Social Bookmarking: Use It Don’t Abuse It

If you are not using social bookmarking techniques to gain extra back links to your website and increase traffic then you are missing out on one of the fastest and easiest ways of promoting your website. In case you didn’t know, social bookmarking is a method of sharing, organizing, searching and managing links to web resources. The bookmarks themselves are held in the forms of categorized links with appropriate anchor text and a short accompanying description. The most interesting thing about social bookmarking though is that the major social bookmarking sites are all loved by the main search engines.

Most of the big sites have a page rank of 6 or higher putting them in the top ranking sites on the internet. Every day millions of people visit these sites to bookmark and share their web favourites. This means two things to you as an internet marketer.

First of all, you can tap into the massive amounts of traffic that these sites generate. Most of these sites enable their members not only to share bookmarks but also to vote on their popularity. Sites such as Digg, for example, have a voting system that enables you to ‘digg’ sites up or down. If your bookmark gets ‘dug’ enough times then it will reach the top of the category listings or even the front page. Getting a front page listing on a site like Digg can generate insane amounts of traffic for the short time that it stays there.

The second advantage of social bookmarking is that, because the major sites are all high PR, then the links that you place there will be factored accordingly. In fact, there can’t be many ways to get easier high ranking back links than using social bookmarking.

Of course, social bookmarking has its rules and there are some that you absolutely should follow, otherwise your account will be banned and you may even lose all of the links you have generated.
First of all, never spam the major social bookmarking sites. They are constantly on the lookout for people flooding their sites with links and even actively encourage their users to report offenders. If you are to use social bookmarking effectively, then obey the 80/20 rule that states that 80% of your submissions should be for sites other than your own. If in doubt, create multiple accounts and spread your link building efforts out over them. This way, if one account gets reported then you don’t lose all of your links.

The other thing to do is to give something back to the community. Remember to vote up other links that you find interesting, and try to contribute interesting stories yourself; don’t just drop links to your money site all of the time.

If you are diligent and follow some simple etiquette, then social bookmarking can be a fantastic way to gain both instant traffic and long term gains in the search engines. Make sure it’s part of your website promotion efforts.

Social Bookmarking: Use It Don’t Abuse It

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