SEO Recap – The Rise of Social Bookmarking Sites

When using the internet, we often find many useful websites, run across interesting news, discover rare information, view captivating videos and explore hundreds of webpages with relevant and not so relevant content. We may often use the internal bookmarking capability of our computer, or even our browser to save these sites and pages for future reference.

However, bookmarking these sites locally in our computer or adding them to our Firefox or IE’s list of favorites to access them at a later stage without having to make a search means that this list of favorite will be available only in our computers or laptops. If we want to access this list of favorites when we are away from home, we have to have our laptop with us – but not everyone owns a laptop or can carry it with them constantly.

It’s all right – a new approach has been introduced to deal with our bookmarks; using these tools means that we can now have all our bookmarks online – which enables us to access our list of favorites from any part of the world, at any time!

As an added benefit, sharing our bookmarks with our friends is now as simple as clicking a button. They will be able to keep track of the updates in our bookmarks, and if they share the same interests then they will be able to access our bookmarks and benefit from the useful links. This idea has been expanded into the underlying principle of social bookmarking, which allows ever increasingly large groups of people to access bookmarks concerning things they are interested in.

Now the individual bookmarks have built up online to create enormous social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Delicious, Reddit, etc. These sites allow us to share and be shared with and make our bookmarks available online through searches so we can access useful information and share your own with others on the internet.

SEO can tap in on the potential of social bookmarking for building links. The favorite links shared by you in social bookmarking sites are indexed and followed by the search engine bots. Each link is counted as a back-link to your site according to the original principle of back links. Search engines assume that you are bookmarking a particular link because you found it useful. When you share it on a site that makes it accessible to others, it is assumed that the link will be useful for others too. When you multiply the number of social bookmarks from various sites by posting links, your back links also increase boosting your websites ranking.

When used correctly, you can benefit a great deal from social bookmarking. When it is improperly used, however, this strategy can get you into trouble and your website’s ranking can drop. You must find social bookmarking sites that do not add ‘no follow’ tag to your link. If no follow tag is added, your link will be alive but search engine bots will not follow this link to your website, which means that it will not count towards your total number of back links. For the best SEO, you want all of your backlinks to be ‘do-follow’ – although some no-follow links can be helpful in increasing visitor traffic.

Don’t submit your links in a random way to all social bookmarking sites. First, find out how many of these sites allow search engine bots to follow your link so that you will not waste your time in submitting the links, then lake sure that you submit according to the rules of the site and are not seen as a spammer always submitting only links back to your own content.