10 Golden Rules of Social Bookmarking

By David Leonhardt

If you have a website, you should be social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is the process of saving a webpage in a place where other people can see it (that’s the “social” part) and in many cases others vote on your submissions.

Why you should do this for your website is obvious. The more opportunities to share your web pages with others, the more visitors you will have. The more places you post links to your content, the better your website will rank in the search engines. The benefits are strongest when your material is voted up to the home page; many more people see the material and on many social bookmarking websites your link becomes DoFollow only once the membership have voted it “popular.”

How you should do social bookmarking is quite another thing, and I see people being burned in the process every day. People who don’t take the time to understand what social bookmarking is all about will at best have their submissions removed and at worst have their account and even their website banned. Here are the ten golden rules. With these in hand, you are unlikely to be burned and, with a little effort, you stand a great chance of reaping some substantial rewards.

1. GIVE. This is very simple. Just as in every situation in life, you have to give first before people will want to give to you. If you want others to help you promote your submissions, take time to support theirs. Vote for theirs. Comment on theirs. Favourite and share theirs. If you have not already figured out that this is the number one rule in networking, in personal relationships, in community involvement, in office politics, in…in…everything social (including social bookmarking), please retreat from the human race for a while until you figure it out.

2. LEARN THE TERRITORY. There is no list of golden rules that applies to every social bookmarking website. Each one is its own community and just as any two neighbourhoods are different, every two congregations are different and every two workplaces are different, so too are every two social bookmarking communities. For instance, if you submit your own material on Digg or Reddit, expect the community to thump you, to be voted down as a dirty rotten spammer. But you are only trying to promote your website? Sorry, that’s not what the site is for and the community does not want to be marketed to. You will have to find other ways than submitting your own pages. Tipd and MMO Social Network encourage you to submit your own material, and so the community is built of many self-promoters. Go figure.

3. FOLLOW THE RULES. In addition to the unwritten rules – what the community will accept – there are some basic rules that distinguish various social bookmarking websites. Some are topical. Zoomit accepts only Canadian pages. Tipd accepts only financial pages. MMO Social Network accepts only online money-making pages, whereas Sphinn accepts only online marketing pages (careful…there is a lot of overlap between these two, but not completely). Other rules are process-specific.  TipBo accepts only tips and advice; don’t try submitting news or funny videos. Newsvine accepts only news stories; don’t try submitting tips or amusing photos. At Plime you risk losing your account just by submitting and content you have a self-interest in. Break these rules, and you are not only a dirty rotten spammer, but a dirty rotten former member.

4. SUBMIT QUALITY. Don’t submit everything you see or everything you write. Most people will grow tired of you and the fluff you submit and gloss right over your submissions. Pick the best to submit.

5.NO HOME PAGES. Don’t submit your home page. It’s like the cover of a magazine; you wouldn’t tell a friend to read the really cool magazine cover, but rather a really interesting magazine article. There are some social bookmarking websites where anything goes – so it pays to take the time to know the territory and the rules – but at most social bookmarking websites, a home page is not considered content.

6. SUBMIT FOR FRIENDS. This is a great way even to make friends – submit the content of other users. I find myself doing this at Tipd, reading a blog post of another Tipd member, liking it, and submitting it. It’s a great way to earn brownie points from others who will be happy to help promote your submissions, too.

7. BE LOYAL. One way to establish a strong network of friends who will vote for your submissions and even submit your material is to make sure to constantly watch for their submissions and vote for them/comment on them. This does NOT mean you have to vote for everything they submit, even if you disagree with it, but if you disagree with much of what they submit, perhaps they are not the right friends for you.

8. BE ACTIVE. The more active you are, the more you’ll be seen. The more you are seen, the more people will check out your submissions and the more votes you will get. Vote, but also take some time to comment.

9. COMMENT. Commenting make you stand out. Not everybody pays attention to who votes for what, but they do pay attention to comments you make. You don’t have to comment on every submission you vote for. I tend to comment when a) a thought occurs to me and I feel like speaking my mind, b) the submitter is someone whose attention I would like to capture or c) when I realize I have been less active of late. If the submission is the submitter’s own blog, leave a comment there, too. They will appreciate it. It’s OK to leave a dissenting opinion, just make sure to always be respectful and polite. Toilet mouths might attract attention, but not the kind you want.

10. CUSTOM AVATAR. Avatars are those little pictures of you or of some image that is the visual representation of your account. And the obvious golden rule that so many people overlook. A “default avatar” says “spammer” at worst, or simply fails to attract interest at best. When I scan submissions on a site, I look for topics of interest in the heading of each submission and I also watch for friends in the avatars. If you don’t have a custom avatar, chances are I won’t even see you.

Follow these rules and you have a good chance you’ll get some of you material to become “popular” at some of the better social bookmarking websites.

Author Information

David Leonhardt is a professional SEO consultant in Canada who provides a free social bookmarketing tool for bloggers and webmasters.

SEO Newbie Or Not: Sphinn Makes For An Excellent Online Tutorial

Sphinn, the Digg-like internet marketing news and discussion forum, is one site that everyone even remotely interested in online marketing should acquaint themselves with. You don’t need to be an SEO expert to benefit from Sphinn, in fact I have found the site to be full of great articles that can help anyone who wants to maximize their impact online — sort of like an online tutorial where you can glean vital information from many of the articles featured.

