SEO and Relevance a Bookmarking Study

Half the battle of a good SEO plan is getting the plan to do what you want it to do.  Let’s say you have a new site and you are doing the “basics” of getting it going.  The basics include good tags, good titles, some blog postings, directory listings, and a social campaign of some sort. (Quite a bit different than the typical start campaign 2 years ago)  All these are a good start to getting some links and building some buzz which seems so important these days.  I also like to ad article marketing into the list, but I much prefer to keep that on blog systems rather than through traditional article sites.  The problem with posting to article sites is that you put a lot of work into an article with good content and you post it, and then you “hope” it gets picked up by a decent site that delivers valuable content to their readers.  What ends up happening is the article gets picked up by some crappy scraper site that just grabs free content from anywhere to fill its pages.  What you don’t get is relevancy.  This can happen somewhat with directory listings as well.  They are effective, but I have found that my site never really fits into a category very well so I lose out on a “relevance opportunity”

Social bookmarking sites are mostly the same as well.  Once in a while you find one like Digg that specializes in something. (Technology and some geeky stuff) and that tends to draw a crowd interested in a particular topic.  This is good because with a narrower niche like focus, chances are all the content will be relevant to each other.  Good relevance tends to cause Google to rank it as authoritative, which is good for you.  So what is the bottom line?  If you can pick and choose a bookmarking site by theme, the greater chance you will have some link juice coming from that site AND you will have the opportunity to be more socially interactive with your peers and users.  This really is the name of the game nowadays since social interaction is becoming more and more important.

In the future you very well may see more Digg-like sites appear that cater to specific areas of interest.  This works well if you are trying to bookmark your sites content with the idea of getting more inbound links to it.  All linking is more or less good if you follow white hat principles and a good conscience.  But why not increase your chances by finding directories and bookmarking sites that cater right to your sites core topic.

One of the newest to fall into this category is a site called Buzz Saw Mill.  As you might have guessed they are focused on the home improvement type of sites such as landscaping, construction, power tools, metalworking, woodworking and all sorts of hobbies.  The categories are much more detailed and site owners are sure to get more link relevance if they bookmark inside the correct category and sub category. 

Other good ideas to gather relevance in your niche is to search out social sites that have been created in the “Ning” network.  Ning allows you to build a site that can capitalize on that very specific idea of being about a certain topic.  A good example of this would be a site called Lumberjocks.  This site is built on the Ning platform and has over 14,000 registered users.  That may not sound like a lot at first but if you look at it carefully you will notice this is a tight community that is only made up of woodworkers.  And as you probably guessed, Google loves it, indexing it constantly.  Anyone “connecting their social site activity from a Ning site to say a twitter feed, would get some very valuable and relevant activity.  These always lead to the one thing we are all looking for, income.