Social bookmarking might sound like a strange ritual that little Midwestern housewives do to one another’s copies of Tony Morrison’s Beloved or a strange Mormon ritual that has something to do with a Pearl of Great Price, but in this instance, we’re talking about SEO. Social bookmarking is a common enough activity for backlink building: you go to a site like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon, or GoogleBuzz, and you create a backlink that points at your stuff.

Sounds quick, simple, and effective. Except that the effective part isn’t really all that effective. Google — and we have to talk about Google because they have an 80% market share of searches — Google, in it’s endless quest to thwart internet markers, has developed a few easy ways of eliminating 90% of internet marketers’ social bookmarking efforts.

The first method is to ignore any social bookmarking account that only points at material from one or two authors. Their algorithm automatically does a WhoIs query on every website they get linked to, so they’ll know that a given bookmarking account only points to your site unless you manage to come up with different identities for each of your sites. That alone eliminates almost every solo webmaster or outsourced backlinker in one go.

But beyond that, they also examine the timestamps on the various backlinks that point to your site — and if they see that your incoming links are coming in ‘bursts’ (like, nothing for 18 hours and then 170 links from 170 different sites over the course of 4 hours), they ignore that, too. That prevents all of the backlinkers who think they’re going to be clever and use software to build dozens of links at a time from getting anywhere.

So what is ‘Real’ social bookmarking? Simple: it means that you use social bookmarking the same way that you use blog posting — you do it often, you do it about different subjects, and you act like a real human being. The truth is that Google loves social bookmarks — as long as they look and feel like they’re from real people who are really interested in what they’re doing. If you can do that, you can make Social Bookmarking really work for your site.

Everyone today takes the existence of SEO companies for granted, but few people remember just how easy SEO was back in the early days. Before we had Google, the monster powerhouse that was determined to produce the best possible results for the searcher, there was a plethora of search engines that were rather content to just show people whatever page had the most backlinks and happened to have the search phrase on it.

SEO in the ’90s was a very fast and unclean affair, with major companies swapping links and starting linkrings and sometimes outright buying placement (before the existence of the now-ubiquitous “Sponsored Links” blocks!). In many cases, if you were an Internet startup competing with another Internet startup for a keyword, it literally came down to which one of you could find more directories to submit a backlink to. SEO companies were named things like “Yahoo”, and they did things like sell you places on their highly-ranked directory — which virtually ensured you a first page placement, even on search engines that didn’t belong to Yahoo.

Then, along came Google. A simple, clean search engine that focused on exactly two things: speed and accuracy. Google came up with results that were completely different from it’s competitors, and amazingly, most people found that the results Google gave were less commercial and more of what they wanted to see! Within three months of the company’s formation, when it was still operating out of a garage in southern California, PC Magazine recognizes the search engine’s “uncanny knack for returning extremely relevant results.”

Suddenly, the game was afoot. SEO companies scrambled, because Google’s algorithm was proprietary, so no one knew exactly how it worked, and it was consumer driven, meaning that Google deliberately spurned the usual SEO techniques of the day and relied on information outside of the ken of the then-modern SEO company.

Since then, as Google’s market share grew from “lots” to “overwhelming”, they have continuously updated their algorithm to account for every clever new move the SEO community has taken to ‘cheat’ their way onto the front pages of the popular search engine. In a way, it’s been good for the SEO experts, because without Google, we’d all still probably be searching for new directories to add to our list.

Sometimes, for whatever reason, one of your websites that’s been pulling in regular money for some time simply stops. On the extreme end, it got sandboxed, but often it’s something less than that. Perhaps a competitor managed to outrank you for a crucial keyword, or maybe an ad that’s been bringing in a lot of traffic is against the ad hoster’s latest TOS. Whatever the reason, when a website unexpectedly stalls, there’s one easy way to get it profitable again quickly: an Adwords campaign headed by a talented PPC management team.

Many webmasters are scared sockless of pay per click advertising, either because they had a bad experience with it or they’ve had some guru tell them horror stories. What no one will admit is that, with correct PPC management, Adwords (or any of the equivalents on the lesser search engines) can be the only way to pull profit out of a profitless site.

