You don’t have to be addicted to Facebook or Twitter to understand the power and influence of social media networks.  A recent CityGrid Media/Harris Interactive telephone survey of more than 1,000 adults revealed that as of March 2011, 63.7 percent of all U.S. Internet users are using social networks regularly.

Why is social media so powerful?

One of the biggest reasons social media is so influential is because it utilizes one of the most powerful marketing tools   user-generated content.  In the marketing world, user-generated content is really just a fancy term for word-of-mouth advertising.   We’ve all seen our friends recommend a restaurant or a movie on Facebook and immediately made a mental note to check it out for ourselves, but this is rarely our response after seeing a banner ad on a favorite news site.  Without a doubt, the opinions of our peers can have a powerful influence on our behavior.

Social bookmarking works in much the same way as social networking, in that it adds immediate credibility to a website.  When you, as a social media user, take a page from your site and bookmark it across various sites on the Internet, it is likely to be seen and read by more people.  When these users like your content, or it gets voted up, re-tweeted or shared on social media, the search engines start to see your site as more important and relevant.

Social Bookmarking sites can make you into a rock star

Even if your site is relatively unknown, it can achieve rock star status through social bookmarking on sites like Reddit, Digg and StumbleUpon. Not only do these social news sites attract millions of visitors who are looking for the hottest news and entertainment stories, they also provide a way for readers to vote on your content based on how much they like what it has to say.

As more people vote for your pages, they are seen by more people, which generate even more votes.  It doesn’t take long before your page popularity generates a tremendous amount of traffic to your site and increases your rankings on Google, Bing and Yahoo.

If social bookmarking sounds like a strategy you would like to consider, the Yoobly team stands ready to implement a powerful and effective social bookmarking program.

Harnessing the Influence of Social Bookmarking 

At Yoobly, we know how to harness the power and influence of the most popular social bookmarking sites and use it to your advantage.  Instead of looking at a social bookmarking the way a user would,   as a place to store and manage their favorite web pages   we look at these sites from a marketing perspective.  Yoobly does a lot more than just post your web pages to these sites; we make sure they are indexed with your key search terms and shared in a way that generates interest.

What are the SEO advantages of social bookmarking?

When you let Yoobly add a social bookmarking campaign to your SEO program, your site will climb up in the rankings on major search engines.  Here are just a few of the ways social bookmarking can play a role in your online success:

1)      You will get valuable back links from highly ranked social bookmarking sites, which will help your site get higher rankings from search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo;

2)      Since most social bookmarking websites allow tags to be added to your bookmarks, we will target your most relevant and targeted keywords whenever we bookmark your web pages;

3)      If you want to draw attention to a new product or a new section of your web site, a social bookmarking campaign can drive traffic to it quickly.

With social bookmarking, content is king

The search engine spiders love to crawl the large social bookmarking sites, such as StumbleUpon, Digg, Technorati and Reddit.  The more bookmarks you have on these directories, the more likely you are to get valuable back links to your website and an influx of new visitors from various sources.  When Yoobly handles your social bookmarking campaigns, we will also be able to track the incoming links and traffic that it generates, keeping in mind that the more interesting or controversial your content is the more likely it is to be bookmarked.

No matter which social bookmarking strategy you choose to pursue, it is possible to generate a massive number of links   plus new traffic to your website   in relatively short period of time.  Both of these are incredibly valuable to online businesses.  Regardless of the business you’re in, a big part of your success online is tied to the popularity of your web pages.   Yoobly is ready to help you take advantage of the traffic on social bookmarking sites and the powerful SEO results it can bring.