Dec
29
Written by:
John Clark
12/29/2008 2:19 PM
So, what are these little icons on our blog and various pages of our website? Can they be useful for your business? If so how?
Source: addthis.com
In your web browser you have a "Favorites" or "Bookmarks" button that many of us use to remember websites. In order to help with that many sites have been created so that users can use them to create their own online bookmarks. These are called Social Bookmarks. The nice thing is that when you use a couple of different computers, going to your "Bookmark" site can give you all the same sites that you have saved. At the office, desktop, laptop or the library - just log on to your bookmark site and you have access to all your bookmarks.
It also enables you to share your bookmarks with others and make your website much more popular. How? Let's take digg.com for example. If you find a site you like and you have a Digg account, simply press correct button and you can "Digg it". It saves that page to your account so it's easy to come back to. In addition, Digg compiles the most popluar sites and ranks them by how many people Digg that site. From there you can get a list of what most people find worth Digging and check them out yourself.
Yes, I know, these people have way to much time on their hands. Still, here is where you can benefit. Create content that people find worth Digging (or Furling or Stumbling Upon) and that creates instant traffic and improved rankings for search because of all the extra traffic and links. Each of those Digg links counts as a link to your site. Get a few hundred and it starts to mount up. People come by and check you out. If they like it, they'll Digg you also and the roll is on.
So, to accomplish this you will need two things:
- The Social Networking buttons on your site for people to push. In life you may not want someone to 'push your buttons' but on the web you do.
- Create content on your site that is so complelling that people will Digg it. Content again is king.
To rank well with search engines and gain traffic you need to use mulitple methods and this is a simple one. With a little luck enough people will like this article so much they will Digg it or help others Stumble Upon it.