Terry Rydzynski

Just a quick post here about the power of social bookmarking in Search Engine Optimisation. I’ll do a proper post once I have more data, but I have just used social bookmarking for the first time and within a week it has dramatically improved my search engine ranking, visitor numbers and my click through rate. I got so excited that I nearly peed my pants!

Anyway, Its been known for a while that submitting your site to social bookmarking sites can improve your ranking in serach engines, but its such a pain to have to manually submit to all those sites. Ed Dale of Thirty Day Challenge fame sent me an email about a nifty new application that can take all the grunt work out of social bookmark submissions. You can find it at www.socialmarker.com and it will let you submit automatically to around 30 of the best social bookmarking sites. Although you will need to spend some time registering with each site first, once you have done so (you’ve already done it anyway, right?!), adding new bookmarks is a breeze. but I digress…

Last week (Thursday 27th October 2007), I used SocialMarker for the first time on a site that i built for the thirty day challenge. On that day it was ranked 314th in Google, wasnt in the top 100 in Yahoo, and wasnt even listed when i did a domain search on MSN UK . By the following Tuesday (2nd October 2007), the site was ranked 42nd in Google, 774 in Yahoo, and 777 on MSN UK.

That’s pretty impressive for an hour’s work - ranking improvements on that scale in 5 days is nothing to be sniffed at either, even if there is still a long way to go.

I dont have decent comparable stats to compare the effect on visitor numbers, but I know that I have got 26 clicks on my affiliate links in that short space of time (i got 6 clicks total in the previous three weeks).

Once this has been running for another month or so, i’ll do a proper post with some real figures. hopefully I’ll be able to report a sale or two in that time as well but i’ll need to find a decent affiliate program in the USA i think, as 70% of the visitors so far have been stateside.

I never realised that social bookmarking could be so powerful in terms of SEO. If you havent already, get on to SocialMarker and submit your site (no spam though - its not nice).