Bookmarking, Indexing, Bookmarking Traffic Strategies
Squidoo pages or blog pages use a form of indexing to make that information more easily categorized and ranked by search engines. Bookmarking is very similar in that you are storing web page links to interesting sites and most of the time, that bookmark gets added to your web browser to make it easy for you to retrieve that site later.
But, what about if you want to share your bookmarks?
There are ways to share your bookmarks online, on the WWW, so that what you find interesting can be bookmarked on a social networking site and made available for everyone else to see too. This makes that content highly visible because it isn't being rated as interesting by a search engine, but rather by human beings. If you provide valuable bookmarks then people start to see you as someone who can point them to great content and you become the expert on that topic through pure association. It doesn't even have to be your content you are bookmarking to make that sort of leap in prestige and recognition.
How Bookmarking And Indexing Works
Bookmarking works because people are much better at identifying spam or commercial solicitations than search engines. They are also better at knowing what might be of interest to another human being. So, you begin to see more people using social bookmarking sites to locate information and even some use them more than big search engines, like Google or Yahoo! It's content that is highly specialized and reviewed by a number of people to make sure it's not spam.
There are several characteristics of bookmarking and indexing that you want to be familiar with: creating and saving links, web feeds, and voting or rating the bookmarks.
Creating And Saving Links
When you bookmark a page online, a link is saved to a shared storage area on the web where other people can view it. Each social bookmarking site will have a way to easily save through their sites using a button on your browser that you install, or by clicking buttons available in the content that others post. Some social bookmarking sites give you the option to save some links as private and other links as public. If you are doing this to increase the traffic on your sites, then you need to use the public option for others to view the content you post.
When you insert the bookmark to the site, it will ask you to index or tag it with words that best describe that link. Some sites can show recommendations for that link, if others have saved the link before you too, but all will allow you to put your own keywords, whether they be one or two words or more. It's generally better to put in as many tags to index the content as you can think of because that will determine how visible that link is on the social networking site.
Social bookmarking sites will categorize the links based on the indexes that you chose and people can search for them using the site's search engine too. So, be sure to be as descriptive as possible when you post the link. Include a brief, but thorough description of the link and tag it with indexes that can put in into multiple categories for people doing searches.
Web or News Feeds
After content is submitted to the social bookmarking site, it is made available to other people using web or news feeds. There are some ways to help your particular bookmark make the news feed in other social networking sites, and that we will cover in the next chapter, Chapter 8. Suffice it to say, after you bookmark it in one site, you want that information to be made available to other sites, and the way to do that is to make use of web, news, and RSS feeds.
Ratings
Bookmarks can become very popular when more than one person begins to discover that site. Then, they gain weight in their popularity because more than one person said it was a favorite and rated it a good bookmark by submitting it. Other systems allow friends to comment on your bookmarks and that to can drive up the popularity because there is more discussion going on with these sites.
Featured Bookmarking Sites
There are so many social bookmarking sites out there that it would be impossible to review all of them within the limits of this chapter. We will discuss some highly notable examples that are sure to drive up traffic if you use them with the strategies we will outline later.
StumbleUpon
This site is unique in that they have their own search engine that offers up random “stumbles” to people who are just in the mood to crawl the web of interesting pages others have bookmarked within the system. When you sign up to join the site, you give them an indication of the categories that are of interest to you. Then, later, when you install their toolbar on your web browser, you are given a button that has the words “I like this” and a thumbs up next to it. Anytime you are browsing the Internet and find a page you like and want to bookmark on StumbleUpon, you just click the “I like this button” and tag it. Later, if you want to see what other people have added to StumbleUpon, you can choose the option to “Stumble the web” and see pages that other people have randomly bookmarked.
This site is tremendously popular and can drive up your traffic overnight! The nice thing about it is that although the stumbles appear random, they are driven by the categories you initially chose when you signed up. So, when someone stumbles across the page you bookmarked, it may seem like a random page to them, but you've just attracted people to your site who already expressed an interest in what you are promoting. It not only drives up your traffic, but the traffic you receive is much more in tune with the type of visitor you are seeking to attract!
Del.icio.us
This was the original social bookmarking site and is still highly popular. It first came out under the url del.icio.us, but now you can also find it by typing in http://delicious.com. Delicious has several great features. One is the ease of bookmarking, with an option to add features to your browser toolbar. Another feature is the way it can recommend tags for you, if someone has already bookmarked that site. A great feature of the site is the way it easily integrates with other elements of the social web, like blogs and websites. You can save bookmarks and create a cloud list that you can import and display in your blog or other content areas. It's very easy to search with a search box available too.
You also have the option to save a public profile so that when someone lands on one your bookmarks, they can check out who saved it. Within that profile you can add contact information and a website url. This is a great way to drive traffic to your site. If your bookmarked pages land on the front page of any of these social bookmarking sites, they will lead to instant celebrity, at least for the time frame they are posted on the front page.
Digg.com
Another popular social bookmarking site is Digg.com. This site makes it very easy to rate and comment bookmarked pages. They also have the categories of bookmarks separated by the media type. So, if you are interested in videos, then you use that tab. If you want news, click that tab. The way digg works is that you have to register to use the service. Then, you will be allowed to rate the bookmarks on Digg.com. Anytime you find a story you like, you can choose to “Digg it” and it will increase the count of Diggs on that story or bookmark. When the count reaches a high number, it may get promoted to the front page where it attracts enormous attention.
Strategies When Social Bookmarking
The point of social bookmarking is to increase visibility for your content and drive traffic back to you. So, you do have to be careful how you are rated, who comments on your bookmarks, and that you have a popular appeal. If you just create content you think you will like, and never check the demographics of the social bookmarking site you are using, the odds are it won't rank very high and it will be wasted effort. So, you want to not only social bookmark content, but also create content that is of interest to that particular group.
The steps to increase visibility are as follows:
- Create your website with content that has a large appeal,
- Register with Digg.com, StumbleUpon, and Delicious.com,
- Bookmark and index all web pages and content you want to submit,
- Submit to multiple social bookmarking sites to get the widest exposure,
- Add bookmark buttons to your blogs and other content you want to have people rate,
- Get people to comment on your bookmarks,
- Get people to rate your bookmarks,
- Share your bookmarks on other social networking sites by posting the links or through news feeds to your circle of friends,
- Rate and discuss other friend's bookmarks,
- Automate the process, if possible.
One of the ways to automate bookmarking is by using a third party tool like Socialmarker.com. You do have to be careful when signing up for products that allow you to automate the process because you don't want to be labeled a spammer. Avoid using any software or third party that promises to bookmark your content on more than 40 sites with one click. You aren't really interested in spammng the web as much as generating bookmarks that attract attention, ratings, and discussions.
You can bookmark anyone's content, it doesn't have to be your own. The idea is to build a portfolio of interesting content and have people check out your profiles that lead them back to your sites. Of course, you will also be submitting your own sites, but if that's all you do it may look obviously self-promoting.
If you don't have interesting content of your own to post, avoid claiming someone else's content as your own. That's known as plagiarism and it can get you banned on a lot of social networking sites. So, always give credit where credit is due and some of that prestige will ultimately rub off on you.
- Leon Edward
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