What is social bookmarking and how can it be used for SEO?

May 282007

published by Gary in Social Media with No Comments

Social bookmarking websites allow you to save your favorite links and if you want to, share those links with the other users of the social bookmarking websites. Users can organise hundreds of links under various tags: you can assign tags (broadly, you can call them categories) to these links and when people search for terms that seem like your tags, the listings under those tags often appear in the search result pages. A few examples of well-known social bookmarking websites are Digg, Del.icio.us, Netvibes, Technorati, StumbleUpon and Netscape (yup, the browser).

Social Bookmarking Effects on SEO

A great thing about the above-mentioned social bookmarking websites is that they allow their users to rank various links, that is, they can vote what links they like. So the popularity of your links over there increases as more and more people give a “thumbs up” to your link.

Once your link gets popular on one social bookmarking website, say, Digg, it soon begins to appear on other websites too, so you can imagine how valuable those inbound links can be for your SEO efforts. Then, people often scour these social bookmarking websites to find valuable content and then publish the links on their websites. The more visible your link becomes, the greater chance it has of appearing on other websites and blogs.

The search engines also use the votes your links get to re-evaluate your website ranking. A website with popular links gets highly ranked by the search engines.

So do you want to instill rocket fuel into your SEO efforts? Then start giving serious thoughts on generating content that encourages your visitors to add your links to social bookmarking websites.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 28th, 2007 at 10:52 am and is filed under Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.