followed by
Social bookmarking sites like delicious.com are rapidly becoming
important to search engine optimization, though for a slightly different
reason than most people might suspect.
Links from sites like delicious.com aren't worth a whole lot from a
search engine perspective, since they use the
"noarchive,nofollow,noindex" robots meta tag at the top of the bookmarks
pages.
However, these social bookmarking tools can be used to drive traffic
to your site, if they're used correctly. The way to do that is to tag
your pages with the keywords relevant to them. This especially can be
used to increase the exposure of new blog posts.
Let's say you have a blog about ringtones. After making a blog post,
post it to your delicious account and tag it with keywords like
"ringtones", "cellphone", and "mobile."
A link and description will then show up on the following pages:
http://delicious.com/tag/ringtones
http://delicious.com/tag/cellphone
http://delicious.com/tag/mobile
Each of those pages has its own rss feed, which is usually subscribed
to by bloggers and other people interested in tracking the latest about
those keywords. That means you increase the chances that those people
are going to see the link to your site, a certain number are going to
click through, and, if your post or article is a good one, some of them
will probably link to you from their own sites..
Also, a link to your post will show up on this page (but only for two minutes):
http://delicious.com/recent
and if enough people find your page interesting enough to tag with
their own delicious.com accounts, then it could show up on this page:
http://delicious.com/popular/
Getting listed on the delicious.com "popular" page can potentially
send you a huge amount of traffic, but getting there is not easy, since
you have to be creating something that a large number of people will
find tag-worthy.
As you can see, the link-building effect of a site like delicious.com
is indirect.The links from delicious.com confer no ranking benefit in
themselves, but they can be used to send traffic to your site, and if
you have something good to offer, a certain number of the people coming
to your site are going to link to you.
However, the traffic boost will be non-existent if the content is
mediocre, and even good content will often be ignored if it doesn't
catch on with a large group of people. While a site like delicious.com
can be used to increase the exposure of your site, if you're going to be
tagging your own pages, you should save it for those pages you find
really exceptional. Otherwise, you're just increasing the clutter on the
site, and boring pages are not likely to result in any increase in
traffic or links.
