SEO Consult Blog

Having a regularly updated blog has massive impact on your on-page SEO. It keeps your content fresh and informative, therefore gaining you high listings amongst other things, allowing you to disperse keywords across your site. It also allows you to market to the social media and bookmarking networks, getting other people to advertise for you for free, for more information on the benefit of social media networks see my last blog. Now before you run off and reinvent the wheel, there are already many free applications out there which allow you to easily integrate a blog in your website. I am using one now, and yes you guessed it, it’s WordPress. I can’t praise the people who came up with word press enough. WordPress is easy to integrate into any PHP system and simplify blogging to the level where even a child can understand it, scratch that where even my mum can understand it! The benefits of WordPress are it’s free, (additional features and bandwidth do have costs associated with them) there are a lot of free SEO add-ons giving you more marketing power, plus their Free Support. The main factor I will say again, it’s simple to get started. Don’t think that this one application will make you a top SEO, but it’s certainly a great place to start.For more information please feel free to contact us at SEO Consult

Search Engine Optimisation is one of the most extensively used buzzwords in the Information Technology world. However, with this ubiquitous use and unqualified popularity comes an increasing tendency to misunderstand this most intriguing of disciplines.

Today, social bookmarking and search engine optimisation are being increasingly mentioned in the same breath. Social bookmarking has emerged of late as an extremely popular activity on the Internet, presenting unprecedented socio-cultural as well as economic dimensions. This increased and effective communication has brought with it great opportunities, a development which has consequently spawned a surge in Internet marketing activity aimed at extracting monetary benefit out of this elusive medium.

Many Internet marketers have come to realise that social bookmarking websites are great sources of traffic. Since the ultimate goal of search engine optimisation is also to drive (preferably targeted) traffic to a website, the two are often viewed in the same vein. However, this is a mistake many naïve Search Engine Optimisation practitioners make. Even though social bookmarking and SEO can appear to the layman to substitute each other, such an oversimplification of the social bookmarking phenomenon would only serve to obfuscate the critical realities underlying the search engine realm.

Social bookmarking is a practice that originally arose without commercial intent, serving as congregation points for the like-minded. Great centres of discussion arose, with websites like Digg pushing the underlying themes of open source promotion, political liberalism and consumer activism. Each social bookmarking site began to market itself to a select subculture of like-minded surfers. With time, these websites began to look more and more like vast cultural hubs that commanded great, unswerving loyalty from their followers.

With such popularity came monetization strategies. High traffic volumes also led savvy Webmasters and SEOs to try to tap some of the traffic for their own benefit. This evolved into a sophisticated consulting business. Consequently, today we see specialised consultants serving social bookmarking marketing services to clients. However, this activity should not be confused with Search Engine Optimisation.

Although social bookmarking management can complement SEO, the two are not the same paradigm. Social bookmarking has very little to do with search engines, and the traffic they provide comes solely from the social bookmarking websites. Most of this traffic, as can be confirmed by multiple studies, is usually untargeted and comprises mostly apathetic individuals looking for an interesting read or a good laugh. Many researchers have suggested that traffic driven from social bookmarking websites is untargeted, non-converting and often a drain on bandwidth. Although social bookmarking sites remain a good source for traffic, the challenge for Internet marketers is now to channel and convert this highly unpredictable medium.