What Is Social Bookmarking In SEO?

If you’re running an SEO campaign, you already know how important online visibility is in driving organic and targeted traffic.

More importantly, good SEO is a must if you want to get good leads and sell your products to them.

Now, there are many ways in which you can improve your SEO and ensure that you’re ranking higher on the search engine results page (SERP). One of them is social bookmarking.

When you use social bookmarking as part of your SEO strategy, it helps your keywords rank higher, builds the authority of your brand, and tells search engine algorithms that your content is valuable to your target audience.

Want to understand how? We’ve got that covered throughout the rest of this article.

What Is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is the practice of tagging and saving a website for later use and reference.

Once tagged, these websites are then saved on the web instead of on your device.

This way, you can access, add, annotate, edit, and share them to build your online presence and promote your website.

What Are The Benefits Of Social Bookmarking In SEO?

We’ve already noted that social bookmarking can help build your online presence and promote your website, but let’s dive into this a bit deeper and explore all of the ways that social bookmarking can help you boost your SEO campaign.

Enhanced Brand Awareness

Currently, over 1.93 billion websites exist on the internet.

That means that if you want yours to be found, you need to find a way to boost your online presence.

The way social bookmarking can help you with this is if you create a profile for your business on a social bookmarking website.

Moreover, you can create content on social bookmarking sites. This way, you’re essentially creating a high-quality backlink to your website.

This would not only make it easier for potential customers to reach you and increase your traffic, but backlinks would also help search engines recognize your website as reputable and your content as relevant to the industry.

Promotion Of A Product

Obviously, social bookmarks can help you drive traffic to your website, but the really important thing about this benefit is that it drives targeted traffic.

In other words, the content that you post on these websites is effective in reaching your target audience quickly.

Why? Because a lot of these websites allow users to explore content based on keywords or tags,

If people are intentionally looking at your content, that means that they’re interested.

If they’re interested in your content, they’re less likely to bounce to another website and more likely to like your business offers and convert into leads.

Looking for some help with generating qualified traffic and getting more leads? Check out the best SEO companies in San Diego.

Improved Search Engine Indexing

The way search engines work is that they crawl the web to find information that tells them whether your website and its contents are relevant to the users.

When you create a backlink on a social bookmarking website, Google recognizes your website as authoritative and is incentivized to quickly alert the users about the importance of your web pages.

The indexing process, when made faster by social bookmarking, helps with faster ranking and leads to a better user experience.

Improved Domain Authority

The domain authority of a website is a measure of how relevant the search engine thinks it is.

Many factors factor into building domain authority—and some, like page speed or download time, can’t be improved by social bookmarking.

However, social bookmarking websites can help you diversify your backlinks and gain traffic from a large number of authoritative websites.

Another way social bookmarking can help you with improving domain authority is through building impactful social signals.

When Google sees that a lot of people are clicking on your website, liking your content, and sharing it with others, it recognizes your website as popular.

Search engines think of these user engagements as recommendations — and these social signals can get you more referral traffic, which will increase your ranking on the search engine results page.

More Subscriptions

Consistency in content creation is extremely important in making your marketing strategy effective.

Further down the line, brands that consistently post high-value content are regarded as credible and are awarded consumers’ trust.

That’s why you can benefit from using social bookmarking websites to post consistently relevant content.

By doing this, you’re increasing your chances of generating a lot of targeted traffic to your website and getting more people to subscribe to your blog.

If your subscribers end up liking your content and the experience you’ve curated for them, they’ll be more likely to convert.

Tips On Using Social Bookmarking Websites

To make the most of social bookmarking websites, we’ve gathered our 7 best practices for you to implement into your SEO strategy. Let’s take a look at them!

Choose A Social Bookmarking Website With High Authority

As low-authority sites are generally focused on specific content, you can get some value out of getting backlinks and posting your content on them. 

However, your odds are much better with high-authority websites, as they have a wider reach and are generally favored by search engines.

For that reason, you should look for websites with a domain authority of over 70. Tools like MozBar can help you figure out whether a certain social bookmarking website meets your criteria.

Complete Your Business Profile

Once you pick a high-quality social bookmarking site, your next step is to create an account for your business. 

A lot of brands make a mistake by leaving their profiles incomplete, so our advice is: don’t be like that.

By filling out details such as your company’s name, address, contact information, and website link, you’re making it easier for potential customers to find you and for search engines to index your website.

Engage With Other Brands And Your Visitors

Unless you actively engage with the community and your users, you’re unlikely to experience the full benefits of social bookmarking.

