You have just discovered a website that you this has some really useful content that you would like to re-visit. You also think that the website would be really useful to your friends or colleagues. How do you save and share this link?

Before you would copy and paste the link somewhere and email it, or perhaps add it to your browser’s favorites tab – but with the tools available today, the process is a lot easier.

While many users are already aware of these tools, we just wanted to share them with you in case you haven’t tried them.

As the web gets more and more profound, and there’s more to read and remember, browser bookmarking becomes less and less desirable to internet savvy users. Social bookmarking is a method of bookmarking which is posted online, catalogued with comments and “tags” (labels for your bookmarks), and shared with your friends.

Steps

1. Decide which site you are going to use to store your bookmarks; the most popular tagging site is http://del.icio.us/ , which is now owned by Yahoo!. We will use this site, but the steps correspond to most social bookmarking sites. Other possibilities include Furl, BlinkList, and Magnolia.
2. Register at del.icio.us. After registering, del.icio.us will allow you to add some buttons to your browser. Follow the instructions- these buttons are important for bookmarking. There are many ways to add bookmarks to del.icio.us, including a Firefox extension, but we will use this method.
3. Once you register with del.icio.us, say with the username “xyz”, you can view all your bookmark online as http://del.icio.us/xyz .
4. Say, for example, you would like to bookmark wikiHow. Go to the main page, and click the “Tag” button that you added to your browser. This button will bring you to del.icio.us- the website and title are already filled in, so add some comments and some tags. Tags for wikiHow would include “wiki”, “howto”, and “reference”. Separate these tags with spaces to distinguish them. These tags will be useful later when you are trying to find a specific bookmark.
5. You can navigate del.icio.us by URL; for example, you can see all the bookmarks saved by you and other users who have tagged with the description “wiki” at this address: http://del.icio.us/tag/wiki . This applies to any other tag if you switch the word.

Tips

• Make sure you use the same tags for the same things- keep a core list of tags in your mind.
• Del.icio.us has a feature which allows you to group similar tags together, called “bundles”. For example, the tags “baseball”, “coins”, and “stamps” would all be grouped together under the bundle “Hobbies”.
• Social bookmarking is meant to be social- invite your friends to use the service. Once they have registered, you can apply the tag “for:friendsusername” to let them know that they should check out that bookmark. When they log in (this works both ways), del.icio.us will embolden the text “links for you” at the top of the page. If they click that link, they will see that you have tagged something for them.
• Most del.icio.us pages have RSS feeds- you can subscribe to your friend’s bookmarks, a specific tag, bookmarks for you, your bookmarks, etc.
• Del.icio.us also allows you to subscribe to specific tags inside the website. Click subscribe at the top of the page and add that tag you want to be up-to-date on. You can also subscribe a RSS feed of your subscriptions.

Social bookmarking tools we personally recommend:

• Stumble Upon » http://www.stumbleupon.com/
• Digg » http://digg.com/
• Delicious » https://secure.delicious.com/

Sources and Citations

• Video: Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• What is Social Bookmarking?
• del.icio.us help
• Tagging
• del.icio.us tools

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Use Social Bookmarking. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Content still reigns as the king in the world of Search Engine Optimization. Some websites get on top of SERPs because of high-powered link building campaigns, but when you talk about visitor loyalty and traffic retention (and yes, public consumption), it will always require that good ol’ optimized content

Steps

1. Readers first, then keywords. In the previous years, SEOs follow this trend: “keywords first, then content”. Now that Google has become more sophisticated, and integrated more complex numerical linguistic methods into its algorithm, webmasters found out that it ain’t just the keywords that matter, but the related terms that revolve around your content. That means you can’t just repeat the word, “cheap cars for sale” twenty times in your paragraphs. It needs more substance (and related words) t han that. It’s almost like writing for your readers alone, and not the search engines. But of course, it’ll be Google and the others who will determine your rankings.
2. Diversify Anchor Text Links As Aaron Wall pointed out, there has to be some variations in the text when one creates those blue-highlighted anchor tex t links. The links on a page are what the search engine spiders follow in determining your website structure. Most likely, the text used in the links are being considered in figuring out what a page is all about. You may also set some keyphrases in bold letters. That tells the spiders which terms you’re trying to emphasize, just don’t overdo it.
3. Take note of word count Although it’s been a classic rule that “readers online do not read”, it simply doesn’t mean that one has to deprive the online users of good, meaty content. Stick to at least 250 words a page. SEOs know that writing down for an appropriate length of text means being more able to include more related terms for the target keywords.
4. Social Bookmarking If the content is real good (i.e. controversial, substantial, significant to a great part of the crowd), then it’s best to digg it, make people reddit, and tag people at delicious. News items are great at Netscape.com.
5. Social Networking Share your blog announcements, latest promos, or any significant tidbit of a fact at your bulletin and Group posts at MySpace, and any other social networks you find helpful in bringing traffic to your site. Just a tip: Make it short and sweet in your bulletin posts since a bulletin is supposed to be quick.
6. Content Submissions Good quality traffic from reputable websites like ezinearticles, goarticles, and isnare will help out in traffic and visibility. It might hurt your rankings though, because these sites are deemed “authorities” or of great value by Google.
7. Blogging does a good job at sharing and syndicating content. If you have a website, and a separate blog (checkout: Link Building with your Blog), it’ll ease out the load in gaining visitors.

Tips

• A SEO-friendly content is no longer the restrictive, robotical-sounding content it used to be. Search engines, in their aim to continuously refine search are catering more to the online readers, the social aspect of the World Wide Web. Content comes out to be more human-centered, and ready for consumption.

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to SEO Your Website. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.