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SEO-friendly social content sites

There are fundamentally two types of social content sites particularly valuable to your SEO efforts: social
bookmarking sites, and social news sites.

Social bookmarking sites

Bookmarking is the practice of saving Bookmarks – or Favorites – to a user-driven website and ‘tagging’ them
with keywords. Other users are invited to review these bookmarks and get involved at a more meaningful
level, by tagging them in their own social bookmarking profiles or linking to them from their own websites.
Most social bookmarking sites tend to work the same way: the contributing user tags a URL and other users
decide if they want to tag and link to the website from their own.

Social news sites

Social news sites differ to social bookmarking sites in that they do not rely purely on user contribution. While
some allow users to post and tag any URLs to the site, others such as Slashdot, Mashable and Engadget are
led by an editorial team that decides if a URL is worth sharing. Social news sites do provide many of the
same benefits as social bookmarking sites, in generating of high-quality inbound links, and increased visibility
of linked-to websites.

Guidelines for using social content sites for SEO

Here are seven ways to get noticed by users of social content sites – and maximize your SEO:
1. Create fresh and appealing content.
2. Optimize the content for search to help taggers to find your content.
3. Cross-link between your content and other related material to keep visitors on your website and
hopefully lead to them bookmarking other content.
4. Include links to other pages on your website. When content is shared via a social site, RSS feed, or
other distribution method, these inbound links will help to improve your link popularity.
5. Be sure links included in your content are direct links, not ‘vanity’ URLs or any that are redirected and
cause confusion to search engines.
6. Provide links to the social content sites you wish to target. In this way your visitors can quickly and
easily ‘vote’ for your material to be included on that social content site.
7. List or vote for your own content on social content sites sparingly, since overuse of this approach is
seen by other users as ’spamming’ and is likely to backfire.

As you can see there are great benefits for social marketing if we only apply the right tools to get the job done. Hopefully this can help in your online success.