Social Bookmarking 101

There is no doubt that social bookmarking is one of the most effective approaches for building up your web site’s One Way Links. Social bookmarking may mean different things to different people depending on how they view using them, so let’s define it first to be absolutely clear: Social Bookmarking is a way of tagging content to make it easy for other users to find, and for tracking that content.

Social bookmarking can take many forms depending on the individual preferences of the person performing the task. Digg, Sphinn, Del.icio.us, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Technorati, BlogSpot and even an RSS fee from your own website or blog can be considered bookmarking if other people are subscribed to your feed, follow or friend you, or vote your content up. There is more than one way to skin a cat.

Social bookmarking can be time consuming and tedious for some people. It can get extremely repetitive, but if done correctly it is well worth the effort. If the social network isn’t your scene, you can hire a professional social bookmarking service to take care of regular bookmarking on your behalf.

The Dos and Don’ts of Social Bookmarking as part of a full service link building campaign are as follows:

Always be selective. Having a huge array of buttons for every social network you can find at the side or bottom of all your content can overwhelm people and make them shy away from using even one sharing technique. People like choices, but they hate feeling overwhelmed or pressured. Use YouTube for videos, Flickr and Picasa for photos, MySpace, Twitter and Facebook for laid back personal messages, LinkedIn for professional shout outs, Digg and Sphinn for really interesting stuff that might go viral. Know your content and where it fits best.

Putting your content in front of the right audience for it is essential. Start by asking yourself if the Technorati crowd or the stay at home moms crowd are more likely to respond to what you are presenting and get them the right buttons to act on when you make your content live. In the opinion of many SEOs, the maximum number of social bookmarking site buttons that should ever be present on a piece of content is five – more than that and the reader figures ‘what’s the use’ and simply skips the sharing step because they either don’t know what to pick or feel overwhelmed and pressured to use them all.

Don’t start bookmarking then get lazy and quit posting new content for your readers. Your following wants to see new stuff every day or so, so space it out. Try to set up automatic updates to simplify things if that helps. Change it up and vary which bookmarking sites you submit to, as well as the type of content, and track your results so you know what works and what doesn’t. It takes time, but again, the data you collect early on can make life much easier for you later.

There are over 200 social bookmarking sites on the web to work with. Your job as the content provider is to find the ones that work for you and focus your efforts on them. You can always have a social bookmark submissions services firm submit en masse if desired – but figuring out where your niche customers like to hang out is the key to successfully generating extra links and traffic.

Everything you do in your social bookmarking campaign must be considered carefully, from how many social bookmarking sites to target, to what kind of content they will find valuable, to whether or not to employ a firm to ensure quality social bookmarking is being done on your behalf. If you outsource your social bookmarking, ensure that your online profile is being accurately represented and that your social bookmarking submissions are being handles correctly so you won’t be labeled a spammer. The last thing you want is to be booted from a site because getting back on is not the easiest thing to do – and that will cost you followers in the long run.

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