“If you build it they will come,” may be great for baseball, but not for articles. Sure, if you write great, original articles you will inevitably get traffic from Google, Yahoo and other search engines. More and more people are finding their news and articles from social bookmarking sites rather than the TV or standard news websites. Here are seven social bookmarking sites that I always submit my articles to gain immediate traffic and solid backlinks. In many instances, your submissions to these sites will beat your original article in Google!

1. Digg.com - Google PageRank of 8 and consistently in the top 100 on Alexa. Get’s about 17 million visitors each month.
2. Propeller.com - Google PageRank of 7 and really the only competitor to Digg.com in the “vote up or down” format because it is part of the AOL Network and owned by Time Warner. Still nowhere near the visitors as Digg with about 1.5 million visitors each month.
3. Technorati.com - Technorati has a PageRank of 8 and gets well over 3 million visitors each month. There is no need to submit your articles. Simple register you blog with Technorati.com and it will automatically post your articles to your profile. You can “ping” your blogs to get faster results.
4. del.icio.us - Is there a cooler .US domain name? del.icio.us is another PageRank 8 social bookmark site. It gets about 1.5 million visitors each month. Is the simplest of them all and takes 15 seconds to submit your article once you are logged in.
5. StumbleUpon.com - StumbleUpon is more of a random site generator based on the keywords you provide when submitting your articles, but there is no arguing the immediate traffic you will get. Use the StumbleUpon toolbar for quick submissions!
6. Reddit.com - Reddit is a simple “Digg.com like” site. It looks ugly, but can provide some traffic. Reddit is a PageRank 7 site and gets just over 1 million visitors each month.
7. fark.com - Fark is a “cooler” looking site that is relatively easy to submitt to. It is another PageRank 7 site, but only gets about 300,000 visitors each month.

Spend 5-10 minutes submitting your articles and you will see immediate results. Check your server stats or Google Analytics now and then to see which ones perform better than others. With 100s of social bookmarking sites out there you will need to figure out which ones perform better than others. Sites with lesser traffic may perform better because the theme of the site may match your articles topic/theme. Submit to these sites religiously and watch your traffic soar! I’m off to go submit this article…

Other posts that you might find interesting:

• Is the Social Bookmarking Era Starting to End?
• Measuring Your Blog’s Success
• Don’t Be A Leech, Be A Social Media Apprentice

Starting a new website or deciding what to write about on your blog or website can be hard sometimes. No writer wants to spend quality time putting together an article that no one will read. Google has a great tool that helps you see what keywords are hot and allow you to compare them against other keywords. It’s called Google Trends and it can be a bloggers best friend when trying to figure out a keyword to target for Google. Chances are if it is hot in Google it is hot in Yahoo and other search engines!

The great thing about Google Trends is that it is not only one of the best tools out there to find the hottest key words, it is also 100% free to use. Simple go to www.google.com/trends and try it out.

Let’s take a look at the keyword ‘Zune’. I watch this keyword because of my Zune Info blog. I simply typed in Zune in the search field.

The results I got showed me several things. First, you will notice a line graph that details the time-frame and the search volume. Additionally, Google matches up hot news with some of the peaks in search volume.

To the right of the search volume graph you will see the top news that likely resulted in the hot keyword being searched in Google. You can click on the link and it will bring you to the news item.

To the bottom of the results you will see the top regions, cities and languages for the keyword.

Five Main uses for Google Trends

1. Find out what annual trends or cycles for the main keyword of your blog/site. For example, Zune gets hot when Microsoft releases a new Zune, typically around the holiday seasons (November through January). You should expect a spike in traffic around those areas and you should plan to maximize the returns on that traffic.
2. Not sure what to write about? Use Google Trend to show you the current top search results. If you can find some keywords that may match an worthy topic then write about that topic keeping those keywords in mind.
3. Want to start a new blog/website but not sure what it should be about? Finding out hot keywords is a great starting point. If it is all the buzz in Google then you should consider the long-term prospects of that keyword.
4. Google Trends is useful in seeing if your site is trending down or up.
5. If you are selling your website Google Trends might help you find a good time to sell. You can sell your site after you get the peak season for your site’s targeted keyword or you can use the upcoming spike as a selling point. You will likely get a premium if you can show a potential buyer that the best is yet to come.

Good luck with using this fantastic keyword trend tool. Post a comment with some of your results!

Other posts that you might find interesting:

• Google Adsense Channels
• Focus Your Efforts on Low Bounce-rate Traffic
• Google Adsense For Search Changes

If advertisers are paying for links on your websites you will want to review Google’s policy on paid links on websites with the intent to pass Google PageRank. Google doesn’t mind paid links, but they do mind paid links that are there for passing PageRank only:

… some SEOs and webmasters engage in the practice of buying and selling links that pass PageRank, disregarding the quality of the links, the sources, and the long-term impact it will have on their sites. Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results.

If you are going to have people buy links on your site ensure that you add the “nofollow” tag into your link as Google suggests:

Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the <a> tag

For example, if your link looks like this:

<a href=”http://www.tw3o.com”>tw3o</a>.

Change it to:

<a href=”http://www.tw3o.com” rel=”nofollow“>tw3o</a>.

By using this simple “nofollow” tag you will be telling the search engine spiders not to follow this link thus saving you from the wrath of Google. Don’t think Google is serious? I found these two example of users that were punished by Google for using a text link service:

… my PR [dropped] from 5->3 and lost all my Google Search Traffic, lost of 16 000 visitors/day.

I lost ~10,000 visitors/day

Go back and add the “nofollow” tag to your paid results and add the tag to all future links that you post on your blog/website. If you are going to use paid link services like zmtc.com and text-linkads.com do some research before posting their javascript onto your website.

Other posts that you might find interesting:

• How to Know If a Directory is Worth Submitting To
• Canceling my ads with text-link-ads.com
• Feed your Blog! Technorati and Bloglines