We know that a site needs to be properly optimized to allow search engines to find it and list it in their search results.  But the next step in traffic generation is social media marketing or “social bookmarking.”  This process allows you to significantly increase the number of visitors to your site. 

Social bookmarking is a new advance in generating qualified web traffic. The word “qualified” is the key to getting customers and sales for your products.  It means visitors who are interested in what you are selling. This is exactly what social media optimization offers.

“Social media” as a category refers to the numerous communal sites on the web. They are a way for people to share information and ideas.  Forums and sites such as YouTube, Digg, Technorati, Delicious.com, and Stumbleupon are just a few examples. These sites are hugely popular and gain substantial recognition as well as traffic.

Social media sites are also a perfect vehicle for your own ideas. For example, if your site is concerned with selling on eBay—how to do it, what to sell, how to reach “power sellers” in record time and so on, you would look for appropriate social media sites that target these interests.  Posting a signature with a link to your site will drive traffic to your site as a result.

What Social Book Marking Can Bring to Search

Yahoo’s user-reviewed restaurant searches or the ranking of videos in Google search are current examples of social media’s measurable variables of reviews, ratings, comments and/or video plays being a critical part of these searches, but social media goes far beyond restaurants and videos.

Monitoring social bookmarking services like Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Ma.gnolia can help search engines in multiple ways by:

• Indexing Sites Faster: Humans bookmark sites launched by their friends or colleagues before a search engine robot can find them.
• Deeper Indexing: Many pages bookmarked are deep into sites and sometimes not as easily linked to by others, found via bad or nonexistent site navigation or linked to from external pages.
• Defining Quality: If someone takes the time to bookmark a site, it usually has some quality to it.
• Measuring Quality: Essentially, if more users bookmark a page, the more quality and relevance that site has. A site with multiple bookmarks across multiple bookmarking services by multiple users is much more of an authority than a site with only several bookmarks by the same user.
• External Meta Data: Users who bookmark sites tag them with keywords and descriptions which add an honest and unbiased definition which is created by the public and not the owner of the site.
• Co Citation: Social bookmarking sites tend to categorize sites and pages based upon the tags used by humans to describe the site; therefore search algorithms can classify these sites with their peers.

In addition, by indexing the social measurement variables such as commenting and votes at Digg, Reddit, Netscape and various niche oriented (all of those Pligg powered hubs), search engine algorithms can also benefit from social news sharing sites by:

• 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 multiple social news voting sites, the higher quality the site.
• Categorization: Like Co Citation, categorization can help define the subject of a site, therefore better helping the engine address searcher intent.
• Commenting: The number of comments can be compared to the number of votes, the higher the comment to voting ratio, the more relevant the news story or site was to the user; therefore, more relevant to the searcher.
• Relevant Sites: Techmeme and Netscape (and hopefully soon Digg) suggest relevant pages and sites to the stories which make their ‘popular’ categorical pages via intra-linking or blog index monitoring. Engines can learn from these projects to help users find alternative or relevant selections in their search results.

 Service Highlights

•    50 manual submissions by an experienced editor.

•    Guaranteed inclusion.

•    Use of top social networking sites.

•    All target sites are PR1 to PR8.

•    You get a receipt for all submissions.