Social Bookmarking
You’ve taken the time to build a website, it has quality content you update regularly and it is visually appealing. Now what?
At this point, the most important thing a website needs is visitors. It’s like the old philosophy question asks, “If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?” In the case of a website the answer is a resounding NO.
There are three ways a potential visitor can get to your website: they can type your web address directly into their browser; they can click on a link on another website that leads to your site; or they can look for something on a search engine and click on your site in the results. Today, we’re looking at the second two.
Your site need visitors and there are two important ways to help get them there. The first is links to your site. If you think about your website as an office building, the more roads you have leading to your door, the easier it is for visitors to come to you. An added advantage is that having more “roads” helps the search engines determine that your site is important and increases your visibility in their search results.
A strong tactic to help build these links is to make use of social bookmarking sites. These are websites where you can create an account and save links, often recommending them to to other users. They are a good way to build backlinks and bring in visitor traffic. A great tip is to think about what your site visitors would be searching for and use that term as your link rather than your site name – for instance “Chicago Lawyer” rather than “Smith Legal Services.” This will help Google and the other search engines promote your site for those searches that apply to you. Vary the words that link to you and it will help you in the long run.
You might be thinking, “if adding one link to my website is good, then adding thousands must be great, right?” I have to strongly caution against falling victim to this impulse. There are software packages out there that are designed to build thousand of spammy links in a short period of time – don’t use any of them. Names to watch out for include XRumer, SEnuke, Sick Submitter, and Scrapebox.
You may also get spam email from people offering to build thousands of links to your site for only a small amount of money but don’t take the bait – whether you do it yourself or pay someone to do it, you will most likely get your site penalized and banned from the search engines’ results pages, effectively rendering your site invisible to the world. Adding too many bookmarks or adding them too quickly is bad.
Instead, you should take the time to always add your links manually and only do three or four a day. In the race to build up your website’s traffic and search engine results, slow and steady wins the day.
Here is a list of the ten of the top social bookmarking sites to help you get started. There are many more you can use to help build links to your website. You can find our list of 100 Social bookmarkings sites here. Good luck and happy link building!
Digg
delicious
StumbleUpon Reddit
Squidoo
Furl
Slashdot
