For those of you who don’t know, social bookmarking links are, put simply, links from social bookmarking websites. One of the most well known of these sites is Delicious which is owned by Yahoo and also includes sites like Furl and Spurl, among others. These bookmarking sites have been specifically created for you to save your favorite website links and share them with the world.
The practical benefit is that you can access your favorite websites from any computer in the world that has internet access. Instead of focusing on why social bookmarking sites are practical, let’s take a look at why they can be effective for webmasters.
Multiple Links from Each Site
With most forms of link building such as buying backlinks, blog comments or even directory submissions, you only get one link for your effort. With social bookmarking however, that isn’t the case. The effort required to bookmark one link will often get you multiple links.
For example, you could get a link from your profile page, the tag you use to describe the link and even on the profile page of other users. If the specific bookmarking website uses categories then you can get links from those as well.
Get the Attention of Web Savvy Users
While web directories can be good for links, it’s not like people actually spend much time browsing them to find quality websites. Social bookmarking is different, in that web savvy users browse them all day long, finding new websites and going to websites that they have previously saved for whatever reason.
The users of social bookmarking websites are very internet savvy, so if that is just the type of visitor you are looking for then you’re in for a real bonus.
The Sites Send Traffic
Most people use social bookmarking links either for practical reasons as mentioned at beginning of this article, or for link building reasons in order to get more traffic from the major search engines. Not only will links from social bookmarking websites help you build traffic to your site, but you will also get links from the specific sites where your link is placed.
Bookmarking tools such as Bookmarking Demon will allow you to automatically bookmark your links on Pligg sites. Pligg sites are social voting communities which tend to get a lot of traffic, so using them will help you get more visitors to your site.
Build Links Quickly
The benefits from being able to make a living from internet income are limitless. If you know how to build a website that interests people, all you have to do is get their attention and you can make your dreams of a four hour work week become reality.
However, being a webmaster and driving traffic to your website is not all fun and games, some work is involved. With link building being the most important aspect of your campaign in order to get targeted search engine traffic, solutions in this area are few and far between. Luckily, there are tools out there that will help automate the social bookmarking process and allow you to build lots of high quality links to your websites, very quickly.
Potential for Your Links to Go Viral
Did you know that some of the top bookmarking websites such as Delicious have the potential to send you over 5,000 visitors in a matter of hours? Most social bookmarking sites have a homepage that shows off the most bookmarked links in the last few days and those links get a lot of traffic.
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Before this I was clueless. Thanks for informing me. I plan on reading more about it this weekend. Then I’ll start bookmarking!
I run a C# programming blog and nearly 40% of my new visitors are from social bookmarking sites. What I learned is I should submit my articles to bookmarking sites related to my blog’s niche and not to the general ones, for example I submitted articles to Technorati, Digg, DotNetKicks and DotNetShouts. The traffic I got from both DotNetKicks and DotNetShouts is 3 times what I got from Technorati and Digg.
I agree with all your points, social bookmarks are great for link building and is not viewed negatively by Google when you submit them for your own sites
While there is a ton of potential in social bookmarking sites, it is not the magic bullet of internet marketing. For the majority of sites on the net, social bookmarking helps very little. This is because the majority of sites on the net just don’t appeal to the masses. Social bookmarking is most effective with buzz worthy topics and topics that appeal to a large audience.
For link building, the links tend to produce an initial rankings boost, but then drop in effectiveness as the bookmarks get buried on the social bookmarking sites.