How Social Bookmarking can raise your visibility

Posted • February 13, 2010 • 1 Comment

This is a guest post by social media strategist Taylor Ellwood.

What is Social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking allows you to bookmark a website or blog on the web, instead of on your browser. This is useful, because if you lose your computer or it dies, you also lose all the bookmarked websites on your browser. By having them on the web, you can always retrieve the websites that interest you.

But social bookmarking does more than just that. When your website or blog is bookmarked on a social bookmarking site, a backlink is generated, which can help with the SEO for your site or blog. Additionally people can tag, share, and rate your website or blog, and even leave commentary. This can be very useful for sharing information about your website with other people, and consequently makes social bookmarking a form of passive marketing. You put a social bookmarking button on your website and let other people bookmark it and share it other people, which means they are marketing your website or blog for you.

Is Social Bookmarking important for raising visibility?

Social bookmarking is increasingly more important especially for bloggers. Bloggers use social bookmarking to draw more readers to them, by creatively using tags and notes to tell people about articles they’ve written. Also readers will sometimes tag articles they’ve come across when they really like the article. Additionally readers can, and will, rate the articles which can improve traffic to the blog, if its rated high enough.

Social bookmarking can also be applied to regular websites and it’s useful to utilize it as a way of drawing more traffic to your site. By tagging your site, you are informing people about what it is, what it offers, and at the same time drawing more traffic to it. Social bookmarking will become more important for businesses because it provides another way for people to find those businesses and even rate them.

How do I get started with social bookmarking?

There are a number of different sites that do social bookmarking. Some of those sites are focused on bookmarking specific types of information. Bibliomancy for instance focuses on scholarly sites and blogs, while newsvine tends to focus news articles and blogs. Obviously not just any social bookmarking site will work. So which ones should you look into and what should you use them for?

Google: You can bookmark sites on google. Enter some tags, and notes about the website.

Delicious: this is an excellent social bookmarking site, which adds some buttons to your browser, which makes it easier to tag sites or articles you find.

Digg It: Another useful site for social bookmarking. It does seem to be more focused on blog articles, but I’ve used it to tage all of my business websites. Unfortunately you have to go to the digg it site to actually tag a relevent site.

Stumbleupon: This is probably the most popular social bookmarking tool. Not only can you tag a site but you can also indicate if you like it or not and even email the site to friends.

When you tag an article or website, include relevant phrases, names, and other information that will help people learn more about the article or site, as well as of course be searchable for people looking for something specific.

The notes section allows you to add relevant notes about what you are bookmarking. Enter a short description about the article or about the websites and services/products offered on it.

Why do I want to use social bookmarking?

It allows you to bookmark relevant pages, rate them, and draw more traffic to your articles and/or websites. It’s also a useful way of categorizing interesting sites or articles you find and sharing them with other people. It can help you raise your visibility and grab people’s attention in regards to your products and services. Since using social bookmarking, I’ve noticed a slow but steady increase in traffic to my blogs. When I check the google anlaytics for my websites, I believe I will see a similar trend. While more traffic doesn’t automatically guarantee more business, social bookmarking does provide another way for you to reach out and connect with people interested in your services and products

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