Years ago when a client's only bullheadedness concern was getting in the top five at Google under a few very major Costa Rica keywords, I said to myself, Oh boy, here we go again! I had to shake my head.
It took me about six months (after his keywords hit the top five) for him to realize, even if keywords are good way to drive traffic to ones websites, it is not the only way. In my client’s case, five years ago, 90% of his traffic came from keywords, NOW over 55% of his traffic now comes from Social Media.
We have all heard it, "Content is King" and "Linking is Good Thinking." And we have all heard how writing articles, helped the linking part. However, that changed a year ago when Google had a major algorithmic update, which focused on Content Farms. They claimed these were not “quality sites” because they listed “low-quality” content where much of the content was copied, and/or duplicated (same article sent to many) and/or nothing but sales hype.
In otherwords, Google is now officially demoting sites from search results with poor or useless content and wants to index quality content and links.
See our article on Marketing Articles in Costa Rica.
And this is where social media and bookmarking becomes a valuable marketing asset, because it helps keep the content fresh with quality information.
There are about 200 social media platforms that are allowing people to save links, or create bookmarks to web pages that they want to remember and/or share with others. These links or bookmarks are saved on a social bookmarking site and are usually viewable to the public.
The top social media websites are, Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter, Stumbleupon, Digg and we would recommend Pinterest. And it takes a bit of time to learn how these sites function.
For example, here is our link on Pinterest under Costa Rica Fishing
If you notice, these actual "social bookmarks" are basically links that have been added into an appropriate category or in this case "the board". On our fishing board, we included the url, descriptions, titles and keywords that apply to the particular photos.
In otherwords, so if you have a small surf shop in Tamarindo and want users to see what your shop has to offer you would want to:
- Construct these links so they focus on your keywords and so they are searchable when using the search on a Social media website. In other words, you would focus on searchable words like, surf shop or repair in Tamarindo. Surfboard rental(s) and surfing lessons in Tamarindo.
- Make the information interesting, so they can be tagged or voted on by others which then provides some indication of its value. For example: If you have some great surfing and shop photos/videos this would help get the user interested in what you have to offer.
Voting and Tagging (or sharing) of bookmarks are done by account users. Social bookmarking links will tend to accumulate more tags over time if the social bookmarking site receives a fair amount of traffic. The more tags and votes that a bookmarked site receives, the more clicks you will receive to your account and website.
Plus, the added bonus, some of the better social bookmarking sites have high Google page ranking and some of these sites do not place any "nofollow" coding tags inside the bookmarking links that would then prohibit the search engine robots from following and indexing the social bookmarked web sites.
This means you are building quality links and content and helps by increasing your search engine rankings on Google.
And we have all seen it where some website suddenly gets listed under a particular keyword that came from some Social Media website.
Social bookmarking then becomes a major part of your internet marketing strategy because building website links are important.
Is it easy?
It all depends on how much time one wants to commit to.
So, how long does it take to Twitter daily, “daily surf and weather reports of Tamarindo “and with a link to your Surf/Rental/Lessons/Repair Surf Shop?
… around 15-25 seconds a day.
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