I got the site up and running, updated some content, and then submitted my sitemap information to the Google Webmaster Tools. As usual, the next step is to wait and see how long it takes Google to start regularly indexing the site.

Instant Indexing

When I checked my site’s info in Webmaster Tools the next day, I found something strange – a page in the site was already cached in the index.

I had included a link to the site in the article here. This site has a decent reputation with Google. According to SEO Meter, this site gets crawled every 1 to 2 days.

Apparently, Google crawled the site, followed the link, and cached that page in the index. It has yet to sort through the new links and the sitemap, but the home page is accessible through a Google search.

Get Articles Listed Quickly

This leads me to a pretty useful bit of information. If you have a link on a trusted site to an page that is previously unknown to Google, it will quickly get stored in the index.

I’ve never found this type of quick response with directory listings or forum links. I suppose the difference here is that it’s a direct content to content link that carries some real weight.

If you already run a website – or if you write articles at Associated Content or a similar site – this seems like a pretty good strategy for jump-starting the crawling process. Choose some of your main landing pages and link to them immediately from other sites that you own and write for.

This will send Google your way, get your pages indexed, and start bringing in a modicum of search engine traffic. From there, you can wait for the rest of your link building strategy to help improve your SERP and Page Rank.

For now, let’s stick with the traffic component. Can a social bookmarking site direct significant traffic to your site, and is it worth your trouble to use them?

Case One: Digg

I’ve used a variety of social bookmarking sites while promoting this site – Digg being one of them. Although some people have had tremendous success with Digg, I haven’t. Most of the articles I Digg end up falling off the recently submitted page without too many Diggs.

In the past two months, I’ve had a dozen or so articles go up on Digg and I’ve only gotten 230 visits in return. Most of those articles fall off the page after I’ve gotten a handful of visits.

Two articles were moderately successful. One article I didn’t submit myself – a reader Dugg it and it promptly gained about 20 Diggs. Despite its relative popularity, it didn’t bring in a whole lot of traffic.

Many of my articles are designed to garnish search engine traffic, so that may be why they don’t appeal to users scanning a bookmark list. I did write another article that focused more on an attention grabbing topic and less on search engine juju, and it did ok on Digg (~100 visits).

For whatever reason, Digg hasn’t been tremendously helpful for me. I still leave it on the toolbar at the bottom – so that users can Digg an article they like – but I don’t actively submit many articles hoping for traffic.

Case Two: dZone

While browsing through social bookmarking sites to promote this site, I stumbled on dZone.

At first I was excited. It’s geared towards programmers and web developers, so my technically oriented articles should have done well. Not so much.

Perhaps I haven’t found the right approach to take. Some articles were probably too rudimentary for the savvy audience, while the more advanced articles didn’t have attention grabbing topics.

I’ve gotten a little bit of traffic from dZone – slightly less than from Digg – but it’s nothing to write home about. I continue to use it every now and again to gain some backlinks, but I don’t count on it for traffic either.

Case Three: Stumblupon

Unlike Digg and dZone, Stumble Upon has done a great job.

One day I looked at my Google Analytics data, and I thought the thing had broken. An average day at the time was about 2-300 visits – and this day showed as over 2,000 visits.

I went into the data and found out that one of articles was bringing in a ton of traffic from Stumble Upon. The same article that brought in about 100 visits on Digg brought in over 2000 visits from Stumble Upon.

I wish I knew why it did that well, and how I could repeat it, but it just kind of happened.

Within the last few days, I’ve also noticed another page bringing in a decent amount of Stumble traffic. For the past several days, it’s brought in 50+ visits each day. I’m wondering how long that’ll last before the page gets shuffled out of the index.

Bottom Line

In terms of traffic, social bookmarking sites can be effective but they seem to be out of your own control.

I haven’t had a lot of luck with Digg and dZone, but I have had some good luck with StumbleUpon.

