SEO Tutorial Part 14 – Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking is a relatively new phenomenon in the world of SEO, but it’s an extremely powerful tool for building backlinks and for driving traffic to your site. Basically, social bookmarking sites enable users to share links to sites they find interesting. For example, a skateboarding enthusiast might share the links he’s collected of cool skateboarding sites with a friend, or a web surfer could visit the homepage of one of these sites to see what’s new and interesting on the internet.
However, these two examples demonstrate the power of social bookmarking in a more organic sense. As site owners, we’ll use the opportunities bookmarking sites provide to bookmark our own sites to boost our link building campaigns. There are hundreds of different social bookmarking sites operating today, but for now, we’ll focus on three of the most popular sites – Digg, Del.icio.us, and StumbleUpon.
Digg.com – Digg currently has an Alexa ranking of 202 – indicating that it’s the 202nd most popular site on the internet. Thousands of web surfers visit this site everyday to check out entertaining news and video clips, making it a great way to drive traffic to your site. Digg allows users to submit sites in eight major categories – technology, world & business, science, gaming, lifestyle, entertainment, sports and offbeat. To submit your site, you’ll need to sign up for a free account with a username, password and email address. Once your account is set up, you’ll be able to add links and descriptions of your webpages, and create icons for your sites that will allow other readers to bookmark your site on Digg.
Delicious.com – Delicious.com is another popular social bookmarking site, in part due to the ease with which you can submit links. Unlike Digg, however, the site is much more freeform – focusing specifically on tags instead of separate categories. In this case, tags are single words that describe the content of the article – for example, “tattoo” in the case of an article titled “how to find tattoo designs”. Users can visit the del.icio.us homepage and search for specific tags that interest them, and the site will pull up all the articles linked in the database that include that tag. Signing up for an account with del.icio.us is similar to Digg.com – just choose a username and password, enter your email address and you’re ready to start adding links to your site.
StumbleUpon.com – StumbleUpon is one of the newer additions to the social bookmarking field. The site’s biggest draw is its ability to recommend sites you may like, based on the recommendations of other StumbleUpon members. Signing up for an account with this service is fairly similar to the process described for Digg.com and Del.icio.us. However, one of the major advantages to this site is the easy-to-use toolbar you can download to your web browser that makes submitting your links simple. Once the toolbar is installed, you’ll see a button that says “I like it” display on the top of your web browser. Navigate to one of your site’s pages, then press the button, and you’ll see a pop-up window that enables you to add your link to the StumbleUpon database.
In addition to these sites, there are hundreds of other social bookmarking sites, many of which focus on specific niches, like the entertainment or gaming industries. Because tens of thousands of people visit these social bookmarking sites every day, there’s bound to be at least one visitor who’s interested in content from your specific niche. If you’re lucky enough to have your article featured on the homepage of any of these directories, you could see your site benefit from hundreds of new visitors in a single day.
But even if you don’t make the homepage, by allowing visitors to easily bookmark your pages at the top social bookmarking sites, you’ll get links back to your pages. As mentioned previously, you can also bookmark your own web pages at the bookmarking sites (but please don’t spam) just to get things rolling and start building backlinks.
Additional Articles in the Search Engine Optimization Tutorial Series:
SEO Module 1 – SEO Introduction & Keyword Research (Watch Online Video)
-Part 1: What is SEO?
-Part 2: Keyword Research
-Part 3: What is LSI?
-Part 4: What are Long-Tail Keywords?
SEO Module 2 – On-Site Optimization (Watch Online Video)
-Part 5: On-Site vs Off-Site
-Part 6: On-Site Optimization Details
-Part 7: What are Meta Tags?
-Part 8: What is Anchor Text?
SEO Module 3 – Off-Site Optimization (Watch Online Video)
-Part 9: Off-Site Optimization
-Part 10: Directory Submissions
-Part 11: Article Submissions
-Part 12: Press Release Submissions
-Part 13: Forum & Blog Commenting
-Part 14: Social Bookmarking
-SEO Tutorial Conclusion
This is an interesting and informative post ! Thanks for the useful information. Enjoyed it.
