Here are tips that could help you generate quality back links to your dealer websites.

1. Know your resources: Before you get started it is important to know the resources you have. If you are in a link exchange scheme, you would have to give out links from your websites or blogs in return of the link-back you get.
2. Analyze your competitors: Observing your competitors from close quarters would not only help you source high quality links but also give you an estimate as to the number of backlinks required for your car websites . Utilities such as Open Site Explorer tool would help you find out the number of good quality links your competitors have and where they have built them.
3. Keyword research is vital: The usage of keywords should depend on the quantum of links you want to generate. If you include too many keywords you run the risk of getting flagged as spam. For building links manually, however it would be in your best interest to restrict your usage of keywords.
4. Identify link sources: After you’re through with doing your preliminary research and planned your strategy accordingly, you would have identified a couple of sources for you to start building your links. A good place to start would be directories such as DMOZ, where you can submit a URL suggestion. You could also find an opportunity to build links in blog sites and article directories such as Ezine where you can engage in link exchange with webmasters using hyperlinks. At this juncture you would want to get links from many different sites. This would make your backlinks look organic for the search engines. However, you should bear in mind that free links are a gamble and may or may not yield the desired results. Even popular directories like DMOZ cannot guarantee you links to your dealer websites.
5. Set a regular approach: Building quality links for your car website would benefit you in a multitude of ways. It would help your website gain high rankings on search engine results pages as well as generate a steady flow of traffic to your website. So while it might be easy to get links for your website, you must pause and ask yourself if they are achieving the desired results for your website. All it takes is a bit of research and a comprehensive Automotive SEO approach to build quality backlinks for your car dealer website. 

A plethora of car websites have mushroomed all over the internet and auto dealers are experiencing a spike in their sales like never before. Car inventory marketing is becoming increasingly popular among car dealers because of its ability to tap into the viral nature of the internet and attract a horde of potential customers to view your dealer inventory online. Adopting a comprehensive and effective Automotive SEO strategy for your dealer websites and indexing your inventory online could help you generate an influx of visitors to your dealer website and quadruple your return on investment in the process.

In this article we shall discuss some effective Dealer SEO tips and tricks for your site which would help you gain an increased amount of traffic and subsequently result in more leads and more sales conversions.

1. Title Tags– The title on your page is crucial as it impacts your visibility on search results. It is ideal to use a long title consisting of about 4 to 8 words. A title containing your primary keyword should be maximized in length as this will increase your websites prominence on search engine results.
2. Text Menu’s Not Flash – It is advisable to use text for your car dealer website’s navigation menu instead of java scripts, flash or image files. Avoid using flash, images or java script for your website’s content as this would impede search engine crawlers from locating your site. Text links are universally crawlable by any search engine and should always be used for your main navigation.
3. Keyword rich content – A website rich in keywords would automatically gain more favorable rankings on search engine results pages. Hence you should add 2-5 keywords on your page content in order to gain favorable search engine rankings for your car dealer website. If your pages contain less than 250 words, you should use just one keyword for a maximum density of not more than three times. The first keyword should be in bold while the second and third should be in italics. Make your pages appealing by including catchy descriptions in your content to entice visitors and potential customers.

Incorporating these Automotive SEO tips and tricks into your car dealer website will enhance your web presence and visibility as a prominent automotive business entity. This would give you an edge over your rivals and hep boost your revenue earning potential from internet sales.

Because this is a topic that so many dealerships are taking a hard look at right now, we at BURN SEO thought we would post about the top 5 things that every car dealership website needs in order to succeed in 2011.

1. Indexed Inventory

We wrote an extensive post about the details of car dealership indexed inventory previously. We highly suggest any dealer interested in stepping up their online presence take a good look at making sure their inventory is indexable on their websites. Automotive inventory marketing is increasing the leads and sold cars for every dealership we have implemented it on. Having your inventory show up in Google searches is great, but also marketing that inventory to Facebook marketplace, Ebay, Craigslist, and other outlets is how we help you turn your hosted inventory into a powerhouse lead generating tool for your dealership.

Making sure you are fully taking advantage of all of the car dealer inventory hosting services that are out there is the first step in taking a much larger market share for your dealership. Enhancing the way your inventory looks and making it easy for your visitors to inquire or even share inventory with their friends and network is an additional consideration regarding inventory that should be looked at.

