Using Social Bookmark Sites for SEO

Importance of Incoming Links

Most of us trying to optimize our sites for search engine traffic know one of the single most important ways to get our sites listed higher on search engines is through obtaining incoming links. For Google, the quality of the website providing the incoming link is also important. It’s very important to get incoming links from high page rank (PR) web pages. Most search engine optimization ( SEO )articles mention this importance. However, many search engine optimization articles do not go into specifics about how to obtain these links.

Avoid Excessive Link Exchanges

A simple way is to have a link exchange whereby websites swap text links from their index or other pages in an attempt to build links. This system used to work very well in the past until Google decided that it didn’t like websites exchanging links simply to perform better in Google’s search algorithm. Google’s position now is that link exchanges are alright as long as they are not excessive. It is unclear how Google defines ‘excessive’.

An alternative approach to building incoming links apart from simple link exchange is to have an A-B-C link exchange. In this scenario site A links to site B. Site C links to site A in exchange for the link to site B. It is widely held that Google’s algorithm is aware of this situation and accounts for it. 

Obtaining One-Way Incoming Links

The vastly superior way is to have one-way incoming links. One-way links are links which point to your site without you having to link back to their site or set of sites. This is clearly the superior method for building incoming links. However, this method may take a long period of time as external websites find your web pages useful and link in to them. No matter the quality of your content it takes time to build natural links in. Such natural links may come from web directories or sites related to your topic which find your website useful and link to your site without being asked.

This SEO article is written specifically to address the problem of building one-way links to your website. By taking some short-cuts it’s easy to get high Page Rank websites to provide one-way links to your website. One of the simplest and easiest ways to gain incoming links is by taking advantage of social bookmark sites. These social bookmark sites include high page rank social bookmark sites such as ma.gnolia.com, simpy.com, furl.net, and del.icio.us.

It’s free to signup and start using these various bookmark sites. Most of them will require that you install their icon into your web browser toolbar. Once installed, simply click the bookmark icon when you’re on any web page which you’d like to have bookmarked. Ideally you may wish to bookmark all the web pages of your site. You can use these bookmark sites to create a URL containing all your own website links.

Once you have the URLs containing your websites then submit these URLs to Google, Yahoo, MSN and other search engines of your choosing. Place links to these URLs on your own websites or on other sites such as within blog comments.

Once these newly created bookmark webpage URLs get indexed and search engines crawl them then your websites will benefit from having quality one-way links.

Importance of Anchor Text

Always remember that the anchor text used to link to your site is extremely important as search engines such as Google attribute the anchor text to your website. The anchor text is simply the hot-linked words that refer to your website. If for example you operate a car dealership then for anchor text you may choose something like “cars for sale” or “buy cars”. It’s good to use adjectives sometimes when choosing anchor text. Continuing with the example above you may choose anchor text such as “autos for sale” or “buy automobiles”. It’s a good idea to vary the anchor text and not use the same anchor text for all incoming links. Keep this in mind when naming your websites as you manage your bookmarks.