Social bookmarking involves recommending web pages that interest you to others with similar interests.  This might include web pages on your own site! Social bookmarking is valuable for two reasons: it can help your SEO campaign and it can attract targetted traffic to your website.

“How can social bookmarking help SEO?” you might ask. There’s a lot of evidence to say that search engines pay attention to what’s happening on social sites (see Rand Fishkin’s article on this, and A Tweet’s Effect on Rankings) and social bookmarking sites are just one type of social site.  Further, Google’s Amit Singhal also recently announced that their algorithm would attempt to bring content to the surface that is ‘trending’.  How else would Google measure what was trending, if not through social sites? It’s likely social sites are playing an even more important role in ranking factors than ever before.

As for bringing you targetted traffic, through social bookmarking, niche information is shared, reviewed and discussed, giving you a chance to get people talking about topics relating to your website or business. Look at what can be a achieved for a small, relatively new website with low traffic volumes:

Below: 3 traffic spikes resulting from the release of industry-specific guides on a website. 

Below: During the same 3-month period, Stumbleupon and Twitter accounted for over 38% of this site’s traffic.

With Google’s relentless changes to their algorithms causing huge headaches for many small businesses, it’s worthwhile considering other sources of traffic.

Social bookmarking works best in combination with a strategy for good content.  You won’t drive any significant traffic to your website unless you have something worth looking at, sharing and discussing (for help with this see our blog writing service, copywriting services and researched articles).

To maximise the effect of your strategy, you also need to include an element of getting involved, helping people out, commenting on how you enjoyed something they posted, if you genuinely did, and if it’s relevant to your market.  If by contrast you just post everything from your sites to your StumbleUpon profile, why would anyone follow you?

A final point worth mentioning is that social bookmarking is that it can get the search engines to look at and index new content on your website more quickly.

Services

TheInternetBusiness.net offers affordable promotion of your content through a comprehensive network of social bookmarking websites.  Get in touch and let us work out a plan that can help your business make the most of this valuable source of traffic.  Our affordable services are tailored to your needs and budget.