2. Social Media Integration

We’ve all heard about it, now it’s time to live it. Social media marketing is an exploding medium for businesses to market on. It is less expensive and along with a comprehensive SEO strategy, yields a much higher ROI than virtually any other marketing platform. Millions of people are now using social platforms like Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis now.

By getting followers on these platforms you will be able to market to them, and have them help you market to all of their networks so that you can continue to grow your marketing base. These people are on social sites virtually every day and you will have the chance to show them your sales, promotions, and news anytime you wish. The viral nature of social networks means that you as a company have to do less work to get your products in front of more people.

This isn’t to say that you will not have to do any work at all. The nature of social marketing requires that you appear to be active on your website, blog, and social outlets. This means that someone must be in charge of managing these various networks so that you can continue to grow your brand on the web. The hub of everything you do must remain your website. A good strategy is to place all new content on your blog first and then break it up and disseminate it amongst your social outlets from there, always linking back to your website. Your website is where all of your inventory, specials, promotions, and most importantly your contact info and lead capture forms await them.

We help car dealerships develop a comprehensive online marketing strategy that includes dealer social media marketing. Being ahead of the curve with these new media outlets will ensure that your car dealership will not only grow your market share, but actually take business away from your competitors.

3. Enhanced lead capture forms

The basic, boring lead capture forms just don’t cut it for today’s web savvy audience. We have seen a 30% increase in conversion rates by making your lead capture forms interactive. By adding a video or audio that will help encourage and educate the visitor about how and why they should complete the form they are on, you are letting your website help you sell them. Not only can you enhance your forms to increase conversions, but we can now help you better qualify your sales leads with smarter web forms on your site!

It’s now possible to enter any criteria you like in order to qualify people right from your website. The client goes on your site, fills out the form, and then is able to be pre-qualified without ever taking any man power away from your sales floor. The pre-qualified leads are delivered to your internet department in real time where your sales people can follow up immediately and lock up the sale. Some dealers have even taken it a step further and actually implemented full sales transactions through their website.

Enhancing your lead capture forms is going to bring you more leads that are better qualified. It will save you time and money, which is what your car dealer websites should be doing.

If you want to take it a step further you can integrate live chat that is manned by business development people who can actually request to engage with your visitors in real time while they are on your site browsing inventory.

4. A modern look

We see so many automotive websites that still look like they were designed in the 80′s. The sites just don’t hold up to the standards that web visitors expect from today’s car dealer websites. It is absolutely vital that your dealer website present your dealership in the best possible light within the first five seconds when a visitor lands on your page. People lose attention span very quickly on the web, and if you website doesn’t look like it is interesting, appealing, clean, and interactive, then they are going to bounce off and find another dealer that gives them what they are looking for.

To gain credibility with your visitors quickly you must project a professional cutting edge image to them. You want to show them that you are the best at what you do and that you take them seriously as a potential client. Your website must engage them and make it easy for them to find what they want. Place lead capture forms in very visible locations so that no matter where they are on your site, they can easily complete a finance application or request contact.

Providing easily accessible inventory search options for the visitors is vital in making sure they can see that your car dealership has what they are looking for.  Once they find the inventory, showing them a very modern and clean looking details page where they can get specifics about the car they are interested in, will help sell cars. We often implement inventory sliders, which are blocks of your site that show visible pictures of the various car models so that people can easily find the car that’s right for them on your site.

It must be noted that the largest growing market on the web is the mobile one. More people are browsing social networks and websites from their mobile device every day. Having a mobile version of your site that is optimized for web devices will help you get more sales than your competition, who are lacking in this growing market. Your mobile dealer website will allow the visitor to view the inventory, complete a sales request, or even apply for financing from their mobile device.

A new face may be in order if your dealership is serious about taking over your local market on the web!

5. In depth SEO

Organic internet leads are a gift that keeps on giving to your car dealership. By ranking at the top of search engines for all of your main keywords, the dealership will get more traffic, more leads, and more sold cars. Showing up on page one of Google gives any dealership instant credibility with a visitor that is looking for a car online. In order to get to the top, it all starts with solid SEO implemented on your dealer website.

So many car dealer web providers only optimize the home page of a dealer website. This means that all of the content and inventory on your inner pages is never going to show up in the search results, because they are taking the easy way out and your dealership is the one that is going to suffer. Doing proper SEO on a dealer website means optimizing all of the meta tags on every page of your site. It means taking advantage of alt tags on every image and title tags on links. It may not be fast or easy, but it’s an undertaking that will benefit your dealer website for years to come. An experienced SEO company understands all the complex variables that must be managed on your website in order for the website to be truly optimized for the search engines.

