One of our New Year’s resolutions at ABS is to use video to deliver quality content to our audience. We will be utilizing a professional to get us started. Beyond that, there are many tips posted about what we can do to maximize the reach of our videos. We follow Mashable and have collected 8 articles this year that may help small business in this area.
Here is an excellent article about avenues to improve search engine rankings through your website presence.
By Jim Lodico
Published December 27, 2010
Are you looking for innovative ways to improve your search engine rankings?
In an earlier post I talked about the need to fully optimize your website and blog posts for search engines.
However, content optimization will only take you so far. For a website to really take off in the search engine rankings, it needs to generate incoming links from relevant and reputable websites. And you have little control of incoming links.
To increase the likelihood of obtaining high-quality incoming links, here are seven things you can do:
Yahoo reported last week that they may be dropping Delicious and their other Social Bookmarking services. ABS has used this service for the past few years and hope they continue independently from Yahoo. Here is the latest news and some alternatives to explore.
It looks like your (and my) personal search engine of interesting web pages is about to go away. Yahoo hasn’t formally confirmed, but all signs point to the impending demise of delicious.com.
What are we going to do with all of our bookmarks?
There are several alternatives available and, if you’re like me, you’re going to have to test some of them out until you find the one that best fits how you like to save bookmarks and later search for them. You’ll also want to export your existing delicious.com bookmarks and, if possible, import them into the new service you choose. Instructions on that are below, but first, here’s a list of options for your post-Delicious.com bookmarking.
10 Delicious.com Alternatives
(in alphabetical order)
Blinklist: Blinklist has some of the same features that Delicious has, like quick bookmarking and sharing with others. Pages can be read offline, as well. But … there doesn’t appear to be a way to import bookmarks, so this is probably a non-starter for existing Delicious.com users.
Connotea: The site advertises itself as a service for “researchers, clinicians, and scientists.” And many of the features are specifically designed for academic users. But it acts in much the same way Delicious does: find a web page, add it to your “library,” add keywords for later retrieval, and so forth.
Diigo: Diigo lets you save web page bookmarks, files, images, and much more. It bills itself as a personal information management service. You can bookmark web pages via a Diigo toolbar and/or a bookmarklet in your web browser.
Evernote: Like Diigo, Evernote isn’t just for bookmarking web pages — but that’s one of the things you can do, and I know a few fellow search marketers who are already using Evernote instead of Delicious. You can save URLs or just text clippings from a web page.
Faves.com: This is not a pure bookmarking site, but a site that acts as a combination of, say, Delicious and Google Reader. When you register, Faves.com installs its toolbar in your browser and that’s how you save content. Your Faves.com home page includes the links that friends have saved (if you choose to connect to others who use the site), making it as much about content discovery as saving.
Google Bookmarks: You may already be using this without even knowing it. If you’ve ever starred a search result on Google.com or starred a place in Google Maps/Places, it’s already been saved into Google Bookmarks. You can also add sites to Google Bookmarks via the Google Toolbar. In fact, here’s a list of the various ways to add pages to Google Bookmarks. And yes, it supports importing bookmarks.
Historio.us: This bookmarking site even has a .us TLD like Delicious.com used to have. Histori.us offers one-click saving, makes snapshots of web pages when you save them, offers tagging and full-text search. It does support importing bookmarks from other sites. There’s a limited free account option, but if you have more than 300 bookmarks, you’ll need to use one of the paid accounts.
Instapaper: If you’re a heavy Delicious.com user, this one’s probably not for you. Instapaper allows you to save web pages for reading at a later time, but creator Marco Ament warns that it’s not “optimized for keeping track of thousands of pages. This isn’t the right tool to collect, categorize, tag, filter, and search the contents of every web page you’ve ever found.”
Pinboard.in: This is not a free service. It offers a basic service for about $7 (one-time fee) or an archival service for $25 a year. The archival service stores copies of your bookmarks and provides full-text searching. Conveniently, you can see a Pinboard vs. Delicious comparison to help you decide if this is the right service for you.
Zootool: Like some of the others above, Zootool isn’t just for URLs; you can save images, documents, and other web-based content. Saving is done via a bookmarklet and, unlike Delicious.com’s blue links, Zootool saves your content as thumbnails. It offers organizing tools like tagging, too.
How to Export Delicious.com Bookmarks
You’ll probably want/need to export your Delicious.com bookmarks in order to get the most out of any of the services above. I’ve mentioned cases where importing is or isn’t available, at least based on the sites’ help pages.
Fortunately, exporting Delicious bookmarks is easy:
1. Login to Delicious and go to your “Settings” page.
2. Under the “Bookmarks” heading, look for the “Export / Backup Bookmarks” link.
Delicious will save your bookmarks as an HTML file, and you have the option to include your existing tags and/or notes.
Your turn: If there are other Delicious.com alternatives that I’ve missed above, or if you have experience with any of the sites above (good or bad), let us know in the comments so that all readers can benefit.
