Bookmark IT for More Profit

I want to touch on the subject of Social Bookmarking and it's implications in helping creating backlinks. Even though Latent Semantic Indexing is the buzz word now a days, we cannot forget backlinks. Think of backlinks as the rope that holds the tent (your site) to the internet. Time and time again I have seen the life of a site diminish if it is not supported by backlinks. I can launch a site, place a blog on the site get it indexed, making money, but 6 months later I lose a portion of my indexing thus, losing a portion of my site portfolio. Those few extra minutes taken per site to create backlinks is pivotal to your online success as you build up your empire.

Social bookmarking has been popular for quite some time and wasn't brought the mainstream until lately. Social bookmarking was sold a cure all for getting your sites indexed and getting great traffic, which can happen, but it is far from a magic bullet.

Social Bookmarking sites such as Furl.com, Technorati.com, Stumbleupon.com, Delicous, Spurl , Article Tag, and Backflip just to name a few. Social Bookmarking is extremely easy, just create and account and bookmark your favorite page. These pages are then available on the bookmarking sites. But what is the REAL benefit of bookmarking?

If you bookmark a site when you first build your site, social bookmarking will bring spiders to your sites, such as Inktomi, Yahoo's spider, they cache your pages and release them over a period of time. Social booking places a specific importance of your site if it is seen on many different platforms, thus creating indexing and ranking for your keywords.

You can bookmark every single page of your site if you wanted, although this is very time consuming with out automated software, it may raise flags and sometimes will result in the deletion of your account. Technorati is not to fond of this practice however, sites such as Furl seem to be a little more lenient if you decide to use an automated tool to bookmark.

For indexing, simply bookmarking your home page is enough to bring the spiders. The key when bookmarking is to use a popular keyword for your niche to attract as many visitors as possible. This is if you are trying to get traffic to your site initially. Again the key is to not rely on visitors from the Bookmarking sites, but placing your sites in the spiders view so your site will get crawled, indexed and ranked.

The best way to use social booking is to strengthen the terms you are trying to rank for. For example, let's say you have a site on scuba diving. You see there is not a lot of competition for scuba diving lessons in MN and you write and article center around this keyword. The next step is to bookmark you site with "Scuba Diving Lessons in MN". This will "tell" the spiders that your page is about this specific keyword and will help with the ranking of your site. Again this is not magic, but does provide a small boost and automatically creates backlinks to your sites.

In Delicious, the more people that save your site to their settings the higher your ranking. Delicous has a favorites listing, which also appears on many other websites. So if you get your site bookmarked and people show interest, then you can bet on receiving 200 visitors in one day. Is this realistic all the time? Only with extremely popular niches, however, the more popular a niche is the more competitive it is to rank for your keywords.

When building a mass number of sites, it is best to build, bookmark and move on. As the age old saying goes, "results may vary", which they do. In scanning my results for bookmarking, I have noticed that the Advertising Niche is extremely popular and should result in many visits, but again, the market is finicky and there are trends and seasons to specific searches. To lesson your frustration, it is best to use this as a tool and move on to other promotional methods such as Article Marketing and Blogging and Pinging. The key is to keep it simple and not put all your hope in one method.

The truth is, social bookmarking works, and if you land the right keyword for your niche, then you can count on hits to your sites. I personally do not rely on visits from an social bookmarking site, I just use this as a tool for indexing and if I get visitors, great, if not, it took me no time to do this and I move on the my next site, knowing that I creating anchors for my tent (site) in the search engines. Remember backlinks show popularity, the more important your site seems, the better staying power you will have in Yahoo, MSN and the all finicky Google.