Once your site is ready to go it’s time to get out there and build links to your website. This is the real power of SEO. Each link coming into your website counts as a vote to Google as to your sites importance. Making sure those links come from relevant sources that will benefit your dealer website is what a Good Automotive SEO company will manage for you. There are many pitfalls and techniques that must be used carfully or your entire site can be banned from Google. This is why employing an ethical and experienced SEO firm that understands the unique nature of the car industry is a good idea.

If a dealership is making an investment in their website, then handling that investment with the proper care and nurturing it’s performance should be the top priority. Once your car dealer website is ranking on the first page of all of the major search engines you are able to get an incoming supply of highly qualified exclusive leads that no one else is talking to. Closing car deals from your self generated internet leads is going to be far easier than from leads purchased through vendors like Auto Trader.  You will be able to save thousands of dollars per month once your ranking on the search engines in your market.

Don’t let your competition get the jump on you. Now is the time to make the investment in taking your business to the web in a big way. It’s only a matter of time until you competition decides to make the leap if they haven’t already. The sooner you begin securing your market on the web, the harder it will be for anyone to try and take it from you.

The following java script code will allow you to add all of your friends at once without having to click on them individually when you want ot share a fan page or group page.

javascript:elms=document.getElementById('friends').getElementsByTagName('li');for(var fid in elms){if(typeof elms[fid] === 'object'){fs.click(elms[fid]);}}

Now how to use it. Follow these 2 simple steps and you will be sharing your pages with all of your friends in no time:

1. First select the share link below the page or group logo on the left. Follow the screenshot below for guidance.

Step 2. Add the code provided above to the URL bar and then hit “enter”. For guidance please see the screenshot below:

With this code you will be able to quickly increase your fan base. Remember it takes 25 fans before you can secure your vanity URL. Then it’s just a constant work in progress to get new fans and to get those fans involved in your page. We will provide further tips on how you can utilize Facebook to increase your marketing efforts in the future to stay tuned.

*update 12/28/2010 - We have posted an updated video for 2011 using the TwentyTen theme on WordPress newer version. It is much more detailed and shows more info on how to properly integrate WordPress into any existing website you may have. View it here: http://www.websitedesign411.com/blog/integrate-wordpress-using-twentyten-2011/

After the popularity of our written tutorial on how to integrate WordPress into any existing website, we found that many people got confused or had a hard time following the written tutorial.

Often copying the code over from the written tutorial was cause for further issues.

WordPress is such a popular and powerful blogging platform that any website can benefit from implementing it. We have found that there is surprisingly little information available on how to easily accomplish this task. The average person is not a PHP guru and may need some assistance in pointing out what needs to be done in order to seamlessly integrate WordPress into their website.

In an effort to further aid the community in easily integrating WordPress into your existing website, we have now documented through a short video how to integrate WordPress into any existing website within 10 minutes!

Follow the step by step instructions in the video below and you can integrate WordPress into any existing website you may have. It doesn’t matter if it’s a CMS or straight HTML website!

If you read the written tutorial you can get an idea of what is needed in order to setup a placeholder blog that you can work from.

Also please remember to delete all the old code once your done working with the individual files. It is shown in all steps except the header.php file in the video. Before saving scroll down and delete all your old code you didn’t use!

You may want to take a peek at the written tutorial on how to integrate wordpress into your existing website before starting.

We hope you find this video useful and look forward to producing more useful tutorials for you in the future. Please don’t forget to leave feedback and link us to view your successful integrations!

If you have any suggestions on future tutorials you would like to see please drop us a line and give us your suggestions.

Now lets integrate WordPress into your site…

Many of our readers have requested that we provide a detailed write up of how to integrate a WordPress blog into any existing website. We are going to show you step by step how to get a working WordPress installation seamlessly integrated into your current website. It doesn’t matter if you are using Joomla, Drupal, or straight HTML, this write up will work for your website too!

Okay lets start by talking about some preparations you need to make. We need to make sure that you have installed WordPress on your host. For the purposes of this tutorial we will install WordPress under the /blog directory. So we are clear your WordPress installation should be found at www.yourwebsite.com/blog. This should be a standard WordPress install, nothing special is required from the installation standpoint.

Once you can see the default WordPress blog on your site at www.yourwebsite.com/blog, then we can begin the customization, excited yet?

