We’ve been discussing many different ways to gain traffic and visibility for your blog or business, today let’s explore one more tool that helps us bring order to the chaos of ourselves and helps others find what we have to offer more easily as well, social bookmarking.
Social bookmarking is essentially the same as saving web pages as bookmarks in your browser, except it exists within a webpage and adds the ability to organize by creating tags, or categories of topics that you can save the websites under that makes them easier to return to.
The tagging is at once one of the strongest positives and negatives of social bookmarking because while it does add some rhyme and reason to web surfing, there is no real standardization of the tagging and it’s basically up to the individuals using the applications as to what categories are created and added.
Of course, there is also the social aspect, which allows others to use your tags and visit your bookmarks as well. It’s an aid to more efficient web surfing as it allows people to browse via organized categories of material, and it allows people to find websites that others have found particularly high quality or useful.
The more times a site has been bookmarked, the higher the ranking it receives in the system.
Some of the most popular sites that people use for social bookmarking include Digg, Delicious (incidentally the website that founded social bookmarking in the first place), Reddit, and Stumbleupon, but there are many more as this is a growing trend.
Your blog or website can be submitted to each and every single one of them as well, even by yourself to help get the ball rolling, though it is considered wise practice to link to a variety of different sorts of content, not just your own. You never know, start digging or linking to other bloggers and see if they don’t return the favor, it works similarly to linking to others on your site itself.
Some people have been known to spam these websites with submitting every single page on their site or every post they make, but this is frowned upon as it’s considered bad etiquette and unnecessary. While many bookmarking sites do not screen submissions, there are some that do and it’s possible to get denied access to submissions and at the very least you’re likely to cause people to ignore your work by spamming with less than useful links, and this is exactly the opposite of what you want to achieve.
So what is it exactly you want to achieve with social bookmarking? Visibility and the extra ability to entice new visitors to your site and to keep them coming back, and it’s relatively easy to get started with. All you do is visit the bookmarking application of your choice, create an account and start submitting links and tagging them. Another beautiful thing about these sites is that while you’re tagging, you are given the opportunity to add a short description of the content of the site you’re linking to in order to give people a better idea of what they will find on the page, as well as why they should visit.
Ultimately you are looking to gain traffic for your site, as well as more hits from search engines and social bookmarking is certainly one way to do this, the more times content on your site is linked to via the web, the better for getting your work or your business on the radar. The traffic spikes from a specific digg for example on one of your pages will not last forever, but it will bring in new readers and some of them may well stay, so it’s worth the extra effort.
There are plenty of easy widgets and free codes available on the web to add buttons to your blog or site that will allow visitors (and you) to easily click to add your content to a variety of bookmarking sites. Examples can be found at Toprankblog, or Addthis.com. Social bookmarking is easy and one more tool to use to give your blog or business a step up above the rest of your competition.
Author Resource:
MrCyberSmartWeb- For more information, free videos and podcasts, be sure to check out my marketing resource website: http://www.cybersmartwebmarketing.com/ CyberSmartWeb Marketing Solutions (TM) Your "How To" WordPress Business Web Development Resource Center
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