The first eBook entitled What Is Social Bookmarking? explains the grass roots of Social Bookmarking, how it came to be, how it evolved and delves into the technologies used in the Social Bookmark world. It is basically a collection of all the articles in the Social Bookmarking category of this website, with some extras and continuity.

The second eBook, HUGE Traffic and Income with Social Bookmarking, shows step by step the method I used on a website a few years ago to generate a consistent income for a whole year after putting in only 3 days work. This method can be repeated and done by anyone who knows how to put a website together.

SeanBluestone.com is proud to offer the following eBooks:

What Is Social Bookmarking?

HUGE Traffic and Income with Social Bookmarking

It’s important to identify your target audience and consider just who actually uses Social Bookmarking sites. This will give you an idea of just who you’re writing to when you create your articles or web pages which are designed to generate huge traffic from SB sites. By having a target audience in mind you can focus on certain types of recurring information and develop large numbers of articles designed to maximize the chances of going viral.

Generally speaking most SB sites were originally created and promoted by webdesigners, programmers and the likes. This still holds true and although sites like StumbleUpon have a wider userbase, a lot of SB users (myself included) are still stereotypical geeks.

Most SB sites have plugins or toolbars for browsers. Number one on the list is FireFox and therefor we can safely assume that a lot of SB users run FireFox.

Finally, it’s important to note that an increasingly large number of SB users are people like ourselves who are promoting their websites. Niche webmasters commonly utilize SB tactics.

What they want

The typical StumbleUpon user is in channel hop mode. Think about when you’re bored and you flick through the channels on TV, waiting for something to jump out and hook your interest. This is exactly what’s happening with StumbleUpon users. As they Stumble more and more, the program learns their tastes and preferences, and they can specify certain categories which interest them. As such you may have more luck aiming and submitting your articles towards one of the “geekier” categories.

Digg users are slightly different in that they read the title and/or description you post BEFORE clicking through to your site. This means that if they click through to your site then they’re actively seeking to read your article. However, they are just as fickle as SU users and if they get turned off by an ugly site, poor spelling and grammar, or an article that simply isn’t interesting, they’re off in a shot.

Many SB sites are strictly for programmers and webdesigners, some are strictly for news articles, journalists and the likes, and some are specialized in other areas. Typically the specialized sites have more worth because they receive less spam and have higher PR. If you’re articles target one of these specialized SB sites, you may get much better results because people are already looking for the type of information you’re offering. If you were to sell some product on your site or you were in niche marketing, you would convert much better.

Most of the Social Bookmark sites offer a variety of RSS feeds in different places and you may need to look around before you find them. Usually they will be marked by the little orange icon(pictured), or marked RSS, ATOM, or .xml.

Let’s run through one site to get the hang of it. Head over to Digg.com and at the bottom you should see a link called RSS Feeds, which will take you to the URL http://digg.com/about-rss. Here they mention some of the feeds available.
User Feeds are where you can collect all the links and data posted by one person. In this way you could create an additional feed for the readers of your website. If your website was on Car Mechanics for example, every time you found a website on the net that had something to do with car mechanics, you’d bookmark it to Digg and your feed would grow. You would then offer your own User Feed to your readers as a nice surprise. Alternatively you could include it on your site and increase your search rankings.
You could make this much bigger and most useful by including Feeds from other users who are like yourself or have similar interests. This way you would build a small team of people building links for your readers or for your website.

However, this involves you physically browsing the web and finding new links. Instead you can use Category and Search Feeds. If you browse to any category in Digg, Technology for example, there is a little RSS icon in the top right. This takes you to the URL of that categories feed which is updated every time something is added there. Usually this will be far more often than any single user feed.

Finally, the Search Feed is one of the best for SEO purposes. It allows you to specify a search phrase term or tag and create a feed for it. That way any time any link or content is added with that tag or search phrase, a new entry on your feed is created. This allows you to laser target items that will be useful on your website or appeal to your readers without doing any work!

To find the URL for a Search feed you simply type in a search phrase in the search box at the top.
Again at the top right there is a small RSS icon which you click, giving you the feeds URL.

For all of the above methods you have found the URL of a feed, but how do you display it on your site? It’s pretty simple, though there are a few different ways to consider.

The simplest method is to use JavaScript. There are several websites offering free services to add and display RSS feeds on your website. You simply copy and paste a small script which fetches the results from the RSS feeds URL and displays it on your site. Unfortunately, this method doesn’t help with SEO because the search engines only see the JavaScript code, and not the actual HTML of the RSS feed.

Instead, we should use PHP. A number of PHP scripts will turn an RSS feed into HTML in a format which suits you, with your own style and colors, etc. This will make it appear as though the information is coming directly from your site (if you want), and help boost you in the SEO rankings.

