Use Social Bookmarking To Generate Traffic To Your Site

Social Bookmarking is a great way to drive traffic to your website.

What is Social Bookmarking I hear you cry.

Have you ever heard of sites like Delicious, Furl, Digg, Technorati? Well they are Social Bookmarking sites. If you look at the buttons on the bottom of this post you will see the links to some of the top Social Bookmarking sites on the web.

The way you get the traffic is to write a useful article and submit it to the top Social Bookmarking websites. You only have to submit the title of the article and a couple of lines of text as a little taster. To read the full article people will have to visit your site.

If someone on delicious for example visits your site, reads your article and likes it, they can bookmark it. As more people visit your site and bookmark your article the higher up the list it gets on delicious, generating more visitors and more bookmarks.

One of my articles made it to the popular page on delicious and the traffic went through the roof. If you look at the top of this article you can see the Alexa traffic ranking graph. You can clearly see the traffic spike for the couple of days when the article got onto the popular page.

The other benefit of this, is lots of other sites use data feeds from delicious and the other top Social Bookmarking sites. So not only will your site be popular on delicious, it will also be popular on many others too, generating even more visitors to your site.

If you are unfamiliar with Social Bookmarking, just click on one of the little logos at the bottom of this article, and follow the instructions. You will soon get the hang of it. Its well worth doing and its a great way to get free traffic to your site.

Use CSS For Search Engine Optimization

How to use CSS for higher search engine rankings?

Nowadays, when everybody is interested in getting the highest rankings possible for their sites with the search engines, it seems that the era of tables-based web sites is coming to an end. CSS programming appears to give webmasters the upper hand in this race for SEO.

What is CSS?

Cascading Style Sheet is a web tool that can be utterly necessary if you want to give a professional, quality look to your site. It is recommended by W3C, who manages the standards for the Internet, in order to add style (e.g. fonts, colors, spacing, padding, alignment, etc.) to web documents.

The Benefits of Using CSS for SEO

Some of the most common examples of CSS usage, are the modification of the colors of hovered links, text placement, establishing the spacing between words, and the modification of border size and style. The style sheets can be inserted directly into the HTML code of each page, but they can also be written on a different page, in an external file (.css).

This second solution is by far the best one, primarily because it holds undeniable advantages such as:

The HTML code on each page is much cleaner.
The CSS file is cached from the very beginning, and this speeds up the load time for the next pages.
The update process can be performed much faster: You can change the entire site just by modifying one file, no matter how many pages there are.

It is quite easy to see the close connection between search engine optimization and CSS. Style sheets will help you decrease the file size of your web pages, and will give you the opportunity to use more text and links than regular HTML, without being constantly afraid of spamming the search engines.

Here are some of the benefits of using CSS.

Reduced file size.
Faster page loading.
Quicker to make site changes.
Higher rankings with the search engines.

The bottom line would be that CSS is much easier to understand and to optimize than simple HTML. It simplifies both the work of the SEO professional, as well as that of the programmer. CSS programming means providing the site with the ability of faster updates in the future, of faster information transfer, and brings along the advantage of a simple code for search engines.

If we think only about the fact that keywords can be highlighted on a page without negatively affecting its look, the page file-size decreases, the code becomes cleaner and more readable, and the bandwidth costs are diminished by lowering the page load time, then it would be safe to say that there is virtually no limit in the series of advantages of using CSS in SEO campaigns.