SEM Blog

Socialable is a plugin for Wordpress which adds a small group of icons below your blog posts that allow visitors to easily add your pages to their favorite social bookmarking sites. You’ve probably seen or used the Sociable plugin on other blogs without even knowing it. It’s probably the easiest and most effective way to add social bookmarking support to your Wordpress blog.

Sociable was authored by Peter Harkins but is now handled by Joost de Valk and is on version 2.6.2 (last updated 3/31/08). Sociable currently supports almost 70 different bookmarking sites such as : Digg, Delicious, Facebook, Google and many others.

Deciding to add Sociable to your Wordpress blog is a win-win-win situation. Yes, it really is so good that it requires three “wins”.

This plugin is beneficial on many levels. It gives your site a Web 2.0 feel, it provides auto-magical offsite search engine optimization since most social bookmarks are public, it can increase unique visitors, page loads and the number of back links in an exponential fashion.

Installing Sociable goes just like installing almost any other Wordpress plugin, the process is fairly straightforward.

1. Download the latest stable version of Sociable (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sociable/)

2. Unzip the plugin to some place easy to find such as the Desktop or My Documents

3. Use a FTP program (such as Filezilla) to upload the plugin folder to your /public_html/wp-content/plugins/

4. Browse to the WP Dashboard (yoursite.com/wp-admin/)

5. Click on the Plugins tab

6. Find and enable the Sociable plugin

7. That’s it!

Browse on over to the standard Wordpress Options menu and you’ll see a sub-entry called Sociable which contains all of its configuration options.

You might find yourself tempted to simply enable ALL of the social bookmarking site addons - I’d highly suggest against this. Too many icons will prevent people from picking our their personal favorites. Given this I’d suggest picking about 10 to 20 selections. It’s still enough to provide variety but not so many that you can’t locate anything.

Enjoy!

Without content, your site is nothing. It’s a paid domain and hosting, like the skeleton in your high school science class, too fake to have ever really live and die. No matter how many inbound links you have from whatever page ranked site they are on, without content, you’ve got junk. Just because traffic comes to your site doesn’t mean it stays there. Without content, your bounce rate will be through the roof.

So where are you supposed to get your content from? It may seem simple enough to just visit a competitors website and rework their content. Some of it probably didn’t even originate from them in the first place. But if they’re popular enough for you to be doing that, then you’ll need to list them as a source. If not, and they happen to stumble onto your site through copyscape (a plagiarism tool), you’re not going to be doing too well.

But linking to your competitors isn’t the best idea when you’re trying to, you know, compete. So don’t utilize that as a source unless you really have to or the piece/keywords are getting a lot of attention right then and there. Until you start getting press releases directly sent to you from your niche, you should keep an eye out on sites like PR Newswire and BusinessWire for relevant press releases. Sourcing these isn’t an issue, and the traffic you could pass over might actually get you noticed too. Unfortunately, unless you’ve got all the time in the world, you’re not going to break every story either.

Having new content continuously added to your site makes a huge difference traffic wise, regardless of whether it’s a blog or not. Not everyone has the time to write all the articles either, so many sites start up a blog and just let it die off. You can easily fill this spot with a hired writer. There are plenty of sites out there, such as DigitalPoint and SitePoint that have many content writers available at various prices depending on the work. You’ll want to make sure that the writer has a decent reputation and definitely check out copyscape to confirm that the content isn’t just plagiarized work. Also, the cheaper it is, the more you need to worry!

Content is what the Google Spider eats. The more food you’ve got for it, the more it visits. Don’t keyword stuff and don’t hire the $.01 per word writers and as long as you keep posting, you’ll be golden.

Several months ago one of the moderators on http://www.webmasterlighthouse.com/forums/index.php

Wrote me to tell me he had listed my directory on his Squidoo lens under Top 10 Web Directories http://www.squidoo.com/seonutshell

I went to check out what was called a lens and I thought it was a great form of marketing. At the time of writing this post 315 users have already ranked the lens. This means 315 users personally visited the lens and it is very likely all were someone tied to the field of SEO. That equals targeted marketing.

With a little time and effort a user can create a content rich lens for free. More about Squidoo can be found on their about us page http://www.squidoo.com/squidoo