SEO traffic without audience engagement gives incomplete results, as visitors that aren’t interested in your products aren’t helpful to the growth of your business.

Use social bookmarking sites to interact with your audience. To get them to like your content, refer it to their loved ones and talk about it all over the internet.

The more people share the message of your brand, the more likely you are to drive new traffic to your website.

Don’t forget to interact with other bloggers, too! These interactions can be a great way of getting natural links from influencers, which can help you skyrocket your SEO campaign.

Organize Your Content Depending On The Purpose

It’s easy to get lost in multiple social bookmarking websites and the array of content they provide. That’s where the importance of organizing comes in.

A great way of ensuring that all of your bookmarked content is easy to find, depending on the purpose you want it to serve at a given moment, is to label it.

There are different ways of labeling your content.

For example, you can separate your content into different categories depending on the audience you want it to reach.

You can also label it for different departments and teams within your company, depending on who might find this content most helpful in the execution of their business strategy.

Lastly, you can also tag your content according to the different social media platforms that you intend to post it on.

Different communication channels yield different results—and the same applies to the types of content.

Distribute Content

We’ve already established how important it is to remain consistent in content creation.

However, that’s one of those things that’s easier said than done.

Creating fresh and unique content daily is tough, even if you’ve got templates on hand to help you generate ideas.

That’s where sharing already existing content comes in.

Social bookmarking websites allow you to save valuable content that you find online, so you can organize, schedule, and regularly share these resources with your audience without putting too much effort into it.

If this feels like cheating, it really isn’t, and that’s what social bookmarking is for!

Work smarter, not harder, right?

Post Your Content

Aside from sharing someone else’s content, social bookmarking websites are great for sharing your own.

Remember to share your resources on these websites as well.

This way, you’re not only relying on that business profile that you’ve initially created to build backlinks, but you’re diversifying your efforts and increasing the odds of your SEO strategy succeeding.

Include Social Bookmarking Buttons On Your Blog

Once that traffic from the social bookmarking websites starts coming in, you want to ensure that your visitors are staying as long as possible on your website.

The longer you can keep your audience on your site, the more likely they are to contact you or purchase something from you.

The way to do it? Give them an enjoyable and, most importantly, helpful experience.

If they find your content valuable and don’t want to lose it, allow them to easily revisit this content by adding a social bookmarking button next to it.

Now, they’re just a click away from being drawn back into it, which can be helpful to your business if you’re using that content to sell a certain product or a service.

The Best Social Bookmarking Websites

Want to know which social bookmarking websites are best for optimizing your SEO campaign?

Look no further, because we’ve got 13 of our top favorites, tailored for different types of businesses and different objectives.

Pinterest

With 431 million active monthly users, Pinterest is not only a heaven for bulletin board lovers, but marketers as well!

Essentially, it is a social media platform where users can “pin” the content they find inspiring, share their own ideas and sort them into different categories. 

Because of this concept, this social bookmarking website is a great opportunity for new brands looking to build their online presence or old ones that want to introduce a new product.

Not to mention that businesses are also supported by Pinterest, collaborating with them and selling their products directly on the platform!

Twitter

In the past couple of years, the use of Twitter’s 280 characters has expanded from sharing witty posts to sharing long-form content as well.

As the usefulness of Twitter posts increased, so did the bookmarking purpose of this platform. 

Just by posting content, images and links, you’re basically performing the action of bookmarking. This way, you’re making it easier to discover valuable content and refer back to it later.

Dribble

If you want to help your design team and get their creative juices flowing, Dribble is a fantastic resource for them to connect with other designers across the world and find inspiration from their work.

You can think of it as of social bookmarking website to keep up with the UI design trends. 

And while not all of the content on Dribble is curated to provide a great user experience, it can serve as a solid starting to point for your designers to build upon.

Pocket

You know that bookmarking feature in Microsoft’s PowerPoint, where if you leave the presentation and come back to it later, it enables you to pick up from where you’ve left off?

That’s what Pocket does for you, too.

If you’ve stumbled upon a useful article or a video, but they’re simply too long for you to read or watch at this moment, Pocket allows you to bookmark these resources and keep exploring them as you’ve left them.

The greatest thing about it? If the content creator takes down this resource, instead of getting a 404-error page, you’ll be able to extract it from Pocket’s database. 

While free for the most part, you can pay for a premium version and take advantage of some additional features, such as highlighting pieces of content and adding comments to it. 

Mix

Mix is a powerful social bookmarking website for curating personalized user experiences. 

