Ever changing search engine algorithms and the penalizing of site rankings for common SEO methodologies has forced (and will continue to force) SEO companies and gurus to come up with new ways optimize site rankings. Thus, the importance of Social

Bookmarking and its relevance to today’s SEO is becoming undeniable and the practice of Social Bookmark campaigns for SEO purposes has grown exponentially in the past year. But what is Social Bookmarking? Why is it so important? The following article attempts to simplify the world of Social Bookmarking and its effect on search engine rankings.

What is Social Bookmarking?

Let’s break the term Social Bookmarking into two parts: Social and Bookmarking. Bookmarking is simply saving the link of a website to your computer for later use. In Internet Explorer this is called ‘Favorites’ and in other browsers such as Firefox, this is called ‘Bookmarking’.

Have you ever added a site to your ‘Favorites’ list? If you have, you’ve already bookmarked! Adding a site to your ‘Favourites’ so that you can visit the site at a later date is called bookmarking. When you add a site to your bookmarks or favourites, the site address and title is saved to your computer. This could be described as ‘local bookmarking’. Social Bookmarking is exactly the same as ‘local bookmarking’ except that you are saving the link (and information about the site) directly to your account on a bookmarking website (examples of bookmarking websites at the bottom of this article) instead of saving the link on your computer.

Once you have bookmarked a site or sites, you can access them anytime by logging back in to the social bookmarking site, regardless of what computer you are using at the time. Ok, so bookmarking is the saving of favourite websites to your computer, and social bookmarking is the saving of your favourite websites to your ‘account’ on a social bookmarking website. Here’s where the ‘Social’ comes in. Since your bookmarks are on the website instead of your computer, they can be shared by everyone. The website itself becomes a huge database of everyone’s favourite sites. These sites are then ranked by votes (how many times the site has been bookmarked by different members) and will appear at the top when someone searches for that category or topic.

Example: Let’s say you’ve created an account at a social bookmarking site. Now let’s say you want to bookmark this article so you can come back and read it again later. When you bookmark it by either logging in to your bookmark account or by simply using the ‘toolbar’ button that comes with most bookmarking sites, you will be asked to name your bookmark. Let’s say you name it “Social Bookmarking 101”. Next you will be asked to ‘tag’ the bookmark by typing in a few words that best describe the article. Let’s say you type in ‘social bookmarking’ and social ‘bookmarking SEO’ for your tags. Once you save your bookmark it is put in the social bookmarking database for everyone to access. When another member searches using the ‘tag’ words you created, they will see your bookmark, the comments you have provided, and web site URL. If multiple bookmarked pages have the same tag, search results will be sorted by how many times each site has been bookmarked: the site that has been bookmarked by the most people appears at the top of the search results.

Why Social Bookmark?

The ideology behind social bookmarking is simple. Have you ever searched a major search engine for a keyword and found that 9 or the 10 sites listed on the first search results page were meaningless? You’ve just wasted a lot of time checking every site on the list when only one was relevant. The idea of social bookmarking is that if search results are all derived from people’s bookmarks then every site appearing in a search result should have at least some value.

SEO and Social Bookmarking

Anyone who has read on SEO methodology and just learned about social bookmarking from the previous paragraphs should already be getting ideas of how Social Bookmarking can help their business. The practice of obtaining one-way inbound links to increase ranking is not new to SEO, and now, with social bookmarking sites, this practice has found a new avenue to work its magic. Here’s why it’s so effective: when a search engine is determining the ranking for a site, it checks ‘inbound’ links. The more inbound links a site has, the better it will rank. The more ‘value’ or ‘weight’ the inbound links have, the more they will increase ranking. Value is determined by a number of factors but some main ones are the linking pages PageRank and trust.

Large social bookmarking sites have hundreds of thousands of members all adding content to the site daily which gives them incredible PageRank. So, when a site is bookmarked, it has just received a high PageRank inbound link. Further, if another member searches and finds this bookmark, they may bookmark it themselves thus creating two high PageRank links to the site. A bookmarking campaign consists of bookmarking a certain URL in as many social bookmarking sites as possible for the sole purpose of increasing the URL’s rank. The result is better rankings for your client, but a slow, unstoppable saturation of superfluous and (sometimes) useless websites making the entire idea of Social Bookmarking redundant. (To be concise, it is important to note that some SEO’s give little value to Social Bookmarking while others vehemently stand by its effectiveness)

Examples of Popular Social Bookmarking Sites:

Blinklist
Bloghop
BlogPulse
Blogsearch
CodeCubed
Del.icio.us
Digg
Flickr
Furl
KB Cafe
Spurl
Technorati

Jared Mumford and Todd Mumford are Expert SEO Professionals with active full time involvement in the world of SEO and SEM. You can read more in our ongoing series at our SEO Company website:
http://www.seovisions.com