Social bookmarking offers a superb method to increase incoming website traffic and improve SEO ranking from additional backlinks.

Social bookmarking uses online software apps to tag a web page in order to access it later. Rather than saving web addresses to your web browser, you save them online, enabling you to share them with others and access them anywhere you have an internet connection. Users can apply “tags” or keywords to bookmarks to describe and categorize websites or web pages. On some social bookmarking services, users can also comment or vote on bookmarked items to move them to the site’s front page.

Social bookmarking allows you to organize, search, and manage web pages. Examples of social bookmarking sites include Delicious, Flipboard, Evernote, Pinterest, Bitly and Digg. If your website is cited on one bookmarking site, people may tag it on other bookmarking sites since people who bookmark may use more than one bookmarking site.

Obtaining Viral Traffic

“Being listed on a social bookmarking site can drive quality traffic: Websites like Digg and Del.icio.us represent the opportunity to get a lot of new traffic to your website. In fact these sites offer the best type of visitors: viral traffic,” explains Benjamin Brandall, head of content marketing at Process Street, in a guest post for Social Marketers.

Brandall says his firm gained monthly page views over 100,000 with the help of social bookmarking sites like Reddit, GrowthHackers, Bizsugar and ProductHunt.

Experts offers these tips to obtain the most benefit from the sites.

Add social bookmarking buttons to your website or blog. “Adding social bookmark links to your blog or web site makes it easy for readers to save and share your content, and therefore for others to find it,” points out Network Solutions.

Be aware of nofollow links. Some social bookmarking sites mark links as “nofollow,” instructing search engines not index the link. That means the links confer no SEO value.

Follow the rules of the sites. If you abuse it, the site may black list your account or even erase every backlink to your site.

Get to know them. Become familiar with the different cultures of sites and their various subunits and cater to their interests.

Don’t push too hard. Avoid being entirely self-promotional. Submitting your own content may be suspiciously self-promotional.

Concentrate your efforts. Focus on one site or just a few. With so many social media sites available, it’s easy to spread yourself too thin.

Ponder your headlines. Viewers see the headline first. They often see only the headline. An alluring headline is critical. “The description must be slightly provocative because this draws more attention but still, never use lies and false facts to provoke interest,” warns Webconfs.com.

Write short descriptions. Many users will not bother to read descriptions over 100 to 150 characters. Plus, some sites severely limit description space.

Build a network of supporters. Cooperating with others and developing a network of supporters who vote for your submissions helps move your content to the front page of social bookmarking sites like Digg.

Bottom Line: Social bookmarking sites can be instrumental in gaining increased website traffic. However, success requires understanding the particular subculture of bookmark users, avoiding being obviously self-promotional and submitting compelling content.

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William Comcowich

William J. Comcowich founded and served as CEO of CyberAlert LLC, the predecessor of Glean.info. He is currently serving as Interim CEO and member of the Board of Directors. Glean.info provides customized media monitoring, media measurement and analytics solutions across all types of traditional and social media.