Social bookmarking for SEO success

Internet marketing experts and search engine optimisation (SEO) gurus will all tell you emphatically about the importance of inbound links for SEO. One of the easiest and most effective means of getting inbound links for your SEO is social bookmarking. However, if you've never used social bookmarking for SEO before, you may find yourself putting in a lot of work and getting very little outcome. There are five key things you should learn before you start social bookmarking with the sole purpose of boosting your SEO.

A social bookmark is essentially a tool which can mark any webpage to be easily found again - either by you or by others in your network. The advantage of using social bookmarks is that pages thought to be interesting by some can be found by others with similar interests. There is a high chance of links to websites becoming viral in the social bookmarking landscape. The really popular links are usually boosted above the rest on any social bookmarking website, which means more people will see them and they have a greater likelihood of getting shared.

From an SEO perspective, you should try to keep an optimal keyword density in all your posts. This is not only good practice for on-site SEO, but it also increases traffic to optimised pages if they go viral. While good SEO practices demand plenty of other things, like informative page titles etc - this importance becomes absolutely crucial when other people start bookmarking you. Needless to say, if you don't have your SEO tactics down pat, social bookmarking will not be of much benefit to your website.

Like any legitimate SEO tool, you have to be patient and wait for the links to accumulate before you expect the results. You could do the bookmarking yourself, however good SEO demands that you keep your inbound link profile as natural as possible. This means not posting 20 social bookmarks to the same page on the same day. Any SEO expert will tell you that while it may give you a temporary lift, it is guaranteed not to last for long before you start slipping in the search engine result pages.

You can use social bookmarking not only for the SEO benefits, but also for building brand awareness and gaining more traffic. If you regularly post high-quality, relevant and timely content on your business or e-commerce website, people are more likely to want to bookmark it and share it with others. The chances of becoming viral have already doubled. Also, if someone is active in the social bookmarking scene, chances are they will belong to more than one social bookmarking website. You can easily facilitate this behaviour from your website's audience, by including those tiny little sharing icons in your web design.

Social bookmarking is definitely a great SEO tool. If you're still unsure of how to make use of social bookmarking to help your business's SEO, it's a good idea to speak to a professional SEO expert or an internet marketing professional.