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:

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 )

My 3 Reasons to Use Sphinn

I can’t imagine search marketers and SEO specialists that haven’t heard about Sphinn yet (it was launched by Danny Sullivan on July 2007) but you know what they say - “never say never”… Any way, since lately I become quite an addict of this social news site, mainly as a source of information about the SEM industry, I feel like a few words won’t hurt no one (maybe even the opposite). These are my 3 reasons to use Sphinn:

1. Stay Up To Date & Diverse
Sphinn allows you to get the latest news from the SEM industry using not a single source but a diversity of sources, including some that aren’t very popular (yet). I don’t know what about you, but if you’re anything like me, I guess you got used to get your SEM reading mainly from one big source, such as search engine land for example. With Shpinn you can get a lot of worthy news items from different sources which is more than just refreshing.

2. Network Yourself
Sphinn community is built on people like you, who are in the business of SEM, SEO, SMO and so on. Visiting Sphinn on a regular basis allows you to get to know important others as well as to get your self known by them. Sphinn users can visit your profile and they’ll probably do that if you sphinn-up their submitted stories or submit an interesting story yourself. Since the users profile include plenty of communicating channels such as email or skipe address, facebook profile, linkedin, twitter and much more you can’t complaint you can’t reach others…

3. Win Traffic (for free)
Assuming you’re not one of those who live by the “time is money” phrase, by participating in Sphinn, especially via submitting news stories you wrote yourself, there’s a big chance you can get some free (and quite targeted) traffic to your blog or business site. Submitted stories at Sphinn can get to the “hot topics” (thus presented at the main page) list even with just a few votes such as a little bit higher than twenty.

 

 

 

Check what others had to say about Sphinn:
Sphinns (Positive)

The social news site every search marketer should be using (SEOmoz)
Confessions of a sphinn vote begging whore (Aim Clear Blog)
How to dominate Sphinn in 4 easy steps (Huomah)
XMCP’s Guide to Frontpaging Sphinn.com (Slightly Shady Seo)
Sphinning Sphinn (Search Engine Guide)
Is Sphinn bad for the industry (Bruce Clay)
Are You the Underdog in Sphinn? (Learning Seo Basics.com)

 

 

Desphinns (Negative)
Goodbye Sphinn (Andy Beard)
Sphinn is basically a popularity contest (Internet Hunger)
Sphinn spammers (Blogstorm)

 

 

SMO Panel on Sphinncon Israel 2008

To make things short, you can find the main SMO presentation by Eli Feldblum (CEO of Rank Above) on the following link: http://www.rankabove.com/sphinncon. 
It is called “Should You Social?” and as far as I see it, the answer, in most cases, is YES.

The SMO panel was the last one on the sphinncon event and I’m getting older and older so I droped my pen and just listened. Sorry.
In any case, if you read my first post on the shpinncon event, you must remember that most of the speakers made me a little bit sick. Apparently, I’m alergic to over-righteousness.

Just for your knowledge, the SMO panel participants were Eli Feldblum (Rank Above), Tzvika Avnery (Tagadam), Roi Carthy (TechCrunch) and Lior Hener (Yedda).

Most of what was said on the panel can be summarized by the following:

- SMO is not about getting more quality links but about approaching people (Lior).
- SMO and SMM both can be used effectively for branding purposes.
- At the end of the day, positions on SE are nothing comparing to an interesting product.
- One shouldn’t do SMO, as well as SEO, for a new “just launched” product. You should wait at least 6 monthsso you can learn your product, its audience, etc, and only after that you can start with the SSS (SEM, SEO, SMO) stuff (Roi).