Social Bookmarks – How Are They Important?
As you know, social bookmarking allows you to save the address of a website that you are interested in visiting in the future, action that is performed in the online environment, thus you can access your bookmark from anywhere, as long as you have Internet. When creating social bookmarks, you can usually tag a page with keywords, for easy classification, choose who to share a bookmark with, discuss with other users about it, rate it, or highlight aspects of particular importance. Each social bookmarking network has its own bookmark management options. Some popular bookmarking sites are StumbleUpon, Delicious, Pinterest, Reddit, Digg and Newsvine.
How are social bookmarks important?
The short answer is “SEO”. A bookmarking service can successfully be used to drive more traffic to your website. If social media SEO is done properly, it is an easy and inexpensive means to attract more viewers to your site. More revenue from Google Adsense and other paid for online advertisements can be obtained. Care must be given to how marketing is done via social media, so that you are not seen as a spammer or banned. Aside from SEO, social media is a great marketing tool in itself, as any post that is considered interesting by your network connections grows your popularity. Let’s discuss in more detail:
• Quick indexing – various search engines will index your page within hours from the moment that it has been bookmarked on a bookmarking site.
• Natural links – after making your website known in the bookmarking community, if its content is interesting, then others might link to your website on their own web pages – you get backlinks. You can naturally obtain several one-way backlinks in this way. Politely refuse invitations for link exchange, as search engines do not view this practice with good eyes. Just like with paid links, search engines consider link exchange to be something that everybody can do, so links obtained in this way are not considered relevant to the actual popularity of a website.
• Links coming from within the popular bookmarking communities are also considered backlinks to your website by search engines. Generally, backlinks are used in the algorithms that engines apply in assigning a rank to a web page. Backlinks coming from bookmarking services are considered natural and therefore they can improve your ranking. They are usually accompanied by descriptive text, which is even better, because keywords can be identified. The appended keywords are also indexed by search engines together with the links.
Even when you yourself submit your posts (links) to the bookmarking community, you create backlinks for your site – it is not necessary that only others share your content for this to happen. The more you write for your blog and announce this in the bookmarking community, the more your blog will become visible to search engines.
• Since bookmarks are represented through tagging, metadata can be asserted to them. This adds to the relevance of the links that are bookmarked.
• Increased traffic due to accessing of your website from bookmarking networks also contributes to higher ranking is search engines, thus even more chances at traffic growth.
• The more traffic you get, the more chances you have that incoming visitors become clients of your products and services, eventually.
• When individuals make a search online for certain products and services, if they come across an article that is bookmarked by you on a social media site and that they enjoy, they might want to connect to your website to be kept updated with new similar articles.
• Not only discussions around your posts and sharing of your website content are of use to you. What you comment on, what posts from other websites you share, what you recommend also says something about you. You can use social bookmarking sites to create your image as a business by showing what you appreciate and whom you collaborate with also. If people like what you like, they might start liking you more.
If you want to use social bookmarks and bookmarking networks for search engine marketing (SEM), here are a few things to do to become and remain popular:
• Make the content on your webpages useful and attractive.
• Make use of images and videos to accompany the text.
• Bookmark not just your own pages, but the pages of others.
• Create as many network friends as possible.
• Stay active, do not allow people to forget about your existence.
Social bookmarking sites can, as we have seen, help you get higher traffic through themselves and also by helping grow your SERP rankings, meaning that your visibility where search engines are concerned can also grow. Marketing in the world of social bookmarks works both as a “word of mouth” campaign and as a SEO campaign.
