Social bookmarking can not only help drive traffic and interest to your website, but also tells you what people think of your content.
The main purpose of SEO (search engine optimization) is to increase your website’s ranking on search engines such as Google, which as a result will help to increase the amount of traffic to your website. Whether you’re trying to be found locally in Ottawa, or casting a wider net, one of the most underused but effective methods of SEO is social bookmarking, a strategy that you should be taking advantage of if you aren’t already.
What is Social Bookmarking?
Odds are you understand the concept of bookmarking – saving a website to a favorites folder so that you can easily access it at a later date for whatever reason. Social bookmarking is a similar concept. Basically, you are able to tag a website as a favorite, saving it for easy future access. The only difference is that you can also share that website with others. Instead of saving your favorite websites to your computer, you’ll be saving them to an online platform.
Why should you use social bookmarking?
By sharing your website to a social bookmarking site, you’ll be exposing it to more people. They can, in turn, mark your website as a favorite and share it as well, thereby helping to increase awareness of your site and increasing web traffic as well. This makes social bookmarking a very powerful tool for your SEO strategy. The following are a few other benefits that social bookmarking will provide.
Quicker Site Indexing
When it comes to SEO, it often takes time to reap the benefits. However, search engines such as Google actually spend a lot of time going through social bookmarking sites. If your content is found across multiple sites, Google will index your content at a much faster rate, thereby helping to increase your web ranking faster.
Social Signalling
Google’s most recent search ranking algorithm update focuses heavily on social signals. Social bookmarking is in itself a social signal, which means that Google will pick up on the fact that your content is worth sharing and bookmarking if it tracks it on several social bookmarking platforms.
Targeted Traffic
Most websites operate in a niche, which means that random web traffic from outside their target audience doesn’t necessarily help them in any way. With social bookmarking, people that visit your website and share it are obviously interested in your content, making the traffic that you receive from social bookmarking much more valuable to your brand.
Improving Page Rank
Quicker site indexing, social signals and targeted traffic all help to increase your website’s page rank on search engines such as Google. The higher the ranking your website achieves, the more exposure it will receive.
What are some of the social bookmarking sites worth using?
There are a ton of social bookmarking sites out there, many of which are well worth your time. The following are a few that you should look into using:
Blokube – This social bookmarking site was designed specifically with bloggers in mind. People share their content, then vote on the articles that they like the most, which in turn will get more exposure.
StumbleUpon – StumbleUpon is one of the easiest social bookmarking sites to use. All you have to do is download the toolbar once you register. Every time you hit the StumbleUpon button, a new piece of content shows up. You then click on the thumbs up button in order to share it with other users if you like the content.
Del.icio.us – You can access this social bookmarking site through your Twitter and Facebook details and you can search through the content posted here by different tags as well as filter your searches by popularity.
Reddit – Arguably one of the most popular social bookmarking sites that you can use, Reddit allows you to post content. Readers will then upvote or downvote your content as well as comment on it. The more upvotes it receives, the closer it gets to the front page of Reddit. Getting to the front page is something of an achievement, as it gets you the most exposure possible.
Digg – Digg is very similar to Reddit although not quite as popular. Like Reddit, you can leave links to websites or content, which can then be upvoted by users in order to experience more exposure.
Furl – Furl allows you to save and organize your favourite content, making it quick and easy for you to access.
Blinklist – Blinklist lets you bookmark your favourite websites by simply clicking a button located on your toolbar. You then have the option of sharing your favorites.
Social bookmarking is a tool that every company should use as part of their SEO strategy in order to increase the exposure of their content, increase their web ranking and increase their web traffic.
