If your activity is not very much dependant on time and location and you are not the sole service provider in the area, you certainly need advertising. If not advertising in its pure sense, then at least some efforts to make your business known beyond the circle of your actual clients, their friends and relatives.

There was a time when ads in the local newspaper would spread the word about you to everyone. Then came a time when you needed to bother about radio-coverage, publish a couple of leaflets, and, who knows, may be your city was big enough to have a TV channel.

Today, however, the issue of spreading information is not that simple. The thing is that the pool of information is bottomless. If you want to get your message through to me, for instance, it’s no use trying to do it with conventional advertising techniques. It was 1.5 years ago that I last saw a newspaper; I only occasionally come across a radio broadcast once in a couple of weeks; as for the television, I don’t watch it at all. And it’s not that I’m a snob who doesn’t care about the world around. The thing is that I don’t have time to follow all the information sources. And even if I did watch TV, how could one guess which of the dozens of channels I would pick that day. When there used to be only 3 TV channels, the term “information space” made some sense. But since their number saw an incredible increase, there have appeared numerous, practically isolated information spaces.

It’s true that some people can afford advertising through television, and radio, and newspapers and the Internet, but I’m going to focus on the latter. Just a year ago all you had to do is launch a site describing your services, spend a couple of dollars on Search Engine Optimization and contextual advertising (AdWords and such), and there would be no way for me to go past your message. But if you consider the amount of information digested by today’s users, it becomes quite clear that it is not enough anymore. Seriously, I use search engines by far less than I used to. And I haven’t been to the news sites for quite a time. The reason behind this is that I long ago realized what kind of information I need. So I get my daily portion of information from thoroughly selected RSS channels and social networks like Facebook and sometimes even MySpace. If I ran a business or targeted customers in another country I would have to master quite a different approach to social media, and have a presence in, say, Orkut for Brazil and India, LiveJournal for Russia, Hi5 for Columbia and Ecuador and so on.

What I’m driving at is that simply being on the web is not enough anymore; you’ve got to show up on the pages of MySpace and Facebook. For many these words have become synonyms to the Internet. A MySpace user may not be aware of what’s going on beyond it, to say nothing of the things that are not in the cyberspace.

Can you be everywhere? I’m not sure, just because I understand that MySpace and Facebook were designed for completely different types of people. The techniques you use to bring your message to people in one system won’t work for the other. Even if you spend a lot of time to get the essence of it. And there’s never enough time for everything, even if spreading information is all you do.

So you either have to put up with the fact that your ads only manage to get the message to the ever shrinking audience of conventional mass media, or you’ve got to hire specialists in the new types of media. Not just the media that have already won their million audiences, but also the emerging ones. The thing is that the interests and preferences of those important for you decision makers can unpredictably and radically change in just months. They can turn to those new types of media that only a handful of specialists and enthusiasts are aware of today.

Just mentioning among other things that you have been at MySpace since 2003 can be very rewarding. Or how about getting to know in 2011 that quite a half of your clients learned about you from a site that will only launch its public beta testing tomorrow?

As for us, we already have our private beta invitation to the Next Big Thing of the internet, no matter which site happens to be the one.

From now on, when Google sees the attribute (rel=”nofollow”) on hyperlinks, those links won’t get any credit when we rank websites in our search results. This isn’t a negative vote for the site where the comment was posted; it’s just a way to make sure that spammers get no benefit from abusing public areas like blog comments, trackbacks, and referrer lists.

In a few weeks other search engines, like Yahoo and MSN, agreed to take into consideration the nofollow attribute of the links their spiders find while crawling. Originally this attribute was introduced to prevent people spam other people’s blogs with comments that contain nothing but links to some sites. If you have a blog yourself, you of course saw such comments linking to sites promoting viagra and texas holdem poker. Later other techniques of link spam appeared, including mass-submission of links to social bookmarking sites. Thus, most social bookmarking sites also introduced nofollow attribute for all the links that are bookmarked by the people. Some sites, like blogmarks.net and netvouz.com have not yet done so, but one can expect them to join the rest pretty soon.

