In this post I’m going to talk a bit about social bookmarking and SEO. A lot of people ask me whether or not social bookmarking can help your search engine rankings and the answer to this question is “yes”, but only if you do it correctly.

Social bookmarking is defined by Wikipedia as a method for Internet users to store, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet. If you have ever posted your link to one of your blog articles with Digg you have social bookmarked it.

Social Bookmarking has a number of SEO advantages:

• You may get a backlink when you bookmark a page on your site (I say “may” because some bookmarking sites use “nofollow” in their backlinks).
• Bookmarking a new page or a new blog post on your site can help get that page indexed in the search engines quickly.
• Most social bookmarking sites allow you to use tags. You can list your target keywords in these tags and this can help your ranking for these keywords

It is very easy to bookmark your blog articles or web pages to multiple social directories with one click. For example OnlyWire allows you to join over 30 social bookmarking services and then bookmark your blog article or web page by logging into your account and posting your title, description and tag keywords.

OnlyWire is free and a good tool but most of the services included use “nofollow” which means that your backlink won’t count in most cases. If you are serious about social bookmarking for the purpose of building backlinks you may want to use software like Social Bookmarking Demon instead. This software allows you to bookmark at up to 100 social bookmarking sites and has lots of randomization and scheduling features built in.

When you write a new blog article or web page and bookmark it you can also help yourself out by utilizing some basic SEO techniques.

To keep it simple what you want to do is choose a specific keyword phrase for the article you write about. If you target longtail keyword phrases, which are phrases of three or more words, you increase the odds of ranking higher on the search engines as these longer keyword phrases tend to be less competitive.

The easy way to set this up is to include your keyword phrase in the title of your blog post. You should then also include it in the first and last paragraphs of the article before you publish it.

When you go to bookmark the article you want to tag it around that keyword phrase. You should include those again in the title and in the description for additional emphasis.

If you are doing a lot of bookmarking you should be very careful not to just bookmark your own websites. If you do this there is a chance that you will be detected as a “self promoter” and one or more of your accounts could be closed. The best way to avoid this is to regularly bookmark other websites as you surf throughout the day. Or use a software such as Social Bookmarking Demon with built in randomization.

Search engines spider large social sites such as Technorati, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Simpy and others multiple times per day. By bookmarking your article in these directories you are creating valuable back links to the new pages on your site and you have a chance of receiving visitors from these social sites (expecially if your post is interesting or controversial and other people bookmark it).

If you follow these tips for social bookmarking and SEO you will see a greater return for your efforts in terms of search engine rankings and traffic.