Social Bookmarking - as if peer pressure wasn’t enough!

Wow, when you think of anything that has had a huge impact on the web-savvy community, you’d have to first think of Social Bookmarking. It’s the equivalent of calling all of your friends, relatives, adversaries, acquaintances and everyone else in the world with an internet connection and telling them that you’ve just read a great story, then reading the story to them and letting them offer their comments. However, you don’t have to sit on the phone, coffee in one hand and donut in the other, talking for days on end to get your message out. Social Bookmarking was conceived from the well-known ‘Favorites’ folder on your PC. If you’re saving a page to your favorites, wouldn’t your friends be interested in that page as well? Wouldn’t others? What if there was a way to save all of your favorites with comments and allow all of your friends to see what you’ve saved - and then make comments of their own? That’s the whole notion of Social Bookmarking.

No, I wouldn’t walk off the edge of a cliff if my friends did; or would I?

And as if peer pressure wasn’t enough, now you have all of your friends telling you what to view on the net, not just how you should dress! However, this is an amazing step in the web. When you’re searching for information on the net, you can quickly become overwhelmed with everything that is available. It’s difficult to decipher what is and what isn’t good content (without, of course, reading all of the 9,700,000 results that you see in Google). However, if others have read a specific article about the topic in which you’re interested, and they have saved that article and explained why the article has value, then you would have a strong starting point to find relevant information.

All hail the Social Bookmarking deities

No, I’m not just writing this to praise the Social Bookmarking divine creators. This phenomenon has quickly become one of the first topics discussed among SEO aficionados. Why? Because one of the most important factors to get your site ranked higher in search results is ‘link-equity’. Link equity is loosely defined as link popularity. So if your site is the equivalent to the high school quarterback dating the head cheerleader winning the homecoming king candidacy, then your site will rank high in the search engines. You see, a search engine determines rankings by deciding how relevant a web page is to a specific term in a number of ways. One of those ways is if others have taken an interest in that page (and made it popular). For example, let’s say you have two pages, both relevant to a specific topic, and you have 200 people read each of the pages. If 136 people save page #1 in their favorites (social bookmark) and 22 people save page #2 in their favorites, then you could certainly determine that page #1 is either more relevant to the topic, more interesting, or just better content than page #2. Therefore, it’s important to do a few of things to your site in response to this Social Bookmarking craze.

Write great content
If you want others to bookmark your page, then give them a reason
Offer an easy way to bookmark your page
This is available in numerous options all over the net. Usually a button that allows users to click and save your page. You’ll see these as examples just below this post
Let users know that you’d like them to bookmark your page
Of course, you should never beg your users for anything (mostly), but a small ‘If you like this page, share it with your friends!’ excerpt works great.

More information

If you’d like more information on Social Bookmarks, or want to see what all the fuss is about, here’s a very incomplete list of social bookmarking sites: