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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