Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites are a little different from social networking sites. Some allow you to create a profile. Most will require you to create an account with a username and password. That allows you to use the site and post “bookmarks” to sites that you like - and that you would like to share with other people. It gets really good when you realize that you can “bookmark” your own sites as easily as you can any other. By doing that, you’re essentially creating backlinks for search engines to find and index, and you’re also leaving a link for other users of the site to find and follow.

It’s great stuff - but don’t go overboard!

Do not swamp any social bookmark site with link after link. It’s best to build your links slowly over a period of time – a long term “organic” approach if you will. Most search engine optimizing (seo) experts agree that a slower organic approach to traffic and backlink building sits better with Google. In Google’s eyes (no pun intended) it isn’t natural for a site to go from 0 to 50,000 visitors in a week’s time.

We also suggest that you develop some kind of promotion journal (maybe in Excel) so that you can keep track of each action you take regarding your sites, and the social bookmarks you create for them. Remember, a vital key to successful social bookmarking is to use popular keywords as tags. When you tag your bookmarks with keywords and keyphrases that people are actually using in regular search engines, you will be much more likely to draw traffic to your sites through your publicly shared bookmarks.