Most bloggers have heard of Digg, or the many clones that are available to submit your posts to in order to boost traffic. Such sites that emulate Digg are driven by software that comes from pligg.com and are known as "pligg" sites. I'll tell you a little more about pligg in a moment. But how many bloggers know that by submitting posts to some of the lesser well known social bookmarking sites can actually benefit your blog more?

Some, like Blogging Zoom are getting big and more popular, but are still very useful for building links and boosting SERPs authority for individual blog posts. They do that by publishing your submitted posts on their main page after your post gets a certain number of votes from othe rmembers of the site. With Blogging Zoom that number is currently 15. So if you join a site like that, it pays to make friends!

But that idea can be followed on to the next level by the smart Internet Marketer. How?

Build your own social pligg site!

Yes, if you have your own web host, then you can build your own pligg site, publicise it and attract new members to build the site from the ground up. Pligg.com provide the software free of charge, so its just a case of downloading it, creating a new MySQL database in your cPanel, following their instructions and uploading the files to your server. You can also download a free template if you don't like the original and with some cosmetic tweaking, you can have your very own, Google friendly social site up and running within a few hours.

The benefits of running your own pligg site are obvious - you can submit all your own posts to it and build up lots of links to your blogs as well as boost their SERPs rankings. In the early stages, you can set the number of votes to 5 to get your posts onto the front page fast, so their links carry with them any Page Rank your new site has.

A timely tip is to buy an expired domain that already comes with some Page Rank and established links to ensure it keeps it. You, of course can promote your new pligg site and get it more backlinks to further establish its authority quickly.

As you may have guessed by now, I have done exactly what I have been telling you about, so that the information is coming straight from the horse's mouth! Yep, I built my own pligg site called TheFB and you can easily register for free and then submit blog posts to it directly from the site.

TheFB can be found by clicking on this link: TheFB

TheFB is a PR2 site at present, which I am building links for to improve its ranking over time. So feel free to sign up and make use of this valuable link building resource and get in on the ground floor. It takes only 5 votes to get your post to the front page at TheFB, so what have you got to lose?

And much to gain!

Terry Didcott
Owner of The Honest Way Forum

A general statement to answer the above questions is that "magic numbers do not exist." The most important thing you can understand as a search engine optimization expert is that algorithms change. Just when you think you understand what is going to make you number one for a keyphrase in a search engine, something could easily change, and you might have to spend months or even years trying to figure the new algorithm.

It is better not to try to reverse engineer the algorithm, do something much easier instead... observe your top competitors. All you need to do is to understand what elements your competitors are using to make them rank in the top positions.

The main elements to getting top search engines rankings are:

- Number, quality, and relevance of inbound links pointing to your site
- Fresh, relevant, quality content (needs to be added frequently)
- Keyword density of your home page or any page you want to rank highly

LINKS, LINKS, LINKS

The first thing to observe from your competitor's sites is their inbound links. This means the number of sites that have a link pointing to their website. You can easily measure it by going to Google and typing: "link://www.yourcompetitorssite.com". However do not only do this on Google because they don't show all actual links pointing to a site. Yahoo and MSN tend to show a lot more of the back links to any given website.

Part of the observation should be not only what the links say, but where the links come from. Think about what the category is that those links come from. If you start to see a recurring pattern, you should start actively searching for links coming from that category.

Some marketers use special software for robotic content creation. They generate thousands of pages with links pointing to their sites. This practice can be very dangerous, as Google will penalize unnatural linking or violations of their terms of service. And what happens is that those links do not look natural. One day one site may have 50 links and the following day have 2000 links, which all say the same thing and come from the same IP address.

If you understand how to observe, this will never happen to you. You will learn how to look at your competitors, and observe how they are getting linked to. Then, just do what they do.

FRESH QUALITY CONTENT

The second thing to observe is how much fresh content the top sites have. Search engines love quality relevant content that is added and updated frequently. You will probably notice that the top sites in your niche have many articles and other quality content, and are continuously adding new content to their sites.

People that surf the web are usually searching for information, so content is the "fuel" of internet traffic. If you want to attract many potential customers to your site, then you need to make sure that you provide enough content which is relevant to their interests. Updating it frequently with more quality content will keep visitors coming back to your website over and over again.

KEYWORD DENSITY

The third thing you need to observe is the keyword density of your competitors. How many times should you repeat your main keywords? In which part of the web page should your main keywords be mentioned? Again, there is no magic number, it's all about observing and measuring against the top websites in your market. But what should you measure?

- Meta tags
- Alt tags
- Titles
- Names of the images on the page
- Heading tags: h1, h2, h3...
- Frequency and position of the keywords in the body text

Each one of these items should be measured independently. There are tools to run keyword density against your competitors. If you run them against the top 3 or 5 sites, you may start to understand the secrets of top rankings.

Again, your keyword density needs to look natural; otherwise you may fail in overall optimization. This is when you use keywords too often or too little. If you look unnatural, your rankings will suffer as a result.

So, what did we learn here? Basically that the key to ranking highly in the search engines is to understand what the top 5 websites in your niche are doing and to apply this to your own website optimization.

What do you do now? Get out there and start getting inbound links for your site. Add quality content to your site daily. And be sure that your on-site optimization, such as keyword density, is similar to that of your top competitors. Continue to do this every day and you will be ranking a the top of the search engines before you know it.

About the author:

Trent Brownrigg is a successful internet marketer and home business mentor. Learn more about all aspects of online business by reading his freehome business tips, discovering online home business informationand visiting his home based businessopportunities website.