Social Bookmarking for SEO

Social bookmarking has become a very popular method for sharing and dispersing information on the internet. When it comes to earning income online, social bookmarking can be a fickle beast. It can be a great way to get lots of traffic to your website if you manage to write something that is attractive enough to a broad enough range of people. But in order to get the most from Social bookmarking it takes a bit of work to get set up.

*Disclaimer- There are a good number of very good SEO's who avoid the social bookmarking scene like the plague. To them it is a time waster that would better be spent gathering higher quality backlinks. They are right. Social bookmarking is not for those who are trying to make adsense blogs, for those who want clicks on ads since the traffic you get isn't targeted to your product like it would be in Google. What it is good for is if you are trying to build an email list, or just get overall more traffic to your website and possibly try to create a community. That is the power of social bookmarking.

Pros and Cons of Social Bookmarking

Let me start off by saying that social bookmarking isn't necessarily good for selling things. It's not the best way to get clicks, sales, or signups, nor is it the best way to SEO your site. You aren't getting targeted traffic like what you would get from Google. What it is good for is getting the word out about your content, drawing traffic, and possibly going what is called 'viral' which means your website gets its 15 minutes of fame as thousands upon thousands visit it for a few days. If you have optimized your newsletter signups well, you might manage to get a hefty boost to your email list and rss subscribers.

From an SEO standpoint, a social bookmark backlink is a low quality backlink. They are not ranked very high anymore with Google, and many of the big social bookmarking sites add "nofollow" to the link, so it's not ranked at all with Google. However, there are a number of sites that do follow your links, and it adds a nice diversity to your backlink profile as well.

So, social bookmarking isn't the end-all answer to your SEO needs, but it is one avenue to explore in an overall optimization strategy.

Guide to Social Bookmarking for an SEO

There are literally thousands of SB sites out there. Too many to keep track of, much less post to. The best thing to do is focus on one or two major social bookmarking sites as your core submission sites, and one or two niche social bookmarking sites specific to your niche, and just use an automated or semi-automated bookmarking service to take care of the rest. More on that later.

Building your Core Social Sites

To build your core bookmarking sites and niche bookmarking sites, choose which ones you will focus on first. What you need to do is appear to be an active and participating member of the site. So fill out your profile with details, add a photo (doesn't have to be yours), join a couple groups, and add some friends from those groups. This will make your account appear legit and less like a spam account. Stumbleupon, Digg, Mixx, Reddit, and Propell are all good sites to look into for major general topic social sites.

Once you do that, you can start submitting sites to the network. But don't only submit your own stuff, it will look like self promotion and nobody will pay attention to it. It's much better, with your main social sites, to submit a good variety of different links and websites, intermixing your own stuff in. Comment on other postings and look like an active member. Gradually, once you gain trust and influence in the community you can start focusing more on your own stuff. On the big sites, this grows your network and makes you look legit. On niche social sites, it is very easy to become a big fish in a small pond very fast, you can gain influence over the community and what you submit will be taken seriously.

Semi-Automatic Bookmarking submission

Now, once you have started to build up your core sites, you can start to use a automatic/semi-automatic system to get your link on the rest. I like http://socialposter.com/ personally. It has a list of over 70 sites, an option to select only the sites that allow dofollow, and if you select "Frame Submit" it makes everything easy and much faster than doing it without the help.

You will need to go in and sign up individually to each of those services. It is a one-off, if tedious, project that will reap rewards.

When using that to submit, make sure you vary the titles, descriptions, and tags that you enter in. You don't want all the titles to look the same since that would quickly be flagged as Spam from google. You want it to look like 70 different people submitted a page to 70 different services. Although be sure to include the keywords you are targeting, it may be a low quality link, but it's still a link.

Social bookmarking this way is free to do, the only thing it costs is time.

Automated Submission

Social Poster offers a program to download that will submit automatically to 120ish websites. I have not tested that though. The reason being is there is a far superior, if more expensive program called Bookmarking Demon. It automates the submission to hundreds of social sites, randomly crawls your websites and submits articles, and it also automatically injects submissions from other popular sites to effectively cloak your own self submissions. It's almost untrackable and very effective at social bookmarking. It's got a hefty price tag, but is worth it if you want to get hundreds of low quality links.