Are you tired of the hassle that comes with creating social accounts? If so, LavaLinx’s unique social account creation could help you. From this section, you are able to create, delete, modify and  add multiple social accounts that will accurately and efficiently track the number of social bookmarks received for your pages.

To begin, log on to your LavaLinx account.

Next, click on the “Social Bookmarks” tab in the middle of the top navigation bar.

That will bring us to this page, where you will come to manage your social accounts. Let’s take a look at each individual section of this page.

The first box states the number of Social Bookmark Accounts you have created (seen here, the number is zero). It also gives you a number of how many public and private social accounts you may create.

We have over eighty-five social sites in the system that you can create accounts for.

Social pages are the pages which have been categorized as sites, pages, news articles, posts, images or videos for use in social bookmarking. Here is a the tutorial on how to add social pages.

There is actually more to this next box than it appears. If you have more than one LavaLinx account, (not social account), you can select which accounts you would like to use a particular social site on. For example, lets say you add Digg as a social site. You have it on your main account, but you don’t want it on your secondary account. This is where you would navigate to change that, and vice-versa; If you want to bookmark on a secondary account site, you will need to go to this page and link your social account with it.

Let’s add our first social account. Click on “Manage” or the number (currently zero)  on the Social Bookmark Accounts box.

You are now viewing a list of all social sites that we’ve added to our system. Currently, there are eighty-five, and this number is continually growing.

Select a social account to add, and click “New”.

If you don’t currently have a profile with the selected social site, you may click the “Setup a ___ account” which will take you directly to the page where you create your profile. When you are finished with profile setup, simply close the window and return to LavaLinx.

LavaLinx gives users the discretion of choosing what they would like to use a particular social account for. Even though some sites such as Myspace and Facebook are private automatically due to their setup (which will show up as N/A, without the option of a drop-down box), you may opt to make other profiles private if you would like to only bookmark your own material on them.

Now just enter your username and hit “Save”. Or if you prefer not to add that account, you may hit “Cancel”.

Remember when we talked about LavaLinx having the functionality allowing you to track multiple social accounts? After you add your initial account, you have the option to add another.

We’ll just keep ours at one. Now you can see that we’re finished adding this social account.

If you return to the Social Bookmarks page, you will now see that we have one social bookmarking account, and we have one of one social accounts linked with this LavaLinx account.

You’re all set up and ready to create trades.

Private bookmarking is a feature LavaLinx added for two reasons: One, it gives users the ability to bookmark their own pages if they desire to do so. The second, more important reason is due to the setup of the individual social sites. Some sites, such as Facebook, don’t give users a public account. This causes a problem with SEO and the link value of your bookmark, as the search engines are not able to view your account and therefore they cannot view your links. A different situation is where sites such as Twitter and Myspace change the URL of the hyperlink to a redirect or shortened URL, both of which negate the SEO value, and make it nearly impossible for those links to be verified.

To create a private bookmark, you will need to navigate to the social pages section.

Once there, select the page you would like to use, and hit “Bookmark”.

You are now on the page where you can bookmark your social page. Notice that the details on the social page are exactly what we entered in our Adding a Social Page Post.

To begin, click on the bookmarking hyperlink in the frame. This example is “Bookmark on Digg”.

This will then pull up the screen where you can bookmark the social page, all without leaving LavaLinx. (Keep in mind there are some social sites that require the bookmark to be made in a new tab. Whenever this is done, you will add the bookmark, close the tab and return to LavaLinx to mark the trade complete.)

The screenshot below shows how the social site will appear in LavaLinx.

Hit the button indicated on the site. For this one, it is “Digg”. For others it may simply be bookmark, vote, like, or save.

You will see now that your vote has been tallied.

The bookmark has been added.  Hit “Mark Complete” at the bottom right of the screen.

The next screen indicates that you are done bookmarking this page on the selected social site. You can continue bookmarking this page on whichever social site you prefer by clicking on the social site image.

If you return to the Social Pages section, LavaLinx will now show that you have one self bookmark done for this page.

You are now finished with the private bookmarking process! We hope this tutorial has been helpful for you.

In order to create social bookmarking exchanges through LavaLinx, you will need to first set up your social pages.

Let’s begin by navigating to the Social Pages section. (If you missed that tutorial, you can review the social page navigation instructions). Here is a screenshot of the page you will be viewing.

Click on the add button and you arrive on to the area where you will input your page data.

You’ll notice there are two sections on this page: Add Social Page and Link Information. Let’s take a look at each of these individually. Here we have the Add Social Page information box.

