When using a social bookmark service such as IMAutomator it's an easy trap to fall into to think that you don't have to do any groundwork and the traffic will just flood in - this is NOT the case! In this post I outline several strategies you can employ to ensure that you're getting the best SEO benefit from your submissions. 1) Do your on-page SEO first The idea behind using a social bookmark service for SEO is not to gain direct traffic - that's only going to happen if you're lucky enough to get on the front page of a big site like Digg and that's really not very likely! No, what you are after here is the backlinks - lots of them. But backlinks blindly thrown at a page that is not optimized are just wasted. Google wants to know what your page is about and then those backlinks help emphasize the authority of that page for the keyword terms that are being targeted on the page. This is such basic advice but so many people forget about it. First make sure you target something! Pick a keyword phrase for your page and then make sure you include it in the title, the description, on the page itself, the URL if possible and you can also sprinkle it elsewhere such as in ALT tags if appropriate and so on. 2) Submit REAL and good quality content This one follows on from number #1. The early versions of IMAutomator we were a bit too lenient with what we allowed and we had a free service which got horribly abused. People would create multiple free accounts to try and get tone of free submissions and they would submit absolutely anything they could - profile pages, about pages, category pages, even multiple copies of the same page with slightly modified parameters. Doing this will actually hurt you, not help you. First of all if you abuse the social bookmark service that you're using then it's not going to last. We discontinued that particular free membership a long time ago. Secondly, your bookmarks are going to be rejected from any site that has a manual review policy which includes all of the bigger, higher PageRank sites. If they deem your submissions to be spam they will not only block the link but block the whole account taking all of the links ever posted with it. Lastly, even if your links get posted and stay there in the case of sites that just auto-allow submissions without checking them, what do you think Google is going to make of them? If Google sees a whole bunch of irrelevant, untargeted links it is simply going to discount them. 3) Pay attention to the TITLE of your bookmark When posting a social bookmark the title is used as the anchor text of the backlink in 95% of cases and the anchor text is one of the factors that Google uses to determine the relevancy of the target [...]The post 5 Strategies for Maximizing SEO With Your Social Bookmark Service appeared first on IMAutomator blog.
