You are starting to see these icons popping up on blogs and websites that take you to place like del.icio.us (now delicious.com) a Yahoo! social bookmarking website and others like twitter.com, myspace.com, facebook.com and more. What are they? Not a simple question to answer but let me talk about delicious.com. This is essentially the heart of social bookmarking. You probably have a sense of creating a bookmark or favorite to the websites you like which makes it easy to go back to them without having to remember the website address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator). But you probably have figured out that when you book mark a website, the bookmark is only on your computer. If you go to a friends house and want to show them the website or want to find it at work, then you still have to remember the website address or URL.
With the problem of finding these websites from other computers led someone to think it would be a good idea if their bookmarks were on the Internet. With that thought social bookmarking was born. This was not only a way to find your favorites away from home but also a way to share them with your friends or social circle. Yahoo! has made social book marking a science. On delicious.com you can save share and private bookmarks as well as search through the shared bookmarks of other people similar to searching on the search engines. The difference is that you only get the websites people have bookmarked as their favorites.
Having said that, these bookmarks are not without their flaws. The social bookmarks are also one way links to those “favorite” websites. People wanting to promote their website quickly caught on and realized that these one way links were important to building their link popularity on the Internet. So not all are true favorites, but it is a good way to promote your business through visitors to your website who like what you have to offer. Some of the first people bookmarking your website might be friends and family trying to help you get established.
Visit delicious.com and create an account for yourself see how valuable social bookmarking can be for you. See the article on www.seoexpertpro.com entitled Firefox and your SEO Tool-kit and download the delicious bookmark for Firefox. If you don’t have Firefox and you should, you can download it right from the article. It’s a great browser and very useful for your SEO efforts on you website.
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I taught the first search engine optimization seminar at the Salt Lake • Tooele Applied Technology College for a group of approximately 25 students and faculty. It was a good group and there were a number of questions from the people attending. I believe that the students started to understand how they can create a marriage between webpage design and search engine functionality.
I requested that the students give me some feed back on the seminar so that we can evaluate the usefulness of the seminar and if useful consider planning a second for some future date.
In our discussion I was able to explain that using a keyword phrase as anchor text on a consistent basis will help to get them relevancy for that keyword phrase. I explained that I typically use the phrase Improved Search Engine Placement as anchor text pointing to my www.seoexpertpro.com website.
Generally I believe that the core concepts of keyword research, keyword relevance and keyword density started to make sense to the group. I’m looking forward to getting some feed back from the group related to the over all usefulness of the seminar.
Salt Lake City, Utah — May 16, 2008 — Salt Lake • Tooele Applied Technology College (SLTATC) is hosting a Search Engine Optimization Seminar for their Media Design Group Students, May 16th. Karl Bennion owner of SEO Expert Pro (www.seoexpertpro.com) and member of the SLTATC Employer Advisory Committee for the Media Design Group has consulted with the School and is working to help improve the Media Design program. “Website designers don’t always have a good idea of what helps to promote a website with the search engines.” say Bennion. This seminar will address the major points that search engines use to position a website in the top pages of the natural or organic search engine results. Bennion will be pointing out the common mistakes that website designers make and giving them a framework for planning and optimizing websites from the inception of the project idea.
This seminar is the first in an effort to break the traditional mold of media design instruction, moving the school and the department forward in a progressive manner to provide students with skills that they can take into the workplace, providing immediate benefit to employers.
The Salt Lake • Tooele Applied Technology College (www.sltatc.edu) prides itself in providing top quality hands on education preparing students to meet the needs of Utah’s employers.