You still need conversions, of course — if your website stalled out because you changed something that dropped your conversions from three percent to half a percent, change it back — but if you’re converting well and what you need is fast, targeted traffic, PPC is your cash cow. Many people will tell you to avoid it because you don’t want to pay “that much” for traffic, but the truth is that a talented PPC management team can keep the costs down (even given their own fees) while keeping the traffic up.

You can improve the situation even more by improving conversions with a Web Presenter or a carefully organized Targeted Email Marketing campaign — after all, traffic from PPC is just like traffic from any other targeted source.

Just remember that PPC is like health care: you do, eventually, want your website to be walking without the Adwords crutch. For that, you’ll need to pursue an aggressive strategy of organic SEO and make sure that your natural traffic starts to flow again. Until that point, however, you’re far better off with a solid PPC management crew driving profits than you are letting your website languish on the bed, slowly dying.

If only there was a traffic fairy. No, not the kind that would give you a quarter if you put a car under your pillow, but the kind that could wave it’s wand and suddenly give your website a thousand visitors per hour until the clock struck midnight, and then leave you with some ruby slippers that could repeat the process when you clicked them together three times.

Sadly, there is no traffic fairy, so those of us in the real world are left to find a good SEO company to guide the good people of Internet-ville to our little corner of that vast metropolis, and hope they buy something before they click off into the sunset.

The SEO services offered by such a company are literally invaluable. Many novice webmasters are intimidated by the thought of spending a few hundred dollars on some SEO work for their website, but in the end, SEO is like a Lego set. Once you have some, you can build quite a bit — and as you buy more, the things you can build only get bigger and better. Only unlike Legos, SEO gives you money back just for having it done right. How cool is that?

To put it another way, SEO work is kind of like sinking a few hundred dollars into a high-yield savings account. You have to put up a lot of money in order to make the minimum deposit, but as soon as it’s in, you start making cash, and as long as you keep reinvesting the profits, the amount of cash you make each day only gets bigger. It’s like Benjamin Franklin said, “The most powerful force on Earth is compound interest.”

Of course, for your interest to compound at the best possible rate, your SEO needs to be done right — and that takes expertise and experience. Those are a couple of things that you probably don’t have at this point in your career, and that’s exactly why you need an SEO company. Compound interest may seem like magic, but in the end, Virginia, there is no traffic fairy.

For years, participating in online bulletin boards relevant to your business’ subject has been a habit that internet marketing gurus have encouraged almost every webmaster to engage in. Quite some time ago, the habit of regular forum posting was very powerful SEO. Forums have a tendency to gather quite of bit of authority on their given subject, and with that authority they can get some decent PageRank as well. A backlink from a relevant, authority site with a high PageRank is the best backlink you can get, so it was considered worth quite a bit of effort to obtain.

But is forum posting still worth the effort?

After all, forums have changed a lot in the past several years. Administrators generally ‘caught on’ to many of the most common forum marketing ploys (for example, preventing people from linking to off-forum site in their signatures). Not only that, but many forums have switched to no-follow links and other SEO-killing tactics. It’s also a lot harder to become a recognized and celebrated member of a large forum these days; the signal-to-noise ratio has become so bad that you have to be excellent in all ways just to be noticed as someone who isn’t ‘noise’.

But for all of that, the answer is “yes”. Forum posting is still worth the effort; you just have to apply your effort in a slightly different way. For example, check to see if a forum’s links are dofollow before you register. Look for forums that are smaller and more specifically focused. Rather than a Warrior Forum that has two million users, look for a Mobile Website Design Forum that only has a thousand. That’ll keep the signal-to-noise ratio more respectable.

Watch out for the pitfalls going in, and you’ll find that not only is it easier to establish a presence and plant a few quality backlinks, but it’s also easier to enjoy the process of doing so. With the right forum, you’ll probably even learn a few things along the way — and which of us couldn’t benefit from a bit of extra market research?