They take a little time to set up correctly, but once you get them going they are very valuable and require virtually no maintenance. Here are 3 of the most popular.

MagpieRSS – http://sourceforge.net/projects/magpierss
MagpieRSS is a free PHP script which allows you to convert virtually any RSS feed to customized HTML to display on your pages.

CaRP – http://www.geckotribe.com/rss/carp/
CaRP is targeted towards people using RSS for SEO purposes and so it’s perfect for projects like this. It’s free but you have to sign up to their newsletter before being given the download link, though you can simply unsubscribe afterwards if you don’t want to receive all the promotional material. A pro version is also available at $30.

Feed2HTML – http://www.extralabs.net/feed2html.htm
A useful, entirely free PHP script which converts on the fly (instead of caching).

We’ve already seen that just by adding a link to one of our articles on a social bookmarking site, we can potentially generate lots of traffic, and immediately generate a valuable, free incoming link. The amazing thing is that we can duplicate this step for virtually every social bookmarking site out there. There are a countless and ever expanding amount of Social Bookmark sites out there, far more than we could hope to count. While the some are useless to us and a few have a “no follow” rule which means the links are useless to search engines, there are still more than 200 valuable sites with good or very good PR. As you can see we have a lot of room for exposure. If we submit our article to 20 SB sites then Google sees 20 incoming links with our keyword in the anchor text from highly rated, valuable sites as well as any of the links created from our tags.

Repeat the process

Hopefully you’re starting to realize the awesome potential of SB sites and how you can generate a large number of valuable incoming links from a single article. But it doesn’t stop there. In fact you can submit each and every article, post and page on your site to various social bookmarking sites, creating several links to each of your pages, potentially thousands of incoming links for your site. The only limitation is that you need to have genuinely valuable, interesting or useful information. Essentially you can generate lots of links, from lots of valuable sites, for lots of different articles which all equates to lots of traffic!

Get Indexed in Hyper Speed

Google finds new sites by sending out a crawler. A crawler, aka a robot or spider, despite its sinister name, is simply a little script that browses web pages looking for links. When it finds a link it follows it to a new page and takes a “snap shot” of that page. It rates the page based on the information, the text, incoming links, etc. Then it checks to see if that page has any links. If it does, it follows the links and moves on, taking a snapshot of the next page, and so on, and so on. Originally the crawlers were sent out at a certain time each month and this was called the Google dance. Webmasters would try and anticipate when the next Google dance would be and optimize their pages for that time. While monthly Google referencing still occurs, mostly the spiders and crawlers are continuously browsing the web, checking for new content, changes to existing pages, and more. The crawlers may check a page and then come back the next day to see if there’s anything new. If there is they may try again the day after that, and so on. Soon they learn just how often a page updates and they adjust for it. If a site only has the odd new post every now and then, the crawlers will only visit every few weeks, every few months, or even less. Instead if a site updates a few times a day, daily or hourly visits can be expected.

If you take a look at popular SB sites like del.icio.us and StumbleUpon, you’ll see that there’s new content every couple of minutes, sometimes even quicker. As such, those sites are crawled almost constantly. So when you list your site and it’s on the front page of StumbleUpon or Digg for just a few seconds, that’s enough time that the crawlers pick up the link, follow it and take a snapshot of your page. If your page hasn’t been seen before, it’s indexed. Indexing is simply the Search Engine registering or acknowledging the existence of your page. It is now ranked, contained in the search engines database, and anyone can search for it. Getting indexed quickly is very valuable and often webmasters will pay high PR sites to link to them just to get indexed quicker. With SB you can do it for free, sometimes being indexed within hours, even within 30 minutes!

A note about adding your front page

Some webmasters use the tactic of adding their front page, or domain name, to several SB sites at once in order to get indexed quickly and increase exposure. Generally speaking this is a bad idea because the SB sites are catered towards individual articles, blog posts, pages, images or videos. They don’t like websites, front pages, RSS feeds, or anything that won’t be immediately useful to a large number of people. Not only that but you may be picked up as a spammer and deleted or blocked. Instead, add several of your articles but make sure that you have a link on the menu back to your homepage. This way crawlers will index your pages AND your front page just as quickly.

A tag is just a category under which all sites with that tag are stored. For example Page A may be tagged with “apple, banana, grape, fruit” and Page B may be tagged “meat, vegetables, fruit, cereals”. As such they would both show up under the fruit category or page.

This simple rule has big implications as it is an excellent new method of storing and organizing information. For users of a SB site, it means they can browse a tag that interests them and see which links are listed under that tag. However, each link may have additional tags which the user may also be interested in. For example a search for “Dirt Bikes” may show a link which is also tagged with “Quad Racing” and the user continues on to read more under the “Quad Racing” tag. He may then follow another appropriate tag and find other relevant information. This simple but overwhelmingly useful organizing system has now become widespread and is now used in most commercial Blogging systems to organize posts. It was adopted by WordPress several versions in and Blogger.com eventually caved in and used it as standard. Tagging systems can be seen in use on commercial sites like the BBC, Flickr, and some e-mail systems. Tagging systems are also useful in academic settings, especially universities, colleges and libraries where the evolution of progressive tagging organizes information in a continuous way.

