SEO benefits from social sites

These days the online ’social’ definition is primarily defined by sites and services that provide many of the social functions on simple interfaces where you just fill out a profile form and then you are ready to start contributing without having knowledge of HTML. In the past if you had several bookmarks that you thought were interesting and you would like share them with others, you could send an email or instant message to a friend or post the links on your web page. Today people are turning to social bookmark services like Digg, Delicious, Reddit and StumbleUpon. Create a profile and start reviewing links that meet your interests, submit new links that others might like which are added to your profile. These services will allow you to give a short description of the page or other item that you are bookmarking and let the community for review.

Unlikely to normal bookmark, services like Deliciousand Technorati, let users ‘tag’ keywords to links as well. This social tagging services allow a tagged link to be made searchable for specific words and word combinations, available through directory like lists or ‘tag clouds’. Searches can be set as RSS feeds and sent to your RSS reader be used to publish searches and feeds.

Another social service is called social search, in which the process can help to winnow down the wheat from the chaff with results are considered ‘more relevant’ than a search engine’s algorithm because the results are hand picked. Some services like Eurekster and Rollyo for example can assist you in creating a personalized/shareable search engines based on your own set of criteria. The subjectivity that ordinary search engines lack is one of the factors that appear to keep these services popular with their users.

On the SEO and marketing side, could this tagging, bookmark, and search service be of use in promoting your website? The answer is the fact that a link back to your site from these services can gain you some small or large amount of traffic. If some one find your bookmark or tag from one of those sites and points back to one of your pages, this surely pass benefit to you. You may find a way to gain more benefits if you take part in some of those social networks in a meaningful way, even if you are not taking part for traditional rankings, link gathering, or other reasons.