Social bookmarking sites have experienced tremendous growth and popularity in the last year. Wikipedia defines these sites as "an increasingly popular way to locate, classify, rank, and share Internet resources through the practice of tagging and inferences drawn from grouping and analysis of tags." Social bookmarks are one of the "Web 2.0" components you hear so much about. SEO experts all agree that these sites are an excellent source of organic traffic and exposure.

Standard directory submission has the primary goal of increasing Google Page Rank, backinks, SERPs. Social bookmarking on the other hand, has the primary goals of increasing traffic, site exposure, and reaching new markets. The response is usually very fast as well. The traffic bump you can see to your site can be within a matter of minutes in some cases. Generally when submitting your link on an SB site, you will be listed on the front page for a short time, generating the initial traffic boost. The interesting thing that can happen with social bookmarking, besides the initial traffic increase, is that your link can get picked up by others and published in more places. Very commonly people will post your link in blogs, forums, and other bookmarking sites which creates a viral effect. This is sometimes referred to as the "pop". It won't happen every time, but the more you submit your URL to these sites, the better chance your site will see the "pop". In our testing with social bookmarking we have been picked up by popular blogs, posted in a popular online magazine, and even national newspaper site, all which lead to huge traffic and exposure for the test site. Although you can't predict when this might happen, editors of these types of sites commonly troll these bookmarking sites for interesting links. A further SEO benefit of social bookmarking sites is that they are a good way to have your website indexed quickly by the major search engines. Yahoo has been known to index sites like technorati.com every 20 minutes.

We recently tested the submission service on an 6 month old site. This site had received no promotion whatsoever in months, and was receiving a 7 day average of 387 Unique Visits per day. We then submitted it using our 40 site package. The 24 hour period after submitting, the traffic increased to 542 UVs, or an increase of 40.1%. This bump is generally short lived, unless of course the link gets picked up by other sources as mentioned before. In that case it can lead to more constant traffic growth.

The hard part with this type of submission is that not only do you have to find these SB sites, but set up an account, confirm that account, submit your site details including URL, keywords or tags, title, description and usually a rating. This can be even more time consuming that directory submission. Fortunately we have established accounts at all the SB sites and developed a system during our testing that streamlines the process. It is still a manual submission process, with our team inputting your details in each site correctly.

A big difference in submitting to social bookmark sites versus directories is that it's best to resubmit your site at various time intervals. While most regular directories keep a link permanently, links on social bookmark sites become archived where very few people will see them after time. So it's good to re-submit your links to keep them in front of viewers. The more time they are in view, the better chance you have of getting that "pop".

As with our directory submission service, you will receive an Excel spreadsheet that provides all the details of your submission campaign as soon as we finish. We also take a screenshot of every submission page for verification purposes. A download link to your screenshots is provided at the top of every submission report.