Why you should use social bookmarking for SEO

Social Bookmarking websites are growing in popularity for several reasons, they are not only a great personal tool but also an increasingly powerful tool for business. The idea behind social bookmarking is that people “bookmark” something that they have seen on the internet to publicly accessible social websites, other people can then see your social bookmark, read what you have bookmarked and then share it again. This creates a much larger level of exposure for the content.

Social bookmarking submission is about sharing your interests with the public with the hopes to generate widespread interest. The real benefits of social bookmarking occur when you’re able to direct this interest to your website. This is not black hat SEO but some of the best white hat there is, you are creating and sharing amazing content on the internet that people want to read and share with others!

Since social bookmarking began there has been an explosion of websites built for this purpose. A few of the most prominent today include Stumbleupon, Reddit, Digg, Pinterest and del.icio.us.

There are several benefits of social bookmarking to help your business grow, I’ve broken these down into four major benefits.

Rapid indexing via Social Bookmarking Sites

One of the fastest ways to get your websites found and indexed by search engines is to use social bookmarking sites. The search engine spiders that crawl the web all index popular social bookmarking sites regularly which will dramatically increase your chances of being indexed by the major search engines. By submitting your website to social bookmarking websites you're going to get found a lot faster.

Traffic Generation via Social Bookmarking Sites

Traffic generation is largely dependant upon the content posted onto social bookmarking sites, a prominent title and quality content will go along way into generating a decent level of click through traffic. The more social bookmarking sites you submit your content to the larger the net you will cast to draw in new traffic. With effective use of specific niche tagging your new traffic will likely be generating new highly specific traffic from your use of social bookmarking.

Personal Branding via Social Bookmarking Sites

Branding is vital to a successful online business, social bookmarking sites gives you an ideal space to create a profile for you and your business. These profiles give you a chance to list your personal web pages giving you both quality backlinks to your websites as well as branding yourself as an expert on your field.

Quality Backlinks via Social Bookmarking Sites

Whilst the main purpose of using social bookmarking isn’t necessarily about the backlinks gained but more about creating a viral spread and starting a social buzz, you do gain quality links for social bookmarking. Personal profiles within social bookmarking sites can themselves increase in pagerank when well maintained making them a valued asset in terms of SEO. Each post to a social bookmarking website is effectively giving you authoritative backlinks.

Social bookmarking can be an invaluable weapon in the SEO arsenal when used well and the combination of benefits listed above could see dramatic improvements to both traffic and ranking of your website.

Things to remember

Whenever you are thinking about submitting something to a social bookmarking site make sure it is good content. Ask yourself the question, “would I enjoy reading this?” If the answer is no then chances are no one else will and if people don’t enjoy it they won’t recommend it, even worse they can vote it down. The key is making your content something that adds value to the internet, not spam.

When you submit something to a social bookmarking site make sure that you do some research and submit it to the right niche. There are as many categories in social bookmarking sites as there are interests in the world! If you pick the wrong one chances are the members of that niche will not be interested in what you've posted, pick the right niche with a good piece of content and you could see your website traffic go through the roof!