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Social Bookmarking vs … Social Networking vs … Social Sharing

Buying social bookmarks and twitter followers isn’t working to help increase site ranking like yesteryear. However, spreading your site across a variety of social mediums can help your site authority as well as gain natural traffic. Since social media has become a vital part of today’s information sharing, creating pages across multiple platforms can boost outreach to all corners of the web.

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Social Bookmarking

The term “social bookmarking” refers to the method of organization and storage of resources by internet users. Through these social bookmarking platforms files are not shared, just the bookmarks that reference them. A common form of social bookmarking would be a program that allows users to save specific links to web pages that they want to go back to or share with others. Popular social bookmarking sites of today include StumbleUpon, Digg, and Delicious.

StumbleUpon

As one of the most popular social bookmarking sites, StumbleUpon is a rather simple idea that has exploded in usage over the past two years. As long as you have the toolbar installed on your computer, you can submit any site to the StumbleUpon database. There is no way to submit directly from the website without the toolbar. Pages submitted on to StumbleUpon get classified to certain categories and potentially can reach thousands of people. If your site does particularly well amongst the interest group it enters and if it receives many likes, it will spread across other interests and be seen even more. Submitting your sites to StumbleUpon will give you the opportunity to be seen, liked and shared at no cost to you.

Digg

Although Digg’s influence has slightly fallen off recently, the links received are still powerful. By consistently submitting your content to Digg, you might strike gold and end up on the homepage. By making several accounts and giving your site some “Diggs,” its authority will slowly aggregate and you have an opportunity to get your page off the ground and in to the eyes and computer screens of many other internet users.

Delicious

Not nearly as large as it once was, Delicious still claims several million users globally and is one of the early social bookmarking sites. Operating off of a categorical submission system Delicious is extremely easy to submit to. Similarly with Digg, your site (if popular enough) has the opportunity to make the “hotlist” on the site’s homepage, which can help drive natural traffic back to your site. Although its popularity has not seen much increase in recent years, Delicious is still one of the bigger social bookmarking sites currently in use on the web. Since all bookmarks posted to Delicious are publicly viewable, posting pages of your site to it can engage Google to crawl it faster and more often.

Social Networking

Social Networking sites have become the most widely used form of website on the internet and have become an integral part in how people manage their social lives. Social networks like Facebook infiltrate all age groups and have slowly become a preferred form of communication amongst most people. The scope and reach of social networking sites is so ginormous it allows certain things to spread virally through millions of people in a matter of minutes. News of a catastrophic incident can spread out from the source and into the eyes of millions within the first 30 minutes. Capitalizing on this extreme connectivity will help your site rank higher in Google and Yahoo as well as drive real interested people to your site. The most popular social networking sites today include Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

Facebook

The crème de la crème of modern social networking is Facebook. Facebook dominates the networking world with an active user base of nearly 1 Billion people. This number is staggering when you think that nearly one-seventh of the people alive on the earth use this single website to manage their social lives. The creation of “social shares” on Facebook allow websites or any other information, picture, media, etc., to be spread easily on a large scale around the web. By posting the Share Button API on your site, visitors can share your pages around the web giving you natural backlinks at no cost to you. Even beyond the links you gain from this, the shares you get from visitors will help direct traffic to your site you otherwise would go without.

Twitter

Quite a bit different from Facebook and Google Plus, Twitter’s style of social networking focuses more on the quick relaying of information between people. Google admits to using data collected from tweets. There is sort of a twist in how to manipulate Twitter for your SEO needs. Google only counts re-tweets from powerful followers in their ranking process. This means that in order to make use of Twitter for SEO purposes, you must have genuinely interesting things to say or a loyal group of powerful followers in order to make a difference. The potential for increasing site rank is definitely there. By gaining even a small amount of social recognition through re-tweets about your site you will always have a flow of new visitors just based on the amount of people each individual re-tweet reaches.

Google+

Google+, for SEO purposes there is a lot of valuable stuff to gain from using this site. There slightly new approach to social networking puts your friends, family, work buddies, etc., in different “circles” to which you can share things. It’s like having a file cabinet with everyone you know perfectly organized neatly in to little manila folders. As in all other social sites gaining some recognition and following through Google+ would obviously be helpful. This site is a Google’s property. That being said the data contracted from this site will be skewed in importance compared to competitor’s sites. Google+ will auto-ping your domain helping you get indexed faster and rise in the rankings quicker. Google values this data very highly so creating Google+ pages will definitely help you out in your quest for a higher rank.

Social Sharing

These sites are a sort of a new breed in the overall social networking world and have potential for more site rank than most people think. These should not be passed over in the SEO process. Social sharing sites take the link sharing of social bookmarking and the social outreach of social networks and join them together in the search engine optimization treasure chest everyone in the SEO industry searches for. The most popular social sharing sites surging in use as of now include  Reddit, Instagram, Pinterest, and Youtube.

Reddit

One of the pickiest and most selective social sharing websites on the web, Reddit has around 35 million users and receives around 1.8 billion monthly page views. The large scale of this site is perfect for releasing links to your site’s pages. However, the community of “Redditors” are notoriously picky in what they want to see or read about. The moderators of the site as well as the whole community is very keen on picking out spam so try to keep all of your content natural.

Instagram

The official launch was towards the end of 2010. Instagram is a free photo sharing program that allows for users to take photos, apply digital filters and share the image on an array of social networking sites. The app really started to gain popularity in the beginning of the 2011 and has only grown out to a larger audience since then. With a count of approximately 60 million users worldwide, Instagram’s most significant potential lies in the massive outreach it has among all different social platforms.

Pinterest

All good SEO’s know this and use Pinterest to virally seed content and gain strong backlinks as well as traffic to their site. Pinterest’s format acts as a virtual bulletin board, as users can “pin” interesting content to their own pages. The viral potential of Pinterest makes it a necessary site to use for optimizing your site. Google has figured out how to detect spam re-pins of content so in order to make use of the power of Pinterest try to gain good natural re-pins. The easiest way to do this is to create infographics about things either related to your site or stuff you can host on your site.

Pinterest is a game changer in the SEO world if you know how to properly utilize its sharing potential. Pinterest is great even if you only get a few re-pins as the authority you gain will be worth it in the long run.

Youtube

Perhaps one of the most widely used sites on the web Youtube houses billions of unique videos. Many of which reach large audiences quickly. Like Google+, Youtube is a Google property and they surely use the data gained from Youtube when ranking sites. Youtube has potential to spread your specific product or website if the videos are original and interesting. Although it might be hard to create videos for a site any webmaster should look in to the benefits of using Youtube to gain traffic and links.

Social media dominates the global communication and information share of today’s society. The world we all live in now is so intertwined with the internet and social networks that in order for your site business or company to thrive you need to be well represented on all platforms of the social sphere. By joining the social you can boost your site’s crawl rate and index time allowing your site to be indexed faster by Google and begin the ranking climb you are looking for. They also provide organic traffic whether you believe it or not. There is no doubt about it—social media sites will give you an edge in search engine optimizing.

Steve Steinberger
www.klicktwice.com
561-281-8330