I’ve been hearing that these social networking sites are putting a ‘no follow’ on all their external links. Is it true? If so, how would it help building our back links except that it’ll help drive some traffic?
This is a good starter for social bookmarking – something I am sure I still do not exploit as I should for SEO purposes.
Social bookmarking is definitely a great way to build links and promote your best website content. I was a big fan of stumbleupon last year but after using it for 3 months the novelty wore off and now I stay clear. Digg is by far my favorite social bookmarking site that was mentioned but I personally read Sphinn on a daily basis, but ever since sphinn applied nofollow to their links it lost a lot of luster.
I have just started using social marker to help me with my social bookmarking. Takes a bit of time setting thing up but hopefully it will save a lot of time in the long run.
Thanks for the useful information. I recently started working with social bookmarking sites to help build awareness of my sites and am waiting to see the results. Good to know that this is an effective means. I will continue working on this process. Thanks.
Nice lists of Social Bookmarking sites. Me, my personal favorites are OYAX and Reddit. Of course, I can’t rid of DIGG.
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I am starting to drink the Social Bookmarking Kool-Aid. There are a lot of good ones out there and the benefits are endless.
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For the moment social bookmarking alongside with blog and forum posting is one of the best starting point for for low cost SEO.
BTW Digg is in top5 referrers of my site’s traffic.
I like social bookmarking sites but only for the backlinks they provide. If you are looking for traffic, bookmarking wouldn’t be the optimal way as the traffic doesn’t usually convert, never mind staying on the site for more than a few seconds.
This is a great site to use for Social Bookmarking, Article Writing and Submitting, They have a quick turn around and the owner is accessible via skype.
If you want to get your website going I would check out this very affordable service. http://www.wcswebdesign.info
Another great social bookmarking site is Twitter. It gives a great word of mouth marketing to my site.
So.. I am almost at the end of the tutorial now. Felt great reading this. And I am really eager put this down in my own website as soon as possible
I agree that social Media sites are very powerfull .. But its hard to get results from it. I am trying to build friends on social media sites. Waiting to get benefit from social media sites..
Twitter is the best thing that happened to online businesses!
Some of the social bookmark sites are redirects or no follow. Make sure the ones you use are follow and not a redirect. They are a good way to get backlinks but not if you use adses on site. Ctr goes down and you earn less.
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Your blog is interesting.. It is very informative.. Social bookmarking is definitely a great way to build links and promote your best website content. I was a big fan of stumbleupon last year but after using it for 3 months the novelty wore off and now I stay clear. Digg is by far my favorite social bookmarking site that was mentioned but I personally read Sphinn on a daily basis, but ever since sphinn applied nofollow to their links it lost a lot of luster.
I think DIGG is from far the best social bookmarking website. I have some traffic from social bookmarking websites, but conversion is really bad, under 1%.
So many websites now are using social booking tools. if you’re site gets traffic, it’s well worth using them. We use AddThis.
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Great article Lisa. Social media marketing can also be a free effective way to start promoting a new site and gain some exposure. I personally like Digg. Some news articles or stories that you submit to Digg can get some high rankings in Google and this can bring some targeted traffic to your site from Digg.
I’m really liking the way you setup your posts in a series. Makes for very enjoyable reads.
To the people saying not to use sites that have applied a redirect to their outbound links: the search engines still follow those pretty well. So they’re still worth the time and effort of building a real account there, and developing your profile (in a non-spammy way!).
As for favorites, lately I’m really likin’ Mister Wong for social bookmarks.
I am a big fan of Social Bookmarking. You hit the nail on the head, it’s great for driving traffic to your site at the same time as building links. Some (very few) SBM sites do not use the NoFollow tag either.
Great article – seo has always been a bit of a mistery to me but this article has really lifted the fog – lots of pointers and ideas that I’m going to try and implement – will let you know how I get on!