http://digg.com is one of the best social bookmarking website. Though social bookmarking and digg-ing is pretty easy task, it can be tough learning experience for new comers.

Social bookmarking websites are useful for promoting your website or blogs.

Bookmarking is also useful for SEO to get higher ranking in search engines and to achieve Google Top 10 ranking.

In this tutorial I would try to provide a detailed step by step instruction on how to Digg.

Step 1 – Account Creation

Before you start digg-ing you need to create an account. It would be better if you use realistic names as this is all about social networking.

Once precaution to take about the social bookmarking websites is that you should remember your credential, if you looses them then you will end up in creating multiple accounts from same IP address which Social Bookmarking websites don’t like.

Step 2 – Account Verification

After account creation you need to verify the account.

Step 3 – Address Import

You will be asked to import the address, wither skip it or if you wish you can use it and proceed further.

Step 4 – Adding Bookmark

If the website which you are bookarking offer an icon/link to bookmark then it is easy, just click on that icon and enter the details and save it. All done.

Step 4 – Adding Bookmark – Manually

If the website does not have any icon or link to bookmark then you have to do it manually. To do so you need to click on “Submit New” link in the header, enter the details; URL of the news/articles or the web site’s URL which you want to bookmark, select the category from News Article/Image/Video and click on “Continue”. In the next window enter the Title & Description in your own words, select the topic category, enter the Captcha text and click on Submit Story.

The description part is tricky as Digg prompts for a good description which is convincing. So it may take a while before you pass through this step. You have to show your writing skills here

Step 5 – If story is already submitted – Just DIGG it

If Digg prompts stating that story is already submitted then verify it and click on “I swear it is Original”.

If the story is indeed duplicate then you don’t need to submit it but instead you have to click on the yellow button marked DIGG and Digg it.

Before you delve deeper in landing pages and SEO you should do home work to find out if you really need landing pages?

Following are some of the situations where you might think of going for landing pages.

1) Your main website doesn’t allow you to do much in Search Engine Optimization.
think of a website which is fully in flash with less text and flash are notorious for SEO.

2) Your main website offers more than 1 product/services with focus on one product/group of products/services and you wish to promote other sub-product/services.

Example could be you sell brand new laptops and wish to venture into selling refurbished laptops also then you might think of going for landing pages for refurbished laptops.

3) Pure sales/marketing pages
Such pages are purely for sales/marketing and are created for direct conversion.

4) Language specific pages
This category is also very popular whereas you don’t want to have a full language specific website and settle with landing pages

There are more situations than described above for which you might go for landing pages.

Okie once you decide to go for landing pages then you might think of following SEO techniques for SEO.

1) Don’t fall in trap for single page sales letters as they are popular in America. Rather go for at least 10 pages website with Contact us, about us, terms etc common pages to fill the quota of 10 pages/

2) Keep it simple keep it highly optimize for SEO, use all the SEO techniques which you have learned

3) Keep it focused for single product/services

4) Don’t copy content from your main website, write from scratch and write unique

5) You also need to go for full SEO services for it, viz. link building, search engine submission etc etc…

6) Don’t forget to get links pointing to your main website, after all that is the whole purpose of landing pages – to divert traffic to main website until n unless it is sales letter and you want to get the action on the landing page itself rather than driving traffic to your main website.

Landing pages could be very useful for SEO and to achieve Google top 10 Ranking in less time and effort.

Well there is no direct reason why a web 2.0 website comes higher on PR.

But there are implicit reasons why web 2.0 websites rank higher. I could think of followings

1) C2C (Content to Code ratio) is higher in Web 2.0 websites as they use CSS and no tables. This certainly has an advantage over traditional websites with tables.

Search Engines do like a clean code ain’t they?

2) Web 2.0 designs are attractive and they really do attract visitors more than traditional websites who often bookmark these websites or refer to others or circulate among their friends who in turn bookmark/refer and this whole chain goes on.

3) With pure CSS the websites pages render faster by virtue of having less code and not to mention that Google now consider the speed as one of important factor in SEO.

To sum up I would say that even though there is not direct relationship between Web 2.0 and higher PR but in the background a web 2.0 design is bound to get notice not only by humans but also by search engines. A Web 2.0 design certainly helps you in Search Engine Optimization to achieve Google top 10 Ranking.

Q: what is 3 way link building?

Answer: Stupidity

I often come across numerous unsolicited requests to go for 3 way link building. The content of these e-mails are same, which states hey I’ve put your link on website A and could you put my link for Website B on your website.

It seems there is no dearth of brainless people on this Earth who could do anything in the name of SEO.

First of all above is not a 3 way link building but a broad day light deception in the name of 2 way link building. And there are scores of people really believing it is going to work and they actually do such kind of 3 way link building.

The 3 way links, originally, meant to be something as

A=>B (A Links to B)

B=>C (B Links to C)

C=>A (C Links to A)

So overall A and C are linked but no direct link exchange.

I don’t see any benefit of the so called 3 way link exchange, it is as good as getting a link from any relevant page why we need to indulge in such complex relationship.

3 Way links don’t help at all in Search Engine Optimization and certainly you can’t get Google Top 10 ranking by 3 way link building.

Always rely on one way quality links coming from relevant content page.

Following is the, ever growing, list of social bookmarking websites which come handy to promote your website/blogs/news site. This list would also be useful for SEO professionals who wish to get into Google top 10.

http://tailrank.com

Mainly for Blogs/RSS and other news stories.

http://fleck.com

Wow!! it is really a cool new socialbokmarking site with innovative bookmarking style. I like it.

http://www.mixx.com

Seems to be good

http://www.blogospherenews.com

It is all about blog, blog related news, stories and discussion.

http://www.bumpzee.com

Bumpzee is bumped, looks good.

http://www.propeller.com

Its forgot password, registration and other functionalities don’t work

http://sphinn.com

Accepts only Internet Marketing and SEO related stories.

http://slashdot.org

Accepts only tech stories.

http://pownce.com

Excellent UI, a true example of AJAX feature usage. It is more of a Social Networking rather than Social Bookmarking website.

http://socialogs.com

Just born have to learn a lot, doesn’t show all stories, after 3-4 pages it goes blank

http://www.plugim.com

Just started, doesn’t look to be promising

http://blogsvine.com

Looks similar to plugim, a startup.

http://www.ppnow.com

Always pops up with an annoying messages “OK! 1 sec … hold on”

http://salesmarks.com

I’m still trying to figure out what this website is all about.

http://www.indianpad.com

Absolutely crap and collects all the garbage from the Internet. Avoid this website at all and don’t waste your time.

http://fark.com

Just crap useless piece of junk. Avoid it. You crate account and then wait for ages before you can submit a new story. It seems some non-technical person has created it.

Defunct Social Bookmarking Websites

http://smarking.com

Error while login

http://www.blinkbits.com

Registration Error

http://taggly.com

Very intelligent and if it doesn’t like username then complains. Bookmarking feature can’t extract title tag. Just a moment.. I found that is no longer alive, so moving it to dead list.

Absolute Junk

http://blogmarks.net

You have to send them explaining them why do you want to join!!!