Social Bookmarking for Links and Traffic

Feb 28, 2008

I have been considering the use of Social Bookmarking for links and traffic. It is becoming hard to obtain links. And there is not necessarily that much traffic through Google for any one group of search phrases. What other methods are there of getting the message out there?

The whole social media sphere is a hot topic these days. Vast numbers of people are spending more time trolling through bebo, myspace, linkedin, facebook... than are searching on Google.

How can you promote your website through these media? Many of them are about interacting with people. Do our clients have the time to invest in such interaction? Is there sufficient payback to warrant the time required for them, or for yourself to do the work for them? Is the work so personal that the client should be doing it themselves?

View a video with Bebo founders Michael and Xochi Birch on iJump. Teens and 20's. 900,000 pages views per month. Interact with users. Create skins for your brand that others can use. Being creative. Don't be afraid of criticism, embrace it, show that you are responsive to criticism and this gives you credibility.

I welcome comment about use of these services.

Using Social Bookmarking for Links

The SocialMarker.com Social Bookmarking service is a site that enables easier listing onto multiple social bookmarking websites - ie Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, Stumbleupon... A number of these websites have dofollow (ie don't use nofollow on their links). This means that the links into your website will count, rather than being ignored by Google.

• Getting mentions on the bookmarking sites so others trolling through them can find your business/products/services - ie you can get a good amount of traffic through Stumbleupon, sites get inundated with traffic when they get Dugg via a Digg listing.
• You are getting inbound links to increase your link popularity
• Make sure that you use the link text that you are trying to rank for - if at all possible
• Descriptions on each site MUST be different - Google does not like duplicate content. Google will try and list only one version of duplicate content, and many times, it will not list anything that is duplicated - neither version.
• Descriptions must be different to the text on your own pages - ie if you are ranked on Google for the phrase "Social Bookmarking for links and traffic", and you have used that phrase in the first sentence of your page, don't use that exact first sentence on any other website. Don't use the two words before, after and including the phrase on any other website.
• Because the social media websites are powerful sites, their pages can rank high for your given search phrase in their own right - especially if you have used the phrase several times on their site.
• Improve your social media pages rankings on Google by linking to them from several other of your websites.

Using Video

Have you created a video about your business, products or services? People enjoy "free" information and training. As well as bloopers and funnies. There are more and more youtube and other video listings in the main Google search results.

• If you word your video submission, and tag it using the search phrases for your business, you have the possibility of getting it into the main search results.
• If your video is funny/informative enough, you could get large numbers of people viewing it, and so softselling your business.

Resources

Inspiration for this post came from a conversation I had yesterday with my friend Scott Evangelo of Info Design SEO Consultants. He is submitting one of my sites via SocialMarker.com. Scott - I look forward to seeing your comments to this blog post! ;)

I have recently subscribed to the Blog, podcast and social networks rss feed from Simon Young at ijump.co.nz. He has daily postings with links to media comment about social media. And he regularly creates video clips talking to thought leaders about social media issues. The latest video was with Roger Beaumont of TV3 on the Future of TV.

Consider submitting articles to Scribd.com. While the pages don't in their own right give links, their pages are able to rank on Google for your search phrases. Especially if you link to them from other websites.

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