If you are trying to increase your website’s organic traffic, then getting a high number of ‘backlinks’ is one of the most important factors to look into. A backlink is when one web site links to your web site. Google looks at backlinks as a token of trust; the more backlinks your website has, the more trustworthy it must be.
While increasing your backlinks can be a long process, social bookmarking sites can be an important way to start building your backlink profile. But these websites also have a number of other valuable uses.
What are social bookmarking sites?
These are websites on the internet where users can share various web pages, blog posts, videos, images and articles. It is a great way for users to manage, organise, search and store many useful web pages and blogs that they come across, and that they would like to share with others or maybe revisit them. Since these sites are web-based services, the user can access the online bookmarks from any device and at any time.
These websites find content based on the user’s interest and their feed is accordingly personalised, and this allows users with similar interests to connect, and view websites that they like and share articles that they find useful.
Examples of social bookmarking sites
Pinterest is one of the most popular social bookmarking sites, with over 70 million users and so far, it has been a big success. It is a social networking site, with bookmarking features such as boards that you can create and save pins that you think are relevant to that board. For example, if you make a board named “Cooking recipes”, you can save pins or ideas related to cooking on that board, and you can share this others and interact with those who have similar interests. Your Pinterest feed will be personalised according to your likes and interests.
Pocket is another well-designed site for social bookmarking. As you scroll through the site, you can ‘pocket’ articles, videos and stories from any publication, app or page. You can save these articles and return to the site at the same time. The paid version of this app allows users to add notes, highlight and annotate the article.
Reddit is also another popular social bookmarking site. Users generally submit links to various images, videos and even stories that they find interesting, and other Reddit users can either downvote or upvote those submissions. By doing that, users can generate a list of bookmarked content, and can promote their content.
Other examples include Slashdot, scoop.it, Dribble, and StumbleUpon that also let users perform similar functions.
How are these sites different from browser bookmarks?
You can not only save your favourite sites but also send them to your friends, see what others find interesting, skim through popular categories and links, and much more. If you save or like a certain topic, it will give you a range of links, images, videos, articles on subjects that might be of interest to you and this could go from politics to technology to history to shopping and so on. Most of these websites offer search tools, where you can look for and find what others have bookmarked as well.
How do you use these sites?
Curating content : People should look to your brand for expertise and resources. With these sites, you can share articles that are relevant to your brand constantly with your audience so you never really run out of content share. These sites save a lot of time and give you the ability to schedule the content well ahead of time. You can already have stored content that users can look at on your page, so you do not constantly have to keep giving the users fresh information.
Organising and saving resources : This helps you keep track of resources that help you develop professionally. You can organise your sources and resources and therefore this helps you stay organised.
Tagging or Labelling content : With most of these sites you can label or tag content. For example, if you have a recipe that is high in protein, you will probably save it to the Healthy Recipes label. This way you can go back to the article and keep your resources readily available.
Sharing the resources : This is a great way to share content with a large group of people on that social bookmarking site. People can regularly check in to your site to find the resources that they need.
Expanding awareness about your brand
How do these sites help? For starters, these sites help largely with brand awareness.
~ Being listed on any social bookmarking sites can drive traffic. People who reached your website or your account on Pinterest, Pocket, Reddit, Dribble, etc. from a social bookmarking website or app, are generally there because your account or website appeared in their search for topics that they were interested in.
~ Search engines mostly list results from bookmarking sites. Therefore, if your site is bookmarked, there is a high chance it may show up in the search engine results.
~ If you are featured on one bookmarking website, chances are people can tag your site on other social bookmarking sites. If someone is on one bookmarking site, they are probably using many others. They may find you through one site and bookmark you on some other site, and this is a great opportunity for website promotion
~ You can increase traffic for your website by adding social bookmarking links to your website. This makes it a lot simpler for your readers to share as well as save your content and also for others to find it.
Businesses looking to promote their product or service can gain by using social bookmarking websites, which are not just a great way to gain backlinks, but also a very good platform to drive traffic to your website.