Best Social Bookmarking Sites for SEO and Generating Website Traffic
Social bookmarking is a useful way to get links out to a relevant audience and harness the power of off-page SEO.
The best social bookmarking sites can boost off-page SEO and, along with link building, can be one of the easiest and most effective ways to generate website traffic.
In themselves, the top social bookmarking sites have high domain authority and receive millions of unique visitors each month. The major benefit is that, just like search engines, visitors to these pages are already looking for sites, products and services just like yours.
So, out of the hundreds of choices, which are the best social bookmarking sites?
Social bookmarking sites are sites where users share links to web pages such as blog posts, images videos and articles.
Often referred to as curated content, they offer a useful repository for other internet users to find similar sites. For website owners, they can also generate website traffic, increase brand awareness and drive engagement.
The chances are you will already be aware of many of the best social bookmarking sites and may already have accumulated links without even knowing it.
The best social bookmarking sites have a high number of regular users, a good domain authority and generate website traffic that has strong engagement rates.
So, which ones are worth investing some time in to help boost your SEO and generate website traffic?
Our no. 1 and favourite social bookmarking site is Reddit, a social news aggregation site in which users can submit links, videos and images that they want to bring to the attention of others. Redditors (users of Reddit) can then upvote, downvote or comment on these to determine how relevant that content is to a particular Reddit discussion.
With more than 1.5 billion visitors every month and a permanent position in the top 20 global websites, Reddit is a powerful way to promote your content.
Pinterest is perhaps one of the best social bookmarking sites around and is also one of the fastest-growing. An image-based service, users share visual ‘Pins’ to their ‘Pinboards’ which are curated by interest, product, service or any theme you like.
According to research, 2 million Pinterest users save shopping pins on their boards daily and half of the users make a purchase after seeing a Pin. It is a very powerful bookmarking tool for eCommerce sites and two-thirds of pins across the 75 billion ideas on the site are actually for products and brands.
Pinterest has moved from online to the mainstream and is in the top 50 global websites.
Scoop.it
Scoop It is a content curation and social bookmarking service that is catered towards businesses and the professional market.
Intended to provide a source of research and publishing, the site has a substantial audience but is not the largest on our list. However, it does reach over 15 million users on a monthly basis!
Formerly known as ‘Read It Later’, Pocket is service for curating links to web pages you want to create a reading list for. Sort of like the text-based version of Pinterest, Pocket is the place for users to ‘absorb great content’.
With more than 40 million monthly users, the site is big and is well regarded by business and commercial users as well as consumers.
Slashdot
A social news curation site that is mainly geared towards the tech market, Slashdot works in a similar way to Reddit and requires its legions of users to evaluate submissions using peer moderation.
We Heart It
Another image based content curation and social bookmarking service, We Heart It offers an organisational tool for people who are looking for inspiration the net. In many ways, it is very similar to Pinterest.
We Heart It. The new Pinterest?
StumbleUpon/Mix
Launched in 2001, StumbleUpon was one of the biggest and best social bookmarking sites around. Also referred to as a ‘discovery engine’, the site learns what users like to browse and return relevant content based on what other web browsers are bookmarking.
The site was actually shut down in 2018 and transferred to a new platform called ‘Mix’. Using the same curation techniques, Mix is proving to be popular but may take some time to become as established as StumbleUpon was.
Dribble
Dribble is a powerful bookmarking site for the creative community and is useful for designers, artists and photographers. Used a lot for inspiration, the site is exceptionally useful for bookmarking not only for creative types but for graphic and web design teams.
Digg
Digg used to be a lot like Reddit but has since evolved to be curated more by an editorial team rather than users itself. However, the site still requires the input of its ‘diggers’ to bookmark content.
Twitter, known really as a social networking and news service is also a great social bookmarking tool; it’s also one of the biggest sites in the world and has a potential reach of more than 3.6 billion users. By posting links to your site along with images and other content, you are (in effect) bookmarking them for yourself to find later.
Don’t overlook Twitter as a social bookmarking site of great interest.
Opace & Off-Page SEO
Opace understands the importance of inbound marketing as a way to generate website traffic and improve SEO. We deliver a range of services including placing links on authority directories, social bookmarking and regular b2b blogging.
To find out more about our off-page (and on-page) SEO techniques, contact us today.
Image Credits: Dr Seema Singh Seemtosh/Wikimedia, Mike Mozart/Flickr, WeHeartIt and MaxPixel.
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