Social Bookmarking Can Help You Establish Authority

Social bookmarking sites have been some of the largest traffic makers in the past 3 years.  Major players like Reddit, Digg, and the new Chime.in offer instant access to hundreds of new stories, multimedia, and news updates every second for an online browser.  This style of “instant information” has become very popular with high speed and fast paced internet users throughout the world.  Reddit is showing their popularity by being currently ranked #47th for traffic on Alexa's top United States websites.

So what does social bookmarking offer to your blog?

Web presence, brand awareness, social networking, and search engine optimization all come to mind when thinking of the benefits from a smart social media campaign.  All of these sites have millions of users and are an easy outlet for your blog, small business, or corporation to reach out and engage with your niche, market, and peers.  Unless your selling pet rocks or blogging about Alpacas, you'll find hundreds of topics and posts going on that are relevant to your website in some way. Start engaging with your peers and the current top posters of the site, this helps establish your profile as authentic and you don't just want to spam or post links constantly.  Reputation management needs to be your guide as you interact online and represent your website by submitting posts and adding comments.

When you first create a profile and get online, look at the conversations that are going on in the top posts, main pages, and popular browsing areas.  Notice how the leading topics contain a “hook” or catchy phrase/tagline that immediately brings a reader in.  You want your title to announce to your readers a few things: the theme, an emotional grab, and hopefully some imagery or video.  Youtube has proven how important media is to improve the user quality of a post or page on the web..  If you can get original images and videos make sure to use them, you'll have a lot more chance at getting your bookmarks to go viral and become incredible link bait for you.

What are social bookmarks?

• 150 or less character title
• 200-750 word descriptions
• Image and Video uploads
• Add URL for source of content

How do they help your SEO campaign?

• Gain strong backlinks to deep pages on your domain
• Keywords in titles, descriptions, URL
• Submit bookmarks to relevant categories and keywords, improving your authority and association with specific niche(s)
• Top sites have 10,000's of browsers per category which can be converted into traffic for your website
• Diversify your campaign with at least 10 social bookmarking sites
• Don't just rely on search engine traffic, get additional traffic from all the sources you can

What NOT to do!

•  Don't spam!
• Never post your main domain more than once per site, link to inner pages/posts
• Always fill in all title, description, and text fields completely
• Keep it unique, mix it up
• Don't ONLY post your domain, link to other interests and sites around the web so you don't look like some automated spammer

What are some social bookmarking sites?

• Reddit
• Scrolldit
• Digg
• Diigo
• Brightkite
• Newsvine
• Faves
• Tumblr
• StumbleUpon
• Delicious

It is vital to any search engine optimization campaign that you include social media networking.  Bookmarking is an easy way to get started into new conversations and engage with online users immediately.  You don't need 15 likes, you don't need to write a few essays worth of content to get any views, all you need to do is to comment on others work and submit your own.  Honestly it can be very entertaining to browse these sites as well, get involved and have conversations that have worth about your market, industry, products, etc.  You can establish some solid reputation on the top sites by doing this and gain a lot of bonus traffic from comment readers. Just remember to take the time and effort to add worthwhile substance when submitting your own content, think about what the end-user appreciates and is looking for.

This is only one part of a diverse internet marketing campaign that you should be trying to update and optimize every week for your sites.  Google expects to see consistency in your blog releases, social media connections, and distribution of original content.  Keep writing new pages and posts, design and create custom video and images, then be sure to integrate all of your unique and original work online.  Regular social bookmarking can do just that, improving your social signals for Google and eventually increasing your rankings.  Also, do not forget to do some serious keyword research on your niche, market, or industry, before writing content and submitting to social bookmarking sites around the web.