Posting news stories on the popular social bookmarking service Digg can help draw attention to them. After submitting your recommended stories, you can use these instructions to track the voting and comments on them by other Digg users.

First, wait a few minutes after submitting a link you want to track, so that Digg’s system can update. Then click the “My Profile” link at the top of the page and scroll down to the “Submitted” link on the page which appears. It may be necessary to scroll right to find this link, which is under the “Stats” heading. Click it and a list of all the stories you have submitted will be displayed.

Find the article you desire to track (you might have to use the search feature if you have submitted a lot of stories). You will see the number of “diggs” it has received, the category, and how long ago it was submitted, along with an option to “undigg” the link. For more information, click on its title.

This will link to a page which shows comments by other Digg users, as well as a list of users who “dugg” your article or posted its link on their blogs. To more conveniently track important stories, add this page to your browser’s favorites list, temporarily save it as a desktop icon, or keep it as a minimized window and refresh it periodically. It will be visible regardless of whether or not you are logged into your Digg account.

You can also mark the page as a “favorite” on Digg, using one of the icons below the article description. This will make the link to this page show up near the top of your profile, under the “Favorites” heading, making it easy to quickly track its popularity upon logging in. Keep in mind that your favorite web site selections are visible to other users.

Digg also has a feature which sends a message to your email account if one of your stories shows up in the “Popular” section.  This is activated by default upon signing up for Digg; it can be turned on or off under “Email Settings.” However, stories seldom appear in the “Popular” section with fewer than two-hundred “diggs”, so this is not an adequate way to track most submissions.

The above-mentioned tips and directions should be helpful to more easily and conveniently track the voting or comments on your news stories submitted at Digg.com.

Making your blog more popular requires taking steps to improve both content and promotion. Neither a well-advertised blog with uninteresting content nor a fascinating blog which is improperly promoted is likely to become popular. Here are 4 useful tips for making your blog popular, with two for enhancing content and the other two for expanding promotion:

1. Try to offer information on your weblog which is not already available online, being sure to cite the source if necessary. Such information may be obtained from reading printed publications and catalogs, personal experience, or telephone calls. Another option is to review a product or service on the blog which has yet to be reviewed online. Also consider briefly explaining data which can be found on the internet but takes a long time to read and/or load; for example, explaining the significant points of a 150 page report issued by an organization or government agency.

2. Write about shorter sub-topics in each of your blog articles/messages, rather than trying to cover broad issues or subjects. Depending upon the topic of your weblog, you may soon run out of subjects or material to post about if each message is very long. People are also less likely to read everything you have to say if the messages are several pages in length, rather than being broken down into shorter pieces. Being able to come up with new sub-topics to write about on a regular basis is an important part of making the blog more popular.

3. Occasionally submit some of your better blog postings to social bookmarking systems like Simpy.com or Reddit. This can be useful for making a significant increase in traffic/hits occur, if your weblog messages are popular with other social bookmarking users. Postings are more likely to be successful in these systems if they are on specific topics which aren’t covered by other members’ recently-submitted links, and don’t appear to be excessively promotional.

4. If you’re planning to post something especially significant or interesting on your blog soon, consider ending the previous posting with a message promoting the next post and when it will appear. This will help remind readers to return soon, thus making your weblog more popular. A similar technique is to release a long article in two or more parts, reminding visitors when to return for the next segment. Any method which can get readers in the habit of visiting your blog regularly is very helpful for making it popular.

If you use one or more online forum services regularly, it is possible to use your forum signature to effectively promote your web site or let people know about a service you offer. Two advantages of forum signature promotion are that it provides a personal recommendation, and is entirely free to use. Here are some tips on how to use your forum signature most effectively, both to increase clicks and improve web site search engine rankings…

1. Follow Rules: Some forums have specific rules about the size, length, and style of your forum signature. Try to find these rules; if there aren’t any, look at other experienced members’ signatures to see what is considered acceptable to use. Violating the rules might require you to waste time creating a new signature, and may negatively impact other users’ perception of you.

2. Right Size: A forum signature shouldn’t be so short that it is overlooked; at the same time, its length mustn’t annoy other members or be larger than your average forum message. Some forums allow members to use graphical banner advertisements in the signature; make sure your ad loads quickly and is not excessively large. 468×60 pixels is considered a standard size for banner ads in general, but individual forums may require or allow different sizes.

3. Relevant Words: If your forum signature has one or more links, the link text should contain words which are relevant to the linked pages’ content. For example, promoting a used laptop computer sales web site with a link titled “Under $75 Notebook Computers” would more effectively improve its search engine rankings than a link with the title “My Web Site.” This will also work more effectively if the subject of the forum is related to the site being promoted.

4. Useful Posts: For your signature to promote well, your forum message postings should be informative, helpful, interesting, and/or entertaining. This will increase your credibility (along with that of the web page or service you are promoting) and make other users more likely to respond to the signature. Posting messages on a regular basis, and at different times of the day or week, will effectively help increase the signature’s audience.

Overall, it is important to effectively optimize your forum signature both for search engine ranking benefits and direct clickthroughs from other users. This requires creating relatively short, but attractive promotional text (or image) and avoiding techniques which may displease the forum’s administrators or other users.

