As I’ve promised yesterday, today I’ll take a look at three tools used to make your life easier when it comes to mass social bookmarking.

OnlyWire

My new favorite, OnlyWire is a tool that you can use to automate all your bookmarking efforts. I have some concerns regarding them though. First of all, they say that they will be bookmarking on your accounts up to 3 sponsor links. They don’t mention however if the links are adult, gambling, pills or other categories. So, I’ve decided to make new accounts for all the social bookmarking sites that they cover and use new passwords only for this purpose, just to make sure nothing unpleasant happens.

After testing the service with 4 accounts entered, I can say that it works. One save and it bookmarked the article with the specified tags on all 4 services that I entered. Right now they cover 22 social bookmarking sites, so it can save you quite some time by doing it automatically.

Social Poster

Social Poster is the first tool of this kind that I’ve heard about. It offers help with bookmarking to 49 social media and social bookmarking sites. It was upgraded lately, so it caught up with the options offered by Social Marker, and right now I think it’s the winner between the two, simply because it offers more sites to bookmark to. The options are the same as far as I can tell.

You can bookmark your link in all those sites, but you also need to make accounts with all of them, so a bit of elbow grease is involved both for registration and for the social bookmarking itself.

Social Marker

Social Marker came after Social Poster, and for a while it was more advanced. After the Social Poster upgrade though, they both have the same way of saving the bookmarks, using frames and buttons to Register, Login, Submit. Social Marker comes short in the number of social bookmarking sites though, with just 32 on the list, so my favorite remains Social Poster when it comes to manual bookmarking.

Conclusion

All being said, OnlyWire seems a fantastic choice as long as you make new accounts, to use just for this purpose. I wouldn’t risk my normal accounts and I wouldn’t use my normal passwords on it, simply because I don’t know what kind of links they will save on them.

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You may want to read this article first if you haven’t seen it before, to understand what I’m talking about: Get 5 Links in 5 Minutes For Every Article You Write.

There are two ways that I see the social bookmarking being done, and that’s depending on the importance of the keywords that your article/site is targeting. If they’re your main keywords or just long tail ones that you want a couple of backlinks for.

Case 1: Main Keywords

Being your main keywords, one can assume that it’s not the first or the last time you’ll get links to that page. With that in mind, you could optimize the pages where you leave your links, to make sure they pass more authority to you. If you’re not going to promote those keywords, then maybe you should apply the strategy from case 2, to make sure that the social bookmarking sites don’t outrank you in the search engines.

When you add your site/article:

• use your keywords in the title
• create tags that match your keywords and some related ones
• put up a description and use the keywords in it

This way, if the site passes link juice, you will have links from relevant pages, that are on the same topic as the page from your site that they link to.

If you’re doing it this way, you should probably have some authority on those keywords already, otherwise you’re optimizing the social bookmarking sites to rank higher then you, since they have some authority already.

Case 2: Long Tail Keywords

As I said in the main keywords case, the problem with long tail keywords is that you’re probably not going to spend too much time doing link building for them. In this case, if you optimize the tags and descriptions for them, you risk having those pages from the social bookmarking sites outrank you in the search engines.

So what I’d try to do is keep the optimization to a minimum:

• use the keywords only in the title of the URL, or just a synonym
• don’t use the keywords in the description or the tag names
• use instead more general keywords from the same topic (Ex: for the keyword IPhone, use the tag Apple instead of Iphone)

I’ll follow through in the next few days with a review of a few online tools for mass social bookmarking.

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I’ve talked a bit about link building with forum posts before, in my link building methods article, and you may know that it doesn’t exactly bring you the best quality links. Still, it’s one of the easiest ways to get links or to get a site indexed, and it can also be a good method of getting a few extra subscribers.

There are some things that you can do in order to get links of higher quality or more visitors from your posts. Here are 10 tips with that goal in mind:

1. Post In Sticky Threads

They’re just two links away from the main page usually, and that means more link love for your signature links.

2. Register And Post In Threads That Get Digged

If you see a forum thread hitting the front page of Digg, there’s a good chance that they’ll also get backlinks from other sources, so it can become a PR2-3 page. Register and post if you have something to add.

3. Post In Threads That Others Link To

It wouldn’t be the first time that a forum thread is quoted in a blog post by someone. Either because its a resource, or because its breaking news. Either way, those threads are good places to post your thoughts on the subject and get a link in the process. Don’t post in old threads. That will get you banned. Post in recent ones, when you see someone linking to a thread.

4. Start Your Own Popular Threads

Blogged about Google and video ads and your favorite webmaster forum doesn’t have yet a thread about it? You can bet that it will be popular, so be the first one that opens a thread about it, and point to the official announcement and to your own take on it.

5. Create a Sticky Thread

A link close to the homepage, building up your forum profile and becoming an authority in your area of expertise, a post of yours that is seen by every new member of that forum for a long time. All these are arguments in favor of really bringing a contribution to a forum by creating a thread that is worthy to be sticky. FAQ, beginner resources, lists of relevant software or tools, whatever works.

6. Help People Solve a Problem

If you see someone asking a question, don’t get discouraged if you don’t know the answer. Quit often just 5 minutes of searching in Google can give you the answer. You spend a few extra minutes looking for that answer, but if you want to be considered an authority in your niche and an established member of that forum, then it’s worth it. Even better if you blog about it and point him to the answer from your blog.

7. Use the Trade Section of the Forums

Trade sections in webmaster forums are good places to trade something in exchange for links. What you can give in return for a link:

• announcing that you’re willing to do guest posts in PR1-2 + blogs,
• free logos in exchange for a thank you link or free advertisement on their blog
• free scripts
• free ebook with a compilation of FAQ in your niche or with tips

Whatever you have to offer, a forum marketplace can be a great spot to get some backlinks if you have something valuable to offer in return.

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