How to Use Squidoo to Promote a Website

Visitors are crucial to your website’s success, and in order to get visitors you must promote your website. There are many free tools online that can help you promote your site. One of these is Squidoo. Squidoo is a site that allows you to build mini-sites called lenses. So why would you need one of these if you already have a website? Because they are quick and easy to build, and they can give your site added exposure at no cost to you.

- Create a Squidoo account. All you have to do is fill in some basic information and confirm your email address, and you’re all set to start building lenses.

- Come up with a topic for the first lens. It should be something that relates to your website, and something that you can write at least a short introduction about. Click the “Make Your Own Lens” link on any page to get started.

- Decide what you want to do with the lens. Once you’ve entered what the lens is about, you’ll have to choose. You can spread the word about your topic, earn money, or make a list. If you want to keep your options open, select “I just want to do my own thing” and continue.

- Fill in information about the lens. Choose a descriptive title and URL, and keywords that people would use to find the information you’re providing.

- Write an interesting introduction for the lens. Try to fit in relevant keywords so that people will find it more easily, and provide useful information.

- Add modules to the lens. If you selected any option other than doing your own thing earlier, there will be some modules already added. Add the requested information to the ones you want to keep, and click the “X” to delete modules that you don’t want. You can also add more modules if you like. Some good ones to use when promoting a website are RSS feeds, link lists, and text modules.

- Once you’ve published the lens, promote it. Submit it to social networking sites such as StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us.

How To Use Basic SEO For Your Blog

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) isn't just for business sites and professional bloggers anymore. Learn how a few simple techniques can increase the traffic, and income potential, for your personal blog.

Before beginning to use basic SEO to improve your blog's page rank, you should first understand why it is a good thing to do. How high your blog ranks for search engines determines how easy it will be for new readers to find your blog by using a search engine. For example, if you are blogging about free traffic, you want people searching for "free traffic" or "free traffic blog" to be able to find your blog. That will only happen if your page is search engine optimized, and has a high rank.

• To use basic SEO for your blog, you should first have an idea of who is reading your blog currently, and who you would like to eventually read your blog. Knowing your audience is an important step. You will need to know what your audience is looking for. For example, if you blog about food, your audience may be looking for recipes, product reviews, and stories about cooking.

• Once you know what your audience is looking for, it is time to pick out your keywords. Keywords are what people type into search engines, such as Yahoo or Google, when they are looking for something. If someone is looking for a blog about a mom who works at home and has three kids, they might search for "mommy blog" "Work at home mom" "mom with three kids" or other similar phrases. The words in the quotation marks would be keywords, or key phrases, in this case. Figure out what words or phrases best fit your blog, and write them out in a list.

• Use your keywords, where relevant, in your posts. If you blog about food, and your keywords include "Recipes" "Quick meals" and "Healthy Snacks" you should be sure to use them in your blog posts, if they fit. A post about healthy snack ideas should use the phrase "healthy snacks" 5-10 times, depending on how long the post is. Search engines will notice the extra use of "healthy snacks" and list that post in it's list of sites about healthy snacks.

• Another basic SEO step for your blog is to use your keywords for post tags and for categories. Search engines put extra emphasis on the words and phrases used this way. You should also use your keywords in headings, post titles, and when naming pages.

• Learn how to properly use links. Links are important for your site's SEO. Search engines will notice links between sites. If you link to a site with a higher search engine rank than yours, your rank can go up a little. This depends on several factors, but it is always a good idea to link out to trustworthy sites. When you use links, be sure to use relevant words for the link itself. For example, if you were linking to another blog, and the post was titled "Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe," the linked text (where readers click to access the other site) should read "Best Chocolate Chip Cookies Recipe" or something similar, not "this post" or "read it here." Extra weight is given to the linked text. Make it count.

• Use pictures to improve your blog's search engine ranking. Pictures that are related to your topic, such as a baby on a mommy blog, can help your blog's rank. When picking out a title for a picture, choose something that relates to the post, because search engines use titles to figure out what the picture is of. "Pic1" or the number assigned by your digital camera won't help you. If your blogging platform (Wordpress, Blogger, ect.) allows you to use the "alt-tag" you should also make use of that for your keywords, if they apply. The same goes for your description field, if it is available.

• Another basic SEO technique is to update regularly by posting often. Search engines like to put the most current results in their highest ranked positions. A blog that hasn't been updated in three months will probably not get the top spot. Regular posting also increases the amount of material, and keywords, on your site, improving your search engine rank even more.

How to Use Technorati

Technorati is a website dedicated exclusively to blogs and personal sites. It compiles of blogs, titles, authors and users like no other site online. This can help you both as a reader and as a site designer/creator. As a reader, you can filter and customize content through Techhorati. As an author, Technorati can help you draw content to your site and see which posts are more popular, for example. Here are five things you can do with Technorati.

