Social Bookmarking – Del.Icio.US

Social bookmarking is the new way of building up external links to a website. Well, it is not really new, but since Wikipedia is no longer a good source to build incoming links, Search Engine Marketers have switched gears to find the next best thing compared to sliced toast. And social bookmarking it is. One of the top sites currently used by webmasters, SEO’s and SPAMMERS is http://del.icio.us.

How easy is it to use del.icio.us? It is fairly easy if you have only one or two accounts to work with. It becomes more difficult if you start creating more accounts coming from one IP address. The current limit seems to be 10 accounts per IP address, but I am not too sure about that as it would really put AOL users into limbo. Well, if somebody is still using AOL I think he or she might deserve to be in limbo. AOL is so 1999. Anyway – several service providers will help you to mass-create accounts on del.icio.us. But the key here is not pure mass usage of accounts, but to strategically use a few accounts. Google and other search engines are smart. 500 incoming links to a website from del.icio.us with similar anchor text will raise warning flags. Google is able to have single pages excluded from providing link juice and a webmaster can be sure that un-natural link schemes will be detected easily. 500 pages or del.icio.us accounts with almost the same links on each account will be very easy to be found and then to be de-valued by Google. Your efforts would go down the drain.

With everything in life – moderation is key. Use a smaller number of accounts with different links. Add links in different order spread out over weeks and months – not days. Do make sure each account carries a different number of links. If all your accounts have 54 links with all the same URLs (even if different order) Google will recognize that and de-value those links (all of them). Create strategies to populate those accounts. Group links by industry or niche market and do not create a wild mix of everything you are trying to promote.

Tagging and social bookmarks at del.icio.us. This is the combination of keywords added to a keyword rich link. Pick good keywords that will be associated with your links. Spend enough time on research because you do not want to go back and re-do all your links.

Conclusion: Del.icio.us is one of the better known social bookmarking websites. Usage is very easy. In regards to SEO a webmaster should try to build up a small “network” of accounts and use them selective ly to link to his or her websites. Moderation is key to success. Too many links in a short time or too many accounts with exactly the same links will raise warning flags and in the end make your work useless, because Google and other search engines will find your links and “take them out” like a sniper with a good rifle.

In-site SEO

Search engine optimization is a long and difficult process. Many things apply to seo a website successfully. Building links from external sites is a critical step towards success. However, many webmasters forget to build internal links as well. Even more important – linking the right pages to others to optimize traffic and rankings are important. A webmaster needs to identify which pages of his website carry the most link juice and then use that internal power to distribute the link juice down to pages that carry less linking power or to new pages for better indexing.

But what is the best link strategy for in-site SEO success? Imagine you write a new killer article and link from it (because it’s convenient while working on it) to other pages of your website. Cool. You got the internal linking under control. Wrong!!!! The new page has no link power at all and therefore your links do not carry anything in regards to link juice. Once your article is ready you need to go back and find other pages on your website that are good link partners. You should look at it the same way as if you would search for external link partners. Where is most of the power coming from? Which topics are related the most?

Once identified a webmaster needs to update older pages and link to the new one. More important – those links need to be keyword-enriched as well. A webmaster needs to use those keywords he/she wants to be ranking for with the new page of content. It is better to work with very targeted links and not with brute-force linking on non-matching keywords.

Conclusion: SEO has many faces and many pieces to it. No one step will bring you to the top. Only a combination of things will provide the best impact. Too often a webmaster hears about buying links to his site or about doing link exchanges. Too often a webmaster fails to identify his/her most powerful pages and to use them to carry link juice towards less powerful pages. Every time a Google Page Rank update happens a webmaster should go back and inspect his website and identify the pages that have a higher page rank than others and use those to “promote” pages with less Google Love.