What is Social Bookmarking and How Does it Relate to SEO?
Social bookmarking started out as a way for business owners and SEO companies to drive traffic to their websites. While the basic concept of bookmarking is still the same, how it’s done has evolved quite a bit. The way Google search engine spiders view social bookmarking links has changed, and poorly done bookmarking can destroy years of SEO efforts.
Using outdated tactics can actually hurt your SEO efforts and demote your website’s rank in the SERPs. Learning to do social bookmarking for SEO can exponentially increase traffic to your website and completely change your business for the better. This can be one of the most powerful tools on the internet, so make sure you use it correctly to avoid your social bookmarking campaign backfiring on you.
What is Social Bookmarking?
When website owners first began using social bookmarking, they used platforms like Reddit or Digg to post links to their websites. They’d start an account, neglect to make any posts that weren’t about their products or a sales pitch, and post links to their website in comment sections on other people’s posts without pairing it with relevant content. The comment sections they’d post in were completely unrelated to their genre. While website hosts did what they could to create built-in spam filters, the problem persisted. Cheap SEO companies found ways around filters. This was the beginning of spamming, and it became a prevalent problem across every comment section on the internet.
In time, Google and other search engines noticed how much getting spammed was bothering users of Reddit, MySpace, Quora, Facebook, and other sites. Spam became so bad that legitimate users were driven off of the platforms. Search engines and social media platforms adjusted their algorithm to label these links as spam. They additionally gave users the power to label links as spam and have accounts reviewed and removed from platforms. Which brought legitimate users back onto websites and platforms.
As soon as the algorithm changed, thousands upon thousands of websites that had spammed comment sections across the internet dropped in ranking overnight and had their accounts shut down. The profiles and businesses that posted genuinely useful information without spamming readers and viewers boomed in popularity over the first several months. Today, these businesses have become titans in their niches. Meanwhile, SEO experts were left scrambling to come up with different approaches to drive traffic to their clients’ websites. Many of them went out of business because they couldn’t even provide short posts in their clients’ language.
The key to survival on the internet is to adapt and keep up with the pace of change. Google’s algorithm is refined and fine-tuned every few years. Tactics that worked beautifully for years can suddenly be an anchor that halts progress and holds businesses back. So SEO experts made changes to the way they approached posting links on social sites. These days, it’s important to write well-written, relevant, concise content that provides value to readers and pair it with high-quality photos and videos. Website owners have to provide real value to their readers and customers to compete in the marketplace.
How Does Social Bookmarking Work Currently?
SEO experts use social bookmarking to backlink clients’ websites on various forums, message boards, Q&A platforms, and blogs. However, these platforms combined only provide a small fraction of traffic that social media provides for businesses. Google is now content-centric, so link building is no longer as easy as spamming a comment section.
These days, to drive traffic to your website you have to build a great profile on social media. You also need to post extremely subtle marketing content aimed at the people who are most likely to want your products. Most of the battle is in creating relevant posts. Viewers will bring themselves to your profile without encouragement if you post good content. So, don’t post website links in every post. There should be a backlink in the description or link tree leading to your website, blog, YouTube channel, or other website or social media account where people can consume your high-value content and shop for your products. There’s a commonly accepted rule that 80% of content posted should be amusing and for entertainment, while 20% should be about your specific products.
The key to good SEO is to provide value. You should only post links to your website where the content is relevant to your niche or where all types of content are welcomed, like social media. The more places you have profiles and post regularly, the more traffic you’ll generate and the more authority search engines and social media platforms will give your posts.
Data is king when it comes to SEO. Find out as much as you can about your customers and gather their contact information. You’ll need to understand why they do or don’t want your products and what their pain points are. Then create posts about those pain points and what you can do to solve a specific problem. Those are the 20% of posts that are safe to post about your business.
SEO experts discovered a long time ago that when you post interesting, well-written comments on videos or posts of people complaining about certain problems, you can get a lot of click-throughs from the link posted in your profile’s description section. Don’t post links in comment sections. The people clicking through are likely to buy your products, meaning the leads you generate are of high quality.
Bookmarking on Social Platforms
Posting links on social media without any relevant content destroys your SEO efforts. Write something relevant and useful to go along with all of the links you post across all platforms and sites. The links you post on various blogs, message boards, forums, and social networking websites shouldn’t read like a sales pitch. Nobody posts a link to their websites in the comments anymore unless the original post or blog asks for a recommendation. Modern social bookmarking is done manually by humans, not robots. It’s a relatively convenient and hassle-free tactic of getting your profile noticed and driving traffic to your website.
Some social media platforms like TikTok and YouTube pay per view on content posted. This is one of the best incentives for business owners to post videos that actually are relevant, entertaining, and useful. YouTube is great start for business owners. It allows you to post affiliate links, links to your shop, links to your sources, and links to your social media pages. You can even post reciprocal links to websites where you source your supplies. They can also post links or content about how you used their products or services. Finding authoritative businesses to work with on reciprocal linking is a huge advantage to businesses.
Bookmarking has evolved quite a lot over the last 15 years. It’s become more about social media bookmarking than getting links posted in other places, like blogs, forums, or comment sections. It’s absolutely vital to post high-quality images and videos if you want to drive traffic to your link tree in your profile. Don’t forget to ask viewers and readers to like, follow, share, subscribe to notifications, etc. This helps in the future to get their views.
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