Due to its increasing popularity, some people have started considering social bookmarking as a tool to use along with other SEO services to make their website more visible. The more often a web page is submitted and tagged, the better chance it has of being found. Through the use of social bookmarking you can help promote your website.
Social bookmarking is a way for users to store, organize and manage bookmarks of web pages that may be of interest to them. They do this through the use of metadata. Like a web directory, social bookmarking services give links authority because the vast majority of the links are reviewed and voted upon by the service’s users. This is like having an editorial staff made up of the social bookmarking service’s own users. Voting upon links can also generates credibility with the search engines even though the services maybe open to spammers as well. Podcast and video blogs are more recent addition to social bookmarking services. These services can add an additional layer of metadata to these multi-media posts, helping the search engines determine what content they contain.
The concept of shared online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 with the launch of itList, the features of which included public and private bookmarks. Over the next few years several venture backed services entered the marketplace. Lacking profitability most of these early social bookmarking companies failed as the dot-com bubble burst.
Most of these early attempts relied on organizing bookmarks using a traditional folder structure. This limited the amount of additional metadata that could be added to a bookmark by the user. As time passed, new companies emerged with a more complete approach to the use of social bookmarking.
In 2003, del.icio.us introduced the concept of tagging and coined the phrase ‘social bookmarking’. Shortly there after services such as Furl and Simpy joined del.icio.us. The recommendation system Stumbleupon was launched in 2004. These services are sometimes called ‘social citation services’. As technology advanced, other services such as Digg in 2004 and Reddit in 2005 were introduced. The latest player to gain note is Pinterest which is more focused on multi-media.
Advantages of social bookmarking
A social bookmarking service can have several advantages over other forms of automated resource location and classification software such as search engine spiders. The classification of resources on these services is tag based. That is, it’s done by human beings, rather than by a search engine algorithm. A human editor will understand the content of the resource, as opposed to just its algorithmic content. Social bookmarking can also rank a resource based on how many times it has been bookmarked or voted for by users. Human editors also have the advantage of dumb luck – they may just stumble across a website or resource that hasn’t been indexed by the search engines. For users of a social bookmarking service, it can be an efficient way to access a large collection of audio and video resources that may not otherwise be indexed on a search engine, or for a user to collate a library of bookmarks that would take a long time to accumulate.
The disadvantages of social bookmarking
Social bookmarking services have their disadvantages when compared to traditional search engines. Social bookmarking works on a tag-based system. There is no standard set of keywords to define the parameters of the search, no standard for the structure of the tags, there is the possibility of mistagging due to spelling errors and a host of other potential problems in search parameters . However, the biggest problem with social bookmarking is the possibility of Black Hat techniques used by spammers. Social bookmarking services are open to assault from those who see it as an opportunity to flood a particular category with pages that are tagged multiple times.
Social bookmarking can be used to augment search engine results by incorporating a more human perspective. As the benefits of using social bookmarking as an effective search engine optimization / SEO tool increase, the use of these systems will see an increase, particularly amongst business users. Social bookmarking is a quick and easy way to increase a website’s profile.
Wi-Phye provides a full range of SEO tools, and social bookmarking is one of those. Contact Us to find out more.
Wi-Phye is a Cleveland SEO Company focusing on helping small business in the local area and arcoss the nation with their SEO efforts.