The Fundamentals of Social Bookmarking

Have you ever used a bookmark? In the days when the books I purchased had a piece of string attached to them, I used it to mark the page after I stopped reading. With the passage of time I found myself using the little inserts commonly know, to my generation, as bookmarks.

How things change, as they always do eventually. I can’t remember the last time I bought a book with a string marker. Can you?

Advances in technology improve the way we communicate with each other. ‘Social booking’ is a straight forward concept, until you add business into the mix. You bookmark the web pages you like, so others [your friends] can find them. Simple, right? But most people in business don’t want or care about sharing their favorite web pages with their buddies. Our reason for using bookmarks is sparked by the promise of massive amounts of site traffic and an improved ranking in the search engines. At least that is why I spent the last three months researching the topic. And there is a lot of information out there. A lot! However, when scrutinized carefully most of the content published about social bookmarking is confusing, misleading and just plain baloney.

So what is the truth? Social bookmarking will increase your site traffic and improve your rank in the search engines. It is also a fairly easy to do.

But don’t expect your website to be on Page 1 of Google overnight. It might be. However, it is all dependant of the competitiveness of your keywords. Also, it is doubtful you are going to generate any sales, at least for the first few months. My advice, plan on getting no sales whatsoever. I bookmark for one reason primary reason, “to get backlinks to my website.” Sure… in a few months, if other people re-bookmark my bookmark and it grows in popularity, I might generate some buzz and make some sales, but it is a gradual process and it takes time. I am committed to the journey and reaching my destination—to get in the Top 5 search results for all my keywords. I already have three spots on the first page of Google for “best video email.” While the competition isn’t exactly huge, results are results!

Insight: organic search engine sales really only kick in when you are in the Top 5 results in the search engines. When you do, you get a constant stream of traffic to your website. Also, your keywords need to generate a decent search volume.

There are also some prerequisites you must put in place to make your social bookmarking worthwhile. You need a website or squeeze pages(s) and a blog. Think about it. On a rudimentary level, each time you bookmark a web page, you get one backlink. More web pages equals more backlinks. If you don’t have very many web pages, what is the use of bookmarking? Also, if you don’t have a blog, I highly recommend you get one and starting blogging about useful stuff right away.

This is how you bookmark: all you need to do is sign-up for accounts on social bookmarking sites and bookmark your web pages and those of others. This would be layer one of the success strategy. You can magnify your success by starting a Conga line using additional members from your team. Be mindful though, as the search engine algorithms sometimes can’t tell the difference between people who are cheating the system and those who simply have a lot of friends in their Conga line.

There are over 100 social bookmarking sites. That number is rising rapidly. For the majority of small businesses [the people I am writing this post for] it would be very expensive to use them all.

I am currently using the following sites for bookmarking related activities because I deem them to be the top 9 sites; about half of them are dofollow sites [you get backlink credit when bookmarking a web page]:

1. StumbleUpon
2. Propeller
3. Slashdot
4. Mixx
5. Digg
6. Technorati
7. Sphinn
8. Delicious
9. Reddit

[A word of caution, don't abuse the bookmarking communities: bookmark your web pages wisely; and bookmark other web pages that interest you as well.]

If you are asking yourself, “why should I take the time to leave a bookmark on a site that doesn’t give me backlink credit [aka nofollow]? You are asking a good question. While you do not get backlink credit initially, if you reach a certain amount of re-bookmarks by the community, normally this is called page 1, guess what? You get massive amounts of traffic and backlink credit.

Insight: all backlinks are not credit equal. For the sake of simplicity, the easiest way to quantify the value of a backlink is to ascertain the amount of traffic the website receives. More traffic almost always equals a higher value backlink.

Helpful Hints

• If you don’t know where all you web pages are Google site: www.yourdomain.com [or whatever extension you use]. It will bring up a list on the pages on your domain that are listed in Google.
• You can ascertain the search volume for your keywords using Google’s AdWords Keyword Tool.
• Another useful tool that will help you pick keywords that are on an uptrend is Google Insights.

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I hope you have found this article useful. If you have any knowledge to share about social bookmarking, or simply have a question, please leave a comments below.

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