How Beneficial is Social Bookmarking for SEO?

Or maybe a better place to start is–What is Social Bookmarking? Using Social Media for marketing is almost a given nowadays, however, many bloggers, website owners, and businesses don’t fully understand how beneficial Social Bookmarking for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) can be as a part of your Social Media plan. If you’re new to the idea of Social Bookmarking, then this is the article for you. Understanding and utilizing Social Bookmarking can be a very important strategy within your online marketing plans, especially if you plan on using Social Media and Search Engine Marketing to bring in traffic to your website. To begin, Social Bookmarking can be defined as the process of web users saving, storing, organizing, managing, and sharing bookmarks of pages that can be found on the internet. Some examples of websites created for Social Bookmarking are Digg, StumbleUpon, or Del.icio.us. From a personal standpoint, Social Bookmarking is quite helpful for any individual who would like to access their favorite bookmarks or websites, not just from their home computer, but from any computer providing internet access. But apart from that, Social Bookmarking for SEO can do incredible wonders at helping promote your business online. How so?

Social Bookmarking for SEO Means Widening your Target Audience

When you add bookmarks to a Social Bookmarking site, along with your promotional content (blog posts, articles, links, photos, videos, etc.) you also add tags and descriptions to associate with it. Now, when the users who are visiting these Social Bookmarking sites come across your link or content, they are able to see everything that is associated with it. This gives them a chance to know what the topic or nature of the content is beforehand. On top of that, users are able to search for content on Social Bookmarking sites and if your links are tagged for topics related to what they are searching for they will be able to find you easier. There are hundreds of thousands of users on Social Bookmarking sites, and tons of sites themselves, so of course by using Social Bookmarking for SEO for your business or website will be casting its PR nets much farther out; this will certainly help drive traffic to your website and get the word out about your business online. Through tagging, you will be able to channel a targeted audience to your website because visitors of Social Bookmarking sites often search for things that are actually of their interest. There is a major difference between just simply using Social Media for marketing and promotional purposes and using Social Bookmarking to drive specific groups of people with specific interests to your blog, website, or business.

How Does Social Bookmarking Help Search Engine Ranking?

Social Bookmarking is an integral part of a Search Engine Optimization plan. While an SEO plan cannot survive off Social Bookmarking alone, it can be a vital life-force in creating authority for, and consequently creating traffic to, your website. You can increase your page rank and gain a backlink when you bookmark a page from your website on a Social Bookmarking site that is “dofollow” (we will cover more about “dofollow” and “nofolow” in a later blog post). Many Social Bookmarking sites are authoritative themselves, so when you gain a backlink from an authoritative site, your page rank and authority increases. Doing this will also help Google to “crawl” and index your links much faster. If you are trying to utilize Search Engine Marketing to rank favorably on Google, it is seriously vital to note that using Social Media for marketing and PR is awesome and surely gets the word out, but using both Social Media (think Facebook & Twitter) and Social Bookmarking (StumbleUpon & Digg) for gaining high-quality backlinks is more than awesome–it is your KEY to authority!

How to Get Started Social Bookmarking for SEO

If you’d like to get started with Social Bookmarking for SEO on your own, here are 10 superb, high page rank Social Bookmarking sites to create profiles with. 1. Digg 2. Technorati 3. Del.icio.us 4. StumbleUpon 5. Squidoo 6. Reddit 7. Fark 8. Newsvine 9. Slashdot 10. BlogMarks     Do’s:

• Set up your profiles and completely fill them out with your information and add a photo, logo, or other branding.
• Also add links to your other Social Bookmarking sites, Social Media, RSS feed, and definitely to your website.
• Remember to save all your passwords in a safe place to easily keep track of your accounts.
• Sumbit articles and other content. Be sure to fill out your title, description, tags, and within your content, be sure to use keywords that will help in your SEO efforts.
• Become active and network with people who are sharing similar topics to you.
• Visit and submit frequently in order to stay an active, high-quality information source!
• Place Social Sharing buttons on your blog posts or pages to engage others to bookmark and share.

Don’ts:

• Avoid only submitting your own promotions. This helps networking efforts and also will prevent you from looking “spammy” to Google.
• Don’t submit every single page of your website to a Social Bookmarking site. Mix up your content to, again, avoid looking “spammy.” You can, however, certainly encourage others to share the posts on your blog!

Let us Help You in Using Social Media for Marketing your Small Business!

At The People’s Marketing, our team can help you with your Social Bookmarking. Social Bookmarking and Social Media in general can be very time-consuming, and as a business owner finding time for Social Media can be very difficult. We have a large accumulation of high-quality, high page rank, dofollow Social Bookmarking sites and methods for making your website traffic soar with our Social Bookmarking submissions. Whether you’re interested in a full SEO campaign for your website (which includes Social Bookmarking) or interested in starting a special Social Bookmarking campaign, contact us for more information.