Not everyone knows why there seems to be such a buzz around all the "social networking" that is happening on all the Web 2.0 sites these days.  If you listen to all the "gurus" they are all saying go post, go post, get on the social sites, but none of them seem to be realy saying WHY.

There are basically three main reasons why it is important to be on these networking sites and build your list of networked people.

1) You can increase your links to your site by posting to these places and getting people to post about your site, there is no doubt about this.  But you do have to be careful that you do not just post about your site.  If you do not post about other sites that are in fact good things to post, then you will not get any "trust ranking" amoung those that read your posts.

2) You can get great information on how to do things, what works, and what is happening in your business by interacting with others in the same business.  This is known as doing your business intelligence work to keep in the know.  The worst thing that you can do is get so far behind in the knowledge curve that you are totally left out when something new comes along, and that is almost daily on the web.

3) One of the least talked about reasons for business networking is that you are in essence building a opt-in mailing list.  If you have people that have subscribed to your contact list, network list, or groups that you run, then you have an opt-in list for doing low-key marketing to.

A really nice new site that has come out in the last few weeks is called ApSense.  It has an easy to use interface, allows for the creation of unlimited groups, provides some advertising options, and allows you to create a network of people.  I would strongly recommend joining this or other similar sites and start building your network so when you want to promote something via a recommendation, you have a network of people that trust your judgement ready.

I have been watching an SEO test being done by one of the top marketers, Jonathan Leger, where he created a site called coolestguyontheplanet.org. One this site he has been testing "white hat" SEO techniques and posting his results in getting ranked in Google and the other engines.

In his postings, he has oulined a number of items that are all white hat topics that everyone trying to get SEO ranking should be aware of.  It is written for the beginner to SEO marketing, but has a lot of good information that we all can use. 

I strongly recommend that you check it out and at least read through the information he has regarding the various resources and basic technques he uses. 

It’s interesting that he also recommends one of the products that I utilize for SEO marketing which is SEO Elite. This tool is used to do an incredible amount of research into competition sites, doing link request tracking, article marketing, and a wide array of other routine SEO marketing tasks.  It has a companion Keyword Elite that is extremely useful in doing keyword research. 

These two products together make a suite of tools that can totally change how you do your marketing efforts.

Ever think about where all the content comes from for the bazillion web sites out there?

Well people write it, mostly in the form of articles. The articles get posted to other sites as content and they have a link to your site as part of the required material to use the article. This gives you one-way links back to your site from other locations and puts you in the position of being an expert on the topic.

I have written a number of articles from scratch and it can be a lot of work. Doing the research on your topic, creating the outline for the article, and then writing the thing. It takes time and I was getting a bit discouraged on how much time it would take to create enough articles to make a difference.

Then I found a tool that really helped me streamline the article creation process, its called the Instant Article Wizard (IAW) and I am so happy I found it. The first article I wrote by hand took me about 4 hours to find and assemble everything. The first one I wrote with IAW took me all of 11 minutes flat, from start to finish. To me that was a major savings of my time, which I do value heavily.

It is not the end-all, be-all to all writing needs, but it can do all basic research for you and can do a lot for major writing projects. If you want to use articles as a medium for marketing your product and web site, using a tool like IAW can save you a ton of time and money.

Let me know if you use it or other tools, so we can compare the products and how well they work for doing this kind of marketing.

Getting Wordpress setup properly for the bots to go through and rank your site is a very important item. In setting this site up, I had wanted to be able to use the sidebars for doing a number of things including having an Adsense area (would be nice to get some money back from the site.)

But in trying to use one of the themes from the free list of themes on the Wordpress site, I found that even though it said it supported sidebars, I couldn’t get any sidebar items to work. So I found that there is a theme from Semiologic that is free and is incredibly complete. The free version is limited on some of the features, but for most people it will work for getting started and then some. The Pro version has a number of extensions and I will probably upgrade to it at some point, but starting out with functional free is good.

The other item that is needed to use the sidebars with the Semiologic theme is a sidebar manager. There is a free plugin available for this, as the Semiologic theme did not install one as part of the free theme. I used the Sidebar Widgets plug-in from Automattic, inc. and as soon as the plug-in was activated, the sidebar widgets where available under the Presentation tab and I cold configure my sidebars.

If you know of some other great tips on configuring Wordpress for SEO ranking, please reply to the post so everyone gets the benefit of your research.

I had an interesting concept come to my attention yesterday.  It entailed using the Web 2.0 sites, like Digg, ClipMarks, Twitter, etc. and Stubmleupon to create a cross reference between your own website or blog and these other sites.

The way the concept worked was to create a reference on the main Web 2.0 site, like ClipMarks.com, and then use StumbleUpon to rate the ClipMarks site that references your site.  This makes it so there is a double off-site reference to your site without there being any direct link from the StumbleUpon, which should give a higher rating to the link on StumbleUpon.

If anyone else tries this, let me know how it works for you.

Till next time…..

Having been in the computer industry for many years and working with the web for almost 10 years, I figured it was time to really get into doing Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

So to help all the others out there that are in the same boat as I am, I decided to document the trials and tribulations of getting sites to actually be listed with search engines.

All the information that I have read gives lots of advice on what to do, how to do it, and why to do it. The problem is that they can’t seem to agree on what really works and how to systematically approach the issue of actually getting ranked. So in this blog I plan to tell other people of what I have tried, what it has accomplished and how it was done. Hopefully, others will also post what they have done and what the results were of those actions also.

So with that said, let the SEO games begin!!!