Web Design and Development

07 Jan

A simple business guide to Social Bookmarking

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50 Social Media Icons
Image by Ivan Walsh via Flickr

Social Bookmarking is one one element of a Small to Medium businesses Social Media Marketing plan.

Social Bookmarking can be really good at helping bring more traffic to your site or to add credibility to your articles.

Basic Understanding of Social Bookmarking

When you find a site or on-line article of interest you can bookmark the site in your browser for later reference.   But there are limitations with this:

Organizing and Searching

Being forever on the net doing market research, I am always finding sites or web articles that I think I would like to look at later.  The problem is that in reality I end up with so many bookmarked pages and a really bad structure for filing them – that I can never find them again.

Some pages I book marked, could well have been filed under market research, hire industry data or even say social media statistics. Trying to remember where I put it became a real brain ache.

Sharing

The next limitation is sharing the articles with other people.  Aside from not wanting to download every site or article and waste bandwidth, I want to be easily able to share articles with others.   This is achievable using the browser bookmark system but it is cumbersome.

Others Opinions

If I do share an article I would like to track their opinions and how valuable they think the article is.   Also how they would categorize the article, ie what keywords would they file it under?

Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking solves these limitations.  It enables you to:

  • Book mark a site or article of interest;
  • Save the link;
  • Organise your links by using multiple tags;
  • Search by for your links by tags;
  • Include other people publicly saved articles who have used the same tags, hence enriching your search; and
  • Assess the value of an article based on others people opinions and ratings.

Why you should do it!

It is this last point that offers the real value to a small business.

If you create an article, lets say through your blog, you can submit it to a Social Bookmarking site.

More Readers. The first reason you would submit the article is that it potentially offers the opportunity to attract more readers.  The social bookmarking site creates a new link from their site back to your blog, good for in-bound links.

Credibility. Others can read the article and rate it as well as make comments. The credibility of the article is increased the more others rate it well or comment accordingly. Yes there is a risk of the reverse happening as well.

Keywords. Other reading a good article may often tag that article with their own keywords.  These tags along with yours are then indexed by search engines.  This can be great for the search engine ranking of your article which in turn can flow through to more traffic to your site.

A well done article can be incredibly powerful in increasing traffic to your site!

Managing the Risks

Social bookmarking technology is generally free and easy to use. However whilst the technology is easy to understand the social groups that use may not be.

If you ever changed school can you remember the first day? The way they talked, the terms they used and what they talked about?

If you were smart you just listened for a while until you got use to them and their cultural norms. Hey why risk being labeled a “dork” better to just hang back for a while.

Social Bookmarking groups are exactly the same. Each social bookmarking service, and there are a number of them, seems have its own distinctive culture or informal rules and interests.

Social Bookmarking Services

There are numerous social bookmarking services.  But as discussed above it pays to select the right one for you.  This article gives a brief summary of each of the top ten and their focus.

Finally

The benefits of social bookmarking for small to medium businesses can be excellent.

But remember it is social by nature, so spend time getting to know the community of followers for your selected social bookmarking service.  Watch the types of articles that are most popular and unpopular.  Take the time to comment and rate others community members posts. Invest time in becoming known as a good community member and they will reciprocate.

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27 Dec

SEO is the Yellow Pages Equivalent of Aardvark

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Auckland 2004 Yellow Pages books
Image via Wikipedia

SEO or search engine optimization is a term most people are familiar with.  However for those that are still struggling with the term, an analogy is helpful.

Last century the one of the critical business marketing tools was to have your company listed in the Yellow Pages.

Now from a sales and marketing perspective, the key to Yellow Pages success was to have your Company Name either:

  1. Listed First or
  2. Have a big Advertisement

First Listing Importance

If you still use or can remember using Yellow Pages then you would remember seeing companies with names like Aardvark or AAAAcleaning etc.

Why, because the Yellow Pages listed in alphabetical order.   So if you were in an industry with lots of competitors then being listed in the first few results was really important.  The reason is simple consumers tended to start at the top of a list to find the name and number of a company to contact.

This same tendency still applies with consumers.  However now consumers use the Internet search engines, primarily Google, Yahoo and Bing to find the same information.

And like their Yellow Pages habit, consumers still more likely to select from the first few listings than to keep flicking through the pages of results.

This is what SEO is all about

SEO is about getting your company listed in the few search results.

But this is where the problem starts.  Search Engine results differ from Yellow Pages in a two very different ways.

Alphabetical Listing is not relevant to Search Engines.  Hence having a name like AAAcleaners or Aardvark automotive has no benefit on search results.

Secondly, Yellow pages has/had a strict categorization.  Categories were defined such as Cleaning Services etc.   Consumers checked the index to find the category that best correlated to the service they were looking for.  Then they went to that page with the listing of all companies.

However such categories have no real relevance on search engines.  Instead consumers effectively define the category by selecting the words they think best describes what they are looking for.  The more popular or common words they use to find you business service or type we now refer to as key words.

Ad-words and Yellow Pages Advertisements

If you could afford it, you took could also improve you Yellow Pages effectiveness by taking out an on page Advertisement.  Such advertisements were and still are effective.  They attract the consumer eye over a plain text listing.

Search engines have the equivalent of this through the sponsored and AdWords that appear on each of your search results.  The difference is though, that research has shown that people are more likely though to click on a result that the search engine has returned than an adjoining paid add.  My thoughts are that the reason for this is that people tend to “own” the returned results (organic results) because it was their key words that brought them up.

Social Media Effect could be the New Aardvark

Naming your company by giving it multiple Aa’s etc in front helped to get you listed first in the Yellow Pages.  It was a budget way of overcoming the marketing power of the big companies who could afford to take out the big Advertisements.

Social Media in some ways could be argued as being the new low cost way of neutralising the big budgets of major competitors in SEO.  Corporations and major franchises can afford to spend big to make sure that their companies come up first through SEO and through paid on-line advertising.   Social Media though does appear to have the ability to help neutralize this, through the range of free or low cost tools.

SEO for Beginners

SEO is not a simple science!  The rules change frequently and there are numerous companies that specialize in it.

However here are a couple of starters.

Evaluate your own site using the free tool from WebSEO Analytics, it is excellent;

Secondly, if you are serious about at least understanding it, read through the following slide presentation by Alex Conway:

SEO Basics – The What and Why of SEO

View more presentations from Alex Conway.

Please send back your comments or thoughts.

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