Social Bookmarking – How Does It Help Your SEO?

All of us want to generate the most possible traffic for our sites, and one way to help that is through the judicious use of social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is the use of a special website that is set up for the purpose of bookmarking your favorite sites for your own use as well as others. They are very useful for storing links to sites you might like to return to, or direct others to, and even more useful as far as getting backlinks to your site from highly trafficked sites. These sites can also generate a surprising amount of direct traffic, so it’s an idea definitely worth exploring!

The Web is a very big popularity contest, and the one with the most links definitely sports an advantage. There are dozens of social bookmarking sites, and while it may seem like a huge task to get to a bunch of them as you need to register and create accounts with each one, they serve as easy ways to up the link volume.

Some of the better-known and more effective social bookmarking sites include places like Digg, Reddit, Propeller, Delicious, StumbleUpon, Google, Slashdot, Diigo, BlinkList, Simpy, Backflip, Newsvine, Mr. Wong, Connotea, Mixx, Ma.gnolia and many others. All of these have a thriving community, and can bring you traffic as well as links.

While it can be a drag to create accounts at a large number of these sites, you only need do it once, and it is also a perfect task to outsource. In fact, power bookmarkers often have their outsourcers create several account profiles for each service, to give them more flexibility and power.

Posting all of your bookmarks by hand is by far the best way, and a task sure to drive you over the edge! Again, it’s a logical choice for your outsourcers, and there are several tools, free and otherwise, that are very good at helping to semi-automate the otherwise painful process. These include sites like http://socialposter.com/, and http://socialmarker.com/. Another popular paid tool is Bookmarking Demon.

However you chose to get it done, get it done! Also, when you are in the process of submitting your pages and posts, videos and more, be aware that it’s generally a good idea to bookmark your best material. Don’t bookmark your Tweet about your dinner last night, unless it has a direct relevance to your business. Also, don’t be shy about bookmarking other sites as well. This makes the process appear all the more natural, and can only help.

The timing of the bookmarking matters as well. This can be a great tool for helping to index your pages, and if you’d like the bookmarks to help and possibly get ranked as well, (can you say multiple listings!) you need to do it very soon after the content is posted. Once the search engines see it, it’s a done deal.

Social bookmarking can be a terrific tool in the hands of a determined webmaster eager to get their site noticed. Just make sure not to go too wild with it!