However, the top social bookmarking sites I listed in my previous post can influence search engine results and traffic to the sites you promote even while using the nofollow attribute on all of their pages.

1. The first site most of you have already heard about is del.icio.us. It is the most popular of all the social bookmarking sites and it’s popularity became it’s power. Some people would use del.icio.us instead of a common search engine if the amount of irrelevant data in SERPs for their query seems overwhelming. Lots of other sites all over the web like tagvy.com, travelicio.us, tagcentral.net and many, many others would syndicate data from del.icio.us for some of the tags people use to describe their links at del.icio.us. The sites I’ve listed publish links for many tags, but it’s not a rare practice that some blog writing, for example, about SEO, would contain somewhere in the blog sidebar several latest links that people tagged as relevant to SEO. And the features I like most about del.icio.us is their export and import. Because all the links you have added to del.icio.us can be exported together with all tags and descriptions in several various formats and del.icio.us seems to be the only place where you can collect bookmarks and then import them from there to loads of other sites and applications that work with bookmarks. Even browsers offer less functionality than del.icio.us.
2. Once you have added several sites to del.icio.us, you can export the links and add them to Yahoo MyWeb. The peculiarity of this service is that it’s integrated in Yahoo and once the page you submitted to this service appears on any SERP in Yahoo, it will stand out on the page and look different from all the other results in the SERP. Yahoo will indicate how many people have saved this very page into Yahoo MyWeb, and as so far very few pages are saved there, this really makes a difference.
3. The last service from this top 3 I want to talk about, is not just a site, the most important feature with Stumbleupon is their toolbar. Once the toolbar installed you can vote for or against any page on the web. Or, if you feel bored, click on Stumble! button on the toolbar and the service will forward you to a random site according to your interests and the chances you land on some particular site are as high as the number of positive votes from the toolbar users. Of course, this would not help you if you are promoting something dull and something that only a small audience would understand, but once your site sells or offers something interesting, you should try Stumbleupon. So far we had very nice results with it for several sites.

And I would not recommend you the following websites for your SEO efforts: lilisto.com, linkagogo.com, unalog.com, igooi.com, hyperlinkomatic.com, zurpy.com and looklater.com. I’m not saying that these sites a bad or useless, but for me they were not worth the time I spent trying to figure out how they work and testing them for the sites I’m promoting. However, you might have a different experience.

But with social bookmarking instead of a few trusted editors for each directory (or topic within the directory as in DMOZ) here comes the power of the crowd that chooses the best sites and pages, instead or limited number of categories – myriads of tags that describe the links as precisely as possible and instead of just one place where the link would be found in a catalog, one wise submission to a social bookmaking site might mean tens or hundreds of links to your site syndicated all over the Internet.

Submitting your link to social bookmarking sites might seem a nice alternative to submitting it to directories. You do not have to wait till the link is approved by the editor (it will appear at the site at once, you can add as many tags describing the links as you need, and much more. If you just want to keep your bookmarks somewhere online instead of just within your browser and share selected links with a few friends and colleagues then any of social bookmarking sites will do for you. You can even go to semi-automatic submission to several sites, with the help of this tool for example.

You can test it on our page if you like: Socialize this page

If you follow this link above, you’ll get a list of services the link will be submitted to. And choosing any service in which you already have an account will bring you directly to the page where you add your link. You will not even have to type the link and page title into each form, the tool will do that for you.

But of course for each good idea there will be people who misuse it. People who will try to spam the social bookmarking sites. And of course these sites will fight such spammers. Some sites would use redirects instead of direct links. Some sites would use nofollow. This means that while any site from the list they use at
this Socializer tool will be fine for just using it to store your link collection not each and every one of them will be fine for SEO. My own top list will include del.icio.us, Yahoo MyWeb and stumbleupon.com and in the following posts I’ll cover each of them more in detail, explain why I chose these 3 sites and give a list of services that seem a complete waste of time for someone who is promoting a site, not just collecting links for fun or future use.