Entries Tagged 'social bookmarking' ↓

The majority of people out there have probably saved their ‘favourite’ web pages on their computer on Internet Explorer or added them as bookmarks on Firefox. But how many people out there are actually using an online bookmarking service like del.icio.us and what are the benefits of doing so?

New phenomenon

Millions of people are using social bookmarking services to bookmark their favourite web pages - however these people are still in the minority because it’s still a relatively new phenomenon.

What are the benefits?

I believe that it’s only a matter of time before storing your bookmarks online becomes the norm. But why is that? Here are the 5 key benefits of using an online bookmarking service:

Benefit 1: Access from anywhere

The first key benefit is your ability to access you bookmarks from anywhere with a connection to the Internet. Because your bookmarks aren’t saved on your computer then this means that you can view and browse your favourite web pages from anywhere.

Benefit 2: Never loose your bookmarks

If you store your bookmarks locally on your own computer then what happens if your computer crashes and you loose all of your personal data? If your important information is stored on other people’s servers then this is limiting your risk.

Benefit 3: Tag your bookmarks

I’m sure that a lot of you will have a lot of bookmarks saved locally on your computer, yet struggle to store your favourite web pages it relevant categories. Wouldn’t you just love to store your information in multiple categories quickly and easily? Well, that’s exactly whattags are. All you do is pick the words that are relevant for each bookmark you are saving and you can find that link a lot quicker in the future by searching for your tagged word.

Benefit 4: Discover what’s popular

On most social bookmarking sites you can see what’s hot and what’s not - that is you can see what everybody else are sharing in their bookmarks for a particular tag. This is an excellent way of finding relevant bookmarks for you. Note: You don’t HAVE to share your bookmarks with other people, but most people don’t mind doing so.

Benefit 5: Network with like-minded users

If you see that one or two users are regularly saving the same bookmarks as you then you can make contact with them or add them to your ‘friends’ list to follow their bookmarking progress. This is an excellent way of benchmarking your bookmarking to ensure that it’s as relevant as possible to your industry.

Tips aimed at users

These five benefits of using online bookmarking service are aimed at users who wish to improve the quality of their own bookmarks.

Del.icio.us is generally considered to be the most popular social bookmarking website.

What the heck is a social bookmarking website!?

Good question! A social bookmarking website is somewhere online that you can keep a record of all your favourite web pages. You can then log in from any computer around the world to access your favourites.

However, what’s even more important about a social bookmarking service is that it’s social. This means that if you want you can share your favourite web pages with other users - and you can see what everyone else is saving in their favourites.

This has two key benefits

A social bookmarking service offers two key benefits as well in addition to giving you the ability to access your favourite web pages on the move:

1) Because you can view web pages that have already been voted as relevant by real people - and not just search engines - the chances are that you won’t be trawling through tens of websites to find the information you need

2) Because these bookmarks are stored online, this gives search engines an opportunity to see what’s hot and what’s not at the moment. This means all you have to do is persuade you visitors to bookmark your site online in their favourites to increase your appeal to search engines!

Social Bookmarking is a phenomenon that has risen dramatically from the dust over the past two years, but what is it and what makes it so significant when it comes to online marketing?

Linking is still queen

When it comes to winning the search engine game, content is still king and linking is still queen. What this means is although the first thing that you need to focus on is quality content for your website, the next most important thing that you need to ensure is that you receives as many as possible QUALITY links to your site.

What are quality links?

Quality links have a combination between two things. Relevancy and trust. You must receive links to your website that are from websites or sections of a website that relate to your own content. In addition to this the websites that are linking to you need to be old and ideally .edu, .gov or .ac.uk etc. domains.

Search engines love to crawl social bookmarking sites

I can’t go on about the quality of your links too much here because that’s a whole topic by itself, but the reason in this case that I’ve brought the subject up is that search engines love to crawl good websites. And there aren’t much better websites for search engines to crawl than social bookmarking sites.

Why are social bookmarking sites so good for search engines?

The reason that search engines love to crawl social bookmarking sites is simple. Because humans are involved and the humans involved are organising their favourite web pages, search engines say that this provides a very strong indication that the ‘vote’ cast for the web page is extremely relevant.

How can you use social bookmarking to improve your search ranking?

Again, simple. Get as many people as possible (who ideally have similar interests) to save your web pages as part of their bookmarks. How do you do that? Well… there are ways of cheating the system a bit, but in the long run it’s not really worth it. It will come back and bite you on the backside.

How do you encourage people to bookmark your pages?

The best way to encourage people to bookmark your pages is to do two things.

1) Provide great content that people will want to come back to over time.

2) Make it very easy for people to bookmark your pages. (Like the ShareThis button at the bottom of this article)