How To: Use Social Bookmarking Sites For Effective SEO

If you know anything about search engine optimization and online marketing then you know that having as many links going into your site from good sources is very important. And if you're not really experienced at building links or SEO in general then you might not know the best way to get good links for your site. So please read on and I'll present to you what I feel is the best way to get good quality links for your site.

There are many ways to get links for your site that will hurt your rankings with Google and the other search engines so let's eliminate these first so that you don't make any mistakes since you don't want to get on Google's bad side. First, don't ever buy links from anywhere. Ever. This is a fast way to get a lot of links indexed by Google into your site and an even faster way for Google to penalize you. No matter what the companies say who are selling links, it is a big no-no so don't do it.

Second, don't use any of the article submission software or article spinning software that's out there. None of it works and it won't help you a bit. You'll spend money and waste your time instead of doing things that can really help you. The companies that sell this junk claim that you can get thousands of links easily but remember one thing: there are no easy ways to get quality links. There are however, some ways that are easier than others and I'm going to show you one of them in this article.

Those are the two main traps people fall into when they are trying to build links so now that you know what you shouldn't do let's move on to what you should do. There are a number of ways that you can build links effectively but in this article I'm going to concentrate on how to use social bookmarking sites. I'm talking about social bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Stumbleupon and many others that are out there.

People can go to these sites, set up a free account, and then bookmark pages to their account on the site so that their friends, and anyone else, can see the pages that they've bookmarked. It's just like bookmarking pages on your browser but with a social element to it. Depending on the site you can vote for pages that you think are cool – for example, on Digg you "dig" a page – and check out all kinds of interesting content that other people have found all over the internet.

So what you want to do is bookmark the pages on your website with as many of these social bookmarking sites as possible. Now if you had to do all of this manually it would take some time but there is an alternative. It's a site called Onlywire and it allows you to build links to about 40 different social bookmarking, and social networking, sites at once. I've used it for over a year now and built thousands of quality links to my site and my clients' sites by using it.

Check out their site and you'll see how simple it is to use. They also have a free service for regular users and paid (though inexpensive) versions for power users. In my next article I'll go into more depth about how to use Only wire effectively but check it out first and get familiar with the site and then we'll look at things in more detail so you'll know exactly how to use this great service most effectively.

Tom Aikins is an SEO consultant and online marketing expert based in Bangkok who presents seminars on these subjects and also offers a complete online marketing training course on his website, http://www.seonorthamerica.com. You can ask questions of him by contacting tom.aikins@gmail.com.