International Social Bookmarking Can do the Job

No doubt that social bookmarking is just a tiny part of SMM (social media marketing) and that SMM is just a small part of SEO or SEM, but you know what people say - All (big) things are amde of small pieces.
As far as I see it, if you work alone (with no SEO expert by your side) or have limited budget for your international marketing efforts (assuming, off course, your project suits the global market) - some international social bookmarking can give you the global exposure you are looking for, both in terms of relevant traffic and in terms of search engine positions.

First step is to know your other languages strong keywords
For this you need to have a healthy logic, more than a couple of hours and if you are lucky enough - some friends who speak the languages of the international markets you wish to target.
Sure, you can use some automatic translating tools like Yahoo babel Fish or Free Translations, but most chances are that you’d miss some important terms as well as distort others. If you got the money - get some expert translator or even better - an expert SEO who speak the language of the foreign market you are trying to reach.

Second step is to build your international bookmarking database
In order to find relevant bookmarking sites in your targeted languages, you need to know the translation of at least two important terms: “bookmarks” and “favorites”. Type these keywords in the search box of relevant search engines (google.de if you look for bookmarking sites in German or Yahoo.fr if you look for bookmarking sites in French and so on) and check the results. Most bookmarking sites look and behave the same, so you shouldn’t have any difficulties in understanding how to register as well as how to submit a site.

In addition, you can search for some blogs in your targeted markets (using google blog search or technorati) and check the bookmarking buttons at the buttom of their posts.
In any case, for your cnvenience, you can find some bookmarking sites in French and German at the end of this post.
Third step is bookmarking and socializing on a regular basis
Don’t just submit all your website’s pages under relevant kewords and then disappear. Submit other URLs (that aren’t yours but from the same niche and language), vote for others’ submissions and so on.  Remember - you can’t talk social bookmarking and do only one of the two. They go together so you must do them both if you want to succeed.

A list of Social Bookmarking Sites in French and German:
Bookmarks.fr (FR bookmarks)
Mesfavoris (FR bookmarks)
Excite (FR bookmarks)
Bookmarks Sites (FR bookmarks)
Plpage (FR bookmarks)
Bookeet (FR bookmarks)
Scoopeo (FR bookmarks)
Bluegger (FR bookmarks)
Yigg (DE bookamrks)
Webnews (DE bookamrks)
Folkd.de (DE bookamrks)
Bonitrust (DE bookamrks)
Kledy.eu (DE bookamrks)
Linksilo (DE bookamrks)
Lufee (DE bookamrks)
Minota (DE bookamrks)
Weblinkr (DE bookamrks)

Anything to add?
Feel free to comment or even bookmark…

p.s
Check this fine video by common craft if you’d like more basic info on social bookmarking:

Tiny URL - ‘Cause Size Does Matter

TinyURL makes me “Click the Link”
Don’t know what about you guys, but ’till I started to twitter I didn’t really need TinyURL eventhough I knew it was outhere, live and kicking. This post is dedicated to Kevin Gilbertson who invented TinyURL, ’cause as far as I see it, he is sort of a genius - not so much for changing long URLs to tiny ones, but for making me curious. TinyURL is a great marketing tool in terms that it makes me “click the link” otherwise (when seeing the URL behind it) I might not.

A Story about a Hot Lady in a Hot Red Dress
Admit it - if I tell you a story about some hot lady in a hot red dress and then invite you to see her picture on this URL: http://tinyurl.com/6be7xa  instead of this one: http://www.mccullagh.org/image/d30-14/bearded-lady-in-red-dress.html- you’ll definitely click the first one but you’d have your doubts about the second one, right?
A-Ha! That’s exactly what I’m talking about! TinyURL allows you to create some mystery around your outgoing links and that mystery works like magic in term of CTR.

Tiny vs. Whiney
As far as wiki can tell us about it, this may (and did) cause some problems such as easy spam or getting into sites that might offend you, but I think there are more advantages than disadvatages into TinyURL [Shout your thoughts on the comment section if you think differently  ] and at least the offending issue can be solved by using the preview version of TinyURL…

For those who are new to TinyURL, just before I say good night and make myself feel tiny again, here are …

Some TinyURLs You Might Aappreciate:
http://tinyurl.com/2pb7f8 - this TinyURL is somehow related to FireFox.
http://tinyurl.com/2vmzcv - this TinyURL deals with something I mentioned here earlier.
http://tinyurl.com/24lp7m - this TinyURL is for opera lovers (wink, wink!).
http://tinyurl.com/2hesey - this TinyURL is stat related.
http://elfurl.com/gpchk - this is like TinyURL but its elf based and it refers to a nice article on the topic that also mentioned http://snurl.com

Have anything to add?
Your shouting time begins now…

Blended Search Celebrates its first Birthday

I have just finished listening to Chris Sherman on the SMN webcast, talking about the advantages of blended search ( a year after it was launched) and I thought “What the hack? Why not summarizing it for you guys?”
so here it goes:

Blended Search - Definition
Blended search, also known by the name of “Universal Search” or “Search 3.0″, is incorporating results from non-web sources (like books, videos and images) into the regular web search results.

