One of the more easy to use and very useful Web 2.0 sites out there  today is one called Weebly. Weebly is a self-publishing platform that lets you use their software and web space to create a site or blog of your choosing. Weebly is also very search engine friendly, and Google seems to like it, giving it a page rank of 8 at this writing. They also seem to pay a lot of attention to the content posted there, with the GoogleBot visiting several times a day, swallowing up new content to rank. Let’s examine what you can do with Weebly and the best ways to use it!

Publishing a site or blog on Weebly is drop dead easy. You simply head over to Weebly.com and sign up to create your new site. You can use a subdomain on Weebly, which will read something like yoursite.weebly.com, or you can register a new domain to use there — your choice. Then you make the determination if you’d like this to be an html site or a blog. Either way, creating content on them is as easy as dragging and dropping page elements into place and making it all make sense. No coding required!

However, Weebly is somewhat unique in that they let you play around with the source codes and CSS stylesheets if you are so inclined, but it’s truly not necessary. You can create a great looking site right out of the box! Add text block, photo galleries, videos, RSS feeds, maps, and images. You can even make a few bucks using Google Adsense and you won’t have any annoying ads belonging to anyone else, as is common with many Web 2.0 sites. You can create a great look for your site using any of the 70 terrific looking templates that you simply plug in and use.

Not only are Weebly sites easy to make and look at, they can be very useful to your marketing efforts. You can post links to your money sites here, and create unique content that will rank on it’s own, sending even  more visitors to your offers or eventual destinations. Using Weebly sites as a feeder site alone is missing some of the potential benefits they can deliver. The standard caution applies, however, to using Web 2.0 sites or any site you don’t own for that matter, as your money site. They can make you a few bucks, but if you don’t control whether they live or die, it’s simply not worth it!

That said, go out and experiment with Weebly! I think you’ll like it!

You surely have heard of HubPages, a self publishing platform that enables you to put up a blog filled with all sorts of content, aimed at talking about whatever it is you have a fancy to. This is a free publishing solution, and all it takes is your time and care. You can also make money from your hub through the ads that are running there, although you have no control over those ads. You are merely providing the content. The ads, usually Google Adsense and several banner ads, are selected by HubPages and the ad networks. You just get a cut.

However, for our purposes, this is not why we want to use HubPages. The best way to use a Web 2.0 site like HubPages is to use it for it’s authority. HubPages rank very well, and your hubs will often show highly in the search engine results because of this authority. This can be very useful on several levels. First, it can help you get sites and web pages indexed as links from an authoritative site and be followed — and Google is on HubPages all day. There is also some direct traffic from Hubs, though that is entirely dependent on the content you create. Any links you create back to your site are no-follow until you reach a “HubScore” of at least 75. Then they will be follow links and pass Page Rank and authority.

Best Practices On HubPages

The best way to make sure you are able to use HubPages to your advantage is to create the best Hubs you possibly can. HubPages does not suffer from spammers, and if there is a hint of spamminess in your Hub, it will be deleted. Moreover, you are only allowed a certain number of links to your site, and beyond that you are cut off.

Try and tell a story with your hub, and make it a mini-authority site on the subject you are writing about. If possible, use other types of media, such as video, images, and feeds. These can also help tell your story, and help your Hub rank higher.

HubPages is a terrific place to post relevant content with links back your sites. Just make sure to avoid the temptation to try and spam them, and you’ll find it very useful indeed!

If you’ve been exposed to Internet marketing for any length of time now, you are probably aware of a Web 2.0 site called Squidoo. Started by Seth Godin, a guru if ever there was one (in a good way), Squidoo.com is a web publishing platform where you can create what is known as a “lens,” which is essentially a web page where you can put up content of your choice. They have gotten a bit more particular of late as they were being spammed to death, and wanted to keep their own authority with Google (which is considerable) while getting rid of certain niches and markets that are rife with spammers.

For the most part, they accomplished this — so much so that you now hear the refrain that “Squidoo is dead” echoing in the marketing halls. It’s not dead, but it is a lot more difficult to get your lens to rank in Google if you are using competitive keywords. Google will show, at best, a couple of results for any given site for a particular keyword. Let’s look at an example. “The Truth About Abs” is an extremely popular health and fitness product on Clickbank. If you do a search on Google for site:squidoo.com + “truth about abs,” Google will show you that it has 2,870 pages in its index for that term. Now ask yourself this question, will you be able to outrank all of those sites above you? Not anytime soon! Squidoo still has the juice, but you need to target keywords more effectively and build your lens around those!

