Build External Links with Social Bookmarks

1 - I can do better 2 - Jury's out 3 - Pretty darn good 4 - Splendiferous 5 - Awesometastic by 7 people | Log in to rate

Ranked #581 in Squidoo Tips, #102,923 overall

Backlinks Improve Searchengine Visibility

This lens was originally intended to be part of my RSS Feeds & Syndication lens, but it quickly became apparent that it needed it's own space.

It's just a bunch of links at the moment, so flame gently, please. I'll be adding commentary RSN.

Bookmark / Subscribe ! 

Handy Utilities For Sharing This Page

Why Bookmarks Matter 

A lot of SEO "experts" will tell you that quality content is what matters in getting your pages (or "lenses") to the top of the search-engine rankings. They will frequently quote (directly or indirectly) material from a four-year-old edition of Google Hacks

Google's 'bots are good, but they're nowhere near artificially intelligent enough to know "quality" content from gibberish. The so-called SEO experts don't have that excuse.

Inbound links -- links from other sites to your page -- are far more important in determining your PageRank and placement in search engine results pages (or SERPs) than keyword density or other artificial means of estimating "quality."

How Bookmarks Work 

Don't get me wrong. Quality does count. But it is human readers who will determine your pages' worthiness, not search-engine spiders. You could try to contact webmasters with similar pages and ask them to link to you or try some sort of reciprocal-linking scheme. These methods are generally tedious, labor-intensive and unreliable.

A far more productive approach is to give ordinary users (i.e. users who are not necessarily also webmasters) the means and the incentive to create those links.

Social bookmarking services provide that function. Users simply click a link which then allows them to store a link back to your page with the social bookmarking service. This facilitates optionally tagging, annotating, remotely accessing, and sharing (both importing and exporting) of links, while contributing to the service's database. It's a win-win-win proposition.

So Many Choices, So Little Time. 

Social bookmarking services are relatively easy to implement, provided you have the necessary skills in CGI programming and database management, which is why they are popping up on the web like mushrooms after a good rain.

Each service has it's own set of features, and its own admirers and detractors, so it's hard to tell which one(s) will be most effective on your site.

Scott Conner (ekstreme.com) has developed an "ekstremely" effective app called socializer that addresses this problem. Visitors who click on the

social bookmark this


link go to a landing page where they can choose their favorite(s) from among several social bookmarking services. Sweet!

He even includes the Squidoo Bookmarklet which is a pretty good shortcut if you want to build a Table of Contents for your Squidoo lenses.

Major Social Bookmarking Services 

My original design for this page involved reviewing all the social bookmarking services listed here. Unfortunately, they are proliferating faster than I can adequately test and review them, so I'll settle for highlighting a few exceptional ones ... for now!

del.icio.us
I'm not sure that del.icio.us was the first social bookmarking service, but it certainly was an early leader in the field, and is probably the most used service today.
Furl
Furl is the social bookmarking service of the Look Smart search engine. It's big, but IMHO not very good. The last time I checked they were extremely biased against content they deemed "commercial" except for their paid advertisers' sites.

Facebook 

Don't Overllok the Obvious

No matter what you say or do, some people will like it and some people won't. Finding like-minded fans is not a matter of message, it's a matter of reach. If you look at the Squidoo Top 100 Lenses the first thing you'll notice is that most of them are pretty inane. If you look a little deeper, you'll see that they have huge numbers of ratings (mostly five stars)

There are at least 50 million facebook users, and probably tens of thousands of lensmasters, some of whom are currently active. Do the math.

Facebook: The Missing Manual

Amazon Price: $13.59 (as of 12/15/2009) Buy Now

Facebook Cookbook: Building Applications to Grow Your Facebook Empire

Amazon Price: $26.39 (as of 12/15/2009) Buy Now

Special-Purpose Bookmarking Services 

Some social bookmarking services are restricted to a particular type of links or by some other criteria. These can be extremely valuable if your content falls within the appropriate categories.

CiteULike
CiteULike (.org) specializes in academic papers. They may or may not have much control over how "academic" their submissions are, but if you are in doubt "lurk before you leap."
Give a Link (.org)
GiveALink is a project of the Computer Science department of Indiana University (Bloomington). Links are used in a research project attempting to develop better ways of searching the web.
Kinja
Kinja bookmarks your favorite blogs (only), and tracks updates. No standard web pages, no RSS feeds, no Squidoo pages (!) -- just blogs. If you spend a lot of time in the blogosphere, might be just what you need to keep up with new postings.

The Robot Exclusion Standard 

AKA "The Robot Exclusion Protocol"

Since the time I originally wrote this guide, there have been a lot of changes in the world of social bookmarking. Social bookmarks have become such a popular mechanism for promoting pages, that many bookmarking sites have elected to exclude searchengine spiders (or 'bots) from crawling these links.

I'm not going to go into a lot of detail about the uses of robots.txt files here, but you can read more at Wikipedia, and elsewhere. The upshot is this: some links are not followed by ethical spiders because the "nofollow" attribute is set.

This can occur for entire directories in the "robots.txt" file, for an entire page via the robots meta tag in the HTML head section, or for individual links via the rel="nofollow" attribute.

Rather than continually update these lists, I suggest that you learn how to check these nofollow markers yourself. That way you will always have up-to-the-minute information. BTW the opposite of nofollow is follow, not "dofollow," and it is the default -- so if a link doesn't say nofollow anywhere, it's a follow link.

Bookmarking Meta Links 

I mentioned ekstreme.com above, which is the first Bookmarking meta link I became aware of. There are others as well.

I'm not going to venture an opinion as to which came first, or which is best, but I will list some here:





NOTE: I don't have a lot of time for this right now, but I'll be adding to this list "soon."

Add This
Add This uses Javascript to put a button on your page, so its not very Squidoo friendly. You can access the same links from the Squidutils Dashboard (No registration, login required.)

Some Social Bookmarking Services 

I'm finally getting around to updating this lens because it has experienced a sudden rise in traffic. I always try to "go with the flow" when this happens -- it's much more rewarding than trying to "drive" traffic to a page nobody is interested in.

In an earlier draft, the page consisted mostly of these links (a snapshot of the then-current links in socializer, basically) I'm not removing them any time soon, but they are secondary to the main topic.

The Links:

backflip

blinkbits

blinklist

blogmarks

buddymarks

citeulike

connotea

del.icio.us

de.lirio.us

digg

feedmarker

feedmelinks

furl

givealink

gravee

igooi

kinja

lilisto

linkagogo

linkroll

looklater

ma.gnolia.com

newsvine

LinkBuddies Rocks! 

No. Really. It does.

The Whole Ed Cata-Blog 

Subscribe to The Whole Ed Cata-Blog

I've never quite been sure what distinguishes a blog from a regular webpage. Timeliness seems to have something to do with it, but that doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule.

Anyway, here are some of the things I've been working on lately...

Loading Fetching RSS feed... please stand by

Explore related pages

Create a Lens!