Benefits of Social Bookmarking Directories

The benefits of submitting your website to social bookmarking sites are quite simple to explain and submitting to them is one of the easiest things you can do, yet many site administrators overlook this simple step.

First off, let’s cover the SEO and marketing benefits.

Number one: you attract traffic to your website from the hundreds and thousands of visitors to those directories.

Number two: Using Dofollow Social Bookmarking Directories with the “dofollow” capability in place (more on this later), you typically receive an inbound link to your website. As we’ve stressed in earlier posts, inbound links play a major factor in SEO. I might add that these are “one way links” meaning you receive a link but are not giving one away. Not that this will make much sense but, each time you put an outbound link to another site, you’re giving up some of your linking power. Therefore one-way links are always best.

Number three: submitting to the social bookmarking directories is free if you do it manually. one by one. The only drawback is the time it takes to register with each directory. For convenience sake there are some reasonably priced automated services that will do massive submissions on your behalf to save time, but you must be careful to choose a reputable one. I’ve learned the hard way that most of these services show little discretion and will submit your site to some shady directories which inherently creates bad press for you in my opinion. The last thing you want is your site showing up in a porn directory or a directory about gambling. Later in the post I’ll refer you to an automation site that connects to only reputable social bookmarking sites. Best of all, it offers a free option…and free is always good!

I’d like to discuss two types of directories. Those with the “nofollow” tag deactivated (“dofollow” directories) and those with the nofollow tag in place but inherently draw in a ton of traffic. Any site that’s considered “dofollow” will create a recognizable backlink to your site once you place your information there. As we know, backlinks are a good thing!

Both are worth your time and effort submitting to. Remember we are looking for backlinks AND traffic. Before registering with and submitting please read the tips at the bottom of this page. Here are two lists of directories I personally recommend. Please note that on occasion a few of these may be down for maintenance or temporarily inaccessible for updating perhaps due to high traffic. If this happens just move onto the next.

“Dofollow” Social Bookmarking Sites

1. Digg
2. Folkd
3. Spurl
4. Kwoff
5. LinkaGoGo
6. SpotBack
7. MyLinkVault
8. A1 Webmarks
9. Tagza
10. Plime
11. Searchles
12. DoFollowDigg
13. Feedmarker
14. Memfrag
15. MySiteVote
16. OldRec
17. Wagg It
18. Otherwhirled
19. OYAX
20. TeDigo
21. MyPIP
22. Yattle
23. Kabulis
24. Bukmark
25. Ciudadlaberinto
26. Cool Search
27. Gozoof
28. Tamilers
29. Ziki
30. Agroots
31. Best of India
32. Promote Your Website Free
33. Zobbed
34. Dizzed
35. Yomash News
36. Bookmark 24
37. 180 Blog Network
38. Pillar2Post
39. Yoo Submit

High Traffic Volume “nofollow” Bookmarking Sites

1. Delicious
2. Diigo
3. Mister-Wong
4. Reddit
5. Blinklist
6. NetVous
7. Simpy

Tips for submitting your site for Social Bookmarking

1. Submit no more than 15 links per day. Google and the other search engines will detect spamming if you go crazy.

2. Use keywords in the tags and description fields and write your descriptions in a human-friendly manner.

3. If you’re a locally focused business, definitely include your city and state in the description.

4. Mix it up a little. Link to different pages within your site and make sure your keywords align with the general theme of the specific page you’re linking to. One day you may link to the home page of your site and then the next you may go to a different bookmarking site and link to your products page.

5. Lastly, ensure that your links are set to “public” before you hit save. This allows other directory users to see your links.

6. You’d be crazy not to use IMAutomator, a free and reputable source for submitting bookmarks for you. It will submit to Mr. Wong (listed above) and 50 bookmarking and RSS directories not necessarily listed here. Also the tool allows you to spread your submissions out over a period of days automatically. I highly recommend using the tool – after all, it’s free!

Sign up for the free version of IMAutomater but still take the time to enroll with and submit manually to as many of the sites above as you can. Let me make one final note about bookmarking and links in general. Submitting to general directories like the ones described here and included in IMAutomator is fine, but you do not…I repeat do not want to use a spammy style service that submits to thousands and thousands of bookmark directories. Why is this? Because such services tend to include many not so reputable “subject specific” directories such as gambling, sports, and even porn directories – this is often referred to as “Contextual Linking.” The more of these unrelated subject specific directories your site appears in, the more likely Google will become confused as to what the theme of your site is – this will actually do you more harm than good. Unfortunately I’ve learned this lesson the hard way. So the rule of thumb is, stick with bookmarking sites that are either known to be general by nature or strictly related to the subject matter of your business in some fashion.

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Once automated source I absolutely LOVE is called Backlink Ranking. These guys totally get it! Prices are extremely reasonable and they actually take the time to create Contextual Links that ARE related to your industry – this will give you a huge boost in SEO!

Recently using the services of Backlink Ranking I was able to propel a local HVAC company in a very competitive market from page 20 on Google to page 1 for 10 premium keywords! This took me all of 15 minutes to set up .

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Social Bookmarking is a great and easy way to generate traffic and backlinks to your site for free! Don’t be crazy enough to pass this opportunity up. I guarantee many of your competitors are not doing this so it’s your opportunity to gain a leg up.

One last note. I mentioned earlier that most of the automated spammy style bookmarking softwares are no good. If you stick with IMAutomator and manual submissions, you’ll do great. Just remember, the backlinks sometimes take up to 4 weeks to get indexed.

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For those of you following the marketing posts in succession we are nearing the finish line. But let us not forget about email and the ways it can help drive your business. Let’s move on to the topic of email to learn more about a valuable solution.

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Tags: dofollow, dofollow social bookmarking, social bookmarking, social bookmarks

This entry was posted on Monday, August 16th, 2010 at 10:29 pm and is filed under Social Bookmarking. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.