Social Bookmarking is about sharing

Social bookmarketing is no new topic in search engine optimization but is starting to attract increasing amounts of attention.  Generating traffic is always a problem for any webmaster and anything that promises to develop meaningful traffic is something worth investigating.

But what is social bookmarking?  Well on your browser you’re probably got a “bookmarks” or “favourites” function that allows you to save certain websites that you intend on revisiting in the future.  Maybe you like to catch up with news, or need to do internet banking, but there are probably a few websites that you like to repeatedly visit.  Of course only somebody with access to your computer will be able to see these bookmarks.

Social bookmarking gives you the opportunity to share your favourite websites on the internet.  Instead of storing your bookmarks in your browser you store them online and allow other people to view them.  By becoming a member of a community of people who bookmark online you are able to discover websites that other people enjoy.  This is an effective way of weeding out websites that nobody really likes.

There are many hundreds of social bookmarking services available on the internet.  Some of the more popular ones are Digg, Delicious, and Furl.

What does this mean for a Cape Town web development team?  Well, there is a standing joke that if you get onto the front page of Slashdot or Digg then you can expect your webserver to fall over because of the huge amount of traffic that comes your way.  Even though raw traffic isn’t really a terribly important metric in SEO having so much of it that you can scarcely cope with the volume is a Good Thing.

Social media has been regarded as a way to get backlinks.  This has lead to a great amount of spam being generated on these sites by webmasters trying to promote their own websites.  Many of the social bookmarking sites no longer give search engine credit to submissions until they reach some sort of threshold.  Search engines will automatically discount the value of links coming from social bookmarking sites that are spammed heavily.  The only really good sort of link is one where a human adds a link to your content because she thinks it is genuinely valuable.

Another way to use social bookmarking could be to check if your users are adding your content to their bookmarks.  The aim of any website should be to make itself as valuable as possible to its users.  One measure of success in this regard could be to see how many times your users bookmark your site.  If nobody is bookmarking your site then it might be likely that your content is not meeting the needs of your users.

~Andy

Tags: social, web 2.0

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 4th, 2009 at 6:13 am by Bertus Floor and is filed under Search Engine Optimization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.