SEO Recap – Social Bookmarking Don't's

Since social bookmarking has become one of the best ways of promoting your website and getting permanent one-way links for your site, you need to give a lot of focus to your social presence on the web.  You can build and gain visibility for your brand name. However, common mistakes made by new to social media web masters in social bookmarking are many and include:

Using  software tools that will submit your bookmarking text to all possible social bookmarking sites in a single click. Doing the bookmarking manually instead of using automated tools is much preferred, since automated content submission is traditionally frowned upon by Google and other major search engines. Doing your social bookmarking manually eliminates the chances that you will be seen as a spammer and your links discounted.  If you have several sites and cannot devote the time to do all the social bookmarking yourself, you can hire a professional social bookmarking service to handle the process for you – but again, ensure that the company that you hire uses manual submissions!

Spamming the social bookmarking sites with sales or marketing text.  You have to be a true member of each site and offer something useful to the online community. This is how other users are prompted to link to your bookmarks. By providing useful information instead of just sales pitches, your brand value will improve dramatically, If you hire this process out, you must make sure that they do not offer incorrect information under your name, because as much as social bookmarking can boost your brand value, it can also affect your brand name adversely and cause the online community to lose trust in you if it is not done correctly.

Adding all possible social bookmarking icons to your web pages. This can make it easy for people to tag your website if they find it useful.  However, overload makes people simply ignore your buttons, so you need to consider carefully  before you load your page with all possible social bookmarking icons. There are over one hundred social bookmarking sites. It is not necessary or advisable to add all those buttons to your website, as this will clutter your webpage and tell the world how desperate you are for links. Instead, choose a few most popular buttons for your website. You can rotate these to get an idea of how many links you get from each button, but four or five buttons is the maximum you should have showing at any one time.

Don’t overwhelm your visitors!

Trading ’likes’ or ’tagging’. Some webmasters try to wheel and deal with other users, setting up a system where other users tag your posts by rating or voting for the posts of other users in an indiscriminate way. It sounds like a great idea but if you are trying to get attention by rating someone else’s post, make sure that you find relevant posts to yours and do not abuse the system with indiscriminate tagging . You don’t need posts that are not linked to your field in any way.

Use social bookmarking responsibly, and you will benefit. Abuse it, and you’ll be universally hated.