What is a Social Bookmark?

Seo Bookmarking

Bookmarking occurs when you want to remember or save a specific link to a site or blog post and you save it on your computer’s memory. Most of you do this regularly with your browser. If you’re using internet explorer, you’re saving web pages to your ‘favorites’ list, and if you’re firefox fans you have a bookmark list.

Social bookmarking allows you to “share, organize and search through bookmarks of web resources” – to quote Wikipedia’s definition of the term. You’re not sharing entire files, you’re sharing references to them, or links. You can usually add a short description and tags to your bookmark to describe what the bookmark’s content is about. Tags are a method that has been developed on the net to inform users of the subject and content of a specific entry, bookmark, post etc.

For example, if I were to bookmark this post on Digg.com, I’d add the following tags, SEO, Wix, social bookmarks, optimizing Wix websites etc.

Different bookmarking websites provide different features. Most of them let you add comments and many provide RSS feeds to their list of bookmarks drawing attention to the different bookmarks, or links, available on their site. Social bookmarking sites are a great place to come across interesting content and it also a great way to get noticed online and get traffic to your website.

How does it work?

You create an account in a social bookmarking site. There are lots and lots of bookmarking sites out there and I will also provide a short list of ones that have been getting lots of great feedback from users at the end of this post. Don’t try to sign up for all of them but choose a couple you are comfortable with and which you think will be useful for you.

You can browse through the different bookmarks already available, also in categories and subjects that are relevant to you and add comments to it. Usually the bookmarking site will have the option of marking a thumbs up or a thumbs down. Participating in the site is actually important so you distinguish yourself as a legitimate user, as opposed to a spammer.

Posting on your own

Once you’ve got your bearings, it’s time to post your own bookmark. Add a description in the same way you add a description to your Wix website. This is important for both the users and also for the search engine – which will crawl the site and see your link. Add tags to your entry and when adding links, place them in anchored text – if possible. Different social bookmarking websites provide different features and capabilities. Not all of them will allow for anchor texts – but I recommend you use those who do. Why not give yourself a bump.

Will this help my website in the search engine results?

The question actually is: will this improve my page rank (PR)? The answer to this is basically a derivative of the answer to – will these links give me link juice from the mother site? The answer is, depending on the popularity of your bookmark. Digg adds a nofollow tag to each outgoing link until that bookmark surpasses a certain level of popularity – determined by the amount of diggs to that site.

Also, the idea behind this system is that people who like your bookmark will bookmark it themselves on their own pages, doubling, tripling and quadrupling the amount of FREE back links to your site, sometimes in a matter of hours.

Also, because SEO (search engine optimization) and SEM (search engine marketing) are so closely knit together, you’re benefitting one by improving the other and vice versa. In the worst case scenario you are improving traffic to your site thanks to all the people who are discovering it through the highly digged, voted for and ranked bookmark which you posted. In this case, it’s a win-win situation.

At some point you’ll find the traffic from your bookmark slowing down, but that’s okay too. At this point, this old link will have been cached by Google (and the other search engines, let’s not forget them completely). You can enjoy this link just like any other back link to your website – and in particular from a reputable link-juicy website, which affects your PR, which in turn affects your ranking in the search results.

The Keys

Social bookmarking isn’t a new toy in the SEO playground and search engines are very aware of the spamming attempts made on them from this direction and have already been acting to minimize the advantages of spamming techniques. So don’t spam –

• Think quality and take the time to create something that will really draw people to your site.
• Adding an endless stream of links will simply diminish the effectiveness of each of the links and will flag you as a possible threat and spammer.
• Don’t bookmark every page of your website but consider the pages that are useful and bookmark them from time to time.
• This shouldn’t be your single strategy to SEO, but rather viewed as another tool in your toolbox.

Lists:

As promised, a short list of popular bookmarking sites. You can always check their popularity on Alexa and even by reading some feedbacks in different forums that deal with it. A short search in Google on the subject of bookmarking can keep you busy for a while – trust me.

• Digg.com – Google’s own.
• Del.icio.us – one of the very first bookmark sites, launched in 2004.
• Stumbleupon – recommended by many for its stable traffic
• Reddit

Furthermore, you can always take a peek at Wikipedia’s list of social bookmarking sites

Have Fun!

So what have you already learned about SEO? Think you’ve figured it out? Here are a few questions that’ll help give you an idea of how much information you still have to learn, and how much SEO you already know. You can take the entire test at the seomoz website.

