What is social bookmarking? It is a way of saving and sharing web documents. Businesses can benefit from it by bookmarking valuable content that might help their company grow in the future.
Social bookmarking is also one of the most popular off-page SEO techniques that help drive traffic to your website. What is off-page SEO? It refers to the activities done outside of your website to enhance the quality and quantity of your site’s traffic. Social media platforms are one of the best tools for off-page SEO.
If you’re about to launch your website, you must know the importance of social bookmarking. It can expose your newly launched website to a broader range of audiences on different social bookmarking sites.
Here’s one thing you must keep in mind: Since it’s free and doesn’t require much effort, people overdo it and you don’t want that. Spamming is not a good practice and doesn’t bring you any good. It can only ruin your brand’s reputation.
Read along to know some of the most commonly committed social bookmarking mistakes and how you can avoid them.
How Does Social Bookmarking Work?
The word “bookmarking” means annotating some text (important information usually) so that you don’t have to search for it later when you need it. Social bookmarking is simply saving or sharing the URL of web documents to social networking sites.
Numerous social bookmarking sites allow share, manage, and save the content you come across, such as Reddit, Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, etc. Bookmarking content on every social bookmarking site is not a good idea. You must review the quantity and quality of traffic it gets before choosing a site.
How to Use Social Bookmarking for SEO Correctly?
People often make mistakes when sharing links to their web pages. Here’s how to do it correctly.
1. Create an optimized profile of your business on social bookmarking sites. Scoop.it, Reddit, Medium, Pinterest, and Dribbble are a few top sites.
2. Create a post to add your link to. Remember, your posts need to have some value for your readers. You can’t just type anything and attach a link to it. Your post must be interesting enough to keep your readers’ attention to the very last line. You can help your readers by conveying necessary information in your business’s niche, or sharing something entertaining.
3. Get the link you want to attach., It can be the link to your blog post, products/service, or any other page of your site as long as it’s related to your post. Select the most relevant anchor text.
4. Publish your post. You must have a fully functioning and attractive website to welcome users through those links. If your website doesn’t function properly, it might lead to losing potential customers and a negative image of your brand.
Don’t have one yet? Don’t worry. You can create one yourself using Strikingly. It is a ridiculously easy-to-use website builder which is used by over 12 million people around the world. To create a website using Strikingly, you don’t need prior coding or web designing experience. All you need is 20 minutes (or maybe less).
Image taken from Strikinlgy user website
Strikingly offers more than 200 free website templates for its users. You can easily customize them in the Strikingly site editor and have your website ready to be published within a few minutes.
Image taken from Strikingly
Furthermore, Strikingly puts forward awesome features such as adding a simple store, blog, and other features to your site in just one click. You can build a gorgeous website using Strikingly that’s suitable to view across mobile and desktop devices.
Image taken from Strikingly
If you want to create a huge online store for your business, Strikingly is the best option for you because it allows you to showcase and sell more than 500 products in your store. It even supports accepting multiple payment methods such as credit cards, Clearpay, Afterpay, etc.
Creating a website with Strikingly is completely free. However, you can subscribe to any of the yearly (or longer) plans to gain access to premium features.
Image taken from Strikingly
How Does Social Bookmarking Benefit Businesses
Here are the benefits your business can gain from social bookmarking.
- Drive Organic Traffic to Your Site
As a website owner, you can use social bookmarking to drive traffic to your brand’s website and educate people about your service or products. In the reader’s eyes, if your content is worth their time, you can become a social media trend.
It is your responsibility to maintain a high volume of traffic by publishing valuable content consistently.
- Simple Way to Establish Backlinks
If you don’t know what are backlinks, they are links to your website on multiple platforms. Whenever your post containing the link is shared, your site's higher traffic increases.
Backlinks are also effective increasing PA/DA which is a score that predicts how high your page will rank on search engine results. Backlinks will create awareness about your brand leading to a better chance of converting readers into customers.
Social Bookmarking Mistakes to Avoid for SEO
Here are the most common social bookmarking mistakes that you must avoid at all costs. They do no good and only harm most of the time.
1. Writing Irrelevant Titles on the Post
Some people might write irrelevant and clickbait-y titles on their posts only to grab the audience’s attention. You must understand that even if you grabbed someone’s attention with a misleading title, they won’t bother to read further after they figure out the title is irrelevant.
This will ruin your brand’s reputation, resulting in losing the audience that you already have. What you should do, instead, is think of the most relevant title to your post and the page your link leads to. Use vocabulary that will create curiosity, but not mislead the reader.
2. Spamming
Spamming your page links on social bookmarking sites is also one of the practices which will ruin your brand’s reputation. One post which contains valuable content for the readers can grab you more traffic than twenty irrelevant posts spammed with the intention of selling.
3. Using Irrelevant Keywords and Tags
Social bookmarking sites allow users to select tags for their posts. These tags help in targeting an audience interested in a specific type of content. Most people select the most popular tags, without considering if they’re relevant to the post or not. The same mistake happens with the keywords.
That’s an example of targeting the wrong audience. The most it would do for you is get people to open your post. But as soon as they see it’s not something related to their interest, they will leave.
Instead of using the wrong keywords and tags, use the ones which are popular and relate to your posts.
4. Sharing Links of Low-quality or Old Content
You don’t have to share links to each one of your web pages. Review each page on your site, then only share the best ones. If you share low-quality or outdated content, it will create a bad impression on the readers. And even if there are some pages on your website worth visiting, they won’t get any traffic.
5. Attaching Too Many Links
Too much of anything does no good. One of the major goals of social bookmarking is to get people to click the link and visit your site. It is not: the more links you attach, the higher chances of them getting clicked.
If you use social bookmarking sites, you would’ve come across numerous posts that contain too many links. Ask yourself, does that look good to you? It doesn’t.
Make sure you add a moderate number of links, not too few and not too many.
Factors to Consider When Choosing a Social Bookmarking Site
Not every social bookmarking website will be suitable for you. You need to check the stats of your target site and what type of audience uses it mainly. For example, if you’re targeting women, Pinterest is a great platform for you. Over 80% of Pinterest users are women.
You should also consider the Google PageRank of your target site. It is an algorithm that ranks a website on a scale of 1 to 10. The better ranking a social bookmarking site has, the better quality and quantity of visitors you will get. A score of 4 or greater is considered an above-average ranking.
Conclusion
Saving or sharing the URL of any web page on social networking sites is called social bookmarking. When you share the links to your web page on social bookmarking sites, along with quality content, it helps create brand awareness and drive traffic to your site. This helps to grow your site and increase your chances of generating sales.
Social bookmarking helps in establishing backlinks that are useful in the organic growth of your site. Suppose you want to gain benefits from social bookmarking sites. In that case, you must avoid writing irrelevant titles on your post, spamming, attaching too many links in one post, and using irrelevant tags and keywords. Instead, you must create a quality post and value your readers’ time to convert them into customers.