The best performing articles were submitted by other people, though – not me. Maybe those people had fans that followed their bookmarks, leading more traffic to my site. Or maybe it’s just luck of the draw.

My advice would be to leave a selection of “Share This” icons at the end of your article to encourage users to submit it to their favorite bookmarking sites. However, don’t hold your breath and wait for a ton of traffic to come in.

In the meantime, consider the SEO benefits of social bookmarking sites. We’ll come back to that another time.

Why? I was able to work in a few nice backlinks to my site and my articles. I’ll earn some cash if it gets traffic of its own.

How Does Squidoo Work?

Squidoo is another writing site online – with a bit of a twist.

Squidoo isn’t about articles… it’s about “lenses.” Each lens is a mini-website. It’s longer and more in depth than an article – but it’s only one page.

You add all the content you want about your topic – writing, pictures, polls, link lists, etc – and hope users come a knockin. If you do get traffic, you get a portion of the advertising revenue.

You can eke out a few extra bucks by including items for sale on your lens – like books at Amazon.com.

Why Did I Write a Lens at Squidoo?

I’m pretty sure my lens (XML Through PHP) isn’t going to make a ton of money. That’s no reason to scoff at the idea, though.

The lens I created was (as you might have guessed from the title) about XML and PHP. In the past week or so, I’ve written three articles here about working with XML. Do you see where I’m going with this?

The lens is an overview of working with XML. Three parts of the lens are hooks to get the reader to come read an article here about a particular application of XML in PHP.

In writing this lens, I accomplished a number of tasks. I created a useful online resource – it should be educational for someone that’s new to working with XML and PHP together. I created some advertisement for my site – any readers of the lens should be enticed to click on one or another of my links. I also improved the SEO of my site by including five targeted backlinks from the lens to content on my own site.

You Should Join Too!

I don’t see any reason not to join Squidoo and make a lens or two about your niche.

You can create optimized links to your site and also capture some extra search engine traffic and direct it back to your site. There’s a decent referral system in place – you get $5 if a referree makes $15. You can also diversify your online writing portfolio and make a little more loot every month.

So head on over to Squidoo, sign up, and write your own lens.

What is Xomba.com? It’s just another site you can write for on the ‘net – and get a share of the revenue through your AdSense account. This makes it ripe for writing short articles that feature your own website – full of targetted backlinks.

There are two types of articles on Xomba – Xombytes and Xomblurbs.

Xombytes are typical articles. They should be a couple hundred words (or more). If I write a Xombyte about one of my websites, I use the same tactic that I use on Associated Content – I write an overview of a topic and include links to two or three of my own articles. For optimal SEO, I usually try to sneak in a link to my front page as well on a targeted keyword like “PHP,” “programming,” or “web design.”

Xomblurbs are even simpler. They seem ripe for backlink generation. They’re essentially social bookmarking articles – you submit a link and a short description. That description can contain html.

So in a Xomblurb I write a short title, add the link to my own article, write a two sentence intro, and then end with something like “This is one of many web design and traffic improvement articles located at the site.” In the last sentence, I link to two of the categories on my blog.

Although I only write a couple of sentences, I can quickly generate three backlinks to my site – two with nicely targeted keywords that are good for SEO.

There’s probably not a whole lot of PR in these pages, but it’s a ridiculously simple and easy way to generate backlinks to your site. I’m going through and writing one or two Xomblurbs a day on my old articles, and I plan on posting most of my new articles there as well. Seems well worth the investment in time for a bit of SEO.

Here’s a sample Xomblurb if you want to check it out.

There are plenty of places to look for free backlinks – some of better quality than others. One trick you can use to build up a decent collection of backlinks is to regularly post on forums in your niche.

Not All Backlinks Are Created Equally

Before you go about posting on every forum you can find, understand that not all backlinks are of equal value.

Some forums (as well as blog comment areas) use the rel="nofollow" attribute in links. This means that Google (and possibly other search engines) ignores the link when crawling and calculating search engine placement.

