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Table of Contents for this issue.....

1.    Authors Comments

2.    Q & A, Suggestions and Comments

3.    Reader Survey

4.    Social Bookmarking (Continued) (Video)

5.    Page Rank

6.    Handy Internet Tools

Author's Comments

Well, here we are starting a new year.  Work at the office is hectic trying to overcome the inertia of the holidays and get things started in the right direction.

Linda is off in Austin visiting Susanna and I am on my own.  This means that she will not be editing this issue so I accept full responsibility for any typos, bad grammar, or other mistakes.

This last week has been very productive in increasing traffic to retirement-jobs-online.com.  I will share some of my secrets with you.  The secrets are in the article about social bookmarking.  Read on.

Q & A, Suggestions and Comments

We received a couple of “thank you” emails from readers thanking us for publishing the eZine.  We enjoy receiving these from our readers since it is sometimes difficult to gage the acceptance of our publication.

If you have anything for this section or you have a suggestion for a topic for an article, please go to http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Suggestion_Form1.htm and give us your input.  With your input, we can improve the Boomer Video eZine.  

Reader Survey  

Linda and I work hard to publish the Boomer eZine each week.  We put out a lot of good information for you.  Now we are asking for your input in return.  

Please click this link to answer a quick multiple choice, three question survey so we can better understand what we should write in future issues.  

Click here to give us your valuable input.  

If you completed the survey, thanks!  

If you did not, please circle back and do so.  It will not take more than a minute of your valuable time.  Thanks for doing this for us.  

Social Bookmarking (Continued) (Video)  

When we left the discussion of social bookmarking in last week’s issue, I suggested that you go to http://del.icio.us and open an account in order to play with it and learn how it works.  

A quick review about social bookmarking from last week.  It is a website where you can post your favorites and access them from any computer with an Internet connection.  It is also a way to drive traffic to your website or blog.  We are using it mainly to drive traffic to our sites.  

Another use of social bookmarking is for research.  You can go to del.icio.us and enter a search tag and find the sites that other people have tagged for that term.  This way you are tapping into the research that many others have done before you.  

We have used the term “tag”.  Just what is that?  A tag is the word or term that you would use to search for the topic on a search engine.  On most of the bookmarking sites, it is a single word separated by spaces.  This makes it difficult for the search terms that are multiple words.  

I experimented with this and it seems that there are several ways that people are creating multiple word tags.  Some are just running the words together “retirementjobs”.  Some are using hyphens “retirement-jobs.  And some are using periods “retirement.jobs”.  

You can experiment with this and see what works best for you.  Just remember to try these different combinations when you are searching tags.  I have decided to use the hyphen between words for our tags.  

There are many social bookmarking sites (I have heard the number of approximately 75 during my research) with del.icio.us being the “gold standard”.  If you want to create traffic to your site, you should post your web pages on each one of them…….  I thought that might slow you down.  You say to yourself – Self, I don’t have time to post to all of those sites.  

Well, enter technology to save the day.  A site has been created named www.onlywire.com that helps automate this task.  It will distribute your post to 13 bookmarking sites.  It actually lists 16 sites, but Maple is being closed down, I could not get Jots to let me register, and Linkroll kept bombing each time I tried to register.  

In order to use Onlywire, you must go to each bookmarking site and register with a user name and password.  Once your have registered in all the sites on which you want to post, go to Onlywire and enter the user name and password in the input box for the particular bookmarking site.  

Next, to make it easy to tag a page, Onlywire has a link tool that you can drag to your link tool bar on your browser.  When you are on a page and want to send it to all your bookmarking sites, click on the icon for the Onlywire link.  You will be asked for your Onlywire user name and password.  The Onlywire page will open with your desired page URL in the input box.  You add the tags that you want for the page, enter a comment if desired, and click the enter button.  At the speed of the Internet, your page has been bookmarked on as many sites as you have listed in Onlywire.  Right now, we have 13 sites on Onlywire.  

Just consider the implications of this.  Each time we add a page to our sites, we send it out using Onlywire.  Onlywire sends it to the thirteen bookmarking sites and thirteen more links to the page (and to the website) appear on the Internet.  We have discussed that the search engines use links to a website as a factor in ranking it.  This is a great multiplier to do this.  

The other implication is that people actively use the bookmarking sites to find information.  This will create traffic to your site.  

When I discovered Onlywire, I set up an account and listed the bookmarking sites on it.  I then entered every web page in retirement-jobs-online.com (RJO) as a favorite.  Within a day, I started to see hits on RJO website from some of the social bookmarking sites so it works quickly for driving traffic.  The increase in the search engine ranking will take time.  

Some might say that this borders on S P A M, but consider that some people have a favorite bookmarking site and only use that site.  You want to make certain that your information is available to them and posting to multiple bookmarking sites is the way to do this.  

Onlywire is not the most intuitive site on the planet so I made a short video about it and how it works.  I hope you enjoy it.  

http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Videos/V1I39Video/Click-To-Play.html  

Page Rank  

A quick definition of Page Rank – a numerical value to measure the relative importance of the web page within the Internet.  For a more detailed explanation, go to Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_rank.  

Page Rank was developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin as part of a research for a new search engine.  Guess what the name of that search engine is?  Yep, Google.  

The rank of pages in a website is a major factor that Google uses to rank a website.  I commented in early December 2006 that the traffic to the RJO site had suddenly increased.  This was due to RJO making it to the first page of the search engines.  This was the same time that Google raised the page rank for the RJO home page to a page rank 3.  

How do you find the page rank for a page?  If you install the Google toolbar on your browser, the page rank will be displayed on the tool bar.  Each time you look at a web page, the display will show you the page rank.  It is handy to know if you are looking at a page that Google has ranked as valuable or if it is not rated.  

I have used the Google toolbar for sometime, and I find it very handy for page rank and for quick Google searches.  

Bottom line.  If you are building a website, you need traffic to your site.  The page rank of the pages in the site will determine where they rank on the search engines.  Be on the first page of Google and you will get your traffic.  Anywhere else, you are almost invisible.  

Remember this when you are building your web site.  

Handy Internet Tools  

Here are some sites that have great free tools for your use.  

http://www.seomoz.org – this site had two tools to use.  One is the Page Strength SEO tool.  This will evaluate a page and tell you how it ranks in several different categories.  Enter a web page URL and study the results to learn what makes a page rank well.  

The other tool is the Keyword Difficulty Tool.  This tool takes a long time to run (50 plus minutes on the key word “retirement jobs”).  However, it produces a VERY detailed analysis of how difficult it will be to get the keyword to rank high on the search engines.  

www.onlywire.com – we have previously discussed this site in the above article on Social Bookmarking.  

www.digitalpoint.com – this site has a great keyword suggestion tool at http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/suggestion/.  It will lookup the times the keyword was searched using both Overture (Yahoo) and Wordtracker.  Since Wordtracker normally costs for use, this tool will get you the results free.  You should always check the Yahoo search number against the Wordtracker number since Yahoo can sometimes be skewed by search robots that are hitting it.  

That is all the tools we have time for today.  There are many more out there so scout around for them.  

That wraps up our issue for this week.  Until next week, stay tuned.  

John and Linda Howe

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