Social Bookmarking is one of the many tools that should be used in your arsenal when practicing search engine optimization. As you may have already realized, there are many pieces that go into search engine optimization and one SEO tactic can not be used alone. Social bookmarking started in the mid 1990’s. Basically social bookmarking is as it sounds, bookmarking a website or web page that you like in order for you to remember it for a later time. One of the major benefits of social bookmarking online is sharing. Once you bookmark your favorite site, page, article or topic you can add your comments or notes and share it with others searching for similar information.
What differs social bookmarking from search engines? Social bookmarking is fully created by users, people, human beings…. people that are alive. Search engines use algorithms. The great thing about social bookmarking is that you get real people that have reviewed the content or website to stand for it’s validity. It makes is almost as if it is a referral. The concept of social bookmarking started as a great helper for those trying to cut out the bad results in their searches. Once someone tags your site in a social bookmark, others see the bookmark and so do search engines. This gives you another way of getting internal links.
Getting internal links via social bookmarking is another way to get inbound links to your website. This is why social bookmarking is so popular. Remember, the more inbound links crawlers see the more likely you’ll get top positions against your competitors. The problem with social bookmarking is that so many SEO’s and search engine marketing experts started to abuse the system that it hurt the social bookmarking industry. By creating many bookmarks, often twice and three times to the same site search engine experts and webmasters started to abuse social bookmarking websites. Many social bookmarking sites are nothing more then spam because of search engine optimization abuse. Many software companies created automated social bookmarking tools to automate the bookmarking process. Letting users use automated social bookmarking software can be a bad idea. Many “wanna be internet marketers” have no idea in the effects of just running SEO software. Automated tools such as link submitters and social bookmarking software need to be handled by people that are professionals or at least by people that know what their doing. You can’t just run a program and submit to hundreds of thousands of sites in one day and think your done. In fact, by doing so you just hurt your own SEO efforts. These days many of the social bookmarking websites online have moderators monitoring spam, automated tools and seo’s bookmarking self promotion. Many of the best social bookmarking sites are well aware of the black hat tactics SEO’s and users try.
Check out what Wikipedia says about social bookmarking.
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Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.
Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so that other users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favor of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, “the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content”.[1]
In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.
Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.
As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features.[2]
—————– Click here to read more about social bookmarking from Wikipedia ————–
That makes sense right? Basically what I said. But here is a part that can’t be missed and must be understood otherwise you stand a chance of hurting your own search engine optimization efforts.
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Spam and corruption
Social bookmarking can also be susceptible to corruption and collusion.[19] Due to its popularity, some users have started considering it as a tool to use along with search engine optimization to make their website more visible. The more often a web page is submitted and tagged, the better chance it has of being found. Spammers have started bookmarking the same web page multiple times and/or tagging each page of their web site using a lot of popular tags, obliging developers to constantly adjust their security system to overcome abuses.[20]
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Social Bookmarking Instructions & Help Tips
If your about to utilize social bookmarking into your web marketing efforts make sure you understand what social bookmarking means. If after reading this and getting yourself familiar with this method of search engine optimization and your still willing to handle this yourself here is what I suggest:
Submit to no more then 5 social bookmarking sites per day.
Never submit the same website twice.
Never submit the same content twice.
Never submit the same page twice.
Create a monthly schedule for your submissions.
Don’t create spam. You will get flagged.
Watch the amounts of links you place in your post or article.
Watch out for self promotion.
Social bookmarking is for bookmarking items you think are cool, websites that others would want to check out. It’s not a way for self promotion or sales so balance your work. Much of social bookmarking is in original content. If your site has a constant flow of original content in a form of articles or blog material, submit that manually. Do not use automated tools to submit to social bookmarking sites. Start slow. Make sure to tag your website in Google’s alert system and watch your links grow. This is a slow and tedious process but if done right, your website will benefit from social bookmarking as part of your overall search engine optimization efforts.
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