Some other search engines – like Yahoo – may still count these. There’s no certain way to know how valuable they are, so I wouldn’t just ignore them. However, if you have a choice you should steer your time and effort to forums where the links you create do not contain the rel="nofollow" attribute.

Where Do I Put the Links?

On most forums, it’s considered bad form to just run around posting links to your site. Be sure to read the rules for the forum. Some forums may allow you to link to your site if the article directly relates to a question someone else asked.

However, there are two places you’ll generally be able to put backlinks.

In your profile, you should be able to set a “Homepage” value. Always do this. On some forums – like Programming Talk – each post contains a link to your homepage by your name.

You can also create a signature. This appears at the end of every post you make, and it is typically considered ok to place self-promoting links here. Some forums will have special rules about this – so be sure to read them.

Once you place links in your signature, make them count. This is a great place to start doing SEO. If you already have a link to your homepage underneath your name, I would use the signature to link to some deeper pages – like content categories. Give the links targeted text (like “PHP Tutorials” or “Web Design Tips”).

A Few Forums to Start With

Since you’re a webmaster, you’ll always find something interesting to talk about on webmaster forums. Here are a few well-trafficked forums that I frequent.

• DaniWeb – I think signature links here are rel=nofollow, but it’s a good forum
• Digital Point – Lots of traffic, and links are followed
• Programming Talk – Decent traffic, and links are followed
• Site Point – Lots of traffic, and links are followed

Start Posting!

What are you waiting for? Get out there and start posting!

If your website isn’t about websites, then you should probably search out some other forums based on your niche as well.

Forum backlinks aren’t going to make your website a success by themselves, but they are a good stepping stone to better SEO. You can use them to quickly build up backlinks for a new site until you start getting better backlinks from other sites.

Another site I’ve found useful is Gimp Tutorials. They’re a great place to list any graphics tutorials that you write for the GIMP graphic design program.

In case you don’t know what GIMP is, head to the Gimp homepage. It’s a free, open source graphic editing suite – similar in many ways to the expensive, proprietary Adobe Photoshop.

Gimp Tutorials is another niche directory where you can submit appropriate tutorials for listing. In this case, appropriate means just about anything related to creating or editing an image in Gimp.

I wrote a very basic tutorial to show users how to create a gradient background image in GIMP. Since I submitted the tutorial to Gimp Tutorials, slightly less than week ago, they’ve sent me 200 visits.

There was a brief spike on the first day, and I’ve been getting a steady stream of 20-30 visitors each day after that.

There doesn’t appear to be a lot of turnover on the site, so my tutorial is still listed third on the front page. That’s after five days. That’s a pretty lengthy period of exposure – considering that others sites (like Good Tutorials) turnover in about a day.

So if you write any tutorials for GIMP, don’t hesitate to submit them here. It’s a good way to drive a few extra users to your latest article.

So how do you keep on writing? Where do all the new ideas come from?

Everybody’s got their own tricks, but here’s one that I love to use when I’m short on ideas. Go through your search engine logs and see what people are searching for – and not finding.

Here’s an example. Last week I wrote an article on How to Create Style-able CSS Tooltips.

As usual, I was browsing through the Google Analytics data a day or two later. While looking through the Search Engine results (the queries that people used to come to my site), I noticed that someone used the query “gradient background image gimp.”

The odd thing about this was that the article wasn’t about creating background images in Gimp – I just happened to mention at the end that you could use Gimp to create a gradient background image and add it to your tooltip.

This tells me two things.

First, someone is looking for this information. If I write it… they will come.

Second, someone else is not serving this information up. If a user stumbles on one of my articles that just barely mentions the topic, there can’t be a lot of targeted articles out there.

I decided to take the topic and run with it. A few days later, I wrote a simple tutorial about how to create a gradient background image in Gimp. I targeted the article at those major keywords – gradient, background, image, Gimp – and now it’s getting some nice search engine traffic.

