Social Bookmarking: Getting Traffic With Social Media Optimization

Social Media Optimization: The new buzz in Internet Marketing. It is a non-conventional approach to the conventional goal – website traffic. Social Media Optimization includes techniques like staying active on social networking websites, publishing articles on community portals. Web 2.0 websites, communities, applications and tools are now a key way to build brands, increase traffic and grow businesses and is no longer just the domain of tech types, early adopters and innovators.

Why Social Media Optimization (SMO) Is Important?

Social media optimization increases the visibility of your social media profiles, your social networking activity and your published content so that it is found by people searching for information and resources that relate to your content.  

Social media optimization helps drive traffic to your website or blog, makes it easier for others to share with their circle of influence, builds community around your brand and helpssearch engines index your social media profiles, social activity and blog posts more easily. It also aides a site member in finding your social media profile and activity when they use an on-site search feature within Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc… to search on keywords that apply to your industry or business.

What is Social Bookmarking:

According to Wikipedia: “Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, but depending on the service’s features, may be saved privately, shared only with specific people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of publicness and privateness.”

How Does Social Bookmarking Build Traffic and Exposure?

Social bookmarking helps build a site or business’ traffic both directly and through indirect benefits.

Direct Traffic Benefits:

• At the most basic level, if people bookmark a particular web page they are more likely to make a return visit at some point.
• Social bookmarking services “generally” allow users to make their bookmarks public access which provides a valuable reference resource for other internet users. Unlike search engines where a computer determines listings and relevance, social bookmarking uses humans to classify content – and is becoming increasingly popular way to find information.

Indirect Traffic and Exposure Benefits:

• Search engines place great importance on the number of relevant inbound links a website has when determining its ranking in their search results. Social bookmarking sites are essentially a collection of classified links to web pages. Where the bookmarks are made public with titles, descriptions and tags, they can provide some useful link value to web pages and help pages get indexed more regularly.
• While the value of a link from a social bookmarking site is not as valuable as one from a “.edu” site – it stillincreases thevalue and relevance of a site in the eyes (spiders) of a search engine. Just don’t fall into the trap of thinking that spamming Social Bookmarking services will necessarily get you to the top of Google or Yahoo!

Nowadays there are 1000’s of social bookmarking services available, so choosing which ones to focus on can be quite confusing.

Here are few bookmarking sites to get started

Reddit
Stumbleupon 
Digg
Google bookmarks
Twitter
Delicious
Friendfeed
Newsvine
Propeller

3 step process to kickstarting your social bookmarking strategy:

STEP 1: Bookmark Your Own Site; Get the ball rolling by exploring some social bookmarking sites and actually bookmarking your own web pages. By listing them on a few of the major social bookmarking sites, with relevant titles, descriptions and tags, your already opening your site up to a multitude of potential new visitors.

Remember: The purpose of this exercise is to generate backlinks to our content pages that help them rank better in Google. I’ll assume that each piece of content is optimised for some keyword. There are usually three places where you can add information:

    The title

    Tags

    Description

Make sure your keyword is in all three of them. Note that the title especially usually becomes the anchor text that is used in the resulting link so the title is arguably the most important element to get right.

STEP 2: Provide Tools for Others to Bookmark your Web Pages/Content. The easiest way to increase the number of social bookmark references/links your have, is by using bookmarklets (images and links that provide users with one-click access to bookmark your content). By adding these to every page on your website or blog, people are more likely to make your content a part of their favorites.

STEP 3: Give Visitors a Reason to Favorite Your Website While there are probably several people out there that will bookmark your web pages already based on the content/information/product you offer, it doesn’t hurt to encourage the behavior. Internet users love unique valuable resources and content. So dig deep and give them a reason to favorite you.

Article Source: http://seoworks.posterous.com/pages/social-bookmarking-getting-traffic-with-socia