Why and How You Should Get Links from Popular Social Sites

Social Bookmarking Orientation

If you aren't yet familiar with social bookmarking, view the video to the right for a quick overview. Getting links from bookmarking sites like Digg, Del.ious.us, Reddit and other social tagging sites will help your Craftsu profile page get spidered by Google faster than almost anything else you can do. These sites' content is updated so frequently, that Google consistently crawls their posts and follows their links many times in an hour.

By using a tool like Shareaholic, you can quickly bookmark your Craftsu profile to several major sites. Shareaholic is a Firefox add-on that lets you quickly and easily bookmark your favorite pages from clicking on a simple icon installed on your Firefox toolbar. To install just Google 'shareaholic add-on firefox' and follow the instructions.

Here are some tips when bookmarking that will improve your results:

1) If you create more than one bookmarking account (example: you want to be on 10 of the most popular bookmarking sites), create a different user name and different password for each account. You can use the same email, but choosing the same user names and passwords leaves a footprint that identifies you in the search engines. You want to appear as different people when bookmarking the same page from different accounts.

2) When bookmarking your profile page (or any other page), avoid bookmarking that page from more than 3 social site accounts in a single day.

3) Most bookmarking sites allow you to fill in a title, description and tags to describe the page you want to bookmark. Use your important keywords in these areas, but vary their use from one bookmark account to another so that they appear to be coming from different people.

4) Occasionally bookmark pages on sites other than your own to give your account a more natural history of marking.

Let's say I have updated my content at Craftsu and I want to bookmark my profile page so that my content gets spidered by Google quickly.

I have already registered and set up accounts at social bookmark sites (examples: Digg.com, Del.ico.us. using different user names and different passwords (but the same email address) for each of the sites.

I have installed the Shareaholic add-on to my Firefox browser. With Shareaholic, all I have to do is click a button and a drop down menu lets me add a link to any of the major bookmark sites. You can also use the "Share" button or icon found on the bottom toolbar of each page at Craftsu or see the "ShareThis" link on the far right column above "Groups".

If I don't have an account with a particular site on the drop down list, I can easily set one up so that next time, it's really easy to add more bookmarks.

I go to Craftsu and click on 'My Page' in the top menu bar. The URL that shows up in the browser bar is my profile page: http://www.craftsu.com/profile/JamesDillehay

Now I can go up and click on the Shareaholic tab on my Firefox toolbar (it's a small green box with an icon that looks like a circle between two curvy lines). A drop down box lets me choose which social bookmarking site I want to mark for my profile page.

I like Digg, Del.ico.us and Reddit because they are very popular and get spidered within minutes. At each site, I fill in my title, descriptive text and my tags. I vary the keywords I use in these areas with each account.

Note: use keywords relevant to your art or craft. Include the most popular search phrase that attracts shoppers: "buy handmade". If you don't know what search terms people use to find handmade products like yours, see the free keyword research tools, like the Adwords Keyword tool at Adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal and Keyworddiscovery.com or the paid Wordtracker Keyword service I personally use and recommend, to help you research words and phrases being used in searches every day. Read this related post on using popular keywords.

My title only has to be a few key words like 'handmade shawls' or 'hand made scarves' or 'fashion accessories'.

My description is maybe a sentence long and might include the words I used in the title and a bit more: "Handmade scarves from James Dillehay as unique last minute gift ideas."

My tags will include the important words above and I might include other search term words like shopping, gifts, ecommerce, etsy or other words and phrases used in searches.

Focus on getting lots of incoming links to your profile page URL (with link text that includes relevant and popular keywords). This is a proven way to get higher rankings and traffic from the search engines.