Web 2.0 Blog

For those of you involved with search engine optimization as I am, you may have noticed that Yahoo has updated it’s Site Explorer program, which has become used as a more popular tool for examining a website’s backlinks than Google’s service. It shows how many other websites are linking to you and there are also plugins which tell you if the links are nofollow or not. These plugins currently don’t work on the new version, which looks slightly more modern and cleaner yet doesn’t seem as usable as before. Perhaps it’s one of those things you get used to.

I’d reccommend everyone uses it to track any worthwhile links coming into your website. Competition can also be examined in the same way. I probably prefered the old design - if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!

Having been a user of Sphinn for quite a long time now, a site which I find very useful and I respect greatly for the general quality of news items posted there by its users, I’m becoming concerned about the volume of companies who think they can get themselves links from this site and actually think their mindless spam is worthwhile.

Sphinn is an INTERNET MARKETING news and discussions site which encapsulates many corners of web activity. It is NOT a resource for promoting car insurance deals, free gym equipment or information about gluten-free pizzas. Those thinking about organising an SEO strategy in this way should know that these types of links are usually deleted within a couple of hours after only several users report it as spam. Furthermore, the link is only influential for as long as the page is relevant which in most circumstances is not very long - so even if you avoid removal from the site, neither your traffic nor your page rank will increase.

I’d also make the same recommendation for StumpleUpon, but I’m not as familiar with this site. Ultimately I think social bookmarking is a very important factor in the sharing of information over the Internet and a great outlet for bringing traffic to your site - especially in circumstances where the content is fantastic, but the author, having no idea about SEO, will never get any readers. But we must be careful that the system isn’t taken advantage of. Spamming social bookmarking sites isn’t blackhat, but it is unethical and worthless - people will never learn. Someone once said SEO is a mug’s game. Sadly, I guess social bookmarking is only advocating that theory.

You look at any blog post including this one, and you’ll see various tags attached around the pages tell you to ‘bookmark this’, ’sphinn that’ or ‘make this post a favourite’ and I’m sitting here thinking who actually uses all these widgets and why? Digg claims to have over 20 million users, which is quite incredible but who are these users?

The idea is that when you bookmark a site or a post, it becomes saved in your profile on the social bookmarking site and most likely shared to other users using the same service. So by making this bookmark, you are also alerting others to the existance of this website’s content. But is it meant for casual Internet users? I think not.

From the people I have asked, who are regular users of social networing sites and are therefore quite in tune with web 2.0 technologies, there is not much understanding of what a social boomark is. Ther’s not much out there that will tell usrs what it social bookmarking is. No adverts, no formal descriptions and certainly no advice as to why anyone should bother with it. And yet there’s millions of users using these services worldwide, how did it all take off?

I do know that social bookmarking is quickly becoming an ideal resource for search engine optimizers. Every time my posts are submitted to social boomarking sites I get more backwards links and Google sees these links as valuable votes, a process which will increase my rankings. If my readers also submit my posts to social bookmarking sites then that helps me even more. It’s therefore easy to see why webmasters use social bookmarking.

However a drawback of this is that these systems are becoming abused by spammers who want nothing more than to fill these sites up with their links. A lot of sites are now using nofollow tags to combat this.

So it’s a good information resource, a way of sharing and promoting websites and it’s definitely a notable method for optimizing RSS based websites, but I’m still not sure who the majority of their users are. It’s also very difficult to find any information about who the users are, I certainly couldn’t find any information on Google regarding the market of this phenomenon. There’s millions of users out there who are using these sites and my guess would be that the majority of users are keen Internet users who embrace web 2.0 technologies and have more than a passing interest in Internet services. This would include:

• Web developers
• Forum and blog posters
• Internet marketers
• Web writers
• Graphic designers
• Web enthusiasts

I simply cannot see how casual users would have the interest, time and patience to learn about how to use social bookmarking. But maybe I am wrong. If you can shed any light on this please give me a reply, or even add this post to a social bookmarking site. Sphinn it, Furl it, StumbleUpon it or and tell people that you’ve Reddit. Just don’t ask them understand it…

If you’re interested in optimizing your blog, you can make it much easier for search engines to crawl by adding a sitemap written on an XML page. The standard way of doing this involves creating a static XML page by taking a snapshot of your site at one time. However, the Google XML Sitemaps Generator for Wordpress will create an excellent quality sitemap for you which dynamically and automatically updates whenever new pages or posts are added to your blog.

Take a look at mine: http://www.adammoss.co.uk/sitemap.xml

It is downloadable as a simple plugin which just requires activation and submission from the Wordpress dashboard area. It results in a clean-looking, well presented and anchored list of your pages, with additional details of when it was last updated. Once installed you don’t need to do anything. It really is a must-have plugin for any serious blogger out there who wants respectable search rankings, so it comes highly recommended from me.

Download the plugin here: Download Plugin