SEO, SEM, PPC, SMO, SMM: An Introduction to the Social Scene: Social Bookmarking and Tagging

Have you been wondering what all the recent talk about social search, social bookmarks, and social SEO has been about? In this article we'll go over a few of the services that you may or may not be familiar with, what they do, and how you may be able to take part in these services.

What is it? Simple and Social.

The essence of many of the sites that I'll be touching on, is that they offer a means to converse with others in a community based web site. A wide variety of web based services and sites fall into a broad category labeled as 'social'. Many of the features that we now take for granted like email, forums, instant messaging, Usenet (most know this as Google Groups now), free web space providers, and others could all fit in the broad definition but these are not what most people are referring to when they talk about the subject today. What differentiates the old from the new? These days I believe that the 'social' category is primarily defined by sites and services that provide many of the same overall functions listed above but often with a focus on simple interfaces along with their social functions. Simplicity in that you often fill out a profile and then you are ready to start contributing vs. having to know HTML and set up a website to post links or photos... And of course the social aspects of publicly contributing comments, photos, blogs, links, or other items to the larger community of a website. Then a discuss by the community leading to the promotion or removal of the contribution in a very public fashion.

Social Bookmarks

In the past if you had several bookmarks that you thought were wonderful and you would like share them with others, you could send an email or instant message to a friend. If you were HTML savvy you would post the links to your web page, or log in to a forum to share them. Today many turn to social bookmark services like Digg, Del.icio.us, Furl, Jots, Socializer, Simpy, browser tool bars like StumbleUpon and a bevy of others. Create a profile and start reviewing links that meet your interests, submit new links that others might like which are added to your profile. These links/bookmarks are viewable from just about any computer, pda, or other device that has web access or accepts RSS feeds.

When you post your bookmark most of these services will allow you to give a short description of the page, video, graphic, or other item that you are bookmarking. What makes these services 'social' is the fact that these links are available to the site's community for review. If people 'digg' your bookmark, it can reach critical popularity and arrive on the front page of the community site and sometimes bring additional traffic. Alternately your bookmark suggestion can be buried where the community's thumbs down means that the link will be available only through a search or when checking your profile page.

Social Tagging

Also different from a normal bookmark on a normal web page, services like Del.icio.us and Simpy, additionally let users 'tag' keywords to links. This allows a tagged link to be made searchable for specific words and word combinations, available through directory like lists, as well as other methods like 'tag clouds'. Searches can be set as RSS feeds and sent to your RSS reader, APIs can be used to publish searches and feeds, and there are new uses just about every day.

Social Search

While throwing a link out to the masses for judgment is less personal than sending it to a friend, the overall process can help to winnow down the wheat from the chaff. In many cases, results are considered 'more relevant' than a search engine's algorithm because the results are hand picked.

Some services even go a step further. Eurekster and Rollyo for example can assist you in creating a personalized/shareable search engines based on your own set of criteria. The subjectivity that engines lack is one of the factors that appear to keep these services popular with their users, which follows on the basic blue print that the Open Directory had set long ago.

Social SEO/SEM?

During the SES San Jose conference, social book mark services, tagging, and social search engines had been brought up quite a lot. Could this new breed of tagging, bookmark, and search service be of use in promoting a web site? There seemed to be two types of answer to this. Some were optimistic but hesitant. Others had an attitude of, "do what you can, while you can".

Both answers boil down to the fact that a link back to your site from many of these services can gain you some small or large amount of traffic. But the traffic may not be very useful if you are trying to sell a product or service.

Most of these users are looking for topical information or entertainment rather than commercial sales links. So news, blogs, article links, entertainment seems to work best.

A link from these pages may cause a page or site to be indexed quicker because these sites are very popular.

Links from specific sections could potentially pass a little page rank.

The potentials above aside, there are consideration to be made. If you hammer only your links using an account or by using several accounts, it may look bad to the community and your profiles will likely be shut down by the community or the administration of the service. While many of these sites do not use a 'no-follow' tag or other method, it may be a matter of time before they do. Also consider that there is discussion that normal engines like Google may not give credibility to paid text links on large sites. I would imagine that well known social bookmark sites may end up in a similar boat if SEOs aggressively promote their own sites and significantly skew normal search engine rankings.

On the other hand, search engines are investing in things "social". Yahoo owns tagging site Del.icio.us, there are 'answer' sites by Yahoo, Google and a beta site by MSN as well as APIs to help you connect these services to your site. MSN has Live Spaces. Through Google's Personal Search you can share your searches via an RSS feed. A normal tagging service or shareable profile doesn't seem that far off if the engines only decide to fully embrace these services. Some tentative steps are already in place so that you can tag using Yahoo's browser tool bar. Some turn to creating their own integration using tool bar APIs or third party apps.

On the SEO side, if some one answers a question on one of these answer sites and points back to one of your pages, does this pass any benefit to you? Should it? There are a lot of unanswered questions regarding the future of these social sites and services but they will likely evolve and continue to hybridize into something new. Taking part today at the very least, may help you to understand future developments and issues.

There may also be not so obvious benefits from taking part in these social sites. Some sites like Technorati and Meetup may help you to meet others in your industry. Be aware, read the FAQs as some sites do not want companies signing up for their service directly, but they do like individuals. If your company takes part in charitable causes, community fundraising, sponsors large events, etc. take pictures and submit them to your personal account. Submit them and tag them with appropriate tags including your business name if appropriate to the photo. Put on rose colored glasses for this, you never know what will happen. You may find a way to gain more volunteers, a new way to reach out to a constituency, or enough prestige to be fought over if you take part in some of these social networks in a meaningful way, even if you are not taking part for traditional rankings, link gathering, or other reasons.

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