First thing we want to do is log into the admin area and make sure you have the WordPress theme set to the default theme. Now pull down all the .PHP files we are going to edit from the host. Navigate through your favorite FTP program to the following location: /yourwebsite.com/blog/wp-content/themes/default/. From here you will want to move the following file to your desktop (or whichever folder you will use to house the files while you edit them):

• header.php
• index.php
• footer.php
• single.php
• comments.php

Now lets make sure you have a page setup on your site for the blog. This will be the “template” page you will use during your customization. If using HTML just make sure you have a page that you can actually visit for the blog at www.yoursite.com/blog. Leave the space where the blog content will go empty except for the text “blog content here”. Also make sure you have a space for your sidebar and write the text “sidebar here” so you can find it later as we edit the WordPress theme with this template. Below is a graphic example of what the blog “template” page could look like:

Now right click on your template page and view the source. From the view source page press Control+A to highlight all the text. Now press Control+C to copy the text. Open up a blank HTML file in your HTML/PHP editor (we will use Dreamweaver from now on for this tutorial). Go to the code page of your editor and delete everything so you have a blank canvass. Now press Control+V to paste the details of your template page into this new document.

EDIT THE HEADER.PHP FILE

1. Open up the header.php file in Dreamweaver. In the code you will want to delete everything after the initial

Use the screen shot below if your unsure:

2. Now go to your template you copied earlier and view the source. You should copy everything over exactly as it is. Start at the top and copy everything down to the area just before where your main body content for the blog will start. This will vary depending on your particular website layout, but it will work regardless. Once you have copied everything you consider to be the “header” from your template paste it into the header.php file. You can delete the title meta tag you copied from your template and replace with the the following one that you can find in the original header file:

In addition you can paste the following code from the original header.php code and place it in the meta area of your copied template code:

3. Since the blog is located in a sub directory we highly recommend making sure you input the full URL address to the files specified in all the meta tag info of your header.php file. For example

would become

Once you have done this for all the meta URL’s, you can save this file and transfer it to your host Copy over the header.php file in the default theme folder we discussed earlier.

EDIT THE INDEX.PHP FILE

1. Open the index.php file and delete everything after the inital PHP call for the header (leave that intact). Go back to your template code and copy EVERYTHING directly after the header area you copied ealier and UP TO the footer. Take this code and paste into the index.php file after the initial PHP header call. Now search your new index.php file and find the content filler text on your template that we suggest earlier. We used the text “blog content here”. Find that text and in it’s place paste the following code:

Good job your almost halfway done!

2. Now make sure you go to the very end of the code of the index.php file and paste the following code as the LAST LINE OF CODE for the index.php file:

3. The last thing you will have to do with the index.php file is find the filler text you used for your sidebar. Remember that we used the text “sidebar here”. Find that text and in it’s place past the following code:

you might have to place a div or paragraph tag around this one and center it or align it left or right depending on your taste.

EDIT THE FOOTER.PHP FILE

1. Open the footer.php file. You can delete everything AFTER the initial PHP call. Go back to your template and copy everything after your index text down to the last code on this page. Paste this code after the initial PHP call in the footer.php file. before the /body tag you will want to insert the following code:

if you would like to support WordPress or want to display the feed information in your footer you can paste the following code anywhere appropriate in your footer file (it’s not required to work so feel free to not include this if you don’t want to):

Okay now you have the basic blog customized to your website! you can overwrite the header.php, index.php and footer.php files in the default wordpress theme folder on your host. If you refresh the page you should see your working blog integrated with your site design! Great work, but not quite done yet…

EDIT SINGLE.PHP FILE

You want to copy everything from your new index.php into the single.php file. Highlight the WordPress code we told you to paste into the index.php file earlier and delete it. in it’s place replace it with this new code:

Keep the rest of the code in tact, you are only swapping out the main content code here. only replace the exact PHP code we told you to insert originally with this one. The last code should still be the call for the footer.php file as it is in the index.php file.

EDIT THE COMMENT.PHP FILE

Open the comment.php file and look for this line of code:

You will want to decrease the cols value to something lower than 100%. I suggest 75%-80% and see if that fits well with the site.

Now overwrite the single.php file and the comments.php file and go back and view an actual blog post on your site. It should look nice and pretty now.

At this point you have succesfully integrated a fully functional WordPress blog into your website. It now looks and functions exactly as the rest of your site does. You can go into your WordPress admin and install plugins and widgets to your hearts content!

if we missed anything or you have any other suggestions for future tutorials don’t hesistate to give us a suggestion! We welcome any feedback.

