Sharing knowledge, rating knowledge, making knowledge available yourself – this is the social Internet. Your online shop’s offering is also knowledge which needs to get into the heads of your customers. In our last article on social media optimisation, we already called your attention to corporate weblogs. In this article, we’ll examine social bookmarks.
Social Bookmarking? Never Heard of It.
Social bookmarks are bookmarks that are placed for websites with social bookmark services and which can be publicly administered. Equipped with keywords (tags), social bookmarks can easily be found by other users of the bookmark services. The more frequently a bookmark is placed for a site, the more popular it is and the further up it consequently appears in the search results of the services for certain keywords.
Through this social component, social bookmarks are a good alternative to the automated ranking algorithms from Google.
But social bookmarks can also easily be used privately for managing your own favourites. You simply mark them as ‘private’ in this case.
Some of the well-known and important bookmark services are Del.icio.us, Digg, StumbleUpon and Technorati (for blogs).
How Does This Benefit My Shop or My Website?
Your online shop or website can also benefit from social bookmarking. Just imagine the users of your site being so thrilled with your offering that every single one of them places a social bookmark at Mister Wong or Del.icio.us, thus making more and more people aware of it. The result would be an increase in the link and domain popularity of your online shop or website, which in turn would make Google happy and which would be rewarded with higher page ranking or a more prominent position in the search results. Wouldn’t that be swell?
How Does My Shop or My Website Get Bookmarked?
For one thing, you yourself should place bookmarks for your site with the named services and your employees, friends and family should do the same.
For another, the visitors of your shop or website need to be motivated to want to bookmark it. Integrate the social bookmarking services into your site, preferably by using a small clickable icon. Visit socialmarker.com and copy the “All-in-one Bookmarking Button code” under “Code for blogs and websites”.
Copy the code that you get on your website to autmaticly enable the social bookmarks of your choice.
