SEO (search engine optimization) is the big talk of Internet marketers, the art of getting organic, free, traffic, which converts to sales and you have no marketing overhead costs. I was on an SEO webinar last week on which the presenter talked about social bookmarking tools as part of an SEO strategy. That it is important to not only bookmark your homepage, pages and posts but even article sites that have published your article or content sites that you have posted to.
When I do start to get the confirmation emails that my article has been accepted I should also bookmark all those article URLs. So you can literally get hundreds of article sites posting your content and the best practice is to bookmark every article URL. That is a lot of work if you have ever tried to do all the social bookmarking manually.
Of course there are some free social bookmarking services on the Internet that allow you to post your URL to social bookmark sites. The best service out there will post to about 79 sites for you, almost automatically and for FREE. Of course you do need to set up each individual account, which can take hours. If you want to create more than one account per website it will involve a large amount of time.
If you are good with your SEO then you are also creating pages on Wikis and other content sites. Those of course need to be bookmarked as well. Pretty soon it becomes quite evident that if you can automate any part of this process it will save you hours of time that you could be writing content or something you enjoy more than the repetitious work of account creation and URL submissions. To tell you the truth, this is not the most enjoyable part of SEO for me.
The good news is that there are programs that will automate your bookmarking for you. I have recently been looking for the right program to purchase. Currently I use the free online versions but with all of those links to bookmark I will install a program, set it up and let my PC sit and work while I create on the Mac.
Choosing the right software is real important and so I will list the features that you need to look for in a bookmarking program.
Cost – Some of the posts I read in forums were people complaining about the cost of the better programs but they are obviously not social bookmarking they way they should be. If they were they would realize the thousands of dollars saved in time by automating the bookmarking process.
Generate Automatic User Accounts – You may know this but when I created all the accounts on Ping dot fm it took me hours and you may know how much time is involved. There are programs that will automatically create the accounts for you. You may need to check email to confirm the account creations but you don’t have to navigate from site to site.
Random Usernames on Accounts – In conjunction with the feature above that saves time there are programs that will also generate random user names so it appears more real.
Social Bookmark Scheduler – You want the creation of bookmarks to look natural and human including the timing of the bookmark creation. My research concluded that there is only one program that allows you to schedule your social bookmarking. That way it appears natural.
Numerous accounts at each Social Bookmarking Website – The program you want will allow you to manage a number of accounts at each bookmarking site. That way you can have more than one link per social bookmarking site to the same article page.
Add social bookmarking sites – Most programs will load only the main social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites number well over a hundred and new sites pop up regularly. A good program will allow you to add additional social bookmarking sites. You want to have your links on as many sites as you can, remembering that links, whether they are follow or nofollow, they all can bring traffic to your site.
Social Bookmark Automatically – Of course you are buying this software so that more of your tasks are automated so besides automatic account creation you want to have the program post your webpage bookmarks automatically as well.
Spin the Title, Description and Tags – You want to make sure the program will not only post these three elements to your social bookmark but it will also spin the information so it is more natural.
Automatic Email Verification – When you submit your social bookmarks some of the sites will send you a confirmation email and there are some programs that will check the email account and activate the link automatically. The number of hours that you will save will be unreal when you use the automation.
Domain Crawler – If you have been blogging for a long time you may be thinking that to bookmark all those pages and posts is an unreal amount of work? There are programs that will send a bot to crawl your website and list the pages. You can then load these into the program and set up the Title, Description and Tags, schedule the bookmarking and go eat a pizza.
RSS Crawler – Some programs will even crawl RSS Feeds so you can load those into the program and bookmark the RSS feeds as well.
Automatic Pinging – Some programs offer a pinging service. Enter your websites and use the program to ping them. Be cautious with over pinging since there are WordPress plugins for pinging and other services. If it appears you are pinging excessively it could appear as spamming.
Project Creation and Management – Did you ever use a program that would not allow you to backup all your work? Make sure your software saves projects so you can go back to it and even export it so you can keep it safe.
Randomization Settings – To ensure that all your social bookmarking accounts are not identical (example: having the same number of outgoing links and tags), you can randomize it by specifying how many percent of your sites and tags are used for bookmarking.
Human Simulation and Anti-Bot – There is only one program that I found in my research that offers this human simulation with submission throttling and even slows down to imitate human submission. You have heard it over and over that it is best to make things look natural. The game is not to “get it done” but to “do it right”.
MultiThreading – This is consistent with most software meaning they are able to perform a multitude of tasks at the same time.
Proxy Servers – If you want to use proxy servers make sure the software you buy is programmed for this.
Captcha – There is software that will integrate third-party services that will decaptcher captcha pages and does it automatically.
To conclude, you should see that choosing the right social bookmarking tools with regards to price alone would be a great mistake. I have reviewed a number of the social bookmarking tools in my usual Excel spreadsheet way and I made my decision and am so happy I did and have already saved hours and hours of time. I was so excited I wanted to share this good news with other people that are in the process of making a decision.
Wishing you success in your social bookmarking. Remember, “Don’t save a d