Social Bookmark Central

We’ve already seen that just by adding a link to one of our articles on a social bookmarking site, we can potentially generate lots of traffic, and immediately generate a valuable, free incoming link. The amazing thing is that we can duplicate this step for virtually every social bookmarking site out there. There are a countless and ever expanding amount of Social Bookmark sites out there, far more than we could hope to count. While the some are useless to us and a few have a “no follow” rule which means the links are useless to search engines, there are still more than 200 valuable sites with good or very good PR. As you can see we have a lot of room for exposure. If we submit our article to 20 SB sites then Google sees 20 incoming links with our keyword in the anchor text from highly rated, valuable sites as well as any of the links created from our tags.

Repeat the Process Across Multiple Social Bookmark Sites

Hopefully you’re starting to realize the awesome potential of SB sites and how you can generate a large number of valuable incoming links from a single article. But it doesn’t stop there. In fact you can submit each and every article, post and page on your site to various social bookmarking sites, creating several links to each of your pages, potentially thousands of incoming links for your site. The only limitation is that you need to have genuinely valuable, interesting or useful information. Essentially you can generate lots of links, from lots of valuable sites, for lots of different articles which all equates to lots of traffic!

SB sites were unique in their introduction of the tagging system. A tag is nothing more than a label which can be applied to any bookmark, by anyone. You can apply several tags to a single page. Technorati, for example, allows up to 20.

A tag is just a category under which all sites with that tag are stored. For example Page A may be tagged with “apple, banana, grape, fruit” and Page B may be tagged “meat, vegetables, fruit, cereals”. As such they would both show up under the fruit category or page.

This simple rule has big implications as it is an excellent new method of storing and organizing information. For users of a SB site, it means they can browse a tag that interests them and see which links are listed under that tag. However, each link may have additional tags which the user may also be interested in. For example a search for “Dirt Bikes” may show a link which is also tagged with “Quad Racing” and the user continues on to read more under the “Quad Racing” tag. He may then follow another appropriate tag and find other relevant information. This simple but overwhelmingly useful organizing system has now become widespread and is now used in most commercial Blogging systems to organize posts. It was adopted by WordPress several versions in and Blogger.com eventually caved in and used it as standard. Tagging systems can be seen in use on commercial sites like the BBC, Flickr, and some e-mail systems. Tagging systems are also useful in academic settings, especially universities, colleges and libraries where the evolution of progressive tagging organizes information in a continuous way.

Tags are extremely useful to SEO. In our example above a fruit tag was either already in existence or it was created when we added the tag. This fruit tag has its own physical page, which would be something like www.socialbookmarksite.com/tags/fruit. This page is picked up by Google as a page all about various fruits and because it has fresh and unique content being added on a regular basis, it begins to rank fairly well over a period of time. If and when your new article shows up in here, you get yet another free and valuable incoming link which is targeted towards fruit and Google sees that your page is about fruit and nudges you up another few ranks and Google begins to get a picture of what your website is about.

In the early days of Google, your rank depended almost entirely upon the content in your pages, how often it was updated and what kind of information was on the rest of your site. When people started to use SEO and cater for the search engines, the search engines reacted with PR. PR was designed to try and identify the worth of a page on outside factors as well as the existing inside factors and give a more accurate reading on how high a page should rank. PageRank determines how early in the search results your site comes and so a low PR page might show up in page 8 of Googles results, whereas a high PR site may show up in the first 10 results of the first page. While the exact algorithm of Googles PR has never been disclosed, webmasters have figured out basically how it functions.

The main things it looks at are on-page factors like:

• The Title
• The text of the page
• The <h1> and <h2> tags
• The titles on the page in
• Bold, italic or underlined text
• The text of links to pages of other sites
• The text of links to pages on the same site

It also looks at off-site factors, such as

• How many sites link to the page?
• What is the text of those links?
• What is the category or theme of the pages linking?
• What is the PR of the site where the linking page is based?
• What is the PR of the linking page itself?

But what does this have to do with Social Bookmarking? Well, most SB sites have large user bases and are very active. They have daily, hourly, sometimes minutely updated links and content. They are popular and have many people linking to their content, not to mention the thousands upon thousands of people who use Social Bookmark icons on their sites (these are all counted as incoming links). These are exactly the kind of things that Googles PR is looking for and as such, most SB sites are seen as valuable to Google and have high PR on their main pages. StumbleUpon.com, for example, has a PR 7 on their main page. This is very high and if you were lucky enough to write an interesting enough article or page that was placed on the front page for a short time not only would you receive a huge amount of incoming traffic but you’d increase your PR and search engine ranking as a result. This strategy can be used to devastating effect to get you many highly valuable incoming links at no cost whatsoever.

Along with the huge influx of traffic and jump in PR you are likely to receive, you can also expect a reasonable amount of exposure. If your article or page is interesting and has broader appeal, you will see a rush of incoming links from various pages and sites.

