McIntosh Marketing Blog

By now we all have been using the bookmarking options or buttons from our web providers like “Bookmark This Page” or “Add To Favorites” but some of us are actually taking advantage of bookmarking sites like Delicious.  These sites will track all of the feeds or pages that you bookmark but in a social type of account so you can have access to all of your bookmarks from any ones computer, anywhere and at any time.  It sure beats wanting to show someone something you found and not being able to remember the link that is sitting at home on your computer.

Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them. – WIKIPEDIA

The definition from Wikipedia above gives a great description of Social Bookmarking.  These Social Bookmarking accounts can be optimized for search engine results that same way as social accounts.  You can use tags in the form of keywords or keyword phrases to list specific types of bookmarks and to group them together.  You can also set up a public list of bookmarks that you would like to share with the public.  You should be able to note the bookmarks in all of these types of accounts as well so you know why you bookmarked the links in the first place.  Using all of these options is very important when optimizing your social bookmarking account to rank in the search engines.

The true benefit of Social Bookmarking is leaving one way back links.  By leaving these types of back links you will gain authority from Google over time.  In order to have your back links properly accounted for is to use a bookmarking site that does not use the “nofollow” tag.  It is good to not only bookmark your own website and category pages but also any related sites to your business or interests.  Granted, you will not want to bookmark your competitors but any sites that may support your product use or confirm any information on your site would be a great start.  You can get really creative with Bookmarking by following some of these ideas:

-Bookmark any sites that mention your link

-Bookmark any sites that have any content published about your site, such as articles, videos or press releases

-Bookmark your main landing page as well as all of your category pages

-Bookmark any blogs you have posted

-Bookmark any of your social or video accounts

-Bookmark any affiliate sites or any sites of anyone you have done business with

-Bookmark any pages that have mentions of your site or products

-Bookmark any local listings or maps listings you might have

This is more than enough to get everyone started so I hope this information helps get everyone started with their own Social Bookmarking!

So many terms, so many things to learn. Just when we started to understand social media (a work in progress), then someone throws out a new term like “social bookmarking.”

Yesterday I was with two friends. One was eating a burger and I talked about delicious. The other person was confused, thinking I was talking about the burger. She did not understand that delicious is a social bookmarking site. http://delicious.com/ This confirmed to my burger eating friend that this is a subject that is not only misunderstood, but has not been evaluated to its importance from a SEO and SEM standpoint.

In short, social bookmarking allows internet users o share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves are not shared, but merely bookmarks that refer them. These are saved as tag and allow people to share bookmarks, just as they would share an email address or a link to a video. It not only makes your bookmarks more manageable, but more sharable. I think sharable is a word.

Social bookmarking also has another benefit. You can specifically target what you want to find when surfing the web. Instead of going into a search engine and attempting to find that needle in a haystack, you can rapidly zero in on the items to what you are searching for.

From an SEO and SEM strategy, social bookmarking is another tool in your arsenal, hardly known about to the newbie or the common business person starting out into the web marketing world. The more often a web page is submitted and tagged, the better chance that web site has of being found.

To understand social bookmarking further, watch this video: