Social Bookmarking

What is Social Bookmarking? It’s no surprise that the vast majority of people are now getting their news, entertainment, and event information via social media. Managing and maintaining access to important posts has become essential to finding a desired post buried in cat memes and Buzzfeed videos. Social bookmarking allows users to store, categorize, search, and manage “bookmarks” of web pages and social media posts. By using social bookmarking sites, users are able to compile links to web pages that they’ve liked or want to share. Bookmarks stored are often public, and can be viewed and by other members of the site. Bookmarking sites like del.icio.us  and digg.com are organized by users applying “tags” or keywords to content on a Web site. These tags allow users to view bookmarks that are associated with a chosen tag. These sites also allow users to see information about the number of users who have bookmarked them, and gives users the ability to comment or vote on bookmarked items. Social bookmarking has also been referred to as folksonomy, collaborative tagging, social classification, social indexing, and social tagging. “Folksonomy” is a combination of the words ‘folk’ and ‘taxonomy’, hence a folksonomy is a taxonomy generated by users How can Social Bookmarking help with web site ranking?

• Since users are sharing content relevant to interests, being listed on a social bookmarking site drives quality traffic. In fact sites like del.icio.us  and digg.com offer a highly valued user by creating viral traffic to sites. Users who land on your site via a social bookmarking site are generally there because your Web site was listed in a search for topics they were interested in. The only drawback to pursuing this form of SEO is that some of the social bookmarking sites will mark outbound links as “nofollow”. This signals to search engines not to follow the link engagement, which means that your site will not benefit from the traffic!
• Search engines often list results from bookmarking sites. This is an extra opportunity to show up in search results if your site is linked on these sites.
• Being featured on one particular bookmarking site often leads to people tagging your site on another bookmarking site. This may sound rather strange, but people who bookmark may use more than one bookmarking site. This can lead to users finding you on one site and bookmarking you on another, which is an excellent opportunity for increasing Search Engine Optimization.
• You also can increase this type of traffic by adding social bookmarking buttons to your website and blog, making it easier readers to save and share your content with an even larger target demographic.

There are numerous benefits and few drawbacks to encouraging visitors to bookmark your web site. The largest benefit being that the type of traffic you will receive will probably be very targeted and engaged in the content on your web site. Check out some of the sites listed above to read more about how Social Bookmarking can increase desired traffic to your website, and contact our experts at Stoute Web Solutions for help on how increase your SEO and add social bookmarking plugins to your site to capitalize on their benefits today!