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Times are changing in the internet marketing landscape.

Whereas before, online businessmen tried their best to keep abreast of the latest strategies that will help them place their websites in beneficial positions in relevant search engine results, nowadays, they are trying out some new tactics that are completely different from their predecessors.

The trend in this day and age, you see, is veering away from the rather mechanical operations of search engines, and leaning towards the more accurate and humanized features of user-driven indexing systems.

Did you get lost somewhere in that statement?

Such is but natural. You see, current trends are dealing with new technology and new approaches that a significant adjustment must be made in terms of the online marketer’s mindset as well as the skills required to make it big in these changing times.

The Death Of SEO

Search engine optimization, or SEO, has dominated the Internet marketing industry for many years. It has been said that 80% of the traffic that can be generated for our online business will come from the search engines. Hence, getting a good position in search engine results pages (SERPs) has become the Holy Grail for most online businessmen.

But search engines are not without faults.

Search engines rely on spiders-robotic little creatures-to crawl through each and every single page in the World Wide Web. Thereafter, these spiders will index the pages according to the algorithms prescribed by the search engines.

Everything is automated. It’s either black or white. There are no gray areas. Hence, it can’t be helped that some pages will be placed in categories different from what the publisher has intended.

Trend Towards User-Driven Indexing Systems

User-driven indexing systems, on the other hand, allow the users themselves to classify websites under appropriate tags. The application of human discernment makes this approach more reliable and more credible for many people. After all, human eyes saw those pages. And the human mind processed their content and indexed them appropriately.

Social bookmarking websites are the most popular kinds of user-driven indexing systems. There are a lot of these in existence today, and judging from their page ranks, they are widely visited pages. The most renowned of these social bookmarking websites are furl.com, technorati.com, del.icio.us, and feedmarker.com.

Social Bookmarking Websites Explained

What are social bookmarking websites, exactly? While viewing web pages on your browser, you may have noticed a feature that will allow you to save a particular URL under your "My Favorites" folder. Click on the "Add To Favorites" button and you’ll be able to save the URL on your hard drive. This process is called bookmarking. The saved URL is called a bookmark.

Social bookmarking websites work the same way. But instead of saving a URL on your hard drive, you’ll be able to save it on a web server, under an appropriate tag.

If you visit a dog grooming website, for example, and you liked it a lot, you can save the URL under the tag "dog" or "dog grooming" in the space provided by any social bookmarking website.

What makes social bookmarking websites stand out is that you can share your list of indexed sites with other people. They may be looking for information about dogs, and your list can help them out a lot.

Marketing Advantages Of Social Bookmarking Websites

This relatively new technology presents a lot of useful possibilities for an online businessman:

- Experts predict that social bookmarking will soon replace search engines as the information finding process of choice by most Internet users. The best way to capitalize on this emerging phenomenon is by starting to position your online business using its features as early as today.

- Social bookmarking can easily be manipulated. You can place your own websites in favorable positions without having to go through the whims of search engine algorithms.

- Tags are beginning to establish an interconnectivity that reaches many platforms and many channels. Social bookmarking websites can easily become the launch pad for your conquest of specific tags which are considered as the "keywords for the new millennium."

The new generation of internet marketing strategies starts with social bookmarking websites. Master this particular channel and you’re sure to garner an avalanche of traffic from sources which were once unknown.

by: Caroline Melberg

If you have a small business blog, or are thinking of starting one, you should be aware of the ways you can use your blog to drive traffic to your Website. It’s simpler than you think.

The first thing to understand about your blog is that each entry is counted as one Web page. Even if you have your blog set to display 10 blog posts on the same page, each of them is counted as a separate Web page by the search engines. That’s why it is important to treat each blog entry as an SEO tool. The following tips should be kept in mind for each blog entry in order to optimize them for the search engines and drive more traffic to your Website from your blog:

1. Optimize each blog post around a single keyword
2. Make sure your keyword is in your blog post title, preferably at the beginning
3. Use subheads with or tags that also use your keyword
4. Include 1-3 keyword links (anchor text) in your blog posts
5. Sign every blog post with a signature link that uses your keyword
6. Use bold and italics effectively to emphasize certain keywords and phrases
7. Be sure to ping the directories
8. Include tags for all of your blog entries
9. Use categories effectively
10. Make links appear natural by linking to internal pages of your Website

Because each blog entry is a separate Web page, the search engines will crawl them and index them just as they do your Web pages. Optimize each one heavily around a specific keyword related to your Website and that’s an extra doorway into your Website for each page indexed at the search engines. Also, by adding anchor text to a couple of those keywords and pointing those links to relevant internal Web pages of your Website you are improving the SEO effect of your blog entry. A poll of top SEO experts by SEOmoz revealed that a majority of those SEO experts said these type of keyword links are among the top 10 most important SEO factors for ranking Web pages. Don’t give up on keywords and anchor text.

You’ll also want to include keyword tags with each blog entry. Those tags will be used by the search engines to index your pages appropriately for your keywords. Also, social bookmarkers will find it easier to tag your blog entry if they like it and this makes it easier to share among their social group.

Your blog category should indicate an important element of interest as well. Unlike tags, you should only choose one category for each blog post. Don’t use "main" or "uncategorized." Those are too generic. Use a specific keyword-related category as that will make your blog posts more crawlable by the search engines.

There are more than 100 blog directories that you can ping to let them know you have updated your blog. I suggest you do this every time you update your blog. With WordPress, and several other blogging software platforms, you can input each directory into a field and the software will send out an automatic ping each time you update your blog. If you are not using WordPress you should go to Ping-o-Matic and use it to ping your blog for free.

Finally, if you sign your blog posts with a keyword-rich signature that points to a relevant internal page of your Website, this will make your Website more crawlable and give you another anchor text link. Use something like, "Find Out More About Keyword." Then add another link that points to your home page.

The important thing to remember about keywords and links, whether on your blog or your Website, is to make them appear natural. The benefits are enormous.