Social Bookmarking Value in Search Engine Optimization
Thursday, November 18th, 2010Social bookmarking has given the small and medium business owners of the world a new way to approach Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Where the old school methods focused on tedious link building and endless on page optimization for specific keywords, social bookmarking services allow owners and webmasters to build links at a much more rapid pace.
Hitting the front page of Google for competitive keywords is an uphill battle. It takes time and is a path littered with many technical hurdles. You can severely shorten the timeline it takes to get there by leveraging a successful social media campaign and by using social bookmarks.
Search engine titans such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing, have been building relationships and sharing real time data with social bookmarking sites such as Twitter. These results are often distinguished from traditional search results, drawing more attention.
There are many social bookmarking services that you can use to increase the exposure that your content receives. A social bookmarking service such as Twitter gives your content the chance to go viral, being shared over and over by Twitter users. A site like Delicious offers you the opportunity to make your post or website into a social bookmarking submission.
When using social bookmarking to add value to your SEO campaigns, it is important to make sure that your users are able to easily share your content. Every major social bookmarking service provides an easy way to share a URL. Twitter has a Tweet button. Digg has a Digg This button. Facebook has Share and Like buttons. By including these into your site, you will be empowering your users to take action and share your content.
Sharing your content through social bookmarking enables you to power through one of the most tedious processes in SEO: building high quality links to your site. Search engines determine who makes it onto their front pages by determining who has the most relevant content out there for each keyword. They determine this in two ways: by looking at the keywords and content on the page and by counting the links that are coming back to your site for those keywords.
When a link is shared on a social bookmarking service, the exposure that site gains has the potential to grow exponentially. The wider that the information spreads on a social media site, the more likely it is that it will gain attention from other media publishers: bloggers, news outlets or other social media sites. As these sites pick up on popular content, more links will be sent to your site.
As the importance of social media and social bookmarking services increase over time, it is likely that search engines like Google and Bing will modify their ranking algorithms to give greater importance to content that is ranked well on social bookmarking service. Being ranked well in one of these services indicates that an audience has found the content to be important and useful. Search engines want to serve up the most useful content they can, which means utilizing information from communities and social bookmarking to learn what the best content is.
You can leverage social bookmarking and social bookmarking services to create stronger SEO campaigns and to drive your sites search engine rankings higher and higher. It’s time to engage with your community!














