You could try putting an image and link to the bookmark in a text module at the bottom of your lens stating something like 'vote for it at ___'.

For me, social bookmarking isn't about driving any traffic. It's about creating a backlink, which Google then sees. This gives me credit as an authority site and ups my Google ranking. That's all I use it for. If someone finds me there, great. But I've never gotten into the "social" aspect enough for it to drive traffic directly because I have a network.

I'm all about building the Google love. That's much more targeted (someone's searching for what I have) than social traffic (you're my friend, so you rank my site even though you don't care about the topic) could ever be for me.

It is all about back links for me as well, except for Twitter and Stumble.  I pick my posts on them carefully and space them out so as not to look like spam.  From those two I not only get a back link but tons of hits as well if I do it right!

Okay - so let me ask you. Everything I read stresses the importance about having numerous backlinks. But now I'm getting the feeling that backlinks are really not that important for getting traffic? I really don't have time to go to all of those social bookmark sights and make "friends" just to get hits on my bookmarks.

But....is the more important factor - keywords - for attracting traffic then?

Back in the day getting indexed was a very, very hard process. Some of the sites I had back in the 90' and early 2000 were not even in the top 1000 results. Never! The only way was to pay and that still didn't guarantee much. To this day Yahoo still charges for inclusion. Why anyone would pay these days is beyond me.

With the emergence of the many social sites that allow sharing the process of getting indexed was changed over night. No more constantly tweaking seo factors on a monthly basis. Man I hated those days, although I did learn a lot. Today you can get indexed in less than 24hrs. 5 years ago that took at least 6 months or longer.

As for bookmarking, you don't have to use every service the planet. Each service is different, some having plenty of love and others simply do not produce as promised. If you have a plan before you start and monitor your efforts before jumping into every service, you can easily find 10-15 sites the deliver good results.

Tags, tags, tags. In my opinion this is where the power is and it is also the number #1 place that people make the most mistakes. I wont interject my own thoughts on the subject rite now but  I will say tagging is the reason for so many people not having good success. This may be related to the fact there is a plethora of information on how to do this and that, that people actually don't know what to do or what information is actually helpful.

Social bookmarking sites work both ways for me, both in traffic and incoming links. The small amount of time it takes to mark up content on these sites is well worth it when I look at the long term goals I have set.

My druthers is to find yourself sites that work for YOU and stick with em. Of course monitor your results. If the link doesn't show up within 48hrs move on. Don't flood everyone rite away. Moderation is a much sounder approach.

p.s.- To get an idea of how important back links are you might want to take a gander at marketleap.com's link popularity check tool and take a look at the 900lb gorillas. This site has been around along time and the data is changing but it will give you a good idea of what incoming links major league sites have.

Last edited by StartPoint (10/02/2008 10:02 pm)

Pixelrage wrote:

Really? I thought it was rather easy to get a 1st page Google rank in the mid-late 90s. All you had to do was spam keywords...that's when people were creating keyword paragraphs and coloring them with the background of the site so they were invisible. It was so easy to cheat Google. I miss those days

I was talking about the moral ways (at least mine) of getting there :-)