Conference notes from the "Bookmarking Strategies" session at Search Engine Strategies New York '07.

Moderator:
Alex Bennert, Beyond Ink

Speakers:
Todd Malicoat, stuntdubl
Lee Odden, Online Marketing Blog
Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Service

Panelist:
Neil Patel, co-founder, Advantage Consulting Services

[L-R] Todd Malicoat (stuntdubl), Lee Odden (TopRank), Neil Patel (Advantage), Michael Gray (Atlas)

Lee Odden, Online Marketing Blog

Has an agency called TopRank...

Social bookmarking came out of the difficulties of managing bookmarks in browsers (not multi-location, etc.) But the cool part is being able to share them via the web and via RSS.

Social Media = Social News + Social Bookmarks

Social News - Digg, Netscape & Reddit
Social Bookmarks - Del.icio.us, Furl, Google Bookmarks

Del.icio.us is the biggest bookmarking site. - good traffic, and lots of good features tools and hacks.

Furl (part of LookSmart) - medium importance. Caches the page for you.

blinklist - medium importance, but good for syndication since they have syndication tools

Mag.nolia - again medium importance. Very group oriented. Has cache and thumbnails and a great API.

Google Bookmarks - medium at the moment, but expected to be high. These will affect your personal search results, which then affects the person's personalized search results (their favorite sites get bumped up in the results).

How you display the social bookmarking links on your site will affect how much people use them. If you use only icons it assumes people know what the icons mean.

Become a user first to understand what it's about. Match the links on your blog to the content of your blog (if your site doesn't have news, then don't have links to news bookmarking sites).

Todd Malicoat, stuntdubl

Why del.icio.us? Because it helps with SEO and links. The decision makers are on del.icio.us - they're smart, savvy and successful (web-wise). Digg is a younger crowd - del.icio.us is somewhat older.

"Web 2.0" scrapers are great for anchor text. Becoming popular on delicious gets you more scrapers.

They're real bookmarks -> repeat visits (real traffic).

Del.icio.us is a top 200 site (Alexa).

When you want to make the popular page there are things you have to do...

1. Coordinate the launch. You'll need 30-50 bookmarks in a 24 hour period to make "popular". Ask your friends to bookmark you.
2. Use a special call to action - highlight it - put it in a variety of places, but be careful of overkill.

Use the firefox plugin.

Use feedburner and add social bookmarks to your feed.

Michael Gray, Owner, Atlas Web Service

If you can figure out what people are bookmarking, you're more likely to do well if you write that type of content. The negative is true too...

Social bookmarking is about being social and making friends.

Watch your competition.

Do reputation management.

He likes to start with digg - check out what got buried as well as what's possible. Learn from other people's mistakes.

If you want to search Netscape you need to use site: in a search engine.

Make friends with people who like the same subjects. If the person is always submitting stories from a commercial site, then it's likely their a paid consultant.

StumbleUpon - requires a toolbar to use properly - inserts an icon in the SERPs.

In del.icio.us you can have friends and see what they're up to... Knowing what someone is thinking about before they blog about it can be really powerful.

Track your company name and your competitors.

You can submit your competitors stuff and put in non-optimal titles (if they're already getting bookmarked).

RSS is the fastest, easiest way to keep up with things.

Q&A

If the same 30 people are always voting on the same things it looks bad and will eventually work against you. They will detect it.

After the initial push, it will die if it's not any good...

Self-promotion is frowned upon - you'll lose your friends if you abuse the system.

If you're the only one submitting articles for your site that will look weird and work against you - you want a variety of users submitting articles from your site.

If you want to experiment, do it with your competitors articles.

AdLabs on MSN is one source for free demographic data on the various sites if you're trying to figure out the best social sites for your content.

Like the search engines, those who can't combat spam will die and go away...

Humor tends to work everywhere - use it.

You can also tie into what people hate - it's about what people are passionate about.

Generally, social media traffic doesn't convert very well. It's about link building, not necessarily conversions. In fact they don't even stay on the site very long. In one study they only stayed on the site for 16 seconds on average. However, it might get you a link from a source that does convert well, so it's not useless...

With Digg you sorta have to get past the haters to get to the audience you want to get to.

Evergreen content does well in the long run.

Tags: SEO/SEM, SES-NY, social bookmarking, Social Media
Categories: Link Building, Social Media, Web Site Traffic