Social bookmarks; How can they help SEO
At first, let me introduce you what is a social bookmark. As you may notice, bookmarking various web pages within a browser could end with strange structure, usually without any possibility to search. That’s why social bookmarks exist. Specialized sites offer free registeration and unlimited boorkarking. The major benefits of such bookmarks are:
- 1) You can search your bookmarks easily,
- 2) You can share your bookmarks with other registered users,
- 3) You can view others’ bookmarks,
- 4) Storing your bookmarks is very simple, since you can assign various relevant tags to every bookmark.
Naturally, you can delete or modify any record saved before. The most advantage for an ordinary user is the first and fourth point above. Unlike ordinary users, SEOs welcome the third and fourth points mentioned previously.
As time goes by, directories captured link popularity and it’s easy to obtain good rankings for even a new site if focusing on low or moderately competitve phrases. Generally, it’s not an easy task to get top rankings for high competitve phrases without any natural link. Natural links rule and they will rule in the future too. In comparison, directories’ listings can be manipulated, but bookmarks can’t be manipulated the same way. It is because of this; More people bookmark your site, more popularity it gets for chosen tags. More popularity for it’s tags, more closer to the first page of relevant tags. The best sites get listings on the tags’ first pages. Bear in mind, that if you run a site about bonsai trees, you shouldn’t reserve tags like „cars, helicopter, etc.“ for it.
Listings on the first pages have two major benefits, both for real people and search engines:
- 1) If you search for your phrase, you will find sites which have been bookmarked the most times for your search phrase (e.g. „microphone, wallet, etc.“) by real people,
- 2) There is a link to each tag, so search engines can find your records too. This means you will get free links if visitors find your web site useful.
You should feel that the second point above means the hardest part. Everything could go easily, however a visitor is the weakest point of this chain. Here below are the reasons:
- 1) Your site must offer links to various sites devoted to offering social bookmarks services,
- 2) Your visitor’s eyes must see these links,
- 3) Your visitor must click on those links (until this point, it wouldn’t be very complicated at all),
- 4) Your visitor must be registered user at site which opens after clicking on a link.
Social bookmarks are known for a long time, however the major part of internet users haven’t discovered them yet. That’s why they can be manipulated easily by 100 people who are paid for SEO. You even don’t need to submit your sites into directories, you even don’t need to pay thousands of dollars on SEO. The only one thing you need is about 100 people (why not your employees, if you’re a boss?). You will simply tell each person to register on sites offering on-line bookmarks and to bookmark your site. It all takes less than 1 minute and you will get hundreds of links! Nothing is much more simple than this strategy. On the other hand, it’s unfair to other sites and it’s applicable if only you have 100 people who do what you say. This is what some so-called SEOs do.
This is why social bookmarks can’t be taken as a 100%-ly trusted links source. Google knows it, however links from social bookmarks are ordinary links, so every serious search engine must count on them. On the other hand, bookmarks sites aren’t manipulated as much as directories are. This is proven, since my sites are receiving some traffic from http://del.icio.us/ or http://reddit.com each time I bookmark some internal page on my sites. Please note, that I’m doing it for testing purposes only, and I’m not spammer.
So what should you do in order to do legal „social bookmarks SEO campaign“?
- 1) It is recommended to use PHP or any dynamic scripting language on your sites,
- 2) Add the following link to each page: http://del.icio.us/post?url=YOUR_URL&title=TITLE_OF_YOUR_PAGE
- 3) You should make the link above visible enough, so visitors will find it.