This article aims to explain why we believe social bookmarking is the future for search engine placement. But there is a good chance that you have never heard of social bookmarking and haven’t a clue what it is let alone why we think it holds the key to search engine placement. So allow us to explain…
What is Social Bookmarking
Social Bookmarking is effectively the practice of sharing and rating links via sites like del.icio.us, digg.com or stumbleupon.com (amongst others). What happens is you create an account with one of more of these social bookmarking sites and post links to sites which interest you. If lots of other people share your interest in the links you have posted, (ie: they have posted the same links) these links get shown in prominent locations of the social bookmarking site.
Effectively social bookmarking is like sharing your favourites list with the World Wide Web.
How is social bookmarking relevant to search engine placement?
Well to begin with Social Bookmarking web sites list links, popular links, what’s more the social bookmarking sites themselves tend to have very high natural PageRank. So if your site is featured on a social bookmarking site, then this is an excellent inlink to your web page.
Furthermore, search engines like Google have always been keen to introduce an element of human opinion and peer review into their search results. Hence their PageRank algorithm which treats each link to your web site as a vote for your site from another webmaster.
This kind of human review is replicated in social bookmarking web sites.
Links which are bookmarked by lots of users on social bookmarking web sites are effectively been ‘voted for’ by lots of individuals, this only helps to re-enforce the PageRank principal of peer review. With this in mind, I would expect search engines to pay extra attention to links featured prominently on Social Bookmarking web sites. Furthermore, I would bet good money on one of the major social bookmarking sites been acquired by one of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN or Ask) within the next 12 months. In fact Google has already started to feature StumbleUpon Reviews in its search results.
What you can do
My top recommendation is to add social bookmarking links (like those displayed on the foot of this page) to the pages within your site. This will encourage your visitors to bookmark your pages on any social bookmarking site where they have an account. Obviously you need to write quality, noteworthy content if you want this to happen regularly.
Of course you can bookmark your own pages, but that will have relatively little impact without wider support. Also its important to regularly publish new content, as fresh, news driven pages are more likely to bookmarked for reference than static pages which have been around forever.
0 comments:
Post a Comment