SEO Synergies: Social Bookmarking and Directory Submission

When you’re working up a strong SEO plan for your website, you’d be foolish to ignore some of the natural synergies that occur between SEO activities like social bookmarking and directory submission. Let’s talk a tiny bit about what each of those are, and then we’ll explain why they work in concert to provide a huge SEO boost under the right circumstances.

Directory Submission

Directory Submission is simply the act of finding relevant, high-authority directories and submitting your website to those directories. The benefits of directory submission are simple: you get a decent backlink, and many times in the infancy of your website, the directory will rank higher for general keywords than your site does. Surfers are more likely to find your site through the directory than they are to find it straight through the search engines, at least until your SEO plan kicks in and you get a bit higher up in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is what you do on sites like Delicious, Reddit, Digg, and StumbleUpon. It’s one of the driving factors behind much of the ‘viral’ nature of the modern Internet — and it’s exactly why every single blog and many webpages have “Digg this”-style buttons all over them. Search engines love social bookmarks, because they come across as ‘honest’, and are therefore generally given more weight.

The Synergy

So how do you use these two SEO tools together to create a synergistic effect? It’s actually pretty simple, when you get right down to it: you use social bookmarking to create links to your directory submissions. Social bookmarking totally allows you to create deep links, and linking straight to the page that mentions your website — especially using anchor text that happens to be your website’s subject — makes Google think slightly higher of that page especially as regards that subject. Repeat over dozens of social bookmarking sites, and the net effect is quite likely to be a noticeable one.

You’re essentially supporting a page that you’ll be relying on to help drive traffic by doing something that you’re already doing — at the same time that you’re socially bookmarking your home site, you can bookmark the directory, and have a decent extra boost for almost no work.