Sphinn, Search Engine People, Danny Sullivan, and Third Door Media

For those of you who aren’t familiar with how Sphinn came about, there are two names you’ll want to remember: Danny Sullivan, who is the content manager for Third Door Media, and Search Engine Land, which is probably the most well known of the Third Door Media brands. The company registered Sphinn.com in April 2007 and launched it soon thereafter.  Almost overnight, Sphinn has become the site where nearly all of the movers and shakers in the SEO/SEM world congregate — which is the purpose of Sphinn fulfilled.

Unlike Digg, Sphinn has a much more community feel to it, a level of professionalism not apparent on Digg. Certainly, there are those who post articles simply to benefit themselves, but then we’re talking about marketing and that shouldn’t be a surprise, nor is that wrong.

A Level Of Professionalism Not Found On Digg

What really separates Sphinn from the pack is that the participants are careful to only select (Sphinn It!) articles that meet their approval. Though there aren’t official gatekeepers to Sphinn, you aren’t likely to find 20 people who would be willing to click on your poorly written article for no reason — the all-important threshold to push your article into “hot” territory and linked under Sphinn’s “Hot Topic” tab (Hot Topic is the default home page for Sphinn too).

How To Use Sphinn As Your SEO Tutorial

Now for the main reason for this article: Sphinn can teach you many things about online marketing thanks to the high quality of contributions made to the site. Specifically, if you want to learn more about how three major search engines work — Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft — and how to maximize search, search marketing, social media, and online marketing, then Sphinn has that information neatly categorized for you.

Of course, given Sphinn’s democratic nature it is still possible to read an article that isn’t entirely accurate or contains some information that is absolutely incorrect. Thanks to a commenting system provided with each article excerpt, you can read what others have to say about the article and usually find those challenges prominently listed. One way to avoid uncertainty about content quality is to restrict your research to the site’s “Greatest Hits” tabs to find those articles which have received the most approvals. Of course, there are a handful of articles (including the all time most “sphunn” article) that are just for the fun of it, but the instructional (tutorial) articles seem to rise to the top as well.

Among the top reads on Sphinn are:

Sphinn – The Social News Site Every Search Marketer Should Be Using: Written by Seomoz CEO and cofounder, Rand Fishkin, the article lists ten reasons why you should use Sphinn, especially if you are an internet marketer.

How to SEO Your Site in Less Than 60 Minutes — Matt McGee wrote this article, but Tamar Weinberg “sphinned” it. No matter, both people are reliable and trusted authorities in the SEO community. This article makes for a good primer on how to make your site SEO-friendly, offering tips any webmaster should follow.

Yes, Virginia, Google Will Hurt Your Site For Selling Links — Danny Sullivan himself was one of the first to spot the crackdown Google made when it began punishing link sellers in 2007. Lest you be tempted to take up this practice in 2008, you may want to read what Sullivan has to say about it. The penalties Google is dispensing are still far reaching, including complete loss of PageRank.

The Internet Marketing List: 59 Things You Should Be Doing But Probably Aren’t — It is easy to overlook the little things, especially when it comes to promoting your site. We often think of that wonderful backlink we got when our article was mentioned by an internet guru like Jeff Quipp or from Marty Weintraub, excellent sources in their own right, but not having an XML Sitemap in place, skipping press releases, and not taking advantage of MySpace and Facebook, are some of the smaller tasks which when added together can have an even greater (and adverse) impact on your site.

No, Advanced SEO Does Not Mean Spamming — Again, Danny Sullivan weighs in on an important issue — advanced SEO. Sullivan discusses the highlights from this year’s SMX Advanced conference and comes to the conclusion that there is a lot of misinformation about which advanced SEO techniques are legitimate while covering those Blackhat methods that can land the site owner in trouble.

Link Building Secrets Revealed — Dazzlin’ Donna found Stoney G. DeGeyter’s article about link building and sphinned it for all of the SEO world to read. What Stoney did was to interview some of the top minds in the SEO world asking them to share one of their top link building secrets. Contributors included Hamlet Batista, Peter da Vanzo, Jim Boykin, Deborah Mastaler, and Bob Gladstein. 11 highly respected people sharing valuable tips you’ll want to study!

Regular Sphinn Visits, Recommended

To get the most out of Sphinn, I recommend the following:

Visit the site on a regular basis. Even if you don’t have anything relevant to contribute article wise, you’ll want to get a feel for how the community operates.

Read, review, and bookmark. Sometimes the information on Sphinn can get overwhelming. Other times it seems that everyone is talking about the same topic. While discussing link building practices can be beneficial, I like to look for something original and I don’t always depend on the most notable names to provide that information for me. If you like an article, make sure you Sphinn It! — you have to register in order to do that. Lastly, bookmark your favorite reads and why not reward the author by stumbling or digging the page too?

Snag a Feed — If you don’t have time to visit Sphinn regularly, why not add one or more feeds to your feed reader? I subscribe to their “Hot Topics” and “New Topics” feeds and there is also a comment feed you can choose. Additional feeds are in the works including a nifty All In One Super Feedmaker which might be worth using when it becomes available.

That’s it! My primer on Sphinn and why you should use it. Spend a few hours a week gleaning information from the articles submitted and you’ll be the wiser for it. I’ve cross paths with many wonderful folks on Sphinn, professionals in every sense of the word, people who willingly impart their knowledge and can point you in the right direction.