Social Bookmarking – A No-Cost Collaborative Marketing Strategy and a Powerful SEO Tool

Delicious, Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit…Are you still trying to figure out what the purpose of social bookmarking sites is?  Isn’t it just a way for teenagers to share “cool” websites?  Well, like all of our powerful social networking tools, that’s how it started out.  However, if you understand the “magic” behind social bookmarking, you’ll soon see that there is a legitimate business use that will have you quickly “Digging” blog articles and websites.

Search engines look at the top social bookmarking sites as part of their ranking algorithm.  The more times your website is bookmarked, the better it is for your ranking.  Further, it’s entirely possible that the bookmark itself will appear in the rankings doubling your search engine power.  However, you don’t want to be the only person bookmarking your website and blog posts.  The gurus who try to uncover the secret workings of the different search algorithms say that the algorithm is able to discount  you bookmarking your own site.

I have to be honest and say that I was a bit skeptical about social bookmarking at first – until I tried it.  One of the phrases my blog is optimized for is “LinkedIn Consultant.”  Part of the process of optimizing a blog for a specific phrase is to write a blog post that specifically addresses that topic and that utilizes that phrase naturally many times.  I was able to very quickly get myself on the first page of Google for that phrase after the optimization – but I wasn’t at the top yet.  I decided to try out social bookmarking and here’s what happened…my “Digg” of my blog post on LinkedIn Consultant went straight to the top.  Further, for a few days, both the blog post and the Digg bookmark showed up on the front page of Google for that phrase – double the search engine power.  Just a few days later, my website or blog post was topping the search engine rankings.  Needless to say, I’m now a believer!

The No-Cost Collaborative Marketing Strategy

So you’re probably wondering how you can strategically use social bookmarking to increase awareness of your business.  This strategy is really only for those people who utilize business blog marketing because you need new content to bookmark.  Essentially, you develop reciprocal agreements in your networking groups and/or with any collaborative marketing partners to bookmark each others blog posts.  It may not be feasible or necessary to have every blog post bookmarked, however, it will have a very positive effect on those blog posts that are designed for search engine optimization or that are “pillar posts” that will have staying power in regards to interest and relevancy.

The best part is that it costs nothing and it can be done very quickly.  If you’re going to be bookmarking frequently, I highly recommend installing the web browser toolbars that all of the social bookmarking sites have.  Then when you’re on one of your partner’s pages, you just have to click on a few buttons to submit the bookmark.

One of the many great things about social media marketing is how easy it is to implement collaborative marketing.  When you formalize these arrangements, everyone wins.  Your customer and prospect base are introduced to the products and services of your partners in a non-threatening way without turning over control or access to the contact information, and – most importantly – you get exposure to your partners’ marketing databases.  This is only one of many strategies that I’ll share as we go along.