Traffic Building – Part 2 Social Bookmarking
What is social bookmarking?
A social bookmarking site is basically a website where you bookmark
a page, a video, or an image rather than just adding them to your
Favorites in your browser. Think of it as online favorites.
You create a profile on the site and when you read something on the
web that you like, you bookmark it under your profile. There are
also a range of browser plugins that allow you to just click on a
button to add the link to your collection. On the most famous social
bookmarking site, Digg.com, this is commonly referred to as digging
a site.
The power behind social bookmarking comes into effect when other
people visit the page which you have bookmarked and they ‘dig’ it
too. Now it has two votes to its favor. The more votes / bookmarks
it gets, the higher it shows in the social bookmarking website.
Essentially, social bookmarking sites are a kind of search engine
where the most voted for / popular pages get the highest rankings.
So how does this help you when you don’t consider your content to be
life changing enough to get lots of votes from other social
bookmarkers?
Google and the other search engines love fresh content so they are
constantly trawling sites like Digg.com for the latest submissions
so that they can add them to their own search engine results. This
is even more important since the Google Caffeine update.
Because you bookmark your page, your URL or web address is stored as
a link. Google sees this link and counts it thereby adding another
link to your incoming link total, which as we know, is part of
Google's page ranking formula. You get a free incoming link.
Also, when I have added a link to Digg.com, I have seen upwards of
180 unique visitors come to a site, that same day, direct from Digg
itself. So you can get actual traffic from Digg.com when people see
the link you've added. Now, it doesn't always happen that way but
can you afford to miss a 180 free visitors?
