Firstly let’s all get up to speed and cover social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is the process of storing you bookmarks or (websites added to your favourites) on a publicly accessible website. This allows people to essentially store their favourites on a website which will be available wherever they are and whatever PC they are accessing the internet from.
Social Bookmarking sites are predicted to make huge gains in popularity in the near future as the boom around user generated content increases and the internet increases in size making finding quality sites harder. Yahoo acquired del.icio.us in December 2005 and they have experienced a 300% increase in their user base since then which shows the growth of these sites.
So now to the main point, can social bookmarking sites be used for website promotion? In an attempt to stop marketing and promotion SPAM most social tagging sites have implemented the now famous nofollow attribute tags (like Wikipedia) meaning no link popularity can be passed on from these sites.
However despite the attempts to prevent any link popularity and SEO benefit being gained, there are still some great benefits to be had by submitting websites to the social plethora of social bookmarking sites. Most enjoy good search engine ranking and appear high up on a huge amount of search terms, this can provide some excellent search engine visibility by population for listings with your sites links.
This provided with searches from the bookmarking sites can provide some good traffic. This can work especially well if used in conjunction with link bait or viral marketing, as a sites exposure increases exponentially as it gets more “bookmarks”.
The increased traffic and search engine listings can increase brand awareness and can be especially useful when launching a new site. So despite the nofollow’s social tagging sites can yield some very impressive results especially when used in conjunction other SEO and link generation methods.
Look out for the next article which will explain how best to go about submitting to social bookmarking sites and what content to use for maximum benefit.
Written by Marx Lomas
SEO Specialist