As with everything on the net, changes are inevitable and nothing is certain. Nobody can predict for sure what will become of Social Bookmarking and the popular SB sites which exist. Many feel that SB sites will become popular and big enough to topple Google and will eventually take over as the main form of traffic. Certainly in the past 2 years SB sites have seen an incredible surge and growth, the likes of which have only been seen on their sister Social Networking sites like MySpace and YouTube.

While websites, spammers and tacticians have always tried to get an edge over Google, Google has continuously modified its algorithms and techniques to stay ahead of the websites. The plain fact is that Google seems to be losing the edge and falling behind. This is what has allowed SB sites to gain the upper hand and become as popular as they are, but it may also be their downfall. We are now seeing many of the techniques and tactics used against Google on SB sites who in turn react and employ new methods for weeding out unwanted elements. This arms race is likely to continue for a while until the market becomes stale and checkmated, just as with Google. What will happen then? Only our imagination can attempt to answer that question.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is tricky to define, but generally it’s accepted to be an umbrella name for all the Social sites and technologies such as Social Bookmark sites, Social Networking sites, Blogging systems, wikis and any platform which consists of a base of interacting people. Many people assumed that this social movement and technology would take over the internet and as such labeled it as Web 2.0, the next generation of the web.

This concept isn’t entirely sensible because Web 2.0 technologies have been around since the early days of the web and have crept in over a period of time. However, there has been an enormous surge in the use of socialized technologies and just as Blogging systems virtually replaced all static HTML pages, Web 2.0 seems to have taken root and dominated certain areas of the internet.

Social Media

Social Media is another ambiguous title which encompasses a few things but is very closely related to Web 2.0. While Web 2.0 describes a set of Social technologies, trends, websites, and the users who make up and use those things, Social Media leans more towards describing just the websites themselves. Prime examples of Social Media are MySpace, Bebo, FaceBook, YouTube and Blogging systems like Blogger.com. Usually when someone talks about Social Media they talk about it for the purposes of building incoming links for free.

Blogging

Blogs, Blogging, Blogosphere, V-Blogs, Blogcasts… These are just a few of the obscure words which only came into being a few short years ago. Going back a few years further and blogs were virtually unheard of, save a few technological social recluses with thick rimmed spectacles and too much spare time. But things move fast online and what starts as a simple buzzword can spread like wildfire. This is exactly what has happened with Blogging which started out as individuals who would keep blogs as a sort of online diary, with posts mainly revolving around themselves and their friends. The ease and speed of Blogging systems made it possible for a complete ameature to create a new Blog post or web page as quickly as they could type it out. So the winning feature of blogs is that they are simple and fast. Not only this but they offer a huge variety of options and functions to publish whatever information a person may have. For this reason Blogs have now become immensely popular and widespread. Millions of websites out there are based on some sort of Blogging system and more millions are added all the time.

These days, most oldschool Bloggers have died out and more and more we’re seeing useful, wanted information on Blogs from groups of amateurs, professionals, and even from big companies. This is a good system because the search engines have new information to add to their databases, people search and get the information they want, and we get another reader or a few cents from an Ad they view.

Ajax

Ajax is also another word that sits close by when Web 2.0 is mentioned. Ajax is an interesting technology which is used to build interactive web pages or parts of websites like a login screen. It’s useful because a section of a website can be loaded using Ajax and then each time a user clicks to a new page or section Ajax handles it instead of the web browser which would result in a new page being loaded, and the server having to transfer additional data.

Ajax is used for things like Auto-completion, when entering a name, number or city into a box, the form will attempt to complete it as you type or to validate information on login screen before submitting the data and adding it to the websites database or backend.

RSS and XML

RSS and XML are often seen as, or strongly associated with Web 2.0. XML is similar to HTML code but allows for more flexibility and is used as the back end to most RSS feeds. RSS is the syndication, or sharing of articles, pages, links, images, etc from one web page to another, or to another device like a mobile phone, email or web TV.

You may have heard of Social Networks which have been around for a decade or so but were never hugely popular until MySpace came on the scene. A Social Network is simply a network of people, usually united by one website where they have a profile, share thoughts and feelings and maybe have their own blog, interfaces for adding photos, etc. There are a phenomenal amount of Social Networking sites and some of them are incredibly popular and wealthy. YouTube, for example, is a Social Network which revolves around sharing and rating videos. FaceBook started out as a more corporate Social Network but has now expanded to include anyone. WAYN.com circles around people who like to travel, but also accommodates everyone. These Social Network sites can be treated in much the same way as SB sites because like SB sites they generate both traffic and links. However, they are usually less revered by search engines, MySpace being a classic example whereby most of the blogs are seen as useless and trivial and have a tough time on Google. As such only a few Social Network systems may be useful for SEO purposes, though a large base of affiliate marketers use Social Network sites to market their products. MySpace provides some excellent facilities for bands and music groups to build a fan base and network with potential customers. These tactics have been exploited by a large cross section of the web from affiliate marketers to publishers to company officials.