Tags are extremely useful to SEO. In our example above a fruit tag was either already in existence or it was created when we added the tag. This fruit tag has its own physical page, which would be something like www.socialbookmarksite.com/tags/fruit. This page is picked up by Google as a page all about various fruits and because it has fresh and unique content being added on a regular basis, it begins to rank fairly well over a period of time. If and when your new article shows up in here, you get yet another free and valuable incoming link which is targeted towards fruit and Google sees that your page is about fruit and nudges you up another few ranks and Google begins to get a picture of what your website is about.

Front Page News

In the early days of Google, your rank depended almost entirely upon the content in your pages, how often it was updated and what kind of information was on the rest of your site. When people started to use SEO and cater for the search engines, the search engines reacted with PR. PR was designed to try and identify the worth of a page on outside factors as well as the existing inside factors and give a more accurate reading on how high a page should rank. PageRank determines how early in the search results your site comes and so a low PR page might show up in page 8 of Googles results, whereas a high PR site may show up in the first 10 results of the first page. While the exact algorithm of Googles PR has never been disclosed, webmasters have figured out basically how it functions.

The main things it looks at are on-page factors like

 The Title
 The text of the page
 The titles on the page in <h1> and <h2> tags
 Bold, italic or underlined text
 The text of links to pages of other sites
 The text of links to pages on the same site

It also looks at off-site factors, such as

 How many sites link to the page?
 What is the text of those links?
 What is the category or theme of the pages linking?
 What is the PR of the site where the linking page is based?
 What is the PR of the linking page itself?

But what does this have to do with Social Bookmarking? Well, most Bookmark sites have large user bases and are very active. They have daily, hourly, sometimes minutely updated links and content. They are popular and have many people linking to their content, not to mention the thousands upon thousands of people who use Social Bookmark icons on their sites (these are all counted as incoming links). These are exactly the kind of things that Googles PR is looking for and as such, most Social Bookmark sites are seen as valuable to Google and have high PR on their main pages. StumbleUpon.com, for example, has a PR 7 on their main page. This is very high and if you were lucky enough to write an interesting enough article or page that was placed on the front page for a short time not only would you receive a huge amount of incoming traffic but you’d increase your PR and search engine ranking as a result. This strategy can be used to devastating effect to get you many highly valuable incoming links at no cost whatsoever.

Along with the huge influx of traffic and jump in PR you are likely to receive, you can also expect a reasonable amount of exposure. If your article or page is interesting and has broader appeal, you will see a rush of incoming links from various pages and sites.

While websites, spammers and tacticians have always tried to get an edge over Google, Google has continuously modified its algorithms and techniques to stay ahead of the websites. The plain fact is that Google seems to be losing the edge and falling behind. This is what has allowed SB sites to gain the upper hand and become as popular as they are, but it may also be their downfall. We are now seeing many of the techniques and tactics used against Google on SB sites who in turn react and employ new methods for weeding out unwanted elements. This arms race is likely to continue for a while until the market becomes stale and checkmated, just as with Google. What will happen then? Only our imagination can attempt to answer that question.

Social Networks which have been around for a decade or so but were never hugely popular until MySpace came on the scene. A Social Network is simply a network of people, usually united by one website where they have a profile, share thoughts and feelings and maybe have their own blog, interfaces for adding photos, etc. There are a phenomenal amount of Social Networking sites and some of them are incredibly popular and wealthy. YouTube, for example, is a Social Network which revolves around sharing and rating videos. FaceBook started out as a more corporate Social Network but has now expanded to include anyone. WAYN.com circles around people who like to travel, but also accommodates everyone. These Social Network sites can be treated in much the same way as SB sites because like SB sites they generate both traffic and links. However, they are usually less revered by search engines, MySpace being a classic example whereby most of the blogs are seen as useless and trivial and have a tough time on Google. As such only a few Social Network systems may be useful for SEO purposes, though a large base of affiliate marketers use Social Network sites to market their products. MySpace provides some excellent facilities for bands and music groups to build a fan base and network with potential customers. These tactics have been exploited by a large cross section of the web from affiliate marketers to publishers to company officials.

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 is tricky to define, but generally it’s accepted to be an umbrella name for all the Social sites and technologies such as Social Bookmark sites, Social Networking sites, Blogging systems, wikis and any platform which consists of a base of interacting people. Many people assumed that this social movement and technology would take over the internet and as such labeled it as Web 2.0, the next generation of the web.

