How Bookmarking Affects Your Search Position

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Friday, 11 of January , 2008 at 4:02 pm

Most Internet marketers place social media marketing in a category all by itself, separate from SEO. That’s fine as long as you realize there are distinct SEO benefits from social media marketing, especially social bookmarking.

I’ve noticed that when I bookmark certain blog posts that I will rise in search engine rankings for the targeted keywords based on how many other people at the bookmarking site agree with me on the bookmark-worthiness of the post. Probably the most effective social bookmarking sites for SEO purposes are StumbleUpon, Digg, and del.icio.us, but I haven’t tested them all. In the Internet marketing field, Sphinn is a good one as well.

When it comes to social bookmarking, the primary SEO benefit is content on your page. Whether you are bookmarking a web page or a blog post, you still want your content to be SEOd properly just as you always do. But bookmarking your content can go a long way to increasing your search positioning.

I noticed this because I wrote about a particular topic and saw a blog post rise to page 1 in the SERPs for the key phrase that I was targeting. Then, other bloggers started writing about the same topic. They pushed me down to page 2 because they had higher site authority, age factor, back links, and several other SEO points going in their favor. That’s fine; those are the rules of the game. But I noticed something else happen when I bookmarked my post.

Just one bookmark won’t help much. But other people started voting on my blog post and as more people voted on my blog post the higher in the SERPs I rose. I didn’t get enough votes to push me back up to page 1, but I did rise three or four positions on page 2 as a result of a few meager bookmarking votes. I could just imagine what would have happened had I had a thousand bookmarking votes.

Category: SEO, Social & Viral Marketing

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