First is the “Name” field. It is important to keep in mind that this is NOT the name of the page you want bookmarked. That section is the “Title” which we will get to later. The “Name” field is for your own personal records, so you can easily track and manage different pages without the need to put in a full title.

You may have the Name and Title fields be the same, or different. That is all personal preference. The example we are going to use will use a different name.

Next, we move down to the URL. LavaLinx will pre-populate the URL based on which account you are in, so all you need to add is the last segment of the URL.

For example, instead of adding:

http://www.lavalinx.com/seo-links/easy-ways-to-gain-reliable-twitter-followers/

We simply add

seo-links/easy-ways-to-gain-reliable-twitter-followers/

The “Expiration Date” is a feature that we’ve added exclusively for those posts that may be time sensitive. You will want to use this feature on a holiday post for example, to make sure that users don’t bookmark this page past the time it is relevant for. To set an expiration date, simply click on the calender image and select the end date. When the time runs out, LavaLinx will automatically disable the page from receiving bookmarks.

For the page we are adding, the content isn’t time sensitive so we’ll just leave the expiration section blank.

The Status is where you select if you would like the page enabled or disabled for social bookmark trading. You can always come back to this page and modify the status at any time.

Tags are one of the most important items to add. These are the tags that users will add to their social accounts when bookmarking your page, so it is important that these tags be relevant.

Last, we have the Social Bookmark Type. Shown with a dropdown box, this feature is more complex than it appears. By selecting one of the options listed, you are giving our system the information it needs to know which sites will or won’t accept that article. This could keep you from being banned in social sites that might not accept that type of article. Here are the options you have to chose from.

Let’s choose Article/Blog Post as our social bookmark type.

Now, we have all of the first section filled out properly. Take a look for grammatical errors and add any information you may have left out.

You are now ready to move onto the next section. If you look below the Add Social Page section, you’ll see the Link Information segment.

There is a sentence above the Title. This is to remind you that the information you put for these fields will be the details that other people use to bookmark your page. The Title will become the hyperlink. One thing to note about the title is you want it to be viral. Try to write something that people will want to click on. If the original post title was boring, this is where you can change it up a bit and make it more interesting.  Questions seem to do well, but you can also use hints, put “quick tips” or anything denoting a list that people might be interested in.

Now, we’ll move onto the description. You will find more benefit from a short, intriguing description, than you would from a long informative one. Remember, you want the reader to click on and vote up your page, so it needs to look as appealing as possible. By not giving away all of your details, the reader will then have to go to your page if they want to know more.

You’ve now filled out the entire form. It should appear like this:

The last step is to hit the Add Page button at the bottom right of the screen.

You’re finished! Now you can go back into your list of social pages and your new page will show.

In order to monetize the benefits that LavaLinx can bring to your websites, it is important to understand how the system works and how to use it effectively. These tutorials will assist you in navigating the site, adding social and link pages, creating trades, modifying trades and troubleshooting issues. One of the more popular features of LavaLinx is our Social Bookmarking Exchange tool. Let’s start with some simple navigation that will get you familiar with common phrases and help you become comfortable using the social pages section of the site.

To begin, login to your LavaLinx account. This will bring you to your “My Account” homepage. You will notice that there are three sites in this account. If you only have one site in your account, it will only show one box.

We want to navigate to the “Social Pages” section, so click on the “Manage” tab of one of your sites (highlighted in yellow).

This now brings you to the site admin, where you can manage link and social trades, get an instant look at stats on incoming links, and edit your site details. One main thing to notice from this page is the orange question marks directly to the right of area titles. These are quick help boxes that you can hover over to learn what that section is about. We will cover all of these unique features in another help tutorial.

To get to the “Social Pages” section from here, we want to go to the upper right corner of the page and click on “Manage” (highlighted in yellow).

You are now viewing your social pages,which are the pages you entered that you would like to point social bookmarks towards.

You can view your pages in whichever way suits you. If you would like to view all of your social pages on one page, click the “List All” link. You may also click on a specific number of page, or hit “Next”.

All pages are numbered and alphabetized by title for convenience. The magnifying glass to the left of the title can be used to open up the page in a new tab.

Next, you’ll notice there are “Self” and “Trade” bookmark statistics. Self bookmarks are those done by yourself to your own pages, and trade bookmarks are those done by others through social trades.

The status of a page states whether the page is “Enabled” which is open for trading, or “Disabled” which is closed to trading. It is important here that if you wish to stop trading on a page, you need to disable the page, not delete it. Otherwise, the stats of bookmarks received for that page will be deleted as well.

