December 5, 2024

The 10 Best Social Bookmarking Sites for Link Building

Link building is a pivotal part of Search Engine Optimization and is something every website owner and SEO should master. Social bookmarking gives us the ability share URLs with others to spread the love.

To help in your efforts, I have put together a list of the top ten social bookmarking sites for link building.

I will also offer a quick overview of social bookmarking and how it can generate backlinks to your site.

Link building isn’t new and it isn’t especially clever but it has evolved a lot over the past few years with our lives having been made both easier and harder. Not long ago, backlinks were regarded as the most powerful SEO tool around in terms of bang for buck. After the search engines woke up to how some were gaming the system, emphasis changed from quantity to quality.

Now, one backlink from a high authority site is worth a dozen or more backlinks from a lower authority site.

The top ten social bookmarking sites for link building2

What is social bookmarking?

Have you ever found a cool website or video and sent the link to a buddy over Facebook or Twitter? Then you have already used social bookmarking. The intent is to allow users to share URLs freely over the internet for the benefit of all. The feature has obvious benefits for SEO, especially if the social network has ‘do follow’ enabled.

Do follow? ’ The code on a web page that allows search engine robots to crawl the site. There is no point social bookmarking for SEO if the website you use doesn’t allow the search engines to crawl it and give you the benefit.

Top ten social bookmarking sites

All of the following have do follow enabled. This top ten is current at the time of publishing, if you’re reading later, the exact order may change. Nevertheless, unless something serious happens to any of these websites, they all offer good linking potential.

  1. Facebook
  2. Twitter
  3. Pinterest
  4. Reddit
  5. Tumblr
  6. Stumbeupon
  7. Delicious
  8. Google Plus+
  9. Slashdot
  10. Digg

There are hundreds of others social bookmarking sites but these are currently the biggest.

Of course, having a list of social bookmarking sites is only a small piece of the puzzle. Now you have to create content that people want to share to gain SEO benefit. Now backlinks are less powerful as SEO tools, you need people to use and share the URL you upload.

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How to use social bookmarking effectively

The first thing to realize is that while social bookmarking is a tool, it is one that needs significant investment in time and effort. Many sites won’t just let you spam them with posts containing URLs. First you have to gain credibility and then post interesting stuff that just happens to contain a URL.

Find your niche area on each site

Most social bookmarking sites will have category areas for industries, interests, hobbies or whatever. You need to find these for the subject you are trying to promote. You will need to create an account and play a part in the community without posting anything. Reply to posts, offer opinion, promote other’s posts and generally be sociable.

Once you’re over any probation period, you will already be getting along with others that have similar interests. Now you can begin gently adding your URLs.

Play by the rules

Blackhat SEO is no longer that effective so you’re going to have to play the long game in any SEO effort. That means be nice, be useful, follow the site rules, don’t spam, post in the correct categories, follow each website’s posting criteria, engage positively with others and generally be a nice guy or girl.

SEO is about engagement so you need to be engaging. It is no longer a fire and forget task, so bear that in mind before you begin.

Add value with each post

You know as a web user that you generally only click on a URL if you know who sent it and if you know it offers you something. Whether that something is a laugh, something dumb, more thoughtful or something genuinely useful doesn’t really matter. As long as you know who gave you the URL and what you’re expecting at the end of it.

If you’re promoting a product, build a useful post around how it helped someone in real life. Or submit an opinion piece on it. Something insightful or coming at the subject from a different angle. People will already know you from your networking efforts so will be much more likely to engage with you.

Using social bookmarking sites for link building is a very effective SEO tool when done right. Now you have a good idea of where and how to being link building and social bookmarking you can refine your efforts and gain genuine, long lasting momentum for your site. Good luck with it!

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