How to be Effective at Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking can be a powerful way to generate traffic to your Internet marketing content and improve your rankings on the search engines. But there are some potential pitfalls you have to avoid with social bookmarking. This article explains what social bookmarking is, what the potential pitfalls are, and how to use it effectively.

Social bookmarking started in the early 90s as a way of capturing web pages. The idea was to have a means of saving or “bookmarking” important websites that you wanted to refer to later. Over time, these bookmarking sites became more sophisticated in how they categorized the sized. They started to use “tags” that would link the sites to a keyword. Another trend was that visitors were able to “rank” how useful they found the bookmarked content.

That has evolved into the modern social bookmarking, which has become a way to promote a website or article. This can work in two ways. First, you can use social bookmarking to create incoming links to your Internet content. And the more incoming links you have to your internet content, the more likely it will rank higher on the search engines. Secondly, you can bookmark your content at social bookmarking sites to attract visitors who search for information at those sites.

There are a ton of social bookmarking sites. Some of these include Furl, Propeller, Del.icio.us, Twitter, Mixx, Stumbleupon, Technocrati and Digg. You’ll find a more complete list of the various social bookmarking sites at SocialMarker. Going through all of those social bookmarking sites is very time-consuming and SocialMarker is a free service designed to reduce the time and effort needed to socially bookmark a website. However, how you use SocialMarker is just one of the potential pitfalls you can face when doing social bookmarking.

Search engines (such as Google, Yahoo, MSN) have begun to crack down on people who systematically use social bookmarking as a way of generating incoming links. If it’s done too obviously, it’s considered spam and this can affect how the search engines rank your content. Search engines actually use algorithms that can identify when someone is “spamming” the bookmarking sites. You can even have your accounts at these bookmarking sites revoked if you cross the “spam” line too much.

You also have to be very careful how you use bookmarking tools like SocialMarker. As mentioned above, SocialMarker is a free system that lets you bookmark your content at a number of bookmarking sites much more quickly than if you were to do it site by site. While it saves time, SocialMarker tips off the search engine sites that you are “spamming” and they are likely to penalize you by reducing your search engine rankings.

The key to being effective at social bookmarking is to be both balanced and natural. This means that you should behave like a “real person” would behave when bookmarking internet content. The most important thing is to not only bookmark your own sites. Bookmark other people’s internet content that you find valuable and of interest to you.

Secondly, bookmark content that extends beyond your business interests. If you love dogs or scrapbooking or wine, then find content on these subjects and bookmark the content you like.

Thirdly, don’t bookmark every single article you write. Bookmark only your best stuff. And if you’re going to bookmark the same article or website at different social bookmarking sites, be sure to not use the same title and review and tags. That’s a red flag to the search engines that you’re “spamming”.

Here are some more valuable social bookmarking tips by Mike Klingler of Renegade Professional.

When you follow these tips, you’ll find that the search engines reward you with higher rankings. You’ll also get a better ranking at the bookmarking sites themselves. And the other members of the bookmarking community will appreciate you not being a “selfish marketer” and be more likely to look at the content you do bookmark.

When you do social bookmarking the right way, namely act natural and not come across as a “spammer”, then there are real benefits to be had. You will get higher rankings by the search engines, and more people at the social bookmarking sites will be attracted to you and find your content. The bottom line is that if you make real contributions and be gracious to others, you will be rewarded. In that sense, social bookmarking is just like anything else in life, isn’t it?

Cindy Schulson coaches small business owners and network marketing professionals. The focus is on working smart by leveraging the Internet to attract qualified prospects to you. Her commitment is to truly listen to you, and coach you on ways that will work best for you.Visit Home Business Wins to learn more and to book a complimentary consultation. Or contact her directly by email (cindy@homebusinesswins.com) or telephone (619 318 8688).