Social Bookmarking - The Three MAIN 'SEO' Benefits

[Jake Dennert]

When it comes to SEO, social bookmarking is a great weapon to have in your arsenal for many different reasons.

Let's get this party started.

Reason #1: Links

When you 'bookmark' your content on Social Bookmarking sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, you're actually creating 'in-bound' links to that specific content. Most of us already know the importance of links... How that's the biggest thing that'll attract the attention of the SE bots, increase PR, etc.

Reason #2: Popular With The Young Crowd

Social bookmarking sites, news sites, any sites that have that little 'status' or 'feed' type feature... They're ALL super popular with younger people. How come?

They'd rather get all their news and gossip from the internet than sitting and watching the BORING news on TV... or heaven forbid - pick up a damn newspaper.

RSS feeds make keeping tabs on certain subjects an absolute breeze. Just pick the topics you're interested in getting updated on - and bang, right to your inbox whenever something new and relevant is posted.

Reason #3: Potential To 'Go Viral'

Last, but not least...

Social bookmarking sites offer you the potential of getting your site or content to spread VIRALLY. I mean they encourage the hell out of sharing things you like or find interesting with your friends, connections, 'buddies' etc.

Get a few people to read your posts, like what they see, add it to their 'favorites' list (or whatever it's called on that particular site)... And all of a sudden you've got A LOT more eyeballs that you wouldn't have had otherwise.

[Dave Rodman]

Social bookmarking was popular about 4-5 years ago, I'm not sure how much value I'd give it today. Traffic on the major sites has plummeted. And if I was google, I'd slap implicit nofollows on any link coming out of a social bookmarking site.

[pdrs]

Sorry, but I have to disagree with 2 of your 3 points (with some exception).

Reason #1 - Links

Completely agree, they provide links and nofollow/dofollow arguments aside links are a good thing.

Reason #2 - The Young Crowd

This may be true. But unless your content/site is specifically geared to appeal to the audience, most younger people are INCREDIBLY internet savvy. They'll spot a BS niche link quicker than you can type it in to whatever spamming service your currently subscribed to and you're not going to gain any significant traffic from this. Again, if you're really targeting something that might have mass appeal than great but I think for the majority of people this isn't going to have any discernible effects.

Reason #3 - Going Viral

Read my reply to post #2. Again, if you're really pouring your heart and soul into one of your niche sites and it's a personal project, sure this could definitely happen. But if you're managing a few quality niche sites providing decent info that is nonetheless designed to get an aff click then this simply isn't going to happen 99% of the time.

Now don't get me wrong, I am not bashing Social Bookmarking links, I think they provide excellent value just for the pure social aspect of them which I think is something that google is paying attention to. But don't delude yourself into thinking that your most recent article on why someone should buy product X is ever going to inspire people to share or go viral.

[RUSHYYZ]

JAke - please send me a PM, I do not have enough posts to PM you. thanks! MIke

[AmandaT]

It really depends on your niche. My main site is in a dating niche and I get great traffic from social bookmarking. I just wish I had a good and inexpensive way to automate it since I only end up doing minimal bookmarking right now.

[P.Sharma]

I just use social bookmarking to make my sites get indexed faster and be on top of Google faster. It really is a way to get great backlinks.

The most common mistake people make is not using enough diversified keywords as anchor texts. As a rule of thumb you must use at least 5+ anchor texts. You don't want Google to classify your sites as spam sites and its easy to catch it since its just so unnatural for backlinks to have the same anchor text

[Justin Stowe]

Originally Posted by P.Sharma

The most common mistake people make is not using enough diversified keywords as anchor texts. As a rule of thumb you must use at least 5+ anchor texts. You don't want Google to classify your sites as spam sites and its easy to catch it since its just so unnatural for backlinks to have the same anchor text

This^^

I've built up tons of links with just one anchor text and my site disappeared into Google.

I started building some links with different anchor texts, and my site reappeared within 48 hours!

So instead of just using "get a boyfriend", you can use
how to get a boyfriend
get a boyfriend fast
how to get a boyfriend fast
get a boyfriend in a week

etc.

[JennyBizz]

I love using social bookmarking. Lately I've been using the heck out of socialadr.

[Dapper Fellow]

JennyBizz - Thanks kindly for the tip about socialadr. I was about to fire up my copy of Bookmarking Demon, but I think I will try this instead.

I like BMD's interface, but I wore myself out loading it up day after day last year.

[Markbenson]

The most common benefits are like we can attract audience on world level. we can increase our page rank in search engine. we can improve our websites visibilities. SEO is a cheaper solution than other marketing strategies.

[KylieSweet]

Originally Posted by Dave Rodman

Social bookmarking was popular about 4-5 years ago, I'm not sure how much value I'd give it today. Traffic on the major sites has plummeted. And if I was google, I'd slap implicit nofollows on any link coming out of a social bookmarking site.

I don't think Google will do that because no follow links will be useful in some other way. Regarding social bookmarking it is still part of link building technique in improving your site's popularity.

[brodiewyatt]

I always include Social Bookmarking to my link building campaign. Always get good results from it.

[jazbo]

Social bookmarking *can* help, but the OP is being a bit general. For a start there a re a gazillion social links, and many are not even clicked once. Second, most have zero SEO value. But yes, a targeted social bookmarking campaign can bring traffic.