*12/02/2009 Edited the tutorial with code in the header.php that was causing a parse error. Also we highly recommend the use of SEO plugins to help with the meta tags once your blog is up and running. Happy blogging!

We have been using Joomla! primarily for website developement because of the advantages it offers with regard to content display. The main problem we have run into is that it does not offer a robust blogging system that can come close to the speed, flexibility, and robustness of WordPress. To remedy the situation we have learned how to completely integrate WordPress into a Joomla! website installation so that you can get the best of both worlds!

Before getting into detail about how this is done it’s important to understand exactly what Joomla! and WordPress should are best at. For basic sites or Blogger only sites one may not even need to bother with Joomla! as WordPress has evolved into a fairly sophisticated CMS in it’s own right, however it still is not as complete in this regard as Joomla!

Joomla! is probably the best CMS (content management system) available to designers today. Because it is open source it has support from thousands of talented programmers that have added to the core functionality of Joomla! in what seems to be a never ending variety fo ways. Joomla! is a module based templated CMS platform. This is where it shines over WordPress as Content can be placed in any of the preset module positions that are designed for both static and dynamic content. There are many pre-made templates available for free that allow unbelievable flexibility in the way that content can be displayed through your web portal.

Additional functionality such as community management, message boards, ecommerce, rating systems, twitter interations, facebook integrations, etc.. are all very simple upgrades for a Joomla! installation. Once one fully understands the incredible power of the CMS platform, the ease with which it is manipulated and added to is incredible. Designers are free to make custom templates and easily port WordPress or basic HTML websites into Joomla! templates. All of these features mentioned are free to anyone with the time and the talent to learn how to master Joomla!

Joomla!, for all it’s great flexibility still has some shortcomings. One of the most obvious shortcomings is it’s inability to produce a serious blogging platform that would rival WordPress. There are several plugins available that try to provide blogging integration for Joomla, but the only one that even attempts to rival WordPress is still in beta and is not free.

WordPress has long been known to be the king of blogging software. Many people today use WordPress to manage their entire website. WordPress is complete capable of being used in this way. In the future we expect that WordPress will be developed to rival Joomla! in it’s ability to be used as a complete and fully functional CMS. For the time being WordPress is limited in it’s ability to fully function as a dynamic web portal in the way that Joomla! is. Today one can setup a complete website designed using wordpress software complete with static web pages and Blogging functionality, even ecommerce and more. WordPress is faster and more lightweight that Joomla! which is always a plus for a web design. When it comes to a fully functional Blogging system there is no match… WordPress is king.

If you are looking to build yourself a small site or one that is geared specifically toward being a Blog, then this article may not be for you since a pure WordPress installation will be just fine for your needs. If you require the full functionality of Joomla! for your website deign, but still want to have the power of WordPress Bloggings software integrated into your website design… then please read on!

The best part of both Joomla! and WordPress is that they are both free open source software. Anyone with the skills to master the software can design stunning websites completely free of charge. This is why both of these softwares are so popular around the world today.

There are many plugins that will provide blogging features for a Joomla! website, but some people require more!

In order to install WordPress onto a Joomla! installation we recommend installing the software into a subdirectory such as yourwebsite.com/blog. This will ensure that none of your Joomla! files will be conflicting with the WordPress files.

Once the WordPress files are complety installed simply continue to setup the WordPress installation as you would any normal WordPress install.

Now you will have access to the WordPress blog by visiting your blog URL at mywebsite.com/blog. You can customize the WordPress template through your admin section of your WordPress installation. Customizing the WordPress installation to match your Joomla! website may be the most challenging part for people that are not well versed in PHP code and website design. You may need the assistance of a professional in order to exactly match the WordPress template to your Joomla! website template. For an experiened website designer however, this will only take a short while to complete. If you need assistance with this please contact us. We will write a tutorial on how to completely customize the default WordPress template to match ANY Joomla! template in the near future. In the meantime please contact us directly if you need asssistance.

Once the WordPress installation has been made to look like the rest of your website (by modifying the header.php,index.php,footer.php,single.php, and comments.php files in the WordPress themes folder) you simply have to link the mywebsite.com/blog URL as an external link in your Joomla! menu.

Now you have the best of both worlds. A Joomla! website that is completely integrated with a powerful WordPress blog.