The “Social Type” categorizes which type of format your page is. When adding a page, you may choose from the below options:

Internal Page

Current Event

Video

Site (i.e. Index Page)

Article/Blog Post

Image

This helps our system determine which social sites will or will not accept your site for bookmarking. Some sites may only accept articles and blog posts, but not videos. Some may only accept sub-pages instead of the home page. This feature is built to keep our users from being banned for adding the wrong type of content to a social site.

Say you are interested in bookmarking some of your own pages instead of trading bookmarks, but you want to keep track of how many trades you do. This is the Self feature you are looking for. You add your social page, navigate to this section in LavaLinx and hit “Bookmark”. Every bookmark you do from this link will be counted in the self bookmarking section. We will go over self bookmarking more extensively in another post.

The “Actions” section is probably the most useful section in the entire post. It is from here that you view page details such as title, desciption, key words, edit any of those details, or delete the page entirely. Again, this will be fully covered in a tutorial.

Last, we have the “Add” button in the top right corner of the screen. You have now navigated through the Social Pages section in LavaLinx, learned the terms and meanings of each section, and you’re ready to start adding your pages.

This concludes the navigation section of our tutorial. Please let us know if this was helpful to you, or if you have any suggestions for future posts. Thank you and good luck!

In case you missed it, post one of this series discussed SEO Optimization, including the use of H-Tags and Meta Tags, and how to choose a URL.

Keyword research. We’ve all heard it said, and I’m sure we’ve all given it some thought. But do we really understand what it means? There is more to it than meets the eye. It is not just looking at numbers and statistics, or worse – picking keywords out of thin air. It is the meticulous planning and mapping of your SEO strategy. Remember, the goal of Search Engine Optimization is to move your site up in the rankings to drive targeted, relevant and converting traffic to your website. In order to do this, your entire site planning all begins with keyword research. This is what will make or break your site in the long run, and it’s not something you should take lightly. Are you intimidated now? Don’t be. This post will guide you through all the steps necessary for studying keywords and choosing which of those will work best for you.

Keyword research can be preformed through tools such as Google Adwords, Word Tracker and many other systems, or you can also research it by hand. To be most beneficial, you will probably want to use both.

1. Start off by asking yourself this question: What is my site about? Try and narrow it down to the main topic, with a few subtopics as well. You don’t need to list every category your site will have, only those that are directly relevant to your main subject. For example, you might have a site about cars. Instead of listing everything relating to cars, narrow it down to three or four things, like cars, parts, repairs, and auto listings.
2. Now that you have the direction you want to go with your site, think like the average web user. If you were going to try and look for information in your sites’ subject, what keywords would you use? Write these down as well. They may be similar to the above, or somewhat different. That’s okay for now. We’re still in the beginning stages of keyword research, so any and all thoughts are welcome.
3. Using the list that you’ve created, go to Google Adwords or a similar keyword research tool and look up the statistics of the words you’ve chosen. Here is a good rule of thumb to remember: the smaller the phrase, the bigger the amount of traffic but the tougher the competition.

Pay attention to the perimeters you can set on your research. To give you an example, the word “cars” has over 151,000,000 searches a month. Or does it? 151,000,000 is actually the broad match number, meaning it includes any and all searched phrases that include that word. We want to look at traffic results that are a little more specific, so set the search to only view exact results. Now if we search for “cars” we get 11,100,000.

4. Next, don’t start with the keyword you want to be ranked for. You might say, “This sounds like bypassing SEO. Why would we want to ignore the very thing we want to be ranked for?” Well, like the example above, the keyword you want to be ranked for may have too tough of competition for you to compete with. So where do you start? With long tail key word phrases. Instead of optimizing your site for “cars”, you might try “custom cars for sale”, or another keyword with less traffic and less competition. This way, you have your major keyword in the phrase (cars), while still seeing some return and some movement on your rankings.
5. Checklist: you have your site demographic. You know what keyword you’d like to go after and you’ve picked a few smaller key words to target first. You’re done right? Wrong. One last and very important thing to do is to research your keywords by hand. The research tools may tell you the amount of traffic the word gets, but it doesn’t tell you anything about the sites that are ranked for that. Do a few simple searches for that keyword in Google, Yahoo and Bing. Look at the competition, their page rank, the age of the domain, the number of cashed pages and the number of backlinks the domain has. This can be a huge determining factor for if you should go after that keyword or not.

One major mistake people make when choosing keywords is they optimize for their own brand name. Now, if you have a huge brand, this isn’t a big deal, but chances are you have a little known brand. You want to optimize for what people will search for, so if your brand isn’t known, it’s not going to get searched for. This doesn’t mean that your brand won’t get out there if you didn’t optimize for it. There won’t be any competition for your brand name, so you will get ranked for it with little to no effort. Spend time chipping away at the smaller keywords and work your way up from there.