Social bookmarking sites provide a way to organize, collate and categorize the web using a classification structure called “tags.”
Tags are nothing more than keywords that are applied to your bookmarked resource. Tagging is a user-generated form of categorization that allows people to use whatever vocabulary is helpful to them. Many have pointed out that this results in the same resources being filed under different tags, which could create chaos on the social bookmarking sites. Like it or not, the web has slowly but surely adapted and this is the standard way of storing valuable resources online.
Besides the use of tags as a means of classification, they also provide value in search engine optimization, as those tags are also indexable by the engines. This may well be the reason that StumbleUpon is the second highest source of traffic behind Facebook!
Here is how social bookmarking sites can help your search engine optimization efforts:
- Faster indexing of sites. Humans bookmark sites launched by their friends or colleagues before a search engine can find them. Bookmarking sites in general have a high page rank and are thus crawled frequently.
- Deeper indexing of sites. When you use a social bookmarking site, you bookmark a page, not a site. This means that you may be bookmarking a page that is hidden so deep into the site that the search engines hardly ever crawl it, unless they get some kind of link that tells them there is something there that is worth while checking.
- Increased quality. If more users bookmark a page, the more authority, quality and relevance the site is perceived to have. This is often overlooked. The more social bookmarking sites that have a page listed the more credibility you create for your content and the more serious the search engines will take your site.
- External meta data. Users who bookmark sites tag them with keywords and descriptions, which add honest, and unbiased definitions. These tags will help you build authority for the keyword phrases used as tags.
- Number of votes. Similar to the number of bookmarks, the more votes a page receives on Digg or Reddit, the more useful that information usually is. If the same page receives multiple votes across social news voting sites, search engines will perceive it as having higher quality.
- Categorization. Using tags, categorization can help define the subject of a site, therefore helping the engine address searcher intent and provide more relevant returns.