You can customize the WordPress blog with your favorite widgets and plugins just as you would any other WordPress installation. We highly recommend submitting a second Sitemap to Google Webmaster tools for your Blog since you will already have one for your main Joomla! website content.

Sit back and start enjoying the benefits of a well optimized website and powerful Blogging software which will help you in your efforts of dominating your market!

Example Joomla/Wordpress Blog Integrations:

• http://www.burnseo.com/blog
• http://fivestarsmortgage.com/blog
• http://www.nfmmortgage.com/blog
• http://www.harddmoneyloans.com/blog

The first thing you should evaluate when considering if Stumble Upon will be right for your needs is your goals. If you are looking to get lots of new business and convert visitors into qualified sales opportunities then chances are that Stumble Upon may not meet those needs directly.

I say directly because INDIRECTLY, Stumble Upon is able to provide valuable links to your business when used properly which can help with link popularity for your site and ultimately assist in your search engine optimization ranking results.

Stumble Upon is great at bringing lots of traffic to your site. Many of those users will find your content useful and will therefore link back to it. This is where Stumble Upon shines above many of the other social media sites available today in our opinion.

GETTING STARTED

Stumble Upon is very simple to use. When you sign up as a member we highly recommend downloading the SU toolbar as this will make it much easier for you to network and share content through SU in the future. In a moment we will get into how to properly utilize the toolbar. Before you can get into those specifics however, it is important to understand how to gain a large network in SU, which will provide a solid foundation for pushing your content amongst the SU Universe.

GROW YOUR NETWORK

As with any social media site, networking and connecting with friends that share similar interest is key to your success. SU makes it fairly easy to build a large community of friends that share similar interest to you. Before adding friends you should personalize your profile. When you are logged into your profile click on home and you will see the “preferences” link on the far right of your toolbar. Use this link to put your personal details, links to your other social media profiles, and most importantly your interest. It’s important to update your interests as they change since this will help other SU users that share your interest connect with you, in turn growing your community.

As you can see, when you view another users profile SU is kind enough to tell you very quickly how compatible you are likely to be for each other based upon your interests and stumbling history. This saves you the time of having to look through each users entire portfolio of stumbles. Once you find someone that is close enough to your interest for your satisfaction, adding them as a friend is also very simple. Simply use the “Send friend request” found at the bottom of the users info on the right hand side of the screen. This will send an email request to the user who will in turn review you and either accept or deny you as a friend. Once they accept you as a friend you are both connected and can easily share content with one another.

Building up a large network of friends is a must for maximizing SU’s potential. It is recommended that you make a habit of adding new friends as often as possible. Each friend that you are viewing will also have a list of their friends. It’s likely that someone that is compatible with you will also have somewhat compatible friends in their network. SU shows you a list of their friends making it easy for you to sift through their networking and sending friends request to as many of their connected friends as you like. SU does have a daily limit and if you add too many friends in one day you will get a lovely message from SU telling you to take it easy and that you are adding too many friends at one time.

USING STUMBLE UPON

Now that you understand what SU is great for and how to build up your network, lets take a look at how to easily add content and share it properly.

As we mentioned earlier in the article, we highly recommend the use of the SU toolbar for your everyday stumbling/sharing/commenting.

The Toolbar makes it simple for you to use SU in your everyday web surfing. When your browser is open you will be able to see how many shares your friends have sent to you easily. Simply press the button next to the numbers to view the pages that your friends have shared with you. While viewing the page you can choose to “like”, “dislike”, or do nothing with the shared page. Use the thumbs up or thumbs down button if you like the content. We recommend not using the dislike button if you want to stay on good terms with your friends. If someone sends you something offensive (which can be weeded out through the parental control in your preferences) or that you otherwise don’t like it’s much easier to remove the friend from your list then to start a negative chain by down voting their content.

If you have time it’s always nice if you can leave a comment on the pages your friends refer to you using the comment button on the toolbar. This will take you to a page where you can see all the other comments on this page as well as leave your own comment.

These simple actions of up-voting and commenting your friends shares will help you become recognized by your friends. Leave them a note to let them know that you up-voted and shared their stumble so that when you share your content with them they will be more likely to return the favor.

Sharing a new blog post or web page is very simple. All you have to do is click the up-vote button while viewing a web page and you will be able to add the details of the page to your Stumbles where you can share it with your network of friends. Be sure to use proper tags and descriptions when adding your pages for maximum effectiveness.

