Let’s round up some general guidelines for LavaLinx users and social bookmarking…

Tagging. This is not referring to graffiti lettering on the side of trains or abandoned buildings. Tagging is a great way to spread out the information you want to share with a wider variety of people within the social site. Think about it. With every ‘tag’ page, someone will be able to find your bookmark on that page. Basically the more relevant and descriptive your tags are, the better your site will be found by those who are looking for your product or information, and thus the more traffic you will see from social bookmarking.

With that said, sometimes for work we’ll slip in our keyword phrases we want to optimize the site for. This isn’t always the case, but yes sometimes we do it. We’re trying to work with the system. Now I’m not saying everyone should flood the tags with all of the keywords they are going after. Please don’t do that! Too many tags listed is a pain for the other users, whereas some bookmark sites will only allow a certain number of tags. Please keep this in mind.

Make sure to give at least a few tags when adding a new social page in LavaLinx. Plus, including the proper title you want and description helps everyone out as well.

I’ve been noticing more and more websites allowing you to auto-bookmark your pages into social bookmarking sites. The SEO world is finally catching onto our idea. Well, none of them introduce “exchange” into their websites. LavaLinx still has the trump on exchange. We need more users in our pool to create social exchanges from.

We will continually improve LavaLinx into the most successful SEO-management tool. Constantly, we research new social sites to include in our growing list of bookmarking sites. Please check the list of sites often, after logging into LavaLinx.com, click on Social Bookmarks, then click Social Bookmark Accounts. Any sites you have signed up for and saved in LavaLinx will show up there. With any new sites you may not have a profile yet for, we will have a sign-up link for that social site.

For whatever reason, we come across social sites that work for some time and then encounter problems within their own site, or change their URL (we have to update LavaLinx to this fact), or that site simply is down one day. All these reasons can create issues for all of us users where we might not be able to complete a social trade right away. The LavaLinx team is out on the front lines, making social trades, so hopefully we will become aware of the issues as soon as they happen. Please be patient with us if you have to wait a bit longer than expected. Or shoot us a quick email letting us know your issue. We are happy to receive feedback from our users. With all of that said, I hope we continue to gain more quality LavaLinx users, just like the ones we already have.

We recently rolled out a few major upgrades to LavaLinx that we’re really excited about. Here’s a few of the things that were added.

1.    External trade process

• Sending Domain: At the beginning of the external trade wizard we ask for the domain of the site that will be sending you a link. We also check to make sure the domain name is valid. The reasons why this is the first step in the external trade process is because
  1. if we already have that domain in our external trade database most of the link information for that domain will be populated in the link wizard automatically
  2. if you have already made a trade with that site, you can be made aware of this fact before you go through half of the linkwizard
• Form URL: Now when making an external trade you’ve probably noticed that we’ve added a few steps. We found that 30-40% of external link trades are made through an online form, so now you can store the form URL. This will make it easier to follow up on trades made through a form.
• Email Checker: Each email address added is checked to make sure it is a valid working email address.
• Tagging: At the end of the external trade wizard we’ve added tagging functionality for sending and receiving site pages. Tagging pages will help LavaLinx users to find the most relevant web pages in link trade scenarios.

2.    External sites – Every time an external trade is made, the site will be stored in a way that will allow you to use it in trades with your other sites more easily.

3.    External Trade Directory – Now has search functionality for finding the most relevant sites to trade with.

Here are other major projects that we have in the works

1.    Automated Trade Suggestions – Lavalinx itself will be able to propose trades to you that match the themes of sites and/or pages.  This functionality will serve a two-fold purpose:  1) it will allow link traders with no time to still be able to take advantage of the system, and 2) it will allow less savvy link traders to make the right types of trades without the struggle of learning all of the SEO rules before trading.

2.    Social Bookmark Management and Exchange – You will soon be able to do much more than simply bookmark your own pages or articles in a couple of your favorite social bookmarking sites. Cross your fingers, we may just revolutionize the SMO (social media optimization) industry.

LavaLinx will no longer be providing Page Rank as part of its trading functionality. We feel that Google’s ability to give a quality score to a web page has diminished to the point that it is no longer of value to our users. Although there are still a fair number of webmasters that look to Page Rank as a measurement of a valuing a web page, we decided that supporting a flawed system is not in the best interest of webmasters seeking successful link trading. Successful link trading should be focused on a cached, content page that is relevant and user-friendly.

We are looking into other services that determine the value of a web page and will implement one that best serves this purpose.

We just recently rolled out a number of improvements to the LavaLinx system.

1. On Receiving pages you can see how many backlinks are pointed to each page.

2. On Sending pages you can now see how many links are pointing to other sites. This is really helpful when deciding which pages you’d like to post links on.

3. When creating link trades with the Link Wizard you can now see the number of links on all the Sending pages.

4. You can now delete internal trades if needed. In a dynamic trade scenario both links will be automatically removed. If one trader has a static Sending page they will be notified via an email of the trade deletion.

5. System pages were revamped to be more user-friendly.

In the works

1. Multiple user trade reports for Business accounts

2. Personalized emails for External Trades.