There are many important differences between Search Engines and Social Bookmarking sites which we must consider. For example, Search Engines are not limited in how much information, or websites, they can categorize and store. They send out spiders, crawlers, or robots which follow links, take a snapshot of a web-page and store it in their database then move on. This can realistically continue forever. Instead, Social Bookmark sites are limited by the number of users they have in their network. If only 100 users are registered, only 100 users can add, rate and tag new web pages and the maximum amount of traffic you can ever get from that site is 100 people. Since Social Bookmark sites are updated by human beings, they are susceptible to intentional mishaps like spamming and misleading. They are also susceptible to trivial things like spelling mistakes and bias.

Search Engines market on being able to provide almost any kind of information. They need to cater for the broadest spectrum possible in order to stay ahead. They need to be able to provide educational material for students, entertainment sites or videos, or whatever. On the other hand Social Bookmarking sites do not need to provide information on any particular subject or topic. While the majority thrive on the most attention grabbing, interesting information, ie videos, funny pictures, etc. Many Social Bookmark sites are specialized in areas like technology, programming, news & journalism, etc and may discard anything that doesn’t relate to its particular niche.

Search Engines will search and list as much of your site as they can, which is generally every single page which is linked from somewhere. Social Bookmark sites will only add one page or article at a time and only when someone physically submits and rates it.

Since the dawn of the internet people have always been trying to find something, trying to find a website to sell them tickets to a game, book a restaurant for tomorrow night, find statistical data on the African Swallow or whatever they need or are interested in. In the very early years, people would find websites by typing in the URL or web address alone, and there were no reference points and very little organization or reference points which made it difficult to find what you wanted.

Soon, directories showed up. Directories were simply repositories of web addresses, usually with a short description about the site, and usually filed under various categories. While these did their job and worked well, sometimes it was hard to target exactly what you needed and instead you’d have to troll through lists of sites to find one that matched your criteria. Some directories solved the problem by adding a search function.

This ushered in the age of the Search Engine. Yahoo!, Altavista, Lycos and others became solely dedicated to searching lists of sites and allowed a user to find any of the sites stored in their database by searching for keywords. They would reference these keywords with those stored in the <meta> tags of each web page like the <meta description>, and <meta keywords> tags. Over the years webmasters adapted to target the meta tag and move up the ranks and the importance of meta tags faded and importance was placed instead on lots of factors like the text on the page, words highlighted in bold or in title tags like <h1> and <h2>, and more. The websites and webmasters reacted by using their keywords in these tags and saturating their pages with certain phrases. In turn Google invented PageRank which is much more accurate at telling a pages worth and value. It looks at the usual factors like the text of the page and the words, but it also looks at incoming links to the page and the rank of the sites where the link is from. In reaction webmasters have started to buy or create links en-masse and again Google falls behind in the digital arms race.

As you can see webmasters have been continually trying to find new ways to rank at the top of the Search Engines, and employ various honest or dishonest methods to do so and the Search Engines have been trying to find new ways to get a more accurate reading and get valuable and interesting pages to the front. But the effectiveness of search engines seems to be fading, they seem to be losing the edge and the sites who use the most tactics get to the front pages win while sometimes genuinely useful websites never make it.

This is where Social Bookmarking comes in. Social Bookmarking sites are simply another way of finding web pages and information on the internet. The difference being that instead of searching by keywords, or by categories, sites are organized by tags and ratings. Instead of a crawler or spider looking at incoming links and judging (often wrongly) how well the page should rank, human beings mark the sites they like and those they don’t.

To get to the first page of search engines like Google, you need to worry about your incoming links, your page title, meta tags, the text on your page, and more. Whereas with Social Bookmarking sites the only thing that matters is that people like your site, and that you have useful, unique content. This simple rule means that the good pages, articles and links rise to the top, and the useless, repetitive or uninteresting pages sink to the bottom. This concept is what has catapulted Social Bookmarking into the spotlight as the new best thing and why such a large, continually growing number of people now use them.

The idea of Bookmarking is very simple and everyone has used it at some point. Standard bookmarking is simply a method of storing a link in your browsers bookmarks or favorites folder for you to visit later on. Sometimes you also supply a little description.

Social Bookmarking is simply taking the existing bookmark function used in browsers, and making it sharable with other people, or “Social”. You’re still doing exactly the same thing: storing the URL of a site, and sometimes supplying a small description.. but now you’re sharing it with a community of other people. To organize all the bookmarks, you and other users can tag or label bookmarks. This means that other people can search for that particular label or tag to find your bookmark along with other related results. Furthermore, you and other users can rate bookmarks using either a simple “Good” & “Bad” system, or a 1 to 5 gold stars system, or something similar. These fundamental rules mean that Social Bookmarking sites develop and evolve into  huge repositories of links where the junk is lost and only the best survive but only ever for a short period of time. To understand why Social Bookmarking is so popular and where it came from, we have to take a look back at the history of the web.