Social bookmarking is a relatively new trend that allows you to store your favourite links in an online bookmarking site that you can access anywhere, as opposed to a file stored on your PC that only your browser reads. What started as a simple online way of storing favourites, soon became social with the addition of voting and commenting capabilities and it very quickly became apparent that social bookmarking was an excellent way to get backlinks for your content.

Sharing a Bookmark = Creating a Backlink

A bookmark is nothing more than a link so every bookmark saved is a new backlink for that content. IMAutomator can take your bookmark and post it on a whole host of social bookmarking sites thus creating a fresh backlink for each site posted to. What is also very useful about social bookmarks as backlinks is that on the vast majority of sites, you don't just post a URL, you also give it a title, a description and some keywords. These are stored with your link and the title is usually used as the anchor text for the backlink. So if you have been doing your SEO properly and you embed your keywords into your title, each social bookmark becomes a keyword-anchored backlink!

What to Bookmark

Most people, when they first discover the power of social bookmarking, especially when using an automated tool such as IMAutomator, tend to misuse it and immediately rush out and bookmark every single URL from their website that they can think of. This is a mistake! The 'social' part of social bookmarking means that in posting the bookmarking you are sharing that link for others to see - and comment on, and vote up or down. Posting rubbish links that offer nothing of value can attract negative comments and votes and in extreme cases can even cause our accounts to get deleted which harms the IMAutomator system.

When you post good content, the opposite happens and the link tends to attract positive votes - this causes that link to rise in the ranks of that website. Popular links often get featured on the front page of the sites which can then start to provide direct traffic in addition to the backlink. In the case of more popular social bookmarking sites, getting on the front page can actually drive a substantial amount of traffic to your site but this will only happen if you post good quality content.

What is good content? Well let's give some examples. Let's say you have a blog that provides information about dog training. If you have a bunch of blog posts about dog training then each one of those posts would be good content. As well as posts though, blogs also have additional pages such as about pages, archive and category pages, maybe a privacy policy and so on. These are NOT good content and can cause account banning etc. One thing to note about social bookmarking is that you can link to your deep content pages - this means that you can bookmark individual posts and pages, so don't limit yourself to just your home page.

Be Aware of Prohibited Topics

There are a number of topics which are not permitted to be submitted using IMAutomator. You may read our submission guidelines for a full list. Be aware that submitting prohibited topics will result in your account being temporarily frozen and possible deletion if continued breaches occur so please do read these guidelines.

How to Bookmark For SEO Benefit

IMAutomator cannot directly improve your SEO rankings or your traffic but what it can do is to save you time when using social bookmarking as part of your SEO campaign. It is really important to understand that blasting out a bunch of mindless links to random pages without thought to keywords, content, linking patterns etc will do nothing for your traffic and rankings and in extreme cases could actually hurt you! To help you avoid this problem, we have put together a module in our training pages which is dedicated exclusively to SEO so please work through that to make sure you get the most out of the social bookmarking tool!

To give you the brief overview however, please observe the following points:

• Start with keyword research - pick keywords that you can rank for, and has decent traffic
• Build quality content around those keywords
• When creating the bookmark, use those same keywords in the Title, description and tags
• Use the slower submission speeds unless for a very busy site or time-sensitive content

If you are bookmarking existing content as many of you will, then take the content you are bookmarking and do your keyword research on that - what keywords are used in this article / blog post etc? Find the best keywords that relate to the content you have already created and then base your bookmark on those keywords. If the content that you'd like to bookmark is not well optimised for specific keywords, then don't worry too much as the backlinks will still be of value but in a more general way. Keyword anchored backlinks can help you rise in the ranks for those keywords but the overal number of backlinks that come into a particular page & domain give strength as a whole so they still count.

Pitfalls to Avoid

The biggest problem is posting too many bookmarks in a short space of time. Even with a IMAutomator Light account, you are allowed up to 10 submissions per day, each of which will go out to 15 sites - you'll be getting 150 backlinks a day. If this is a new site that hardly has any backlinks and it suddenly starts getting this many every day, Google is going to flag that is unusual and will most likely discount some of all of them. We highly recommend going with the default option of one link per day - all those 150 links will still come, but they'll be spread over time.

Secondly, you also need to play nice with the social bookmark sites. Your title and description in particular should be meaningful and pertinent to the content. Don't just put the keyword and nothing else for example as this looks like obvious spam when posted on a social bookmark site. Other people see the submissions that are made and the idea is to post a bookmark that would entice people to click on it.