Hard to imagine that you started down this road to blogging bliss less than two months ago, isn’t it? What once seemed to be an insurmountable unknown has evolved into a 2011 must-do. In the spirit of you have to start somewhere, just embrace your inner athlete and as Nike says, “Just do it!” But maybe you’re feeling just a bit under-inspired? If that’s the case then how about a quick recap?
- To Blog or Not To Blog: Part 1 (The Four Letter “B” Word?)
The best place to start is at the start. What we learned here was that blogging isn’t as bad as many interpret it to be. In fact, blogging is just another fairly simple way to communicate.
-To Blog or Not To Blog: Part 2 – Self-Publish or Perish
Things picked up a bit on Part 2. I explained that as marketing evolves from being one directional to conversational a blog is the perfect way to embrace your public, and they you. Regardless of simplicity, for those organizations that want to reap the benefits, blogging is becoming the new business card. That is, it’s a necessity.
- To Blog or Not To Blog: Part 3 – Social networking friends with blog benefits
You asked for more benefits and you got ‘em. The content in a blog can be instrumental to improving your website’s SEO (search engine optimization). In short, Google’s bots and algorithms like blogs. A blog is also a great way to disseminate information by harnessing the power of social networks and the “share culture”.
- To Blog or not to Blog: Part 4 – They say, “Everyone has at least one blog in them.”
And then in the previous chapter we resolved your final set of fears. “I don’t know what to write about,” and “I’m not that good of a writer,” and “I’m too busy,” were all resolved. Another answer was the soft sell – contact Karla or Paula at ABS and they’ll work with you to develop a solution to meet the needs of your business. Done deal!
Regardless of what your personal feeling are about the Internet, I think it’s pretty safe to say that it’s here to stay. It’s certainly not going to go away just because you ignore it. Whether it’s blogging, using photos & video, tapping into social media or whatever other innovative trend or staple is ahead, your brand is going to have to participate in some way. There’s no need to overwhelm yourself, just chip away at it. The more you do, the more you’ll learn. And of course there are also resources such as myself to guide you along the way.
When it comes to business and marketing what I like to say is, The Internet. You can figure it out now, or you can figure it out later. But you will need to figure it out.
We’ve finally rounded the corner and we’re in the home stretch. We’ve gone from blogging? to blogging! In fact, given today’s business climate and consumption of information, blogging is an ideal medium. Now comes the fun part – we just need something to write about.
“What’s that? Now comes the hard part?”
No, now comes the fun part. Remember (from Part 2) the theme of the moment is sharing. It’s not about what you know. Or about rattling off some list of examples of why you’re the best. It’s about being on the other end and receiving something that adds value to your life. For example, this article. I’m trying to share with you my passion for blogging, as well as why I believe it should be your passion too. Would anyone really care if I talked about what a great blogger I am? See?
So with that context in mind, let’s just keep it simple and we’ll all agree that
there must be at least one thing in the course of a given week that at least
some of your followers would also be interested in.
Maybe you attended an event? You could share some details and ideally some photos too.
Maybe you saw the advertisement for a particular movie, TV program, lecture or seminar? Let them know about the what and the when, and of course a bit on why you think they might enjoy such a moment.
Maybe you just finished a great book (or a video on YouTube) that is relevant to your business and the interests of your target market? Share your experience and possibly throw in a couple links to other relevant media and/or articles.
The truth is, when you keep your eyes and ears open and your radar on, the
possibilities of what to share soon become endless. Just always be sure to try to keep it relevant. Convey your passion but don’t lose sight of the receiver’s wants and needs.
“Ok. I’m sure if I tried I could initiate a conversation with my audience. But…”
Stop! I know where you’re going next. At this point it’s about time and/or
writing ability, correct? Please pardon me a moment while I shift into soft sell mode. If you’ve made it this far (i.e., you too believe in the idea of blogging) then relax, there are viable solutions available to you.
There are plenty of communications and public relationships outfits who will be glad to work with you. A perfect example would be ABS. Blogging is a natural extension of their other written-word based services. For ease as well as the sake of consistency you could have blogging added to your current package of services. And if you don’t have a relationship with ABS (or similar) then it’s probably time to establish such a relationship. If you don’t have a blog and don’t know where to start they can help make that happen for you. Of course, if you’d rather, you can reach out to me as well.
“That’s great. I was really worried about the actual writing part. Thanks!”
Glad I could help. The bottom line is to get the ball in play, get things
rolling. You don’t have to be Shakespeare, or Tolstoy. And you’re certainly not writing, “War And Peace.” Once you get started – either solo, or with support – you can grow and progress, or just kinda meander along. The pace and tone is entirely up to you. Quite often your audience will give you feedback so you can modify your game plan as you go. And of course, if you’re using a professional for support they will be able to provide guidance as well.
There’s one more part to this series, Part 5, and then I’m done (for now). If
you have any questions in the meantime please feel free to contact ABS, or
myself, and we’d be glad to help you get your blogging ball rolling.
It looks like your (and my) personal search engine of interesting web pages is about to go away. Yahoo hasn’t formally confirmed, but 
