Selected Social Bookmarking Sites For Link Building

Selected Social Bookmarking Sites
This is not an e-book about Web 2.0 or social media. We’re not going to tell you that social sites will forever change the world because we’re not yet sure ourselves if this is the case. Here’s the deal

At this time we leverage a handful of selected social bookmarking sites for their SEO and link generation benefits. So we’re not even going to “go there” on the whole Web 2.0 and social media traffic thing. This section is about using social bookmarking sites to create quality links for your Web pages and thus improve your search engine rankings. You don’t need to download any “blasting software” for sending your bookmarks to thousands of sites at once. In fact doing so is lame and inconsiderate. There are many bookmarking portals that are specific to a theme. It’s poor manners to blast links for your cell phone site to a portal dedicated to global warming, for instance. So please be courteous and refrain from link spamming.

Bookmarking sites are listed here as step four because this is a super simple method of instantly creating good back links. You can outsource mass submissions if you want, but we recommend manually adding your back links to a few quality services, whether you do so yourself or pay an employee to do it for you.

LINK BUILDING ACTION STEP:
Join the three bookmarking sites below, listed in order of relative value. Then, following the tutorial you’ll find after this yellow table, add backlinks for all of your Web pages and blog posts to each service.

FURL
ASK.com MY STUFF
BACK FLIP
Each time you add a new site, page, or blog post to the Web be sure to link to it from these services.

You are certainly free to join even more services if you want. But the list above will very quickly get your pages and blog posts indexed and provide a boost for your search engine rankings.

How To Use These Recommended Bookmarking Services

First of all, these sites are membership programs so you’ll need to quickly register an account and then validate your email address. Once this is done you can login and start adding links.

There are actually multiple uses for these services. Many of them allow you to set up a member profile, join groups, etc. But we’ll be focusing solely on their use as quality link generators.

You can either login to each program individually to manually add your links (not recommended), or you can leverage the semi-automated tools each service provides. We recommend you take advantage of the tools provided, as they will make the task of link building much faster and easier.

Each of the bookmarking services we recommend will provide you with toolbars, browser bookmark buttons, and more. These utilities install safely and seamlessly onto your computer and allow you to insert your back links into each bookmarking service with the click of a button. The following screen capture tutorial will walk you through the process of adding two of the bookmarking tools provided by FURL to your machine. The basic process is pretty much the same with all other services.

Adding The FURL Bookmarking Tools To Your Computer

The first thing you’ll do is login to your FURL account:

Once you are inside your FURL member’s area, look to the top menu bar. It’s big and orange; you can’t miss it.

Find the ‘Tools’ link as shown below:

Clicking the Tools link will drop down a menu box with options for acquiring your push-button bookmarking utilities.

Click on the Install Furl Tools option:

You will then see a page where you can add a Furl button to your browser’s bookmark function. Simply right click on the button image and choose ‘Add To Favorites’.

Your computer will ask if you’re sure you want to do this. The Furl button is safe
so go ahead and proceed.

Note: You’ll see the green arrow button on the Furl button installation page. Click on that to be taken to the Furl toolbar if you’d like; the toolbar works very much the same as the bookmarking button once it’s installed.

The button will install immediately after you accept. And from here forward any time you’d like create backlinks from the Furl site all you need to do is follow the steps below:

Using The Furl Button To Easily Generate Quality Back Links

Once you have your Furl button installed you’ll find creating your links extremely simple. Just follow the procedure below for every Web page and blog post you’d like to link to. First, open the page you want to build links to in your Web browser. In the example below I have entered http://net-10-phones.com into my address bar.

Once your target page is in your browser window, open your bookmarks display by clicking the Favorites or Bookmarks link/icon on your browser toolbar. Then find and click the Furl it button you installed in the previous section.

See screenshot on the next page for clarification.

Clicking this button will bring up a small pop window that allows you to enter the details of your backlink:

Below is an itemized list of what each form field on the Furl bookmarking form means.

URL: Obviously this is where you insert the link to the page you are bookmarking. Title: This is your keyword anchored link title. Be sure to use a good keyword phrase for this field. Topics: Select the most appropriate categories for your link. This will affect the perceived relevance of the link just as if it were added to a directory. Rating: Be sure to give yourself five stars to encourage other Furl members to check you out. ?

Mark Public: Leave this button ticked to allow your link to be shown publicly.

Mark Read: Don’t worry about this option.
Comments: Insert a blurb for other Furl members if you want.
Clipping: If you highlight a particular section of the page you are bookmarking before opening the Furl it box, this highlighted portion of Web copy will be shown in the clipping field.
Keywords: These work like keyword META tags or blog tags. Enter a list of comma separated, appropriate keywords and keyword phrases in this field.

Once the form is completely filled out, click ‘Save’ and move onto the next page you wish to link to. Your backlink is now entered into the high PR Furl system. The other two social bookmarking services we recommend function in almost the exact same way as FURL. Use the above tutorial as a reference for adding your links to them as well.

“Nofollow” Nonsense Revealed…

Many bookmarking sites claim to be nofollow programs. But as we mentioned at the beginning of this e-book this is not always relevant for the following reasons:
1. Sometimes Google ignores the nofollow command.
2. Sometimes sites are not telling the whole truth about using the nofollow
relation to prevent search engines from following backlinks.

One of many examples is the Blink List bookmarking service. This program has a great bookmarking form complete with flexible tags options and a great vote (“blink”) system. However Blink List claims to be nofollow, and this is even verified when we use the NoDoFollow extension tool.

But the truth is revealed when a backlinks check is made using the Google search engine! We did a standard backlinks search and discovered that in fact the Googlebot is following links from this allegedly nofollow site!

Here are a few good bookmarking services we found that claim to be nofollow, but are in fact allowing the search engine spiders to follow and index links posted through their system:

Blink List
Delirious
Magnolia

If these bookmarking services are really dofollow backlink opportunities, why have we not recommended them in the above section? We didn’t give them a full recommendation because of the potential inconsistency; it’s possible these services could shift into real nofollow relations in the future.

However we are saying here in this “afterthought” to the main bookmarking chapter that it may be worthwhile to use the above programs. In fact we have used all three to generate quality backlinks for a number of sites and blogs. There has also been some commentary to suggest the Delicious bookmarking service does not really enforce the nofollow rule as they claim. We have been
unable to verify this through our own research but we wanted to mention it so you can pursue the matter on your own if you like.

Busby SEO Test.

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