What is Social Bookmarking and why should bloggers care? Good questions! It’s been around for a long time but is just now coming to the attention of the blogosphere.
Social bookmarking is the process of setting up an account on one or many of the social bookmarking sites like Technorati, Del.icio.us, MySpace, Stumbleupon, Google Bookmarks, Yahoo My Web, Digg, Spurl and many others. These seem to be the most popular. Setting up an account on any of these services is quite easy because they don’t want your life story, usually just a user name and password. So - the first time you go to these sites it will take a bit longer but once your account is set up, it’s a matter of clicking to the site and bookmarking your page.
Bookmark your page? What page? You bookmark the page of your blog post that you just did. You can put keywords into the form too so others can find your post by keyword. This does two things - you get a link to your post - and we all know how important incoming links are for the search engines - and you make your URL findable by keyword for anyone who uses that social bookmarking service and searches by keyword.
Think of these sites as mini search engines. If you use any of the ‘big’ search engines to search by keyword you’ll get about a zillion returns. How do you choose? Can they all be relevant to what you want to know? Of course not. By using these social bookmarking search engines, the results will nearly always be relevant if the poster picks good keywords and there won’t be a zillion returns.
How can you leverage the use of social bookmarking sites? Easy - there are plug-ins available for most blog platforms that allow you to put a line of social bookmarking sites across the bottom of each post. All your reader has to do is click on the icon for the site of his choice and bookmark that post in his own account. Presto - another incoming link to increase your pagerank.
If you are a blogger, there is really no easier way to get incoming links and get noticed by the search engines. Give it a try!
Note:
Cathy Perkins is an author, blogger, and WordPress expert who lives in the beautiful foothills of North Carolina. Watch as she builds her site, http://www.wordpressguru.com from the ground up. You will learn all you ever wanted to know about WordPress and more. Sign up for the WordPress Guru newsletter while you are there.