So if you’re ever short on ideas, this is a great way to respark that creativity. Look through your search engine logs for queries that bring people in – but don’t bring people to what they’re looking for. Then… give them what they want.

But even if you’re not interested in being published on someone else’s site, AC can be a great tool for you as a webmaster. You can use it to get optimized backlinks and targeted traffic.

If you’re not familiar with AC, here’s a quick rundown of how it works. You write an article which you can either submit for up front payment (in which you get paid ~3-8 bucks if they like it) or you can bypass the review process and get published immediately (without upfront payment).

Either way, once your article is published you earn a revenue share (Performance Payment, $1.50 per 1000 page views). The good thing about skipping the up front payment is you can post articles that advertise your site – without it getting reviewed and picked over.

Although most of my AC articles are strictly for content, I have created a few as an experiment for gaining backlinks and traffic. Here’s what I typically do.

I identify a topic on one of my sites that I’ve written a few articles on (3-4). Then I write a brief “Guide” article that gives the reader an overview of the topic. I dedicate one to two paragraphs to the sub-topics that each of my pages targets, and I include a link to my content page so that the reader can get more information.

You can see an example with this article on graphic organizers. It targets three content pages that I wrote on my other website (Babel). It also gives the user some useful information.

I originally tried this strictly as a method to gain backlinks. On that grounds, it definitely worked. I included four links to my site – one to the front page and three to individual content pages. They were indexed quickly and picked up by the search engines.

The unintended consequence of this is that it directed a bit of traffic to my site, too. It’s by no means a vast amount of traffic, but every little bit counts. In the past week, that article sent 21 visits to my site – a couple of visits per day (see the Google Analytics screenshot).

Doesn’t sound like a lot, but consider this. If you write ten guide articles that get an average of ten click throughs per week – that’s another 400 visits per month. On top of that, you’ll get 30-40 backlinks with keywords that you chose to best benefit your site.

This seems like a great tool for promoting your site – especially a relatively new site. You can get optimized backlinks, you can drive some traffic, and you even get income from Associated Content if people do read your article.

Get paid for advertising your own site? I don’t think it gets any better than that. Go sign up for Associated Content and write a few stump articles yourself.

I’ve tried out a few methods, with varying success. What has worked really well, so far, is submitting an article to a niche site: Good Tutorials.

People often advise you to submit your articles to social networking and article sites. Often times this will get you a few backlinks and little to no traffic.

I stumbled on Good Tutorials when I was looking for some information on a different topic. After browsing around the site, I noticed that they take and review submissions of tutorials for inclusion in the directory. I thought what the hell, let me try it out.

I submitted the tutorial I wrote about creating a php script to send trackbacks. After signing up and submitting the tutorial, they told me it would take one to two days to be reviewed.

I never got an e-mail back confirming that my tutorial had been accepted or not. I forgot about it for a couple of days – kind of busy at work. Then, today, I logged in to see what the status was.

My tutorial had been accepted two days ago. In that time frame, it got 95 clicks. I logged into Google Analytics, and sure enough there was a big jump in traffic. Good Tutorials had sent me approximately 90 visits, and some of those people had looked around the site at other entries and articles.

I also noticed a bit of traffic coming from another new site – Tuts Buzz. I checked it out and it was another tutorial directory. A link to my tutorial had shown up there as well, probably from Good Tutorial’s feed.

Whether or not I’ll continue to get substantial traffic from these sites, I don’t know. It may be that I’m getting some click throughs because my tutorial is on the “Newest Tutorials” list. Maybe it’ll drop off to nothingness when it just becomes a filed away tutorial.

However, it definitely seems to be a worthwhile way to get some traffic. Unlike a lot of article sites – that send you a few low PR backlinks and no traffic – I got a real measurable increase in traffic.

So, if you write any tutorials on coding, software, or technology – head over to Good Tutorials and see about getting your own listing.