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December 1, 2005

The Beginners Guide to Promoting Your Site With del.icio.us

Social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us are rapidly becoming important to search engine optimization, though for a slightly different reason than most people might suspect.

Links from sites like del.icio.us aren't worth a whole lot from a search engine perspective, since they use the "noarchive,nofollow,noindex" robots meta tag at the top of the bookmarks pages.

However, these social bookmarking tools can be used to drive traffic to your site, if they're used correctly. The way to do that is to tag your pages with the keywords relevant to them. This especially can be used to increase the exposure of new blog posts.

Let's say you have a blog about ringtones. After making a blog post, post it to your delicious account and tag it with keywords like "ringtones", "cellphone", and "mobile."

A link and description will then show up on the following pages:

http://del.icio.us/tag/ringtones
http://del.icio.us/tag/cellphone
http://del.icio.us/tag/mobile

Each of those pages has its own rss feed, which is usually subscribed to by bloggers and other people interested in tracking the latest about those keywords. That means you increase the chances that those people are going to see the link to your site, a certain number are going to click through, and, if your post or article is a good one, some of them will probably link to you from their own sites..

Also, a link to your post will show up on this page (but only for two minutes):

http://del.icio.us/recent

and if enough people find your page interesting enough to tag with their own del.icio.us accounts, then it could show up on this page:

http://del.icio.us/popular/

Getting listed on the del.icio.us "popular" page can potentially send you a huge amount of traffic, but getting there is not easy, since you have to be creating something that a large number of people will find tag-worthy.

As you can see, the link-building effect of a site like del.icio.us is indirect.The links from del.icio.us confer no ranking benefit in themselves, but they can be used to send traffic to your site, and if you have something good to offer, a certain number of the people coming to your site are going to link to you.

However, the traffic boost will be non-existent if the content is mediocre, and even good content will often be ignored if it doesn't catch on with a large group of people. While a site like del.icio.us can be used to increase the exposure of your site, if you're going to be tagging your own pages, you should save it for those pages you find really exceptional. Otherwise, you're just increasing the clutter on the site, and boring pages are not likely to result in any increase in traffic or links.

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