Build External Links with Social Bookmarks

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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."

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.

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.

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.

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