Social Bookmarking for SEO
Social bookmarking has become a very popular method of sharing and disseminating information on the Internet. When it comes to earning an income online, social bookmarking can be a fickle beast. It can be a great way to drive a lot of traffic to your website if you manage to write something that is engaging enough for a wide range of people. But to get the most out of social bookmarking, it takes a bit of work to set it up.
*Disclaimer: There are quite a few very good SEOs that avoid the social bookmarking scene like the plague. For them, it’s a waste of time that would be better spent collecting higher quality backlinks. They are correct. Social bookmarking is not for those trying to make AdSense blogs, for those who want ad clicks, as the traffic you get is not directed to your product like it would be on Google. What it’s good for is if you’re trying to build an email list, or just get more general traffic to your website and possibly try to build a community. That is the power of social bookmarking.
Pros and cons of social bookmarking
Let me start by saying that social bookmarking isn’t necessarily good for selling things. It’s not the best way to get clicks, sales, or signups, nor is it the best way to optimize your site for SEO. You are not getting targeted traffic like you would get from Google. What it does is get the word out about your content, drive traffic and possibly go what’s called ‘viral’, which means your website gets its 15 minutes of fame when thousands and thousands visit it over a few days. If you’ve optimized your newsletter signups well, you may be able to significantly increase your email list and rss subscribers.
From an SEO point of view, a social bookmarking backlink is a low-quality backlink. They don’t rank very high in Google anymore, and many of the big sites add “nofollow” to the link, so it doesn’t rank at all in Google. However, there are a number of sites that follow your links, and it also adds some nice diversity to your backlink profile.
Therefore, social bookmarking is not the final answer to your SEO needs, but it is one avenue to explore in an overall optimization strategy.
Social bookmarking guide for an SEO
There are literally thousands of SB sites out there. Too many to keep track of, much less post. The best you can do is focus on one or two major social bookmarking sites as your main submission sites, and one or two niche social bookmarking sites specific to your niche, and just use an automatic or semi-automatic bookmarking service to take care of that. of rest. More on that later.
Building Your Top Social Sites
To build your main bookmarking sites and niche bookmarking sites, choose which ones to focus on first. What you need to do is appear to be an active and participating member of the site. Fill out your profile with details, add a photo (doesn’t have to be your own), join a couple of groups, and add a few friends from those groups. Be a real contributing member. This will make your account look legitimate and less like a spam account.
Once you do that, you can start submitting sites to the network. But don’t just send your own stuff, it will look like a self-promotion and no one will pay attention to it. It is much better, with your main social sites, to send a good variety of links and different websites, mixing your own stuff. Comment on other posts and look like an active member. Gradually, once you gain trust and influence in the community, you can start to focus more on your own stuff. On large sites, this grows your network and makes you appear legitimate. On niche social sites, it’s very easy to quickly become a big fish in a small pond, you can gain influence over the community, and whatever you post will be taken seriously.
Time management with social bookmarks
Social bookmarking and social media in general can be a huge waste of time. The media absorbs you and you end up spending a lot of time on something that is not going to make you money directly. Make sure you use your time wisely. There are a number of semi-automatic social bookmarking websites to try, see which one you like, and use.
You will have to enter and register individually in each of the services. It’s a unique, if tedious, project that will reap its rewards.
When using it to send, be sure to vary the titles, descriptions, and labels you enter. You don’t want all titles to look the same, as that would quickly be flagged as spam. You want it to look like 70 different people submitted a page to 70 different services. Although be sure to include the keywords you are targeting, it may be a low quality link, but it is still a link.
Social bookmarking in this way is free, the only thing that costs is time.
Social bookmarking for SEO step by step
1. First focus your efforts on 1 or 2 main sites and 1 or 2 niche social sites
2. Start by being active: join groups, comment, add friends
3. Don’t promote yourself at first, send lots of different types of links
4. When submitting to multiple services, vary the titles and descriptions (always include a keyword)
5. Don’t get sucked into wasting too much time, social media is good, but it’s not a substitute for real SEO
If done correctly then you should develop a decent portfolio of deep link backlinks to your websites and also have a steady increase in traffic.