The content that you save and the people that you follow on Mix results in two things: 

• Content and people recommendations for you, based on your interests
• Content and people recommendations for people who follow you

The Mix algorithm tracks the things people like and suggests more of the same. 

In terms of how this can benefit your business, it’s pretty clear that Mix can help your content reach its intended audience or the people who are actually interested in your business offer.

Reddit

Reddit’s primary role is social bookmarking.

The way it works is that people submit their content, which others then rate based on whether they like it or not. When your content is frequently upvoted, it ranks higher. 

Sounds like a great way to build backlinks and promote your website? That’s because it is.

A great way in which you can utilize Reddit is to provide something of value for free to your audience. A piece of advice or recommendation that solves one of their pain points.

Once recognized as relevant and helpful, this sort of engagement can lead to referrals and new business opportunities.

Apart from that, it can paint your brand in a positive light, as you’ll market yourself as a company that cares about the community and its users.

Digg

One of the reasons Apple products are so popular among tech lovers is that they’re innovative. Users like innovation, and they like to stay on top of trends. 

If your business is looking for a way to get on board with the newest trends and keep growing in the future, Digg can help you with that.

The way Digg works is that it gathers trending stories across different industries and puts them on its landing page.

As Digg is a high-authority website, you can probably guess how landing content that showcases your business offer on its front page can benefit your brand.

Scoop.it

Scoop.it is a great tool if you’re looking for a way to publish your content across different channels, while also getting recommendations for other content related to your expressed interests.

It’s a single platform from which you can share your articles, newsletters, and social media posts across different websites, blogs, forums, and social networks. 

This way, you can ensure that your content is reaching both your target audience and other influencers. Also, you’re ensuring that you’re never running out of content ideas.

Tumblr

Utilizing the Tumblr dashboard for sharing your content is an affordable way of reaching a diverse audience and organically promoting your business. 

It’s conceptualized in a way that supports the curation of shorter, relatable posts that showcase the authenticity of your brand and spread the message of your business.

If you’re in a niche market, Tumblr can serve as a helpful social bookmarking website for increasing your brand awareness, engaging with your audience, and building a long-lasting relationship with them.

Facebook

While Facebook is not strictly a social bookmarking site, it is certainly a website used for social networking. 

When you create a business profile on Facebook, complete it with all the relevant company information and then use it to interact with your audience, you’re making it easier for yourself to understand the ever-changing needs of your users.

By understanding the pain points of your audience and how they feel about your brand, you can use this data to make changes to your business and stay relevant in the market.

This way, your Facebook profile is not only filling out the platform’s website directory but serving you in improving your business strategies too.

Medium

Now, more than ever, consumers care about your brand messaging.

Great products don’t do it as a standalone anymore unless your company culture and values align with those of your consumers.

If you’re looking for a way to make it easy for the consumers of your content to check whether the message you send in your content matches the values of your brand, Medium can help you meet that objective.

How? Well, when a user “claps” or favorites your article on Medium, this social bookmarking website offers them more insight into the author of the article, as well as the brand behind it.

Moreover, thanks to its personalization algorithm, if someone on Medium bookmarks posts of other authors that are similar to your content, they’ll be recommended your posts as well.

This can, again, help increase your brand awareness and drive traffic to your website.

Delicious

Delicious is a social bookmarking website where businesses can save, manage and share their bookmarks from a single, centralized platform.

This web service has a huge community aspect, as it gives its users control over certain crucial aspects of social bookmarking.

For example, users can add their own keywords to the bookmarks and categorize them as they prefer.

This can be both a good and a bad thing for your business, as the freedom of users to create their own tags can lead to an increased risk of having your content flagged as spam by search engines.

However, the benefits that Delicious offers still outweigh the disadvantages. And if you want to stand out among millions of other businesses trying to improve their page ranking, you’ll need any help you can get.

Slashdot

If your users are anything like me and they like to start their mornings off with news, Slashdot gives them an easy way to stay up-to-date with the latest events across different industries.

The way Slashdot does it is by allowing its users to search for particular topics and apply several filters to find stories relevant to their interests.

This social bookmarking website can be a great way to reach the tech community and promote software products or services. 

Conclusion

As you can probably tell after reading this article and understanding how social bookmarking websites work, content that gets upvoted by the community is likely to rank higher in SERP.

If you’re looking to build your brand presence and credibility while also generating more traffic and sales leads, social bookmarking is a must in your SEO campaign.

Author bio

Travis Dillard is a business consultant and an organizational psychologist based in Arlington, Texas. Passionate about marketing, social networks, and business in general. In his spare time, he writes a lot about new business strategies and digital marketing for DigitalStrategyOne.