It’s actually fairly likely that you’ve never heard of a web presenter, but if you have, it’s actually fairly likely that you’ve only heard glowing things said about them by people who want to sell them to you. Web presenters are still fairly new in the world of online marketing; they don’t have the credibility that tools like custom blog creation or targeted Email marketing have. Like Email marketing, Web Presenters aren’t a part of your SEO strategy — they’re the second stage, a tool used to increase conversions.

The basic law of making money online is mathematical: the number of visitors you get times your conversion rate times the sale price of the product minus your costs equals your profits. Increase the visitors (with SEO), and you make more money — but increase the conversion rate (with a Web Presenter), and you make more money as well. At some point, improving your conversion rate becomes more profitable than pushing more traffic onto a low-conversion page, and that’s when tools like Web Presenters come in handy.

A Web Presenter, for the record, is a full-body or head-and-shoulders image of a person who pops up on your screen and talks to you about the content of the page. The benefits of a Web Presenter are intuitively obvious: they talk to you, they have posture and gesticulations and all of those secondary elements of communication that text lacks, and they’re hard to stop watching once they get started, so they increase stickiness as well.

But there are pitfalls to be found when hiring a Web Presenter. You should be careful to choose a Web Presenter whose image matches that of your company. Hiring a conservative-looking older gentleman for an agile young SEO company might not be the right fit, for example. You should also make sure that your Web Presenter is comfortable with your content. Having a Web Presenter that pronounces ‘SEO’ as a one-syllable word that rhymes with “Rio” will immediately throw suspicion on that company’s site, for example. Make sure that the image and the content come across clearly, however, and you should find that a Web Presenter has very positive effects on your bottom line.

When you’re a novice webmaster, sitting in your living room in your PJs and looking over the (probably nonexistent) traffic flow to your website, it’s hard to consider dropping a few hundred dollars on SEO services provided by an established SEO company. After all, you’ve done some research — you know how easy it is to write a backlink. You’ve seen the forums where they tell you a dozen easy ways to write a backlink to your site. You’re even on a mailing list where a charming lady from Western Washington State tells you a bunch of high-Page-Rank sites you can get backlinks from all by yourself and very easily.

Why do you need to spend that kind of money? After all, if you can understand how to get a backlink written, you can surely find some experienced Indian or Filipino gentleman to do it for you for a couple of bucks an hour. That’s real value, isn’t it?

Not really.

You see, there are several things that an SEO company will do for you that a freelancer cannot. It’s true that if what you want is backlinks written, a freelancer can do it cheaply — but if what you want is an organized backlinking campaign planned and executed, you’ll be hard pressed to find someone on ELance or Craiglist who can do that for any less than a real SEO company would charge.

Backlinking campaigns require several elements that simple backlink writing doesn’t. You need to have a long list of fully-researched keywords. You need some short, high-traffic, high-competition keywords that you’re willing to commit large amounts of effort to dominating, knowing that they’ll be the core of your traffic. You need dozens and dozens and dozens of low-traffic, low-competition, long-tail keywords that you can rank for easily and take advantage of the numbers game on, knowing that no one is terribly meaningful but the synergy they generate will be.

You need tracking — you need to know which backlinks are driving traffic that actually buys, so you can make more of those. You need to know which backlinks are driving tire-kicker traffic so that you can make less of those. Without that kind of value, your SEO money is just being tossed down a hole — and what kind of freelancer is going to be able to do all of that for you?

Whether it comes in the form of article marketing, custom blog creation, or social bookmarking, there’s a lot to be said about the power of organic SEO to drive traffic. But some webmasters don’t seem to get the fact that traffic doesn’t equal profitability. Ask anyone who’s gotten fifteen million hits on YouTube for a video that didn’t link anywhere or ask anyone for anything — you can get all of the hits you want, but without a solid endgame, all of your SEO efforts don’t mean a thing.

There are a lot of powerful SEO endgame strategies out there, but only one of them is so powerful that it’s been adopted almost universally by everyone from internet marketers to small businesses to major corporations: the power of targeted Email marketing.

Targeted Email marketing basically amounts to three things: you get someone to give you their Email address (and agree to let you send them Emails), you send them an Email with a strong call-to-action, and they click the link and (hopefully) buy stuff. It sounds so simple, but as with any aspect of trying to get someone to give you money, there are a lot of pitfalls.

