What I hope to do in the post is provide you with a practical self contained strategy which will have a large impact on your website traffic and visitors.

Each of the items discussed here – blogs, links, social bookmarking – are very important items in themselves for increasing your website traffic, but used together in a coherent way, it really is a case of one plus one plus one equals five (or maybe even seven!).

So, lets discuss them one by one, then we’ll show how to interlink them into a coherent online strategy.

BLOGGING

The benefits of blogging are well understood – but I’m going to repeat them nevertheless:-

-Firstly, from an online marketing perspective, what you want is a blog which is part of your domain and integrated in your site. That is, not externally hosted but actually a part of your site. (WordPress.org is what we use for our clients).

The reason for this is that the search engines will see this as part of your site (eg www.yourdomain.com/blog) – so the links into it (good blogs will always attract links naturally) will count towards your Google Page Rank. Also if you are regularly adding new content to your website search engines will see this as a positive factor.

– As already stated providing you offer value added content on your blog (educational information about your industry, your services, recent legislation; tools and useful articles people can use to help with their business etc – there’s no shortage really) you will attract links naturally which will bring visitors directly and add to your Google Page Rank.

(Incidentally, another neat idea is to create ‘product reviews’ where you can objectively discuss the pros and cons of specific products, allow customers to comment -moderated of course – with a link back to the specific product on the website)

-Also your blog, by definition, will be text and keyword rich so naturally disposed to getting good rankings (many people find their blog ranks higher than their main website) and the major blogging platforms – WordPress, Typepad etc – automatically generate metadata in a search engine optimised format.

– The final point is that RSS sign up to your blog and social bookmarking options are a standard part of the technology, and these two items again are great tools for automatically keeping you in touch with your clients and prospects and increasing your web visibility.

So, in short, blogs are good for you. They will increase you search engine rankings and increase your direct traffic. But read on….
(Incidentally if you dont have the time to set one up your self we can do it for you – Blogs and Social Bookmarking Service)

SOCIAL BOOKMARKING

What is social bookmarking? Its very similar to using bookmarks in your browser for sites you want to remember – the difference is its web based so everyone can see your ‘favourites’ and you can see everyone elses.

There are many different social bookmarking sites, all with their own features and quirks. Some of the more famous ones are del.icio.us and Digg, in fact you can see the top 30 here.

Digg allows you to rate articles and the more highly rated the article becomes the higher it rises in the rankings. Del.icio.us is different again in what it does – the important thing is its other people providing comments on your articles/blogs.

So how will this help with your web traffic and how can you go about exploting these sites?

There are two ways, the first relates to search engine optimisation (SEO). The fact that you have links from these sites to your blog will have an impact on its (and your websites) rankings. (NB Some of these sites – not many as it happens – use ‘nofollow’ in the link meaning that the google spider will not follow and therefore not pass on any ‘link juice’. So if this is you sole purpose in using them then you need to use ones which dont use ‘nofollow’. There’s a list here.)

The other reason of course is that they will drive traffic directly. These are very popular sites – the top 10 account for around 20 million visitors per month so having visibilty on them is a great way to generate visitors to your site/blog. Tagging your articles/posts with the correct keywords will enable searchers at these sites to find your link directly.

An example of how this works can be seen on this blog – you’ll see lower down you have the opportunity to ‘bookmark’ this article through several of the important bookmarking sites. If you did this my blog would get more visibility and an all important link.

BRINGING IT ALL TOGETHER

So, imagine having links from these sites to your own. It will help boost your search engine rankings and also bring additional direct traffic.

The process to implement this is quite straightforward:-

1. Build a blog (integrated with your website)
2. Write useful articles/content for your blog
3. Encourage people to ‘bookmark’ you – like I do in this blog
4. And…(very important!)….Get someone (eg us) to ‘bookmark’ your blog articles with all the major sites.

If you dont want to do it yourselves we can do any, or all, of this for you in a very SEO advantageous way:-

Here are the details of the service we offer – Blogs and Social Bookmarking Service

Either way you should get it done – it will make a big difference to your online marketing.