To submit your blog to Google, simply go to the online submission form, shown below, and enter your blog’s main URL. It’s usually your blog’s home page, and you should include the http:// part of your blog’s URL (for example, http://www.myblogdomain.com). You can enter any additional information or keywords that you want to provide, but they don’t affect your submission or appear with it after your page is indexed. Then type, in the text box, the spam-blocker text that appears on your screen and click the Add URL button. It’s that easy!

The Slashdot slogan says it all: “News for nerds and stuff that matters.” Slashdot (shown below) has a reputation for being an outstanding social bookmarking site for people looking to find and share content related to technology, science, or science fiction. Slashdot works slightly differently from other social bookmarking sites in that submissions are reviewed by editors before they’re available for the Slashdot community to view.

Diigo (see below) is a unique social bookmarking site because it lets users save, for later access, a copy of any page online as it appears at that moment. Each member can store as much as 5 gigabytes of data. Users can also search and share saved pages with each other.

Reddit (shown in the figure below) is a popular social bookmarking site known for its “no frills” appearance. To use Reddit, you create a free account and begin submitting content by clicking the Submit button on the Reddit site. As users vote content up and down, the most popular content makes it to the home page of Reddit and drives a lot of traffic to that blog or Web site. Reddit has a reputation of focusing on offbeat news and unique commentary on current news.

Members of Orkut, a social networking site owned by Google, can communicate, connect, and share information, pictures, and videos. Although Orkut isn’t one of the most popular social networking sites, it has a strong Brazilian user base. You can sign in to Orkut by using the Google Account information you set up when you created your Blogger blog (see below), so it’s easy to get started.

The BlogHer social networking site is unique in that its intended audience is women bloggers. BlogHer (shown below) offers a directory of female bloggers, advertising, forums, and conferences. Additionally, members can create their own blogs on BlogHer to share thoughts, ideas, and news so female bloggers can communicate, network, and grow.

The popular Friendster site is very similar to other popular social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Friendster (shown below), which is open to anyone over the age of 16, invites its more than 75 million members from around the world to connect, share information, and communicate in a common space. The site offers a variety of applications to users to customize their experiences, including a mobile application. The clean design of Friendster helps you easily find friends and try applications.

6. Keyword Proximity – some engines, such as Google, use the concept of “keyword proximity” as part of their ranking formulas. As suggested by the name, “keyword proximity” means the how close keywords are to each other. Put your keywords as close together as possible and make sure your sentences are clear.

Here’s an example:

- We have been selling blogging data products for over 3 years.
- We have been selling products for blogging for over 3 years.

In this case if someone should look for “blogging data products”, the first sentence will rank higher because its keywords are closer to each other.

7. Keyword Frequency – is a measure of the number of times keywords occur within a page’s text. It’s tied to the concept of keyword density. Search engines want to see more than one repetition of a keyword in your text to make sure it’s not an isolated case. The recommended repetition is 3-7 times.

8. Keyword Density – the final point on visible text is keyword density. Simply stated, keyword density is the number of occurrences of a keyword divided by the total word count. For this, I try to keep my initial density to between 1-7%. However, this number may have to change depending on the level of competition. Also, be warned that the text used in anchors <a href=”page.html”>this is your anchor text </a> affects your density. Don’t worry if your initial density is lower than that of your competitors as you will learn later in this article that there are many ways to affect your keyword density other than placing your keywords in your visible text.

9. Anchors and Links – anchor text is that portion of a hyperlink that is viewed by a user on a webpage (The Clickable text).The keywords in anchor text enhance the relevance of the target page pertaining to the keywords used. While the relevance of the page containing the anchor text is also enhanced to some degree (because of relevant keywords appearing on that page), the real gainer is the target page URL.

Use this knowledge to build the relevance of each page of your site, through optimized anchor text containing important keywords, relevant to the theme of such pages, from other pages of your site. The inclusion of important keywords in the anchor text can make a big difference in the final ranking of your site pages.

All search engines that matter, give significant weight to the anchor text on your pages.

For example, if your keywords phrase is “blogging” and you have a link with anchor text “Read all about blogging here” on a page , pointing to another page about blogging. The tendency is to link “here” to the anchor text content URL whereas the best way is to link “blogging”. You can also locate (or insert) important keyword phrases in your page’s natural text and link it to relevant target pages of your site. The target page’s name should include in it, if possible, your keywords. This is how a hyperlink code looks like:

< a href=”target-page.html”>blogging</a>

10. Frames , Java scripts, Flash – About frames: DON’T USE THEM; they are not spiderable from the search engines. Regarding Java scripts and Flash do not use them excessively. The reason for this is that spiders cannot read JavaScript (or Flash) and thus any link or text created by such JavaScript will not be counted in your indexing and will produce a lost opportunity.

