Marketing Defined

What is Social Book Marking?

Users create a public repository of bookmarks relating to blog posts/sites that they like via social bookmarks in web services like Del.icio.us. This concept of social bookmarking began as far back as 1996 with the launch of itList.com, followed by services like Blink and Hotlinks to name a few.

Undoubtedly, the popularity of Social Bookmarking has increased with the advent of the most well known site of them all; Del.icio.us. From a SEO standpoint, social bookmarks can build you a massive amount of back links which for all intents and purposes, appear to originate from authority sites… and we know by now that inbound links (non-reciprocated) to your website from related authority sites is paramount on Google’s requisite list to propel you high in the SERPs.

How to use Del.icio.us social bookmarking services to gain related Inbound Links?

Easy! it’s as simple as signing up for an account at Del.icio.us and posting your urls under the “post” tab in your account. Each post requires you to:

• enter the url
• a title for the anchor text
• a short description, and
• of course the tags (all important) under which you want your link bookmarked

Adding posts to Del.icio.us can also be fully automated and accomplished in a matter of seconds by installing the Firefox “del.icio.us” extension, that allows a one-click inclusion of the current webpage you are viewing directly from your Firefox browser. As you browse the web and find a page you want to save, click the “Tag this” button that appears in your Firefox toolbar, next to the “My Del.icio.us” button — after installation of the Del.icio.us extension . You may also add the required description, notes, and tags to the page directly in Firefox, before saving it… pretty neat!! In addition to bookmarking great related content from other webmasters at My Del.icio.us page, I also now add chosen Marketing Defined Blog posts to “My Del.icio.us” page on a daily basis. To gain up-do-the-minute information in your chosen niche and field of expertise, you should also subscribe to quite a few del.icio.us tags.

Some examples: To see the most “popular” posts, try: http://del.icio.us/popular/” to which you would then add the name of a field you want to track after the field “popular”. Therefore for “popular” posts in the field of “seo” this is what you use: http://del.icio.us/popular/seo.

Be sure to add all the sites tagged with those keywords into your RSS reader. Learn how to become a connected Del.icio.us user by utilizing every facet in this gem of social bookmarking sites. For instance the “inbox” is a mystery for many, but it’s a powerful tool that allows you to track what’s been added to particular tags and to track what particular users have bookmarked. Here are a couple of excellent posts to clear any remaining mystery in using social boomarking, which will turn you into an accomplished Del.icio.us user: The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users at Slacker Manager.com and Absolutely Del.icio.us - Complete Tools Collection which is constantly updated at Quick Online Tips.com

The Importance of a Tag in Social Bookmarking

Firstly, allow me to explain what a tag is. A tag is

• A keyword which acts like a subject or category
• Each user “tags” a web page or image using his own unique tag
• An image or web page may have multiple tags that identify it
• Web pages and images with identical tags are then linked together… and
• Users, if desired, use the tag to search for similar web pages and images

Most of the book marking services give you your very own personalized book mark page that displays all your bookmarks - AND- even though in the early stages, the page rank of your personalized page might be zero, it will build up over time. You thus are constructing your very own — high PR — personalized bookmark page which will form part of your crucial SEO arsenal. Another optimization factor is; the page rank on each “tag” page of a site like Del.icio.us is naturally passed back to your site. For example the inclusion of your link tagged “seo” at the appropriate http://Del.icio.us./tag/seo page will pass back the PR4 of that page to your website.

List of popular Social Bookmarking sites with associated page rank

Below is a list of various social bookmark services that you can utilize to boost your page rank

Del.icio.us : is one of the most popular of all social bookmarking sites that has rapidly taken off in popularity since being purchased by Yahoo.  Del.icio.us has earned its healthy pagerank of 8.

Digg : is a technology news website where users submit an article for review, but it is the users who decide which articles get valuable coverage on the home page. It appeared a bit strange to me that you are allowed to comment on the very same “Digg” site you submit to them. Digg has a pagerank of 6

Slashdot : is the original social bookmarking site. Slashdotters can submit stories or links they find interesting and then users comment on them. A drawback of Slashdot is that stories and sites have to be pre-approved; which has driven a lot of hardcore Slashdot users to other social bookmarking sites such as Digg. Dream of the huge tidal surge in traffic you will experience if you are ever Slashdotted on the home page which bears the page rank 9.

Furl : a service offered by LookSmart that allows you to save copies of any Web page and search within your own personal archive of Web pages - and - share what you find. People use Furl to create their very own personal shopping lists, real estate directories, job searches, student research papers, etc. Furl has a page rank of 8.

Listible: Fairly new, but rapidly gaining in popularity and is basically a list for Lists. Here’s how Listible works: it’s a brilliant combination of tagging, voting, and listing. Tagging for organization, voting for relevancy, and listing for ranking purposes. Anyone can make a list, and anyone can add to that list [free registration required].

Here is an example of some of the excellent lists that are added daily at Listible : Best Firefox Extensions for Power Users: A long list of tried and true Firefox extensions submitted by Listible users. Listible which is currently in beta has page rank 2, with a page rank 4 for many of its list pages

Reddit : page rank

Blinklist.com : page rank

Simpy : contains a lot of technology related stuff mixed in with a lot of very eclectic links. Simpy has a page rank 6

Social Bookmarking Services, Resources, and Plug Ins

A great way to get the visitors to your websites to instantly bookmark your articles and posts is by using a service called Socializer at Ekstreme. After adding the small snippet of code they provide, when a visitor clicks on this link they are provided with a large list of social bookmarking sites which they can add your blog post or article to.

Anders Bergman has written a customizable Wordpress plug-in version of the Socializer Bookmarking system .

Another similar Wordpress plugin is the Sociable plug in at Push.

The Social Bookmarking plug-in currently used on this site is Share This: see the icon green with the caption “Share This” at the end of each post.

A couple of software tools that automate the process of submitting articles to Web 2.0 sites are Auto Social Poster [Wordpress premium plug in] and Web 2.0 Submitter [installed on your desktop].

Use social bookmarking or Web 2.0 as it is referred to… for discovering popular new sites, expand your industry expertise and share knowledge with others.