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Increase Traffic to Your Blog with Effective Social Bookmarking
Social bookmarking websites differ from search engines because they are people driven and not software driven. A search engine ranks your blog (or website) pages through a complicated set of rules built into a software program (known as an algorithm). A social bookmarking site ranks a blog post or webpage based on the number of times it has been bookmarked by other members.
The effects of social bookmarking are much the same as word of mouth advertising. People generally only bookmark webpages or blog posts that interest them, but they also classify the pages by using tags. Generally these are only single word tags and are used in a simple search system to display matches ranked by popularity. The popularity of a webpage or blog post is determined by the number of times it has been bookmarked by other users.
Tags are simply a way of categorizing bookmarked pages. For example a blog post on increasing website traffic could be tagged with these tags:
- website
- traffic
Social proof plays a big part in bringing traffic to your blog from social bookmarking websites. The more one of your blog posts has been bookmarked, the more people will feel compelled to visit your blog to see what they are missing out on.
Some social bookmarking services like Digg can result in a huge increase in traffic if your post becomes popular and makes it into the homepage of its category, or makes it into the Top 10. Unfortunately Digg traffic is short lived and is often not very targeted, but you will get some regular readers from the traffic.
With this in mind, you have to make it easy for people to bookmark your blog posts. Fortunately social bookmarking services will supply you with a small coded button to place on your blog which makes it easy for visitors to bookmark your posts.
Some of the most popular social bookmarking services are:
del.icio.us
furl
Technorati
Spurl
Simpy
Scuttle
BackFlip
BuddyMarks
blinkbits
BlinkList
Digg
Netscape (probably my favorite)
If you don’t want to manually add a list of social bookmarking buttons, there is a plugin called Sociable by Peter Harkins which appends links to social bookmarking services so your readers can bookmark your blog’s posts.
If you are comfortable modifying php code, there is a good article by Andy Beard for modifying the Sociable plugin to add rel=”nofollow” to these links so your pages don’t pass any page rank to the social bookmarking services. You can read the article here.
A word of warning - people who regularly use social bookmarking services won’t be fooled by poor poorly written posts, over optimized posts or posts created from other people’s content. Make sure your posts contain useful well written content and you will get bookmarks and a corresponding increase in traffic.
One further point to bear in mind is many social bookmarking services will only accept bookmarks from posts on certain topics. The point being not to add links to every single social bookmarking service you can find. Choose a handful which best suit your blog, get to know the social bookmarking service fully and only link to the few you have chosen.
Your Success - My Passion,
Alejandro Reyes
skype: whoisalejandro
yahoo: whoisalejandro
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