SHARING YOUR STUMBLES BRINGS TRAFFIC!

Once you Stumble your new content, log into your Stumble Upon account and go to your home. From here you can see all your recent shares and liked pages. Find the content you want to share with your friends in the list. It will take SU a few minutes to capture your image and display it here so don’t be worries if you have the blank image for your share right now, it will populate shortly automatically.

When you hover your mouse over the page you want to share, you will get a small popup in the lower right hand corner that says “share”. Clicking this button will open up the sharing pop-up on the right hand side of your page.

You can choose to share this Stumble with select friends or click the “all” box to send it to all of your friends at once. Below the friends list you can type a custom message that will display to your friends in their SU toolbar when they view your shared Stumble on their browser. Here you can type a brief message they can view to peak their interest. It is recommended you utilize this space for maximum effectiveness of your shared Stumbles. If your friends like it they will share it with their network and so on bringing you vast amounts of traffic to your site!

It’s important to note that you should not spam your friends with every single post you make on all of your blogs. There are several reasons for this. The most important reason is that SU gives a ranking formula for each users importance. If you Stumble Content from the same site only you will be flagged as a spammer and your shares will have little weight or even worse you can be banned. Don’t let this happen to you.

Share a variety of content in your particular areas of interest to help yourself build up a reputation as an authority on the topic in your network.

BECOME AN AUTHORITY STUMBLER

There are a few tips you can use to help your shares have more weight. SU has implemented a five star system and it’s thought that the more starts your shares have, the more likely they are to pop up when people Stumble something in it’s category.

In order to be a power SU users try to follow these pointers:

• Share and Stumble a variety of good content
• Give Testimonials to other users
• Try to get as many reviews/testimonials from your friends as possible

To understand social media marketing one should first look at a general history from whence it was spawned. In the recent past search engine optimization consisted of webmasters exchanging links with one another. This was done to provide both traffic and link popularity for both webmasters involved in the exchange. Google and other search engines quickly learned that random linking between unrelated sites for the sole purpose of increasing one’s link popularity was not a good way to judge the importance of a website.
This is where one way linking rises in importance. In the past the best source of one way links was from directories that would link to your website. It was great! You could control your anchor text and be listed amongst other relevant verbiage on the linking website. Again it didn’t take long for the big G and it’s wanna be friends to devalue these one way directory links. What was a webmaster to do? Enter blogging! The beginning of social media was born through the advent of blogging. With a blog a webmaster was able to not only gain one way relevant links form his blog to his websites, but he/she was also able to build up a “social” following. These users benefited by gaining content that they could share with their own users as well as linking back to the original poster benefiting his website with traffic and one way links. It didn’t take long for savvy webmasters to begin to ruin the value of this revolutionary new platform. The game was simple. Comment on the related blog linking back to your site. Sure you added absolutely no value whatsoever in most cases to the original blog post, but you got free one way links that you had complete control over back to your sites! The world was great again until the nofollow attribute came into being. The nofollow attribute made it so that any link going out with the nofollow tag attached to it passed absolutely no redeeming link juice to the outgoing link. This didn’t make those eager beaver webmasters happy and so the search for easy one way links continued.

What was the next big thing for our webmaster to destroy through gaming of systems and greed? BOOKMARKING! Yes sites popped left and right providing webmasters with a source to list their favorite bookmarks (back links). All was great until this source of juicy back link was devalued as well at the hands of said abusers of systems.

Enter Social Media Websites

Social media websites are places where webmasters can submit their links, pictures, articles, videos, audio, or any other media sources. In most cases these submissions are then able to be made “popular” by community participation. The more votes you get the fastest the more popular your submission becomes and therefore the more eyeballs it will get on it.
This is the simple explanation of what a social media website is all about. In fact social media marketing has become an entire industry unto itself. The savvy webmaster has to play a lovely tightrope walking game.

• More users viewing your content and potentially clicking on links back to your site.
• Free one way relevant links back to your site!
• Articles themselves rank well in search engines helping you to cover more keywords quicker

The press release and article submission sites get regular fresh content and therefore they already have good page rank with the search engines. Your article gets immediate search engine recognition for being listed on their sites!

Some of the free sites we prefer to use include:

• Go Articles
• Article City
• Isnare
• PR Log
• Ezine Articles
• 24-7 Press Release

and many others. If you are not currently submitting press releases and articles as part of your overall SEO strategy strongly encourage you to start doing them immediately.