Search Engine Optimization | 3 of 3
The first 4 off-page search engine optimization steps were discussed in the previous page (Search Engine Optimization: Search Engine Off-Page Criteria). Here is a 5th, social bookmarking, which is growing in importance for search engine placement.
Previously, we had bookmarking -- where, if we liked a website, we bookmarked it in our browser for later reference. This simple act would have contributed to that site's search engine placement a tiny bit. Then with the advent of Web2.0 and the internet's swing towards community interactivity, came Social Bookmarking websites. These websites offer a service that allows people to organize and store bookmarks of web pages. Bookmarking a page in a social bookmark site is just like doing bookmarking in your browser. Except that, instead of being on your computer, a social bookmark site lets you save them online -- so you can visit these bookmarks from any computer. And perhaps share them with other users. Sharing can be privately within a group, or publicly. Some bookmarking sites even offer RSS feeds that alert viewers when bookmarks are added or tagged. Users are encouraged to organize bookmarks with tags. Tags are keywords associated with a bookmarked web page. Bookmarks can then be searched and viewed based on their association to tags. These tags are known as external metadata, being similar to metadata or tags assigned by website owners in their web pages, but contributed by the public instead. (Metadata means data about data, or data describing data, and is used for Search Engine Optimization.) These external tags or metadata can be even more valuable for search engine optimization than on-page tags, since descriptions used are assigned by a (presumably) unbiased public, rather than the site owner. Especially if there are hundreds of viewers tagging the same site.
The idea is, of course, for excited visitors to submit your site to social bookmarking services. But if not, there is nothing to stop you submitting your own website. Or to ask a friend to do it. In fact, some bookmarking websites encourage you to submit your own site. But don't overdo it -- too many submittals, or spammy content, can get your site banned. After that, how much traffic you get depends on whether users of those bookmarking websites like your site. If you have attractive content, you might get thousands of visitors who come and review your website for themselves, and even submit your site to other bookmarking services.
When choosing social bookmarking websites, you would generally benefit more from those that do not set links as NoFollow. These contribute the all important link juice to your site, in addition to the other benefits of social bookmarking. (See NoFollow in the Glossary if you're not familiar with what it is and why it's important.) Social Bookmarking Websites that do not use NoFollow:
Apart from the above, there're a few social bookmarking websites that do use the NoFollow tag, but which you should not ignore, even though you won't get any link juice benefit from them. That's because they're among the biggest social bookmarking sites, and you'll still get the benefits of external metadata, votes, and traffic arising from their size and rank.
One reason social bookmarking helps in search engine optimization is that it provides backlinks to your site. Backlinks are really very important for driving traffic. So we'll talk about the many other ways to get links, next.  Go to top of this page: Search Engine Optimization Part 3 of 3 << Back: Search Engine Optimization Part 2 of 3
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