Traffic Generation: Can Social Bookmarking Help?

Traffic Generation: Can Social Bookmarking Help?

You have probably heard a lot of talk about social bookmarking over the past 12 months. It has been said that social bookmarking can help increase traffic and generate links to websites however we are going to explain exactly what social bookmarking is and how it can help if at all.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is a public list of favourite websites which are open to the public display. They are submitted and featured on social bookmarking websites and an example of this would be Stumbleupon or Digg.

When a site is featured on a social bookmarking website it is available for any other person to view and to interact with that website. It is basically like a search engine just without so much trash.

With social bookmarking websites you only get to view websites which other people have deemed interesting enough to bookmark them. This instantly cuts out 10% of the garbage on the internet today. Generally speaking its real people who bookmark these websites however as with every traffic generating method on the internet there are ways that it is exploited or taken advantage of.

Using robots or automated software to bookmark certain websites across a whole array of social bookmarking websites is a popular method. You can also ask friends, workers, employees to create accounts and to bookmark the websites as well.

The more a website is bookmarked the more popular it will become, since it will rise to the top of a certain category or area within that social bookmarking website the chances of people viewing that website will increase. For example, if I was to bookmark a legit site selling iphones for half the price, then you would probably receive an instant flurry of people viewing the website, a couple would purchase and then bookmark the website, as more and more people realise its legit and bookmark the website for others to view it slowly but surely becomes more and more popular. Many people bookmark websites for reference and ease of use as they can come back to that website later on.

Social bookmarking is a sort of voting system whereby people bookmark (vote) for sites that they enjoy or find useful. After they have bookmarked (voted) for that website it moves up in the system and has a higher chance of being viewed by more people.

How do you get started?

If you do a search for social bookmarking websites on Google you will find a massive array of choices. Go to each website and register (its free), once you have activated your account then start listing your websites. One word of warning though is to not focus on trying to just get one website viewed lots, also bookmark websites of interest to you in every market.

In many cases, whilst submitting your websites you will be asked for tags these are similar to keywords when posting an article to a website or setting up a website. The tags you choose should relate to the website you are trying to submit. For example if the website your trying to submit is about Iphones then some keywords would be “Cheap Iphones”, “Iphone Applications”. Many sites will also give you the option to write a short description about the website. I recommend writing a description whilst using the tags to improve your description.

Building Popularity

As with everything worth doing, building popularity will take time however when done properly the benefits can far outweigh the time spent.

I suggest starting with one bookmarking website and one webpage. An example would be using Stumbleupon as the chosen social bookmarking website and a webpage would be perhaps a newsletter opts in page or a squeeze page so that you can build your lists.

I would also recommend adding a link back to the bookmarking page from your webpage so that visitors also have the chance to bookmark your website and therefore increasing your authority.

After you have done this it is time to move on to a new social bookmarking website and do the same again with another web page and another social bookmarking website. Set up another account and go over the process again. The idea of using different social bookmarking websites is to help spread your website throughout the Internet and to help increase the amount of different links you have directed back to your website.

As a final note I think it is important to mention that you should not spam websites and that you should only bookmark and promote useful content. Also don’t concentrate on just bookmarking one website bookmark a variety of websites to ensure you don’t get your account banned.
Source: www.back-links.org