Social Bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. Basically, is uses the concept of “bookmarking” but extends it to include internet technology. So instead of bookmarking sites on your local computer, you bookmark sites that you like through web services. This way, your bookmarking process remains the same; the only difference is where the bookmarks are stored. By being stored on the internet, it gives other people access to your bookmarks, and allows people to create “group” categories in which they can collaborate to create a list of resources about a particular topic.

Also, the sites where you bookmark allow you to “tag” your entries. Once you select a site to bookmark, you can also assign a few words, or “tags” to your bookmark, which allow the bookmarking service to easily categorize the link that you added. This way, if other people search their site for a similar topic, they can find a link to the sites you have bookmarked by using keyword, persons, or popularity. Tagging allows you to share the benefit of your research and favorite sites by allowing others to find them. However, if you wish, you can also choose to keep your bookmarks private.

The technology behind social bookmarking is not complex, which means the threshold to participate is low, both for Web sites offering such services and for users. As the landscape for online resources changes and new systems of classifying those resources emerge and mature, the design and function of databases themselves may ultimately be changed to accommodate new ways of managing information.

Social Bookmarking Effects on SEO
Social bookmarking is already having an effect on search engine optimization. Search engines can use the data available to them through social bookmarking by: counting the bookmarks as votes, using tags to help categorize data, using bookmarks to enhance link popularity counts.

Votes
By spidering social bookmarking sites and identifying how many sites have bookmarked or voted for your site, the engines can use this data as a modifier for their rankings. If you get a lot of bookmarks, this could then increase your SE rankings.

Link Popularity
If many sites have bookmarked your pages, this means that there will be links to your site from other pages (social bookmarking sites). The engines can then use this data for their link popularity counts. Additionally, if you rank well in the social bookmarking site, this will give your site additional exposure, thus allowing other people to find and link to your site.

Tagging
Based on how users tag your site, the engines can use this data for their semantic analysis. So, if your article is tagged with the word “computers” , the engines can add this data to the info they have about your site and improve your rankings in the “computers” keyword category.

Crawling
The engines crawl sites such as technorati and del.icio.us often. So, if people bookmark or vote for your site, it’ll help your page get crawled quicker.

1. Web 1.0 was about reading, Web 2.0 is about writing

2. Web 1.0 was about companies, Web 2.0 is about communities

3. Web 1.0 was about client-server, Web 2.0 is about peer to peer

4. Web 1.0 was about HTML, Web 2.0 is about XML

5. Web 1.0 was about home pages, Web 2.0 is about blogs

6. Web 1.0 was about portals, Web 2.0 is about RSS

7. Web 1.0 was about taxonomy, Web 2.0 is about tags

8. Web 1.0 was about wires, Web 2.0 is about wireless

9. Web 1.0 was about owning, Web 2.0 is about sharing

10. Web 1.0 was about IPOs, Web 2.0 is about trade sales

11. Web 1.0 was about Netscape, Web 2.0 is about Google

12. Web 1.0 was about web forms, Web 2.0 is about web applications

13. Web 1.0 was about screen scraping, Web 2.0 is about APIs

14. Web 1.0 was about dialup, Web 2.0 is about broadband

15. Web 1.0 was about hardware costs, Web 2.0 is about bandwidth costs

One of the major issues which have always raised questions among the search engine optimization is “Search Engine Optimization for Dynamic Websites”.

What are “Dynamic Websites”?

Dynamic websites are websites whose pages are generated on the visitor request. Unlike static pages (primarily .htm/.html pages), dynamic pages are generated when a user triggers an action through that particular page.

Here is a sample dynamic URL-

http://www.abc.com/cgi-bin/search/results.pl?q=%22dynamic+websites%22&…….

As per the above example of http://www.abc.com, the dynamic part (i.e. the part) of the URL which changes as per surfer request is the part after the question mark (?)

What are the problems that search engines face in indexing Dynamic URLs?

1. Search engines often consider a dynamic URL as an infinite set of links.

2. Since dynamic URLs find maximum application in online shopping carts, there is a possibility of incorporating a session id to a particular page. As session ids of that particular page change, the search engine spider needs to index an infinite number of copies of the same page, which is a Herculean task for them.

3. Proceeding with the same logic presented in point 2, indexing the same dynamic page might overload the servers of the search engines and therefore prevent the search engines to present with the most relevant information in the fastest possible time.

Here is what Google says about indexing of dynamic websites -

Reasons your site may not be included: Your pages are dynamically generated. We are able to index dynamically generated pages. However, because our web crawler can easily overwhelm and crash sites serving dynamic content, we limit the amount of dynamic pages we index.

What are the options that you have in order to make a search engine spider index your Dynamic URLs?

1. Use of softwares - which can change the dynamic URLs to static ones. These softwares remove the “?” in the Query String and replace it with “/”, thereby allowing the search engine spiders to index the dynamic content.

Example -

http://www.xyz.com/books.asp?id=2254

will change to

http://www.xyz.com/books/2254

The latter being a static URL, it can easily be indexed by the search engine spiders.

2. Use of CGI/Perl scripts - One of the easiest ways to get your dynamic sites indexed by search engines is using CGI/Perl scripts. Path_Info or Script_Name is a variable in a dynamic application that contains the complete URL address (including the query string information). In order to fix this problem, you’ll need to write a script that will pull all the information before the query string and set the rest of the information equal to a variable. You can then use this variable in your URL address.

