SES New York: Bookmark Strategies

Originally uploaded by SmallBusinessSEM.com.

Bookmark Strategies

Todd Malicoat, Stuntdubl.com
Lee Odden, Top Rank
Michael Gray, Atlas Web Service
Neil Patel, ACS (Q&A only)

A veritable Who’s Who of SEO Blogging is here (alpha order): Lisa Barone, Jim Boykin, Cameron Olthuis, Barry Schwartz, and (I think) Chris Winfield. I’m here, too, representing the Who’s That? of SEO Blogging.

Lee Odden

will do an introduction to bookmarking

Web-based bookmarks: The wisdom of crowds
– one-click saving, tagging, sharing, RSS, etc.

Social Media includes social news and social bookmarks
Social News: Digg, Netscape, Reddit
Social Bookmarks: del.icio.us, furl, Google bookmarks
– del.icio.us is most popular; significant traffic opportunity
– furl - medium traffic opportunity
– blinklist - medium traffic opportunity
– ma.gnolia - medium traffic opportunity
– Google Bookmarks - medium/low traffic opportunity, but growing; using this service will affect your personalized search results, so encourage users to bookmark your content with this service

Todd Malicoat

will focus on del.icio.us

Why use it? “For me, it’s all about the links.”
1) Bookmark aggregation: “popular” posts are scraped elsewhere; great anchor text; users post their bookmarks on their sites - get lots of links, even from .edu pages
2) Real bookmarks
3) Real traffic - top 200 Alexa site
4) Smart, savvy users — tends to be older crowd than Digg users; 60% are 25-44 years old

Tips
– coordinate the launch; need 30-50 bookmarks within 24 hours to make “popular” page
– ask friends to bookmark your submissions
– use tools: call to action at end of article, but don’t overkill (Lee said this, too); call to action at beginning of article; Tagometer offered by del.icio.us;

Michael Gray

Using bookmarking tools for research - what are people bookmarking? what do they like? what don’t they like?

Research on:
1) Digg - search with “show buried stories” to see what people don’t like
2) Netscape — have to use Yahoo to do this, i.e. [site:netscape.com keyword]
3) StumbleUpon — make friends with people who stumble sites in your niche
4) del.icio.us — use network to make friends; watch who bookmarks related material and study the tags they use

Track your company name
Track your competitors
^^ use Google Alerts, Yahoo Alerts, RSS, etc.

Q&A Session

Don’t always have the same 30 friends submit/bookmark - will look spammy and you’ll be caught.

Paid content is a barrier to this type of marketing; give it away for free, or make it free for the 1st week before putting it behind the paid wall.

Social bookmarking is not a way to get links to your home page. Deep links are good.

It’s about links more than conversion/sales. Social visitors don’t usually convert well.

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