9/01/2006

 

Harnessing the Power of Social Bookmarking for SEO

As SEO professionals we are constantly searching for ways to get our sites ranked and indexed better.

We all know that backlinks are "life blood" that get a site ranked higher in the search engines.

Black hat SEO experts in the quest to get one way backlinks till now relied on various methods like blog comment spam and referer log spam.

The latest technique is using social bookmarking to get one way back links.

What is social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is utilizing a web service, where users create a public repository of bookmarks pertaining to sites that they like.

The concept of social bookmarking dates back to 1996 with the launch of itList.com, followed by services like Blink and hotlinks and many more. But,the popularity of Social Bookmarking increased with the advent of the most popular bookmarking site till date, del.icio.us.

To the uninitated, these bookmarks may seem like geekspeak, but from an SEO standpoint these can build you a massive amount of backlinks which seem to originate from authority sites.

So how does one go about utilizing these social bookmarking services?

You simply sign up for an account and then post your urls. Each post requires you to enter the url, a title for the anchor text, a short description and of course the tags under which you want your link bookmarked.

A tag is a keyword which acts like a subject or category. Each user "tags" a webpage or image using his own unique tag. An image or webpage may have multiple tags that identify it. Webpages and images with identical tags are then linked together and users may use the tag to search for similar webpages and images.

Most of these services give you a personalized book mark page that has all your bookmarks displayed, and though when you start out the pagerank of your personalized page might be zero, it slowly builds up over time.

An additional important point worth looking at is that each tag page on the site has a pagerank which gets passed on to your site.



 
Social networks are getting a lot of attention these days including Wikipedia, del.icio.us and MySpace. Along with the buzz, these sites are also generating a lot of traffic! How can you integrate links for these types of social network sites into your search engine marketing program? While there are an increasing number of social networks, this article will stick to the above as they are kings of their domains so to speak.
I recently had the opportunity to attend Search Engine Strategies in New York City this past February, 2006. While attending a session in regards to community marketing tactics using both Wikipedia and tagging, the panel asked the audience, “Who here knows what Wikipedia and tagging are?” less than half the room raised their hands.
Let me give you an overview of these concepts.
Wikipedia is a free community content driven encyclopedia. I have included an excerpt about Wikipedia from their about section located at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About
“Begun in 2001, Wikipedia has rapidly grown into the largest reference website on the Internet. The content of Wikipedia is free, written collaboratively by people from all around the world. This website is a wiki, which means that anyone with access to an Internet-connected computer can edit, correct, or improve information throughout the encyclopedia, simply by clicking the edit this page link (with a few minor exceptions such as protected articles).”
Your benefits of using Wikipedia as an online marketing strategy are various. To begin with, your submitted content about your product or company may be very short and simple to begin with. As your content ages and more members view and contribute to your content with edit revisions, your content submission will grow and grow. For example, your submission may start out as a forty word brief that may turn into a multi-page article. Additionally, Wikipedia has a good Google Page Rank of 9 which will help boost your website’s PR with a quality backlink from your submitted content. Finally, using keywords that relate to your site in your contribution will assist you in controlling more space within the search engine results’ pages for your particular brand, product or name. For example, doing a Google Search for the term “Microsoft” returns a Wikipedia content entry about Microsoft in the tenth position of the Google SERP for “Microsoft”.
Little Known Discovers A Simple Way To Then Says, If I Can Do It You Might Do Better

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