Just a bit about search engine optimization.

One thing that is known to increase traffic to your website is social marketing. It isn’t rocket science to work out that social marketing is both time consuming and boring, so why do it? The good news is that you don’t have to, you can get some decent free social bookmarking software!

You could of course subscribe and pay for an automated system. You need to enter all your registration details for all the social market sites you want to submit to, and let the software do the work. There are some pretty good sites that do this. There are at a couple of good sites that will do this for free, albeit to a smaller number of sites. The two sites I’m looking at here are Social Monkee and Social Marker.

The Social Marker site is semi-automatic and possibly the first free social bookmarking software on the web. What you do here is to tick boxes for the sites you want to submit to (and you need to register for these), fill out the boxes for the target url, the keywords you want to use, a title and information box and click “go”. The software shows all the information you need in boxes at the bottom of the page, then takes you sequentially to each site where you drag this information to the appropriate place and click “submit” once you are logged in. You then move on to the next site. There are three problems I have personally found with the Social Marker site.

* I frequently get thrown out of the sequence and have to re-start from scratch again.

* When you list the keywords, it is natural to split them with a comma. However, not all sites want them input in this way, so you have to do it manually.

* It is quite well known that Google does not like identical texts on multiple sites and will ignore them. Social Marker at the moment, only allows one text option, unless you enter more manually for each site.

On the positive side, Social Marker is a free social bookmarking software and submits to some of the top sites and allows you to select those sites according to whether they have ‘do follow’ links or not.

Social Marker is sponsored by the ever popular Book Marker Demon program, and this would be my suggestion if you want to pay for a dedicated and useful piece of software.

Social Monkee works a little differently to Social Marker, but is still free social bookmarking software. The Monkee has a widget that you download to your browser (Firefox), and simply click on to allow you to download 25 inbound “do follow” links to one site, per day, completely free and with no strings. You can do it by just logging into your Social Monkee account, but using the Monkee widget is easier as it pre-populates the first required information fields. What is also better than Social Marker, is that you have three titles, three information fields and three sets of keywords. Hit submit, and the Monkee runs around submitting different spins of your information to the social sites and then writes a report for you to view (clever Monkee heh!). This process is a lot less time consuming than Social Marker.

Now, the above is also totally free, but if you want to spice it up a bit and get a hundred inbound links a day, to at least three different pages or sites, then you will need to upgrade. Now the good news is you can do this with, or without hard cash. To upgrade for free, just recommend the free service to 12 people or, if you just want to pay the one-off $47, this will give you 9000 back-links every month instead of the 750 you get free! I’m afraid I took the free option, as I’m a bit mean, but you don’t have to.

Now, both these sites are worth looking at and both use free social bookmarking software. But if I had to pick one, I prefer Social Monkee as it works well, rarely has any hickups and allows you to spin the text and titles to some degree.

Check out these sites at; www.SocialMarker.com and Social Monkee . Or for the dedicated Book Marker Demon program.