In addition to directly promoting your website, social bookmarking services can be helpful in search engine optimization (SEO) efforts as well, because they create inbound links to it. Read on to learn about some of the most effective social bookmarking services to use for SEO purposes, as well as the best techniques for improving their effectiveness.

Two important factors which determine how beneficial individual social bookmarking services are to SEO efforts include the type of link code they use, and their Google PageRank levels. Many websites, such as prchecker.info, can be used to check Google PageRanks. Some social bookmarking systems, like Digg, Newsvine, and Reddit, use regular inbound links which are helpful in SEO because search engines give credit to the websites they are linking to, thus improving their search result rankings. However, some of the other services, like StumbleUpon and del.icio.us, use a “rel=’nofollow’” tag in their links, which prevents most search engines from considering the link in search rankings, thus eliminating most of its SEO benefits. To check for this on another social bookmarking website, use the “View Source” function in Internet Explorer.

Having a link appear on any page of a social bookmarking service may help your SEO efforts, but appearing on more important pages will have a greater benefit. For example, the home page of Digg.com has a Google PageRank of eight, while its “World News” page has a PageRank of six; getting your link on the home page will improve your site’s search result rankings more, at least on Google. Keeping the link on a social bookmarking service page for a longer time will also help; this increases the chance that search engine “spiders” will find it before it disappears. Getting more users to recommend your web site/page on such services will both increase its chance of reaching the home page and keep it on higher-ranking pages for a longer period of time. Placing social bookmarking recommendation logos on your website can help achieve this, along with producing interesting, useful content which users will want to recommend.

Several social bookmarking services, such as Digg, allow users to choose the title text of links they recommend, while others (like StumbleUpon) use the website’s HTML title tag for this. Either way, the title should contain words which people search for and which are repeated in the linked website’s text. Choosing a link title like “You’ve Got To See This!” might attract attention, but is less useful in SEO efforts because it doesn’t contain words relevant to the website it is linked to.

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