What is it Good For?
- The sources that we use to get information from are just the same, but we use them more than we did before the launch of blended search. Searchers no longer need to use the search engine’s different tabs (news, images, etc) - they get the relevant results for their search inquiry directly on the web results page. In other words - if “Vertical Search” was alive somewhere in the past, I guess there’s no doubt it’s starting to die now.

- Search marketers and businesses’ websites have more seats on first results page to “fight over”. Before “blended search” was born, websites could be shown on only 2 out of 10 results per page. Today, one can be shown on the same two seats from the past (seats that are reserved for the website’s pages, usually the homepage and some inner page) but also on other seats taken for social sites such as youtube (video results) or news sites (press releases).
Basically, one can be shown on most if not all of first pages’ results (take Britney Spears for example).

- Searchers are open to more sources of information otherwise they might not know about. Think about your old uncle - if not for the blended search, will he still be sending you funny YouTube videos? Moreover, the blended search makes the all process of searching much easier. looked for an IPhone and got a video result among others? With Google’s “Universal Search” results you don’t need to jump to the video site in order to watch it - Just click on the “Watch video” link (marked in red at the following example):

What is it Sad for? 
- Less precision: Vertical search resulted in better search results, since it was focused on specific search field (video, news, images etc). Blended search returns a wide range of results that are more speculative than accurate (in terms of what the searcher was searching for). This is clearly demonstrated by  the following screen shot taken from Chris Sherman’s webcast:

- No more “good old only web results”:  Google is no longer showing only web results. Even if you use the “web” tab in the search process, you’ll get the blended search results which means web sites, videos, images, news sources and alike. This lost of “only web feature” is quite sad, since there are still lots of people who’d like to get these results with no extras… 

- Bad blogs and products results: Search engines don’t index these two very well, so blended search in this term is quite poor. 

So what will Blended Search bring?
- Better and much more sophisticated statistic tools to track conversion rates out of different search results, such as video which is un-trackable at the moment.
- Better and much more sophisticated SEM efforts: Traditional SEO will be nothing but complemental, while search marketing will focus on viral video, creating juicy (and highly optimized) press releases and so on.

What do you say?
Do you see the future of blended search differently?

Feel like reading more about blended search? I bet you’ll enjoy the following:
Blended search increases your visibility ( April 2008 )
Blended search results study by iprospect ( April 2008 )
Google’s ranking advice in blended search ( February 2008 )
Optimizing for blended search ( January 2008 )
Search 3.0 by SearchEngineLand ( Nov 2007 )

How Much Does Your Site Worth?

I guess everyone would like to say that their site worth is more than six numbers, but online tools will say (or strive to say) the truth. In any case, I gathered some of the tools you can use to learn about your site’s worth as well as to show off about it…

dnScoop
dnScoop is one of my favorite and I think it is also the most reliable source to figure out sites’ and domains worth.  Checking Google.com’s worth, for example, returns an estimated value of $2,030,000,000.

dnScoop offers additional information such as:
Domain age - while stating that ”being older is better” in terms of existed websites,
Current Pagerank and if it’s valid
Number of inbound links
Current alexa rank,
IP report and
Link value by Text-Link-Ads. 

Website Value Calculator
websitevaluecalculator.com , lust like dnScoop, is 100% easy to use (user friendly). All you have to do is type your URL in the box and you get the site’s value. Google.com’s worth according to websitevaluecalculator is $1,561,822,935, a little less than the evaluation dnScoop’s gave us.

The “Website Value Calculator” site offers its users a banner to show off their sites’ value. Here is the banner Google could use if it felt like showing off…

My site is worth $1,561,822,935.
How much is yours worth?

Site Estimator
The SitEstimator allows you to get the worth of many sites by simply typing their URL and according to it, google.com’s worth is $90,749.59K. For those who’d like to offer the site estimator tool on their website or blog, just get the sitestimator’s widget …

Glurk
Glurk describes itself as a “website value calculator”, and maybe because of this it demands that you fill up lot of details before getting the simple answer of the value of whatever site you are interested in finding its worth.  Glurk age could be the reason for its being not very progressive tool as it is 9 years old and anyway I didn’t receive any propper answer from it when asking for Google’s worth…

What do you think?
Can you trust these tools even when they give different results?
Do you know some other site’s worth tools?