In my previous post Components to Increase Website Traffic Generation I said I had planned on doing some follow up posts regarding each of the components I mentioned for getting traffic. So, here is the post on social bookmarking.
The idea behind social bookmarking is to get your links out there for others to come across and visit your site. By having links to your posts or website on these bookmarking sites, you are exposing it for more people to come take a look and see whatcha got. Frankly though you probably won’t get a ton of traffic from these sites. It’s a bit like playing roulette. The odds aren’t in your favor, but you will occasionally get some traffic from those links. Who knows, you may even get lucky and your link makes it to the top of the social bookmarking popularity contest and you do get a ton of traffic.
There is a bigger benefit to having links on some of these social bookmarking sites than what I have mentioned so far. They are great for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) purposes and getting backlinks. Backlinks are links on a site that link back to your site. Part of the calculations that a search engine uses when assigning PageRank to a site is based on how many sites link to your site.
Now, don’t get carried away and start bookmarking all over the place. The search engines like to see natural and genuine links. If all of a sudden you have 100’s of bookmarks that weren’t there 2 days ago, Google and the other search engines will count that against you. You can bookmark to one or two bookmarking sites that you are active on, but don’t go crazy.
You can in-fact find a ton of (looking for a decent word here) poop, when you perform a search for “social bookmarking” or “social bookmarking traffic”. There are many folks out there selling automated bookmarking tools and bookmarking services. Stay away from these! These will get you in trouble with the search engines. It is much better to have links happen naturally than by having 300 of them suddenly appear out of know where. The search engines do know the difference. I don’t know how, but they do. You will see what traffic you do get from the search engines start to fall dramatically if you use these methods.
What you can do, other than bookmarking on the one or two sites you are active on, is to have a tool on your blog or website that allows the visitor to be able to share and bookmark your stuff for you. You know, like that little bookmarking button I have at the bottom of every post. This way they can save it for later if they want to come back to it or send it to his/her sister. Once it’s on the bookmarking site (and assuming he/she didn’t mark it as private) other people that use that bookmarking site can see the link and possibly pick it up.
It helps when you bookmark yourself to carefully select your keywords that you are listing with the bookmark. You want to make them highly relevant to your site and terms that someone would use when searching for your site on the search engines. This is what the search engines will see when looking at the other site to determine which search results your site shows up in.
I found a video on YouTube that I thought was useful and relevant to today’s topic. Have fun! There is more we could cover, but we will have to do that another time. You can find more tips on how to use social bookmarking sites to get traffic on my Squidoo lens.