1. Where is it LEAST important to include keywords?

1. title
2. body text
3. Meta Keywords
4. Headers

2. What is the best way to maximize the frequency with which your website/web page is crawled by he search engines?

1. Insert a “crawl delay” parameter into the robots.txt file.
2. Submit your site directly to the search engines through submission forms
3. Visit Google’s Webmaster Central and increase your “crawl frequency”
4. Search for your website more frequently in the major search engines
5. Add new content frequently

3. How can description Meta tags help with the search engine optimization?

1. This is a trick question! – Meta descriptions are not important
2. They’re an important ranking factor in search algorithms
3. They’re the texts that entice searchers to choose and click your listing
4. They help inform search engines which keywords are most important on your page

4. Which of these sources is considered the best source for competitive link data?

1. Ask.com
2. MSN
3. Alexa
4. Google
5. Yahoo

5. What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

1. There is no difference, they are synonymous
2. SEO refers to organic/natural listings while SEM deals with PPC or paid searches
3. SEM implies association with traditional marketing companies, while SEO is usually independent or uaffiliated with traditional marketing
4. SEO focuses on organic/natural search ranking, SEM encompasses all aspects of search marketing
5. SEO is what they call SEM on the West coast

6. Which of the following is NOT considered to be a highly important factor in ranking a particular search term?

1. Temporal relevancy – the number and quality of links pointing at a certain page over a given time
2. An HTML validation (according to W3C standards) of a page
3. The quality and quantity of all external links to the page
4. The link popularity of a specific page within the domain
5. Keyword usage in the title tag of the page

7. When creating “flat architecture” for a site, what are you attempting to minimize?

1. The KB size/weight of pages targeting search engines
2. The total amount of scrolling necessary for the website’s navigation
3. Colors used in the design
4. The number of tabs/windows that open during normal navigation
5. How many links a search engine must go though in order to reach content pages

8. Which of the following is NOT the best method for creating quality title tags?

1. Writing great copy that encourages users to “click” on your listing
2. Making sure each page has a unique title
3. Including an exhaustive list of keywords
4. Limiting the title tag to about 65 characters, including spaces

9. Which character limitation is the best in regards to the title tags (assuming you want your title tag to be fully displayed in search engines)?

1. 108
2. 20
3. 65
4. 45
5. 85

10. The ‘PageRank’ was dubbed just so because it was created by Larry Page and not because it happens to rank pages.

1. False
2. True

11. Creating a ‘sitemap’ with links to other pages in your domain is important because…

1. Most web users outside theUS prefer this navigational method
2. It can help search engine crawlers access many pages on your website easily
3. A site map reduces the rate at which spiders crawl your pages
4. It’s a mandatory requirement for submission to most of the important search engines

12. Why are absolute (http://www.mysite.com/my-category) URLs better than relative (“/my-category”) URLs for on-page internal linking?

1. Absolute URLs provide a link back to the original website after they are scraped and copied onto other domains
2. They provide more keyword context for search engines
3. These URLs provide greater keyword weight
4. Absolute URLs are filled with vodka – duh!
5. Search engines can’t crawl relative URLs

13. How should you avoid duplicate content issues that are often present in temporal pagination issues (where content moves from page to page, as can be seen in article lists, multi-page articles and blogs)?

1. Use a Meta robot “noindex, follow” tag to the paginated pages
2. Each page should be displayed in a new tab/window
3. Link the paginated pages with a rel=”nofollow” in the link tag
4. Pagination does not have any duplicate content problems associated with it

14. What should you do with old URLs after updating your site’s URL structure to build new versions of your pages?

1. Nothing
2. Move the old links to a sub-domain
3. Create 404 landing pages for the old URLs so search engines & visitors understand that the content is no longer there
4. Use a 301 to redirect them to the new URLs
5. Request their removal via webmaster central and site explorer in Yahoo!

15. When multiple pages on your website are targeting the same keywords, which is the best way to avoid keyword cannibalization?

1. Restrict search engines from crawling/indexing less important pages
2. Remove duplicate keywords from the Meta keywords tag on secondary pages
3. Add links on all the secondary pages directing back to the page you want ranked for the term/phrase, using primary keywords as anchor texts
4. Increase keyword density on the main page and make sure its denser than that of the other pages

Did better than you thought? Not as good?

Here are a few good SEO websites/blogs you might enjoy reading for more information:

• Matt Cutts has been working for Google since 2000. His blog is an easy read and always a great place to find updates on Google.
• The SEOBOOK is also a good read with handy information and links to a good training center.
• Another place to read up on SEO tricks and tools is SEOCHAT.
• One of the best places to get updates is search engine land.

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PR: wait… I: wait… L: wait… LD: wait… I: wait… wait… Rank: wait… Traffic: wait… Price: wait… C: wait…