The first pitfall is that word ‘targeted’. That means that you have to collect the emails of people who will be interested in your final offer. Anything else and you’ll get a 90% unsubscribe rate the first time you send out an email with an offer in it. Generally, you can successfully target by offering a free information packet about the same subject as your product in exchange for their Email address.

The second pitfall is that word ‘marketing’. People don’t like to be sold on stuff, and unless you’re Ron Popeil, you shouldn’t try to sell people something when you first ‘meet’ them. Arrange an autoresponder to send them information-filled emails for a few to several weeks, without asking anything of them. Only once they’re sure that what you’re sending them is worth reading should you pop the sales link.

Done right, targeted Email marketing not only builds sales, but it builds a solid list of satisfied customers that will look forward to your new offers — and who doesn’t want a crowd of people just waiting for another chance to give them money?

Forum posting. Custom blog creation. Article writing and distribution. Press release services. Let’s face it — there are a LOT of SEO services out there, so many that most webmasters couldn’t afford them all even if they wanted to. SEO companies will tell you — quite rightly — that it’s important to spread out your backlinks so that they come from a wide variety of sources, but it’s silly to try to get every single possible backlink variant going to your homepage.

In fact, there are a few simple ways to trim down the list to a dozen or so techniques that will fit your website best. It boils down to two questions: are you making money already, and what is your growth strategy?

Are You Making Money Already?
If you’re already seeing money coming in, then you have something of an idea about the conversion rate of your traffic. This is important, because different traffic sources have different conversion rates, and you need to know how to maximize the traffic that converts best for your site. Unfortunately, this is a process that requires testing and is unique to each site, so you’ll have to do the work on your own to figure out which link types to cut out — or have a talented SEO company do it for you.

What is your Growth Strategy?
Backlinks generally come in one of two broad types: links that drive traffic, and links that drive rankings. Some, like a well-written article submitted to a popular article directory, can do both. By and large, however, you have a choice between immediate traffic at the expense of long-term ranking power, or surviving on minimal traffic for quite some time until the rankings kick in and the organic traffic starts to flood. The design of your business should dictate which you shoot for, and you should communicate your choice with your SEO service.

In either case, if you’re not already seeing good business, it’s probably a good idea to pair your SEO efforts with a talented PPC management outfit, just to get the traffic flowing up front. The PPC costs might cut into your profits, but without them, you wouldn’t have any profits to cut into, so it’s a win/win.

Most of the world has heard it by now, but just in case you haven’t, Google has changed the rules once again. The infamous Google algorithm that determines page rank and position for searches has been changed, dramatically. This time the search giant knocked out link farms completely, invalidating any link that comes from a site with either no content or duplicate content, including, it appears, RSS summaries on news sites. Those links can still give you traffic, but they won’t count towards your positioning when potential customers are searching for your products or services.

On the flip side, Google has obviously decided that on-site content development is what they want to see for sites to be awarded those top spots on Page One. Blog posting, once considered a casual pastime, has now become an essential element of any internet marketing campaign. If you plan on getting any kind of significant organic traffic from search you will need to start writing or hire someone to do it for you. In the three months since the Google Panda announcement websites have been literally disappearing from the top twenty pages of Google’s search results.

For the time being, other search giants like Yahoo and Bing are playing by the old rules and you can see the disparity in the rankings. Seeing a top ten in two columns and a Page 30 in another might seem hopeful to some, but not when the Page 30 is the search engine that controls a 90% global market share. When it comes to search engine marketing, what Google does is what the industry standard is. The smaller players may win back some ground over this, but not enough to be significant.

Organic SEO companies have always used link building as one of their staple elements in any campaign, but they don’t all do it the same way. Here at Webwise Media, we’ve always focused on content rich links, site development, and article writing and distribution to high-PR directories. The exact details of the Google algorithm remain secret, but we know from tracking our analytics that none of our sites have lost any ground. That tells us and our clients that we’re doing something right. What would we recommend for you? Let’s start with some blog posting.