If you run a website, own a business, or manufacture a product, it is quite possible that it will receive negative publicity on the web at some time. This could be in the form of a news article, blog posting, review, or forum topic. Either way, it has the potential to harm your reputation and decrease revenue. If negative publicity of this type is false or does not accurately represent the business, consider using SEO (Search Engine Optimization) as part of your reputation management efforts…

The higher the page that is harming your reputation appears in search engine results (for the business or product’s name, or related keywords), the more it is a concern. One SEO reputation management technique to counteract this is to boost the search result rankings of other pages containing more favorable information. Placing links to such pages on your own web site will help accomplish this, as search engines generally give higher ranks to the results of pages with more links to them on other sites. If there aren’t any other sites with information about the product or business, consider issuing a newsworthy, positive press release about it; these will often spread to other web sites. Try submitting such press releases to a major article directory which accepts them (like GoArticles.com) as a component of the SEO reputation management campaign.

Likewise, reducing the number of links to the webpage with the negative information will also help decrease its prominence. If the page has false information and you can prove it, consider contacting any website or blog owners who have linked to it, politely providing them with reasons and/or data on why it is false. If the claims have received a great deal of attention and are causing significant damage to the business’s reputation, another option is to create an SEO optimized webpage on your own site refuting the accusations. Make sure this page is linked from a Site Map or another page on the web site, so that search engine spiders will be able to find it. If the undesirable page has been submitted to a social bookmarking service (like Reddit or Digg), it is very easy to create an account and “downvote” its link; this will help reduce the page’s listing prominence or make it disappear.

Following the above-mentioned tips should help you more effectively carry out online reputation management while utilizing SEO techniques. It is best not to use any aggressive, threatening, or unethical methods for accomplishing this; management practices of this type may be revealed and used to additionally worsen your reputation.

The major search engine and portal Yahoo.com is in the process of conducting tests aimed at the integration of Delicious (Del.icio.us) social bookmarking data into their search results. This lets searchers know how many Delicious users have bookmarked a particular web page. At present, it only occasionally becomes visible in Yahoo search results. These tests appear to be part of a trend in which Yahoo purchases other popular web sites and takes steps to integrate their content with Yahoo.com functions.

According to searchengineland.com, Yahoo recently began these integration tests; when visible, a line below each search result shows how many Delicious users have “bookmarked” the corresponding pages, along with a short list of “tags” (or keywords) they have been classified with. A small Delicious logo also appears alongside this line of data. Del.icio.us was acquired by Yahoo about two years ago. Yahoo has already completed the integration of itself with another major web site it acquired nine months earlier, by integrating photographs from Flickr.com with their Image Search feature.

The integration with Delicious enables people searching on Yahoo to know the number of people who have recommended a particular web site or page, theoretically helping them to choose the better result. For example, someone could search for a news story on a particular event which happened in the past, then read the article with the highest number of Delicious bookmarks, based upon the assumption that more users would recommend the better article. It could also give searchers a somewhat better idea of how established and/or trustworthy different online retailers are, although it wouldn’t be best to use it as the only source of information for this purpose.

However, there are some potential drawbacks to expanding integration with Delicious beyond tests. Factors unrelated to the quality of web content can impact how often it is recommended, such as how old it is, what percentage of people agree with an opinion it expresses, or how many people have an interest in promoting it. Also, Yahoo is more well-known and has existed longer than social internet bookmarking, so many of its users may be unfamiliar with this concept. It remains to be seen whether searchers will find this useful or cluttered, which will be the most important of tests in determining if integration of Delicious remains a permanent component of Yahoo web search.

In addition to directly promoting your website, social bookmarking services can be helpful in search engine optimization (SEO) efforts as well, because they create inbound links to it. Read on to learn about some of the most effective social bookmarking services to use for SEO purposes, as well as the best techniques for improving their effectiveness.

Two important factors which determine how beneficial individual social bookmarking services are to SEO efforts include the type of link code they use, and their Google PageRank levels. Many websites, such as prchecker.info, can be used to check Google PageRanks. Some social bookmarking systems, like Digg, Newsvine, and Reddit, use regular inbound links which are helpful in SEO because search engines give credit to the websites they are linking to, thus improving their search result rankings. However, some of the other services, like StumbleUpon and del.icio.us, use a “rel=’nofollow’” tag in their links, which prevents most search engines from considering the link in search rankings, thus eliminating most of its SEO benefits. To check for this on another social bookmarking website, use the “View Source” function in Internet Explorer.

Having a link appear on any page of a social bookmarking service may help your SEO efforts, but appearing on more important pages will have a greater benefit. For example, the home page of Digg.com has a Google PageRank of eight, while its “World News” page has a PageRank of six; getting your link on the home page will improve your site’s search result rankings more, at least on Google. Keeping the link on a social bookmarking service page for a longer time will also help; this increases the chance that search engine “spiders” will find it before it disappears. Getting more users to recommend your web site/page on such services will both increase its chance of reaching the home page and keep it on higher-ranking pages for a longer period of time. Placing social bookmarking recommendation logos on your website can help achieve this, along with producing interesting, useful content which users will want to recommend.

Several social bookmarking services, such as Digg, allow users to choose the title text of links they recommend, while others (like StumbleUpon) use the website’s HTML title tag for this. Either way, the title should contain words which people search for and which are repeated in the linked website’s text. Choosing a link title like “You’ve Got To See This!” might attract attention, but is less useful in SEO efforts because it doesn’t contain words relevant to the website it is linked to.