The Marketing Benefits of Online (Social) Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking is a phenomenon that has risen dramatically from the dust over the past two years, but what is it and what makes it so significant when it comes to online marketing?
Linking is still queen
When it comes to winning the search engine game, content is still king and linking is still queen. What this means is although the first thing that you need to focus on is quality content for your website, the next most important thing that you need to ensure is that you receives as many as possible QUALITY links to your site.
What are quality links?
Quality links have a combination between two things. Relevancy and trust. You must receive links to your website that are from websites or sections of a website that relate to your own content. In addition to this the websites that are linking to you need to be old and ideally .edu, .gov or .ac.uk etc. domains.
Search engines love to crawl social bookmarking sites
I can’t go on about the quality of your links too much here because that’s a whole topic by itself, but the reason in this case that I’ve brought the subject up is that search engines love to crawl good websites. And there aren’t much better websites for search engines to crawl than social bookmarking sites.
Why are social bookmarking sites so good for search engines?
The reason that search engines love to crawl social bookmarking sites is simple. Because humans are involved and the humans involved are organising their favourite web pages, search engines say that this provides a very strong indication that the ‘vote’ cast for the web page is extremely relevant.
How can you use social bookmarking to improve your search ranking?
Again, simple. Get as many people as possible (who ideally have similar interests) to save your web pages as part of their bookmarks. How do you do that? Well… there are ways of cheating the system a bit, but in the long run it’s not really worth it. It will come back and bite you on the backside.
How do you encourage people to bookmark your pages?
The best way to encourage people to bookmark your pages is to do two things.
1) Provide great content that people will want to come back to over time.
2) Make it very easy for people to bookmark your pages. (Like the bookmark button at the top of this article)
If you’d like to find more about social bookmarking why don’t you come to one of our Internet marketing seminars?
Written by David Bain on March 21st, 2007 with 6 comments.
Read more articles on Social Bookmarking and Viral Marketing.
