Online marketing has gravitated away from true-and-tried ad and affiliate marketing toward the rapidly growing world of global social networking.
Social bookmarking is a great traffic-boosting search engine optimization (SEO) strategy because it’s easy, effective and trendy.
A social bookmark is a link that people post to social websites for others to see because they find it interesting, valuable or cool.
In a way, social bookmarks are just like the bookmarks you already have on your private computer. The difference between the two is that social bookmarks are saved to the web where they can be easily shared while private bookmarks are saved to your own browser.
The idea behind social bookmarking is simple: post links on popular social bookmarking websites to increase your own traffic and gain an ongoing stream of new readers and customers.
Content and links that are openly shared with other Internet users literally have unlimited growth potential. For example, one link can quickly multiply and reach thousands of desktops across the world if one user passes it on to others, and those users in turn do the same, and so on.
Because social bookmarks can be passed on indefinitely, they have the potential to reach a much wider audience and generate significantly more traffic than other online marketing methods.
Reasons why social bookmarking needs to form a part of your SEO strategy.
Fast Site Indexing
Search engine optimization is very often a waiting game. But what about the times when you just don’t have weeks to spare? One way of getting Google to index your site with lightning speed is to engage with social bookmarking platforms. Google and other search engines are crawling these platforms almost constantly. When Google finds links to your content across multiple social bookmarking sites, it will index that content with far greater speed than if the social bookmarks did not exist.
Send Social Signals
The very nature of social bookmarking dictates that social signals are sent out across the expanse of the internet, letting Google know that the content you have produced is worth sharing and bookmarking. As a result, Google is informed that your content is useful for a group of people and your SEO will be improved as a result.
Do-Follow Links
In the game of search engine optimization, a huge amount of focus is put on do-follow links. Do-follow links essentially pass on some SEO power from the linking website, whereas a no-follow link does not. Many people hold the opinion that social bookmarking sites are useless because the backlinks are no-follow links. But this is not always the case. Social bookmarking sites that can provide your business with valuable do-follow links include Digg, Diigo, and Scoop it.
Targeted Traffic
Most business websites operate within a specific niche. When you operate within a niche, having masses of traffic from the four corners of the globe is not necessarily that useful. What is more useful is receiving targeted traffic from the specific demographic that you have a vested interest in. This is where engagement with social bookmarking can help. People who visit your website as a result of social bookmarking will actually be interested in what you have to say. This means that you are likely to gain loyal readers, you will improve your page views, and Google will look favorably upon your new found popularity within a niche.
Boost Your Page Rank
The cumulative effect of the benefits listed above is that you will ultimately have an improved Page Rank. When Google is considering how to rank web pages and websites it takes into account incoming links from sites with impressive domain authorities, social signals spread out across various platforms, and engagement with a particular audience. By refocusing some of your SEO efforts on to social bookmarking you will find that your sites have improved rankings within Google, and that they also climb to the top of search results with greater speed.