This concept isn’t entirely sensible because Web 2.0 technologies have been around since the early days of the web and have crept in over a period of time. However, there has been an enormous surge in the use of socialized technologies and just as Blogging systems virtually replaced all static HTML pages, Web 2.0 seems to have taken root and dominated certain areas of the internet.

Social Media

Social Media is another ambiguous title which encompasses a few things but is very closely related to Web 2.0. While Web 2.0 describes a set of Social technologies, trends, websites, and the users who make up and use those things, Social Media leans more towards describing just the websites themselves. Prime examples of Social Media are MySpace, Bebo, FaceBook, YouTube and Blogging systems like Blogger.com. Usually when someone talks about Social Media they talk about it for the purposes of building incoming links for free.

Search Engines market on being able to provide almost any kind of information. They need to cater for the broadest spectrum possible in order to stay ahead. They need to be able to provide educational material for students, entertainment sites or videos, or whatever. On the other hand Social Bookmarking sites do not need to provide information on any particular subject or topic. While the majority thrive on the most attention grabbing, interesting information, ie videos, funny pictures, etc. Many Social Bookmark sites are specialized in areas like technology, programming, news & journalism, etc and may discard anything that doesn’t relate to its particular niche.

Search Engines will search and list as much of your site as they can, which is generally every single page which is linked from somewhere. Social Bookmark sites will only add one page or article at a time and only when someone physically submits and rates it.

Social Bookmarking is simply taking the existing bookmark function used in browsers, and making it sharable with other people, or “Social”. You’re still doing exactly the same thing: storing the URL of a site, and sometimes supplying a small description.. but now you’re sharing it with a community of other people. To organize all the bookmarks, you and other users can tag or label bookmarks. This means that other people can search for that particular label or tag to find your bookmark along with other related results. Furthermore, you and other users can rate bookmarks using either a simple “Good” & “Bad” system, or a 1 to 5 gold stars system, or something similar. These fundamental rules mean that Social Bookmarking sites develop and evolve into huge repositories of links where the junk is lost and only the best survive but only ever for a short period of time. To understand why Social Bookmarking is so popular and where it came from, we have to take a look back at the history of the web.

Since the dawn of the internet people have always been trying to find something, trying to find a website to sell them tickets to a game, book a restaurant for tomorrow night, find statistical data on the African Swallow or whatever they need or are interested in. In the very early years, people would find websites by typing in the URL or web address alone, and there were no reference points and very little organization or reference points which made it difficult to find what you wanted.
Soon, directories showed up. Directories were simply repositories of web addresses, usually with a short description about the site, and usually filed under various categories. While these did their job and worked well, sometimes it was hard to target exactly what you needed and instead you’d have to troll through lists of sites to find one that matched your criteria. Some directories solved the problem by adding a search function.

This ushered in the age of the Search Engine. Yahoo!, Altavista, Lycos and others became solely dedicated to searching lists of sites and allowed a user to find any of the sites stored in their database by searching for keywords. They would reference these keywords with those stored in the tags of each web page like the , and tags. Over the years webmasters adapted to target the meta tag and move up the ranks and the importance of meta tags faded and importance was placed instead on lots of factors like the text on the page, words highlighted in bold or in title tags like <h1> and <h2>. The websites and webmasters reacted by using their keywords in these tags and saturating their pages with certain phrases. In turn Google invented PageRank which is much more accurate at telling a pages worth and value. It looks at the usual factors like the text of the page and the words, but it also looks at incoming links to the page and the rank of the sites where the link is from. In reaction webmasters have started to buy or create links en-masse and again Google falls behind in the digital arms race.

As you can see webmasters have been continually trying to find new ways to rank at the top of the Search Engines, and employ various honest or dishonest methods to do so and the Search Engines have been trying to find new ways to get a more accurate reading and get valuable and interesting pages to the front. But the effectiveness of search engines seems to be fading, they seem to be losing the edge and the sites who use the most tactics get to the front pages win while sometimes genuinely useful websites never make it.

This is where Social Bookmarking comes in. Social Bookmarking sites are simply another way of finding web pages and information on the internet. The difference being that instead of searching by keywords, or by categories, sites are organized by tags and ratings. Instead of a crawler or spider looking at incoming links and judging (often wrongly) how well the page should rank, human beings mark the sites they like and those they don’t.

To get to the first page of search engines like Google, you need to worry about your incoming links, your page title, meta tags, the text on your page, and more. Whereas with Social Bookmarking sites the only thing that matters is that people like your site, and that you have useful, unique content. This simple rule means that the good pages, articles and links rise to the top, and the useless, repetitive or uninteresting pages sink to the bottom. This concept is what has catapulted Social Bookmarking into the spotlight as the new best thing and why such a large, continually growing number of people now use them.