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Social bookmarking has been a part of many people’s backlinking strategy from a long time and is considered one of the easiest ways of building free backlinks.
On the other hand, Social signals have only become a part of people’s backlinking strategy in recent times after social media has become a part of daily life for the majority of internet users.
Although, due to their similar names and similarities between the ways of building them both, many people who are new to blogging get confused between them. That’s why today we have brought a guide explain both in detail.
Social Signals vs. Social Bookmarking
We’ll explain the meaning and the right way of building both one by one. Let’s first see social bookmarking:
What is social bookmarking and how to do it correctly?
If you are a frequent internet user or even if you use it every now and then, you must already be familiar with the concept of bookmarks. Bookmark is basically saving any site or web page’s address for viewing it later.
Whenever you find a website or web page interesting enough or want to read it later, you can save the URL of it in your browser’s bookmark folder and open it later when you want.
However, it happens sometimes that you may accidentally delete these bookmarks while deleting the data of your browser. Or a bookmark can become useless if you have saved it on your local browser and feel the need to access it from somewhere else.
This problem is solved by websites which allow you to save your bookmarks online and then use them as you do your offline bookmarks, but from anywhere and anytime you want.
What’s beneficial for us is that these bookmarks are often public and since these are saved in a web page, a social bookmark to your site also acts as a backlink and can be used for SEO purpose.
There are basically two ways to build social bookmarking backlinks. The first is naturally or by adding a button on your site similar to social sharing buttons such as facebook or twitter which allows people to bookmark a specific page or post of your site.
Then you can encourage them to bookmark your post on those sites and you get a backlink for free. Since this is a natural action, the number of such links does not affect your site in a negative way.
The other possibility is that you build those links by yourself using your own accounts. This, if done to the right extent, can help you in indexing your sites faster and play a role in your backlinking strategy as well.
Although even when there are hundreds of social bookmarking sites who offer do follow links, social bookmarking links should not be more than 10% of your total backlinks.
Another thing to remember will be to add a proper description and tags whenever you use bookmarking for your own site as it will give you an edge over thousands of other links present on the site which lack these things.
Top Do Follow Social Bookmarking sites
As we said, social bookmarking sites can be a part of your backlinking strategy but you shouldn’t be completely dependent on them and use them only to give a variation to your backlinking profile.
Here is the list of top ten do social bookmarking sites which should be enough for this purpose:
Do follow social Bookmarking sites
Websites PR
Pinterest 9
Reddit 8
Delicious 8
Stumble Upon 8
Tumblr 8
Slash Dot 8
Fark 7
Scoop it 7
Diigo 7
Bibsonomy 7
Now coming to the second aspect of this post, social signals are something which has only emerged as an important part of any SEO campaign in recent times.
Social Signals are basically the appreciation you receive when you share any of your page or posts on any of the famous social media sites as in Facebook, Google Plus, or Twitter.
For example, whenever you post a link to your post on social media, people can like it, comment on it, or if they find it interesting enough they might also share it.
Google’s crawlers try to keep track of every link shared on these sites and each one of the above-mentioned actions is considered a positive signal telling that this web page is really worth reading or people are genuinely liking it.
Google has made social signals a part of their ranking algorithm because its end goal is to rank the content which will be the most useful for users and social signals are one way to determine it.
Although while we know social signals are now an important part of Google’s ranking algorithm, nothing much is known about how it works and nobody can exactly describe how Google usage social signals to advance or degrade your rankings.
How to get social signals?
Since Google now considers social signals a positive sign, you should also start using it as a part of your backlinking strategy if you want to be updated with SEO and don’t want to be left behind.
Thankfully, social signals are not yet that big a deal and gaining them is pretty easy if you know how to. First of all, you should be present at all three of the big social sites i.e. Facebook, Google Plus, and Twitter.
Facebook is undoubtedly world’s largest social network so it’s defiantly considered when it comes to social signals. On the other hand, Google Plus is owned by Google itself and they have made a deal with Twitter to share data, which means these two are essential as well.
Normally, if you are not looking to rank a specific page, being present on these social sites and sharing your posts regularly are more than enough. Another thing you can do is add convenient sharing options on your blog which allow people to share your post on these sites easily.
If there are posts which are marquee for your blog, you can also try social locking plugins which allow you to lock a part of the content until a person takes an action such as liking a post on facebook or sharing that post.
For an example, if you are writing about comment backlinks, you can create a list of blogs which may be useful for the reader and then hide the list behind a social content locker.
If you are looking to rank a specific page in real time or doing event blogging then you’ll need a good amount of social signals in less time. In such conditions, you can try using a service which offers social signals.
Such services can be found on SEO marketplaces, such as Fiverr or SEO Clerks and they don’t cost more than $5-10 which is not a very large amount if you are looking to rank an event blog which can earn you hundreds of dollars in less time.
Wrap up
This was our guide in which we have tried to explain both social signals and social bookmarking in easy words. If you still have any questions left, do let us know in the comment box.