SEO Ebook Release, Cool Tools, and More on Social Networking

The Dao of SEO was officially launched on Sunday July 14 with much fanfare - well, me and a Twinkie. More on that later.

If you haven't read the last newsletter you may want to take a peek at that first as I want to continue to talk about social networking as a way to promote your business and get some good one-way back-links. I mentioned last time that I'll be happy to organize a group of program members who'll volunteer to go in and vote at Digg.com (maybe elsewhere) should any of our members have an article mentioned there. A number of you have joined.

The idea at Digg is to bring interesting news stories to the attention of members. In a sense, it's like members are editors of the WWW sifting through various content trying to find read-worthy content. Small business entrepreneurs can exploit that by writing content for their blog or website that may get mentioned on Digg. Of course, you can guarantee that your content gets mentioned just by submitting a mention yourself or better still having someone else do so. Then get your friends to vote for it to heighten its visibility for regular Digg members in the hope that you will get both visits and back-links. Sure, top stories will have hundreds of "diggs" but niche stories may only need a handful to get some visibility.

Here's the registration page at Digg. Once registered you're entitled to submit a commentary on something you've come across on the Intenet, just by clicking on the "Submit A New Story" link located in the upper right hand corner of the home page.

Two of our members made submissions there already. Check out here and here.

As you can see, it just takes a little imagination and once you get going on this sort of writing more and more ideas will come to you. But as mentioned last time, David Williams understands this better than I do and has taken it much further than I have so he may be the man for you to talk to. Indeed, I recently commissioned one of his colleagues to prepare my book launch press release.

To exploit social media myself, I then added the press release to my blog. Next, I asked one of my friends to register at Digg so she could then post a commentary . You can find the result of that here. Hey, but if you click it, then stay there long enough to register and vote for it and for the above two stories from our program partners (thank you!). It takes a minute as you don't have to submit a personal profile to become a member, just get a user name and password.

In the last newsletter, I mentioned the Conference I attended in Toronto recently. One of the presenters raved about the free Firefox browser and I think he was right. I downloaded it and love it. It's particularly great for its over 1,000 addons many geared to managing the Internet marketing aspect of your business and some bringing social networking right to your browser. All the tools work right within your browser allowing you to locate a variety of SEO tools all in one place. One nice little tool I found there was SeoDigger which reports on your rankings for up to 50 search phrases on Google and Msn.

I also recommend the Groowe.com toolbar as part of your browser (Firefox or IE) . In case you’re not sure what a toolbar is, a toolbar is simply a program that adds functionality and ease-of-use options to the end-user. The simple Back Button is an example of such functionality. The Groowe.com toolbar combines all in one the Google, Msn, and Yahoo toolbar along with toolbars available from other search engines. It's handy for checking your rankings across a number of engines or just doing searches. Digg and Wikipedia are on there too.

And, here's something I just stumbled upon last night while writing this. Have you heard of widgets? Those of us using Mac OS X have enjoyed them for years. They are mini-applications that sit on your desktop (called Dashboard by Mac users) that add functionality to the desktop. They are also available for PCs now. There are thousands of them (weather, clocks, cams, stock tickers, etc.). Well, you can now turn your blog into a widget that other people can place on their sites or if you have a website independent of your blog you can put your blog as a widget on your main website!! I just joined Widget Box last night and turned my blog into a widget:



What was cool is that I was able to place it at the bottom of my main optimization site at Hand Submit changing the appearance to suit the web page. Not only can such blog widgets serve as handy reference tools for site visitors but they may be super one-way links if you can get others to place your blog on their site.

You see, I think the above is such a cool tool that I'm going into Digg right now to mention it as newsworthy with the link pointing here in order to attract some attention to this very post. This is another of exploiting social media.

Is your website business-to-business oriented? Well, if it is maybe you should check out business.com, a business to business directory . It never gets mentioned when the pundits talk about the most popular search engines and that's for a good reason, it's not top three overall. But it is a big player in the business-to-business niche and apparently 12% of all business-to-business Internet traffic goes through Business.com. To get your site listed there will cost you $199 a year but in addition to possibly bringing you traffic it should be a strong one-way link.

My 'how to' step-by-step SEO ebook is now available for PDF download from http://www.dao-of-seo-ebook.com It's 142 pages and summarizes what I've learned about optimizing websites over the last seven years. I plan to issue new editions twice a year and make those available to previous buyers as free updates.