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March 22nd, 2010 by Susie
Social bookmarking sites are important, as we’ve discussed before. They can be great sources of relevant incoming traffic and the links they provide can have a very significant impact on search rankings. In this post we’ll give a quick introduction to the most important social bookmarking sites and then you can get going with some targeted social media marketing.
We’ve talked about digg.com and they way it works in previous blogs. It is one of the most popular social bookmarking tools, and one of the easiest to build into your website body (you can get someone- like us- to do that for you if you’re not comfortable up to your elbows in bits of html code). Basically it stores and shares links to sites Digg users like, combines the resulting pool of links, and lets more users say if they like the sites or not. It provides a very useful ranking and very useful publicity to sites with something handy or fun on offer.
Twitter is actually more popular than Digg by quite a significant margin, but it’s not so closely focused on links. You can post a short snippet of whatever you want publicly or to a restricted group, and people who have signed up to follow your Twitter posts (or twitters) receive it. Links, while not making up the bulk of Twitter traffic, are a significant fraction. The folks at Twitter analyse trends of what’s being talked about by whom, making it easy to find and join in popular topical threads that are open to public view.
There are two ways of using Twitter for social media optimization purposes. One is to get a link to or mention of your site flowing around in the twitter traffic, and the other is to get other Twitter users to sign up to your feed. Through the latter method you can keep them updated with new information as often as you like. However, Twitter posts are so quick and easy to generate that it’s a bit tempting to go overboard and twitter too often.
Google Buzz is brand new, but it’s backed by the full might of the Google colossus and already a formidable force in social media- and thus important for SMM. Like Twitter, the focus is on message passing, not links, and the principles of use for SEO purposes are similar.
StumbleUpon is entirely link-oriented, a true social bookmarking site. It works differently to the list-based Digg, in that you state your interests and click a button, and the software will automatically load a site straight into your browser window. This site has been added to the index for the specified topic by a user who liked it. You can give it your approval if you like it too, which provides a backbone rating system much like the one created by Digg. Like on Digg, getting a good rating is a great big feather in your SMM cap.
Reddit is also pure social bookmarking, and has a more standard list feel but a greater focus on whatever is ‘hot’, controversial, or the flavour of the day, rather than a consideration of sites by topic. Delicious is similar, but a little less racy and a little more subdued in feel.
There are plenty of others around too. Most of the above can be easily suggested to your site users by including a relatively simple button on your webpage- you’ll notice a bar of such icons on the lower right of the searchengineoptimization.co.uk page. Installing one is a great start to a strong SMM strategy and can give great benefit to your overall search engine optimization efforts.
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Great post! This is great information. Even though I am a social media professional, it’s nice to see what others are doing and it’s even better when we’re doing the same thing!
Very informative post.I have just started my own website and the information here is crucial to me developing a well ranked site. I’m sure your list will help me develop my site.