Link Building and Social Bookmarking – a Powerful 1-2 Punch for SEO

Link building plays a vital role in every organic SEO strategy. And as things stand today, off-page SEO tactics carry the bulk of the weight as compared to on-page optimization techniques of the past. Link building is the primary weapon used in outranking your competition in search engines.

However, not all backlinks or inbound links are created equal. Google and other major search engines no longer consider simple reciprocal links valuable. As a matter of fact, the relevance and quality can significantly affect your page rank. Hang around bad backlink neighborhoods and you could be penalized. Focusing on high-quality and relevant one-way links is the name of the game now.

Link building strategies

There are several methods for one-way link building, they are:

* Directory submissions
* Article marketing and syndication
* Forum posting
* Guest blogging
* Press releases
* Paid links (see my recommendation at the end)
* Social bookmarking

This post focuses on the powerful technique of social bookmarking for link building.

Popular social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz, Reddit, Twitter and whole bunch of others allow their registered users to add links to sites and blog posts. Such links are great for building quality one-way links and driving targeted traffic.

Obviously, you need to use this powerful 1-2 SEO punch of link building and social bookmarking wisely to get the most out it. If all you are doing is adding links to hyped up sales pages, you are not going to get much link love.

On the other hand, if you add links to newsworthy posts, they may catch the attention of other like-minded bloggers and they’ll vote your entries up. Imagine the amount of free traffic you can get if you happen to make it the first page of one of these popular social bookmarking sites.

Let me give you an example to illustrate my point. Let’s say you have a blog on health and wellness and you write a new post about how Aromatherapy as Alternative Medicine for Treating Minor Medical Problems. If you can tie that to a recent scientific study that was discussed on TV, you now have a very newsworthy link to bookmark, one that has a good chance of being bookmarked by others and going viral.

Link building game plan

Here are the basic steps involved if you are just starting out with social bookmarking for building links:

1. Drip your links slowly and naturally – don’t go wild at first by adding hundreds of links in one day. You are most likely to be viewed as a spammer and quickly banned from social bookmarking sites. Start by adding 5 to 7 per day, skip a few days and then add some more.

2. Focus on your home page – concentrate on adding links to your home page at the beginning. If you have a blog, so much the better because you probably have the 10 most recent posts excerpted on that page. Later on, you can start adding URLs to inner pages and direct posts.

3. Become part of the community – just like everything else on the Internet, you first have to give before you can take. Remember to bookmark other interesting sites you see that you don’t necessarily own yourself. Build your online credibility and visibility before people will trust you to share your links.

4. Create a good profile – here’s your chance to share a little bit about who you are as a person and your beliefs to connect with others. Do take the time to add a photo instead of using a generic avatar.

5. Start building a friends/ followers/fans list – retweet interesting tweets or bookmarking URLs posted by other people, especially if they have a following of their own..

6. Vote on stories – don’t be shy, be heard by voting on stories that you see on the first page of your favorite social bookmaking site.

Follow this simple plan for using social bookmarking and watch your link building go through the roof.

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Have you used other methods that been successful for you in building links? Share your comments and thoughts here.