What Is Social Bookmarking?

What Is Social Bookmarking?

You’ve probably heard the term social bookmarking, but may be a bit unclear on just what it is, or how it’s used in internet marketing. Never fear, we’re going to solve these mysteries right here and now!



Bookmarking pages has been around almost as long as the internet. You’ve done it yourself, by “Favoriting” sites and pages you’ve found useful or fun. This enables you to return to these pages when you want to  quickly and easily. It also was the impetus for shared social bookmarking sites to spring up, like Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and many others, whose purpose is to act as a sort of social collective, where you can publicly save and share your bookmarks. The search engines found that this was a great way to gauge page popularity, and began indexing bookmark sites daily, thus making the popular bookmarked pages even more popular! Not only that, but many times the bookmarks themselves will show up in the search engine results pages (SERPS) giving you more listings for your content. This is why marketers make it their business to make sure their pages, and especially the pages of their promoters are bookmarked.



There are several ways to do this. You can set up accounts at many of the social bookmarking sites, (there are many) and manually bookmark yourself. You can go to sites like SocialMarker.com and SocialPoster.com and do it semi-automatically. You can choose a service, like our favorite here at ContentDivas, (and we do a LOT of bookmarking!) SocialAdr. Or you can outsource it entirely. Any way you get it done, it needs to be done. It’s a competitive Web out there!



Here are a few tips for more effective social bookmarking.



* Try not to bookmark your own pages from your own site. This smacks of self-promotion, and too much of it will get you banned from at least the social bookmarking site. Have it come from elsewhere.



* Don’t only bookmark your own stuff. Make sure you bookmark other sites you find interesting as well, particularly in your niche.



* Consider outsourcing your social bookmarking. This definitely keeps it at arm’s length!



* If you do it yourself, make sure you bookmark a ratio of something like 7 other pages to one of yours.



* If you use a service or semi-autoposting tool, make sure to vary the titles and descriptions of your bookmarks. If they have a spinning utility, take advantage of the ability to spin these. (One of the only good uses of spinning!)



Using social bookmarking can have the immediate effect of getting some direct traffic from the bookmark sites themselves (a page that lands on the front page of Digg because of it’s bookmarks can bring server-crushing traffic!) and over time better search engine rankings.



It’s definitely a weapon to add to your arsenal!

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