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Nancy McCord

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Social Bookmarking | Social Media vs. PPC | 5 Website Killers

Social Bookmarking - Is It Worth the Effort?

Social bookmarking is a new smart way to create inbound links to your content, but is it worth the time and effort? So far based on client studies, it appears to be a very workable approach to building inbound links that can help organic search placement. However, it is labor intensive.

Here are a few client results from the Google Webmaster control panel after just 30 days of social bookmarking three pages a week for two of our clients.

Client A
inbound links before: 5,099
inbound links after: 5,107

Client B
inbound links before: 9,964
inbound links after: 10,162

Although this is not a super fast way to grow links, clearly social bookmarking is growing links nicely over a short period of time. The link growth however depends on the topic and quality of content. Client B's site appears to be growing faster as the quality of content is more newsworthy and is of better quality when compared to Client A's.

I have found that the social bookmarking sites have worked very hard to defeat automated entries and so our links are all generated manually, which is labor intensive. However, social bookmarking can be done by any site owner with a bit of extra time. I find the benefits in the short term are measurable and easier and more efficient than contacting website owners asking for a one way inbound link or even a reciprocal link, and less expensive than article marketing.

If you are interested in our social bookmarking program, I invite you to visit our social bookmarking services page for pricing and more information.

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Social Media vs. Pay Per Click

Let's say you own a fairly new business, where should you spend your time and money to generate sales – social networking or pay per click?

I feel that social networking is an excellent way to connect with prospects and engage clients. I love Twitter, Facebook, and blogging, but will these avenues generate immediate sales for a new business? I have to say from my personal experience using all these tools, that although they are important, for immediate sale generation these tools can simply not compete with the power of sales generation results that Google AdWords provides.

Does this mean you shouldn't be involved in social media? No, not at all, but I feel that for new startups or a business that wants a return of immediate sales from their monetary investment, that pay per click using Google AdWords specifically, is a better investment. I feel that social media involvement is key for positioning, customer engagement, and overall web authority, but this is most important for an established businesses.

Startups typically have a short fuse – you have to generate some business quickly in order to stay in business. The more business you generate the more you can invest in your web presence. Here's where social media involvement for the typical startup may simply be too far sighted. Although these are important things in which to invest your time, they may not return quick organic search placement and sales for six months to a year or longer. In fact, these social avenues may not generate sales at all, they may instead help with web authority, competitor differentiation, and possibly organic placement.

So, if your need as a new business owner is to generate sales and you have a limited budget, I recommend investing in pay per click using Google AdWords to get the jump start that you need. Then, later as you are more established and have more cash to invest in growing your web presence consider blogging, Facebook and Twitter.

Find out about our Google AdWords services and pricing to see if we would be a good match for your needs.

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Five Website Killers

There are many things that you can do to benefit your website, but have you thought about the things that you may do that can kill your website? Here are my five top website killers – things you clearly should stay clear of doing to get good organic search engine placement and impress viewers.

1. Build your website all in Flash. Flash may look cool, but search engines cannot catalog the information contained in .swf files or for that matter .flv files. Even in 2010 Google has stated that they cannot really spider Flash sites with proficiency.
   
   
2. Steal your content from another website. You need unique content, don't scrape someone else's site. Not only may Google not rank you for the duplicate content but you may get sued for copyright infringement. You can't use the content even if you give credit – that's still infringing.
   
   
3. Forget to test your website in Firefox. If you don't check, you won't know and you really should know what your website looks like in Firefox. Firefox is an important browser and the choice for nearly 25% of the browsing market. If you don't look good in IE AND Firefox, you may alienate a large part of your site visitors.
   
   
4. Make your web page layout too big. Although there are actually still some people surfing the web with 800 by 600 pixel resolution, the bulk of people are at 1024 pixels wide. For my own site, still nearly 50% of my viewers are at a resolution of 1024 pixels wide. Make sure you have website statistics that track this and then make sure to design your site to accommodate the majority of your viewers making sure you don't have scroll bars at the bottom of your web pages.
   
   
5. Forget to use webmaster tools. Google, Yahoo and Bing have webmaster tools. Make sure you are using them so you will know how the various search engines see your website. If you have problems, these tools can be invaluable; helping you to diagnose problems and discover hacked pages.

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