Building Backlinks with Social Bookmarking

Marketers in almost every niche understand the importance of social bookmarking to build links back to their websites. If you use bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.icio.us, and Technorati properly, you allow other users to add your relevant links to their sites and marketing lists and your URLs go viral as a result of sharing these links.

By submitting your own URSs as bookmarks to the social bookmarking sites with a brief review or commentary, you increase the likelihood that you will benefit from return traffic to your domains. Once you bookmark your own sites, others who are searching or surfing the bookmarking sites will find your bookmarks, share the links, and in some cases, your site will be voted up as a popular site worth visiting by others on bookmarking sites like Digg and related bookmarking sites that use peer review to assist with search results.

In fact, if your site becomes very popular with enough votes by others , it could become one of the lead sites listed on the front page of a bookmarking site. This kind of listing can result in thousands of visitors of day who also want to see why your site if so popular. In order to maximize your exposure and the chance that your site will be voted a popular, make sure that your site content is worth reading or seeing and not just a squeeze page or sales promotion.

The best way to ensure that your sites are voted as highly popular within the social sites is to submit URL bookmarks based on content related to current news. Don't simply submit the homepage or index of your weblog or website as a bookmark. Keep your eye on current news events, write a post related to a popular topic, and submit the URL for that specific post from your blog to the social bookmarking sites. For example, if Apple computer releases a new computer and your blog has a technical theme, write a post about a review or intriguing aspect of this new product and post the link to this commentary on the social bookmarking sites.

If your sites don't lend themselves to news connections or feature content of a more general nature, it's not vital that you receive a lot of votes for your links nor critical that your links be shared by others--this is preferable but not an absolute neccesity. What's even more important is that the social bookmarking sites provide you with an additional means for gaining backlinks to your sites. These backlinks are indexed by search engines and provide the authority needed for the search engines to rank you higher in search results based on external links from popular social bookmarking sites that point to your site.

I mentioned not solely submitting the homepage or index of your weblog or webpage as a bookmark. Although this is a great starting point, you don't stop there. As you begin submitting your initial bookmarks, be careful not to bookmark too many of your own sites at first, because this can give the impression of being a spammer. As you bookmark your own sites, you should also bookmark other interesting sites you see that you don't necessarily own yourself. People will take notice of your helpful approach and your sites will be viewed more favorably. Helpful bookmarking by sharing interesting information is one of the keys to being an effective community member. Use your profile to share information about yourself related to your interests, adding a picture, and building a friends list if this is allowed by the site.

Good community members are also careful about how many links they add per day. Limiting your submitted links to ten or less per day is proper. After you've been a user for several weeks, you may be able to increase your submissions per day while you continue bookmarking stories on other websites. Vote for a few of the stories that make it onto the first page. Bookmark a major news story on a network site every once in a while or a funny or instructional video. Your bookmark history establishes your legitimacy within the community. Community legitimacy leads to increased views and traffic to your own bookmarked sites.