Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking Services – Does Your Small Business Website Need Social Bookmarks To Increase Its Web Traffic?

Social bookmarking services can be an integral part of your website promotions. Many of these social bookmarking sites have very powerful communities, and just one well-placed bookmark on a site like Digg or Reddit can increase your web site traffic dramatically and within hours.

That is but one way in which social bookmarking submissions increase web traffic to your web site and build your business. However there is another “angle” to this social bookmarking phenomenon as well. In word…backlinks.

Social bookmarking sites are “crawled” by the Google Bot and Yahoo Slurp so frequently that these backlinks get indexed incredibly quickly, literally, they get indexed within minutes. And in this high tech day and age even that is lightning fast.

Social bookmarking SEO is a type of search engine optimization in which link builders will either manually (by hand) or mass submit (through software) social bookmarks in order to promote their websites. The traffic that is received from the social bookmarking sites is usually minimal and short lived…ahh, but the backlinks can be as good as gold. Because, backlinks are the “juice” that boosts search engine rankings.

Now, that’s not to say that using a mass social bookmarking submitter is going to give you page one Google rankings for your chosen keywords. No, that’s not going to happen, sorry to say, however social bookmarking is a smart component of an overall backlinking strategy and SEO plan.

Alright, let’s talk about DoFollow social bookmarking sites. DoFollow links pass along what’s called Page Rank or “link juice”…this PR or link juice raises your site’s visibility on Google. So, we definintely want a lot of DoFollow social bookmarking links.

Does that mean that NoFollow links aren’t welcome? Absolutely not, good targeted traffic can be gained from a NoFollow link…and even more importantly, when a website gets nothing but DoFollow links that sets off alarm bells with Google’s Algorhythm that your site is…I don’t know how to break it to you…spam. There, I said it.

Spam sites get flushed from Google’s SERP’s, so that is certainly not what we want. A smart SEO plan uses a mass social bookmarking submitter on what are called web 2.0 properties (Hub Pages, Squidoo Lens, Vox, Ning, etc.) in order to protect you main site from being flagged as spam while getting a lot of extra “link juice”.

This is an advanced and excellent backlinking strategy, but even it needs to be done with care. All link building needs to appear “natural” to Google…if it does, your search engine rankings will soar.

Finding a trust online marketing partner who understands how to use social bookmarking submissions in a coordinated, non-spammy way (using both manual and submitter programs) is one of the keys to your long term SEO strategy and the key to promoting your small business website.

Download our FREE report, outlining how we help small businesses market their websites online for maximum possible effectiveness for the lowest possible cost. Or contact us for a consultation