Example -

http://www.xyz.com/books.asp?id=2254

When you are using CGI/Perl scripts, the query part of the dynamic URL is assigned a variable.

So, in the above example “?id=2254″ is assigned a variable, say “ab”

The dynamic URL http://www.xyz.com/coolpage.asp?id=2254

will change to http://www.xyz.com/books/ab through CGI/Perl scripts which can easily be indexed by the search engines.

3. Re-configuring your web servers -

(i) Apache Server - Apache has a rewrite module (mod_rewrite) that enables you to turn URLs containing query strings into URLs that search engines can index. This module however, isn’t installed with Apache software by default, so you need to check with your web hosting company for installation.

(ii) ColdFusion - You’ll need to reconfigure ColdFusion on your server so that the “?” in a query string is replaced with a ‘/’ and pass the value to the URL.

4. Creation of a Static Page linked to an array of dynamic Pages - This approach is very effective, especially if you are the owner of a small online store selling a few products online. Just create a static page linking to all your dynamic pages.

Optimize this static page for search engine rankings. Include a link title for all the product categories, place appropriate “alt” tag for the product images along with product description containing highly popular keywords relevant to your business. Submit this static page along with all the dynamic pages in various search engines, conforming to the search engine submission guidelines.

1. Why Links Are Important
Probably the word that associates best with Web is “links”. That is what hypertext is all about – you link to pages you like and get linked by pages that like your site. Actually, the Web is woven out of interconnected pages and spiders follow the links, when indexing the Web. If not many sites link to you, then it might take ages for search engines to find your site and even if they find you, it is unlikely that you will have high rankings because the quality and quantity of links is part of the algorithms of search engines for calculating relevancy.

2. Inbound and Outbound Links
Put in layman’s terms, there are two types of links that are important for SEO – inbound and outbound links. Outbound links are links that start from your site and lead to another one, while inbound links, or backlinks, come from an external site to yours, e.g. if a.com links to mydomain.com, the link from a.com is an inbound link for mydomain.com.

Backlinks are very important because they are supposed to be a measure of the popularity of your site among the Web audience. It is necessary to say that not all backlinks are equal. There are good and bad backlinks. Good backlinks are from reputable places - preferably from sites with a similar theme. These links do boost search engine ranking. Bad backlinks come from suspicious places – like link farms – and are something to be avoided. Well, if you are backlinked without your knowledge and consent, maybe you should drop the Webmaster a line, asking him or her to remove the backlink.

If you are not heavily backlinked, don’t worry - buying links is an established practice and if you are serious about getting to the top, you may need to consider it. But before doing this, you should consider some free alternatives. For instance, some of the good places where you can get quality backlinks are Web directories like http://dmoz.org or http://dir.yahoo.com.

First, look for suitable sites to backlink to you using the Backlinks Builder below. After you identify potential backlinks, it’s time to contact the Web master of the site and to start negotiating terms. Sometimes you can agree to a barter deal – i.e. a link exchange – they will put on their site N links to your site and you will put on your site N links to their site - but have in mind that this is a bad, risky deal and you should always try to avoid it.

Internal links (i.e. links from one page to another page on the same site) are also important but not as much as backlinks. In this connection it is necessary to say, that using images for links might be prettier but it is a SEO killer. Instead of having buttons for links, use simple text links. Since search engines spider the text on a page, they can’t see all the designer miracles, like gradient buttons or flash animations, so when possible, either avoid using them, or provide a meaningful textual description in the <alt> tag, as described next.

3. Anchor text
Anchor text is the most important item in a backlink. While it does matter where a link comes from (i.e. a reputable place or a link farm), what matters more is the actual text the link starts from. Put simply, anchor text is the word(s) that you click on to open the hyperlink – e.g. if we have the best search engine, than “the best search engine” is the anchor text for the hyperlink to google.com. You see that you might have a backlink from a valuable site but if the anchor text is something like “an example of a complete failure”, you will hardly be happy with it.

When you check your backlinks, always check what their anchor text is and if there is a keyword in it. It is a great SEO boost to have a lot of backlinks from quality sites and the anchor text to include our keywords. Check the anchor text of inbound backlinks is with the Backlink Anchor Text Analyzer tool below. Besides the anchor text itself, the text around it is also important.

4. Link Practices That Are To Be Avoided
Similar to keyword stuffing, purchasing links in bulk is a practice to be avoided. It gets suspicious if you bartered 1000 links with another site in a day or two. What is more, search engines keep track of link farms (sites that sell links in bulk) and since bought links are a way to manipulate search results, this practice gets punished by search engines. So avoid dealing with link farms because it can cause more harm than do good. Also, outbound links from your site to known Web spammers or “bad guys” are also to be avoided.

As mentioned, link exchange is not a clean deal. Even if it boosts your ranking, it can have many other negative aspects in the long run. First, you do not know if the other party will keep their promise – i.e. they might remove some of the links to you. Second, they might change the context the link appears into. Third, it is really suspicious if you seem to be “married” to another site and 50% or more of your inbound and outbound links are from/to this direction.

When links are concerned, one aspect to have in mind is the ratio between inbound and outbound links. Generally speaking, if your outbound links are ten times your inbound links, this is bad but it also varies on a case by case basis. If you have a site that links to news sources or has RSS feeds, then having many outbound links is the inevitable price of fresh content.

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