11. Navigation – The navigation structure of your site is important because it is through your navigation that the search engine spiders are able to access all of your web site’s content. For sites with a small number of pages you should have every page of your site linked to every other page of your site. This can be done by having a left/right side menu or by putting a link to every other page on the bottom of your page. For sites with many pages it is advisable to include in directories the pages that are content related.

Delicious is a popular social bookmarking site that works slightly differently from Digg and StumbleUpon. Rather than submissions being based on topics and categories, they’re based on keyword tags. The power of Delicious, therefore, in terms of driving traffic to your blog, comes from the quality of the keywords chosen to tag your content.

Similar to the social aspect of Digg and StumbleUpon, users submit content and share it with their networks of friends in order to promote it and drive traffic to it. The chances of your content making it to the front page of Delicious, where it can be discovered by the highest number of people, often depends on the size of your network of Delicious user connections that promote your submissions.

To sign up for an account with Delicious, click the Join Now link in the upperright corner of the Delicious home page and complete the online registration form. After your account is created, you can download Delicious toolbar buttons so that you can submit content with the click of a mouse.

Follow these steps:

1. When you find a page that you want to bookmark with Delicious, click the Delicious Tag button from your browser toolbar. This step opens the Save Bookmark window with the URL field already populated for the page you want to bookmark, as shown below.

2. In the Title text box, ensure that the title reads correctly. If the title field automatically populates with a title for the page you’re submitting, make sure that it’s accurate. If necessary, correct the title or enter a new one that’s appropriate.

3. In the Notes text box, enter a description of the content you’re submitting. Take the time to write a relevant, useful description.

4. In the Tags field, enter a series of relevant keywords that describe your submission. Separate each tag with a space, and take the time to enter keywords that people would use to search for the type of content you’re submitting.

5. If you’re submitting a piece of content that you don’t want to share with other people, select the Do Not Share check box. This feature is useful if you use Delicious to save content for personal use as well as public use.

6. Click the Save button. The Save Bookmark window closes and your content is saved to your Delicious account.

StumbleUpon is another popular social bookmarking site where users submit (or “stumble”) and share links to content they like. The site uses a voting system that’s fairly similar to the one at Digg. Users stumble content, and other users vote on the content, giving it a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. Content that receives a lot of thumbs-ups can make it to the front page of StumbleUpon and drive a lot of traffic to that site.

To join StumbleUpon, simply click the Join StumbleUpon button on the site’s home page and complete the online form. After you join, you can add the StumbleUpon toolbar to your Web browser, which makes it easy to stumble content with the click of a mouse. Also similar to the Digg system, StumbleUpon users can add friends to their networks and use their networks to promote and share specific content. One of the keys to StumbleUpon success is making many friends and submitting a lot of excellent content to build your reputation. Although it isn’t against the rules to submit your own content to StumbleUpon, there’s an unwritten rule to submit more content that is not yours than content that is yours. This strategy is easy to follow by using the StumbleUpon toolbar, which works in popular Web browsers. When you stumble upon a Web page that you want to share, simply select the thumbs-up icon on your StumbleUpon toolbar.

If the content is new to StumbleUpon, a window automatically opens, where you can enter details about the submission. If the content has already been submitted to StumbleUpon, one click of the thumbs-up button (or thumbs-down button, as the case may be) is all it takes to share the content you like.

Follow these steps to submit new content to StumbleUpon:

1. When you find a page you want to stumble, simply click the thumbsup icon from the StumbleUpon toolbar in your browser window. This step opens the StumbleUpon content submission window, shown below.

2. If text automatically populates the Title text box, check to ensure that it’s accurate. Be sure to check punctuation marks as well as the text in this box.

3. In the Review text box, enter a description of the content on the page you’re submitting. Make sure that the description you enter is relevant and useful.

4. In the Topic section, click the link for the category that’s most appropriate for your submission. If you don’t see an appropriate category in the list, use the drop-down menu to find more categories to choose from.

5. Click the appropriate radio button on the Adult line to identify whether the submission contains content that’s appropriate only for adults. You can’t submit your content unless you click the Yes or No radio button in the Adult section of the submission form.

6. Use the drop-down menu to select the language that the content is written in. The default is English, but a wide variety of language options are available to choose from.

7. Click the Submit This Site button. A Rating Submitted message appears, and the window closes automatically. That’s it. You’re done!