Make it Easy to Share your Content on the Web

With the increasing profileration of web 2.0 tools on the web now it is great to see a service which helps you make your content easy to bookmark for sharing on a wide variety of social networking sites.

AddThis provides a bookmarking and sharing button to help distribute your content across the Web by making it simple for your visitors to bookmark pages and share them with other people. Over time this will drive more traffic back to your site, increase your link popularity and ultimately your search engine rankings.

Using this service means you don’t need to include a different button for each bookmarking service. The service is provided free of charge and also gives you statistics on its usage.

There are an extensive number of sites which AddThis provide links to including but not limited to: Delicious, Myspace, StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati, Reddit, Facebook and so on.

Give it a try – AddThis today!

Creative ways to use social media

There is an article published today at Search Engine Land entitled Really Boring Products That Rocked in Social Media. The article shows some very creative ways people have used social media to drive traffic to their websites. I particularly like the urinals – check it out!

Google Insights for Search launched

On August 5, Google launched Google Insights for Search. This product allows you to get a better understanding of search behaviour and provides some interesting new features such as a heat map to display search volume and areas of regional interest. It also allows you to do some great keyword research.

To access these great features you must be logged into your Google account (if you don’t have one you need to sign up for Gmail).

As an example I wanted to find out the Search Volume for the terms: "climate change" vs. "greenhouse gases" in the state of Victoria, Australia.

Here is the result of the search:

The Regional Interest I specified was Victoria in Australia which gave me this map and showed that it was specifically Melbourne.

This is what the map looks like for the whole of Australia:

And then you get these great related search terms list:

This is a really powerful way to start doing keyword research. These terms are what real people are actually searching for.

To access this fabulous tool visit Google Insights for Search and start playing – I highly recommend it!

Take the A List Apart Web Professionals Survey

A List Apart is conducting their annual web professionals survey to get as truer picture as possible of the way the web profession is practiced worldwide. I took it – only takes about 5 minutes or so – here is the link http://www.alistapart.com/articles/survey2008