A couple of lens building tips are in order here. Squidoo likes to see at least four modules on your lens, and it doesn’t hurt to vary the types of content. Have some text, video, and anything else that melts your butter! They offer a ton of choices!

Squidoo is a very useful publishing platform. Make sure you’re using it to not only drop links to your sites, but also to sell or presell directly!

This is a question we get asked all the time. What is the difference between the two? We believe it’s important to know the difference, so lets take a moment and lay it out for you!

WordPress.com is a free hosted blogging solution. You simply go there and sign up, and you have a blog! Simple as pie! You can use any of their available themes (templates) and you’ll have a spiffy new blog up in no time! That’s the good news!

The bad news is that you have limited space, you cannot edit the themes to your liking, and you also have limited widgets and plugins to use. Moreover, you cannot put any advertising on your site, or affiliate links (While WordPress can, and does!). If they find you are, or are using the site as a doorway page to your affiliate offers, your blog will be deleted without notice or recourse. It’s their sandbox; their rules!

They have an apparent dislike for certain markets, such as the “make money” niche, and will take them down very quickly. So, for this reason alone, WordPress.com is NOT a good choice for hosting any sort of business site!! It’s just too chancy.

These WordPress.com blogs can be useful for pointing visitors to your sites, as they do get some love from Google. Just be aware that they can and do frequently disappear, so you need to determine if you can live with that.

WordPress.org, however, is another matter entirely. This is where you can download the WordPress blogging platform that you can then install on any domain you wish. (That you own!) This blogging platform is state of the art, and has more features than we can reasonably talk about here and now. If you’re looking to put up a blog, you won’t find an easier solution or more functional software than this! There are literally thousands of themes and plugins to make your blog look and operate exactly how you like it to!

You can download the blogging platform from WordPress.org, and either take advantage of their famous “5 minute install,” or, if you have a web host that has the Fantastico script library on your cPanel, you can literally have a new functional WordPress blog installed in about 3 clicks. You can then customize to your heart’s content!

The main difference to stress here though, is that any WordPress blog you install on your own domain will be all yours, and no one will be able to tell you what you can or can’t do with it! If you are planning to set up a business blog, this is imperative to know! No one wants to wake up one morning and find your business deleted!

Many times you hear the term Web 2.0 bandied about, and it has come to mean many things in several different disciplines, but for our purposes in Web marketing, it means any site that allows user-generated content. This can be in the form of a blog, video, profile or others.

Why would we want to use these sites? Many times they seem to have little to no relevance to what we are making our sites about. The reason we want to do this is for easy, authoritative, one-way links to your site! Let me explain this further.

Google and the other search engines use the number of incoming links to your sites as a barometer of the popularity of your site or blog. They are, in essence, “votes” for your site, and if get enough of these, you’ll find your rankings starting to improve. The reason they are “authoritative ” is that many times they have a great deal of page rank and trust rank, and Google views them as more valuable links. A good example of this would be links from Wikipedia. One-way links simply mean that they are linking to you, and you’re not linking back to them.

Many times we’ll use these Web 2.0 properties to place content with anchor text links pointing back to your site. These are usually very easy to set up and can carry quite a bit of weight. Sites like Squidoo, HubPages, and WordPress.com are beloved by Google and the rest of the search engines, and you can get quick, easy links and sometimes rankings by using these.

Here is a list of some of the popular Web 2.0 properties we sometimes use. This list is not comprehensive and doesn’t include video and photo sharing sites, which are also very good for this as are popular social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and others where you can drop links to your sites in your profiles.

Squidoo
HubPages
VOx
LiveJOurnal
Multiply
Wetpaint
Wordpress.com
Terapad
Xanga
Soulcast
Edublogs
Squarespace
LiveVideo
Zimbio
3steps
Tripod
Vox.com
Weebly.com
Wikispaces.com
Blog.com
Blogetery.com
Ehow.com
Gather.com
Insanejournal.com
Jimdo.com
Livejournal.com
Msnspaces.com
Nexo.com
Ning.com
Onsugar.com
Quizilla.com
Sosblog.com
Tumblr.com

As you can see, the possibilities are endless. You can put up links to your sites today, and it will cost you nothing except time. Or, if you haven’t the time or the wherewithal to learn how to use all these sites, you can always outsource this task.

However you do it, just make sure that you’re using Web 2.0 sites as a part of your overall link building strategy.