• Read a blog's content feed. Just like any other RSS feed reader, Technorati provides you with blurbs of content from any blog registered on the site. Let's say you want to read blogs about the presidential elections. Just go ahead and do a blog search--by name, author or a simple word--and click on one of the blogs that show up. The latest content on the blog or site will display as a list of posts that you can read on Technorati or by following the links to the original site.

• Read reactions to a blog posting. As if it were a conversation thread, Technorati will show different reactions to entries after they were posted, and how blogs link to each other when covering the same topic.

• Check a site's authority. Technorati classifies blogs and sites by authority, that is, the number of times someone posts a link to your site. The higher the rank, the more incoming links you have to your site. If you just registered yours, this number might actually be a question mark. Don't worry; Technorati is gathering information about you site.

• Post a Technorati widget on your site. Get the best out of Technorati and visit the Blogger Central. There, you can find all sorts of widgets and gadgets available for you to use on your own site.

• Explore multimedia content. Technorati selects and updates all the photos and videos that have been uploaded to the web and through different blogs. You can check them on the photos and the video section as if it were a gallery. Instead of visiting all those blogs, you can check the content with one click.

How To Use StumbleUpon

StumbleUpon is an increasingly popular web tool that allows users to choose preferences for Internet surfing and view websites that fit those parameters. This article will show you how to sign up for a StumbleUpon account, what the account is for, how to download and install the StumbleUpon toolbar, how to use the StumbleUpon toolbar and how to write a review for websites you visit, using the StumbleUpon toolbar.

• Visit the StumbleUpon website and sign up for an account. During the account process StumbleUpon will prompt you to install the StumbleUpon toolbar. Follow the directions onscreen for this.

• Now that you're StumbleUpon toolbar has been installed, it's time to stumble. Click the "Stumble" button located at the left of the StumbleUpon toolbar. On first use, StumbleUpon will prompt you to select your interests. When you "stumble" you will only stumble onto pages that relate to your choosen interests. For instance, if you said science was an interest of yours, some of the sites you StumbleUpon would be science sites.

• Now that you've stumbled onto a site you've more than likely never been to before, let StumbleUpon know if you like it or not by clicking either the thumbs up or thumbs down button on the StumbleUpon toolbar. If you'd like, you can also write a review of this website by clicking the "talk bubble" just two buttons away from the thumbs down button. Add your review to the list of reviews.

• From the StumbleUpon toolbar you can also email your friends about the website you are visiting by clicking the "send to" button on the toolbar.

• Clicking the green double arrow on the StumbleUpon toolbar will allow you to Stumble through certain sites, such as Blogger. If you select Blogger from this list, whenever you click the stumble button you will be brought to a blogger page. To switch back to random websites, click the Earth button.

• Clicking the button on the toolbar containing the two people will allow you to view websites that your friends said they liked. To do this though you must have added friends to your account. If you don't have any yet, no worries you can go back to StumbleUpon and do this. Simply allow StumbleUpon temporary access to your email account to pull email addresses and send invites or search for friends of yours that might already have a stumble account.

• Other buttons on the toolbar include: the newspaper button, which will show you news item sites; the image button, which will show you sites with images as the main theme and it will show you images on Flickr or other public image hosting sites; and the video button will show you a video at StumbleUpon.

• Also included with the toolbar is the tools drop-down menu, which allows you to invite friends, sign in and out, and more.

How To Get Free Unlimited Traffic From StumbleUpon

Do you want to get free unlimited traffic to your web site or blog? Maybe you are writing articles to make money online and you would like to generate the number of visitors to read your articles. You can use Stumbleupon to generate free unlimited traffic to your site or blog.

• 1st
Join stumbleupon and begin to give a "thumbs up" to those web sites , web logs, and online articles that you like. You can start by giving this article a thumbs up. You want to do the same to your articles.

• 2nd
Stumbleupon has an active community that you can make friends and view the sites they like if you have similar interests. It is best to be a friend to those peoples with similar interest so when you ask them to take a look at your blog, web site or articles they will also be interested. This way you build a reputation in a certain niche.

• 3rd
Download the Stumbleupon tool bar. Stumbleupon is unique to social bookmarking sites in that it offers a toolbar to allow you to stumble a site without logging in to stumble upon. Stumble every site you like. It also saves the sites so you can go back to them at a later time.

• 4th
Request your friends to Stumble your web sites, blogs, and articles. The importance of the online community is to support one another. Especially if you have similar interest. The more your site or article is stumbled it will be promoted as "recently popular", "top rated", "most shared", and "recent rated". Quality content, Good title, good presentation and lots of networking builds web traffic to your article, web site and / or blog.

• 5th
Ultimately when you use StumbleUpon as social networking tool which you generate free unlimited traffic to your web site, Blog, or even article. This increased free traffic increases your page rank and income.