4.05 – Submitting to Social Bookmarking Services

Submitting to Bookmarking Services

Consider submitting URLs to bookmarking services from a personal, rather than business, address or have friends or employees use their personal email addresses as the submission source. Use neutral, non-promotional language in any comment or review. Figure 4-4 shows how to submit a site to FolkD, a popular social-bookmarking service. Submitting to social-bookmarking services is usually very simple: Create an account and submit a URL with a brief description.

— Social bookmarking example —

Try to use appropriate search terms in category names, tags, text, or titles when you submit your site. Select terms that searchers are particularly likely to use. Generally, you can find those terms in traffic statistics for your website or in tag clouds (a graphic display of search terms that appear in an article, with the most-frequently used terms appearing in a large font) from the target service. Enter your site in as many categories as possible.

If you have separate domain names or subdomains for your blog or community site, submit a few of them as bookmarks, along with your primary website, as long as the number is reasonable (say, less than six). You can also post social bookmarks to where links are permitted on Facebook, LinkedIn, or other social-networking pages to further enhance your visibility. Just don’t personally submit too many of your own pages to one bookmarking site lest you become marked as a spammer.

Be discreet. Don’t spam social-bookmarking or news services with multiple frequent submissions. Although you can organise a few submissions from others to get the ball rolling, don’t set up multiple accounts per user on a social news service to vote for yourself or use automated submitters, which not only might have malware but also might be prohibited. Like regular search engines, these social services act aggressively to detect and blacklist spammers. Read the Terms of Use on every site if you have questions.