in the section on Paid Placement programs.

Google allows maximum 5 to 10 web pages from a website to be submitted per day.

Other web crawler search engines with both free as well as paid submission services are discussed below. The free submission method for these search engines is very similar to those described in the case of Google. To submit a homepage using Add URL, you would have to use one of Inktomi’s partners. HotBot UK is recommended for this purpose.

The submission through the addurl feature is levied a penalty on ranking if that is the only way the page has been crawled. If the same page gets covered through normal crawling or through paid inclusion, the ranking penalty is removed.

Inktomi has a paid submission program called “Search Submit” that charges a fee of $39 a year for your homepage. More web pages can be added for $25 per web page. After a year, if you do not renew the service, Inktomi might drop your homepage. Inktomi’s partners sell this program. Inktomi allows maximum 20 web pages from each website to be submitted per day. Inktomi also provides Bulk Program wherein you can add thousands of web pages at a time. A small fee is charged each time someone clicks on your web page listing.

The Add URL page for Fast Search: With this it might take up to six weeks until your web pages show up. Fast Search’s paid submission service cannot be accessed directly by you. It can be used through its partner Lycos. The fee for this service is $30 for one year. Additional pages can be submitted at $12 per page. Fast Search also provides Bulk Program wherein you can add thousands of web pages at a time. A small fee is charged every time someone clicks on your web page listing.

This is owned by Ask Jeeves, one of the popular search engines. Teoma, however, doesn’t have a free Add URL feature. Teoma, being a web crawler can always include your homepage for free if there are other web pages pointing to your homepage. Like other engines, it has a paid submission program for a fee of $30 a year. Additional pages can be submitted at $18 per page.

This is another very popular search engine. AltaVista does have submission via the Add URL feature at http://addurl.altavista.com/sites/addurl/newurl. As discussed with other search engines, free submission might take more than a month until your web pages show up. An automatic submission through submission software may not work with this URL, as it requires insertion of a specific code that is displayed on entering the submission page.

Following services are offered by Alta Vista. Express Inclusion: According to Alta Vista, this is the fastest method of including your URLs as Express Inclusion lets you add up to 500 URLs to AltaVista’s search results within 2 business days. It does Daily refreshes (weekday only)and keeps your listings fresh. Trusted Feed:This service is reserved for partners who submit more than 500 pages to the AltaVista database. Trusted Feed enables submission of custom titles, keywords and abstracts and provides the clients with highly qualified traffic through weekly updates.

Listing Enhancements: This service visually distinguish your pages in the AltaVista search results with Listing Enhancements. It also controls the look and feel of your results by adding logos, icons, custom taglines, and text links to your URLs.

Reseller Program: AltaVista’s Reseller Program provides you with the opportunity to deliver highly qualified traffic to your clients’ sites by using any of the following programs: Trusted Feed, Express Inclusion, and Listing Enhancements.

Basic Submit: This is the basic submit service which enables the clients to add or remove up to 5 URLs at a time from the AltaVista global database. URLs will generally be evaluated within four to six weeks of submission. Basic Submit is a free service. As discussed with other search engines, free submission might take more than a month until your web pages show up. An automatic submission through submission software may not work with this URL, as it requires insertion of a specific code that is displayed on entering the submission page.

AltaVista’s paid submission program has a fee of $39 per page for six months ($78 for a year). For additional 2 to 10 web pages the fee is $58 per page per year, whereas for an additional 11 to 500 web pages the fee is $38. AltaVista also provides Bulk Program wherein you can add thousands of web pages at a time. A small fee is charged each time someone clicks on your web page. Fortunately, there are ways to verify and whether your site has been listed or not. This is described in the section on “verify and monitor listing”. Directories are very popular and are widely used by people as a source of information. Web crawler search engines may also have better chances of finding your website if it is listed with any of these directories. Most of the directories charge a fee for listing your website. Some sites such as Yahoo offer free submission as well. An important aspect of submitting your website to a directory is to have a 25 word or less description of the website. This allows the web crawler search engines to efficiently find and include your website. Yahoo, LookSmart and Open Directory Project are some of the most popular directory services on the World Wide Web.

Yahoo provides two submission options: Free submission known as “Standard” and paid submission known as “Yahoo Express”. The free submission cannot be used for commercial websites. Also, with free submission there is no guarantee that your website will be approved for submission.

LookSmart provides listings used by the very popular MSN Search service and AltaVista. Hence, like Yahoo, it is essential that you submit your website to LookSmart. LookSmart also provides two options for submission: Free submission for non-commercial websites and Paid submission for commercial as well as non-commercial websites.

LookSmart paid submission charges you a nominal fee every time a click is registered against your website. Free submission cannot be done directly from LookSmart. It has to be done through a site owned by LookSmart known as Zeal.com. Once your website is approved for submission, you can submit your website by using the “Manage” link at the top of each of the categories.

Having your website listed with Open Directory is essential. It provides results to Google, AOL, Lycos and Netscape Search. Open Directory doesn’t have a paid submission service. Commercial as well as non-commercial websites can be submitted to Open Directory absolutely free of cost. This, however, has its drawbacks. There is no guarantee if and when your website will be approved for submission. Having mentioned that, Open Directory does generate high traffic for your website, once approved. Thus, submission to this directory is worth the uncertainty involved.

Submission can be done by using the “Add URL” link at the top of each of the categories. Generally, if your website is accepted, it would appear within the directory in about three weeks’ time. If rejected, there is no limit to how many times you can resubmit your website. These are three most important Directories on the World Wide Web. Getting your site listed on each of these is a must as it can lead to a significantly large audience for your website.

The maximum length of the Title of the website should be 60 characters for Yahoo, 65 characters for LookSmart and 100 characters for Open Directory.

Description of your website is essential for submission to any Directory. The maximum length of this description for Yahoo is 25 words or 200 characters, 170 characters for LookSmart and 25 to 30 words for Open Directory.

Yahoo requires that you submit the Title, Description, Your name and Email for website submission, whereas LookSmart and Open Directory only require the Title and Description of the website. Yahoo allows a maximum submission for one category per website; LookSmart and Open Directory allow a maximum submission for one category per URL.

Thanks to Ken Mathie is a marketing consultant based in Darwin, Australia. His specialities include Online & Offline Business Development and Management, Training, Marketing and Software Development.