March 21st, 2010 by Susie

When considering social media marketing, it’s easy to let social bookmarking slip under the radar. Sites like Digg and Delicious are less well known than Facebook and Twitter, although this is partially because they receive less attention in the off-virtual mainstream media. They represent less of a radical change in the way the internet works, because they’ve been around for far longer, and have far fewer users and viewers.

So why bother including them in an SMM and SEO plan, then? The answer lies in the structure and purpose of the sites. Social bookmarking sites are designed with link building in mind. It’s quick, it’s easy, and you can set up the on page infrastructure to let users of your site do it for you. And while the biggest social bookmarking sites can’t hope to rival the social media giants in number of users, they are certainly not insignificant when it comes to user base.

Let’s start with what’s on our homepage. Close to the bottom on the right hand side you’ll see a little horizontal bar of icons. These are our links to outside services and intended to help our site users help us get ahead on the internet, including on social bookmarking websites. The dark blue circle is the Digg icon. We’ve just installed a new Digg profile, so there isn’t much to see right now, but let’s go to digg.com and explore what’s going on.

What you’ll see is a page full of links with short meta descriptions. Those descriptions are user generated, not taken from the linked sites. The process begins when a Digg user decides they like a particular site. They add the link to their profile and either display it publicly, share it with a group, or store it for private use. Just like when you bookmark a site through your browser, but with a short description added. The difference lies in the sharing, and in what happens to the links once they’re posted. If more than one person likes the site at the same url, the meta of the Digg entry changes and it goes up the rankings. You’ll see boxes by each link with ’91 diggs’, ‘3347 diggs’. That’s the number of people who’ve given the site a thumbs up with the digg button. As the site’s dig entry gains in popularity, more people are likely to see it, check it out, and digg it in turn, so growth can be extremely rapid.

We’re sure that by this point you see how this is great for search engines and that social bookmarking can be a powerful SMO tool. From a search engine perspective, it’s even better than a human edited directory, because it’s not just straight approval or disapproval that’s being measured, but a ready made metric of popularity (or otherwise- you can impact negatively on a site’s digg position if you don’t like it).

It’s also pretty difficult to fool. All major social bookmarking sites prevent one user from sitting at home and digging a site over and over again to build up popularity. What you can do is make it as easy as possible for users to digg your site and encourage them to do so. Results will depend on the quality of your site, like all search engine optimization ultimately does.

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