Online Real Estate Technology

I’ve mentioned social bookmarking in a couple of previous posts, and on the right hand side of this blog, you will see both Mr Wong and Delicious as widgets, but what do they mean and how do they influence traffic or search engine rankings.  Lets break this down into plain speak for you and look at the effect for example, of social bookmarking on my blog.

The best known use of bookmarks was adding a web site to your favourites tab on your computer, the limitation of this was that you had to always have your computer with you and if you travel or wanted to search your links from another computer you had no way of remembering what those favourite web sites were, now if you have a photographic memory, then you’d be ok, but if like me and probably 90% of the community, there’s a lot going through the old brain cells and sometimes when I would like to revisit a web site for research, entertainment or information without my favourites section, I’d be at a loss to revisit these.

Some consumers visit lots of web sites per user session per day, and the ability to be able to save and access those favourite web sites from a central location is both time saving and convenient. Thats where social bookmarking comes in, take delicious.com, you can create an account and then bookmark or save all your favourite sites in one location and then come back to those from any computer anywhere in the world. The other benefit is, you can also see who else, on the web, has bookmarked your posts, web site etc. You can also search by tags, and see at a glance what other web users find popular or of interest. For example, if you click on this link  http://delicious.com/mikeandrew you will find all the bookmarks for my blog, and by searching Delicious for Mike Andrew Real Estate, you will find, who has, on the web, bookmarked my content.

The other impact on blogs and web sites of social bookmarking, is the use of either “nofollow” or “dofollow” links, these are links that allow search engines to follow your bookmarks and popularity on the web. Sites such as Delicious have “nofollow” links so they have little effect on your search engine rankings, however, Mr Wong.com, Spurlit.com,backflip.com etc do, as they have “dofollow” links, and by bookmarking your posts and articles, they do have an impact on your search engine results.

Bookmarking your posts creates backlinks and you need to make sure these bookmarks are public, so that consumers, ( Meaning Google ) can see them.

You can also see at a glance what the most popular tags are that are being searched on the web, and what content is important or valuable to on line consumers. Be careful though, if you are a blogger or web site owner, you should only bookmark one piece of content or web page per day per site.

I’ve included a link to a video which explains the process of bookmarking in plain english for you, and I hope you enjoy, also check out the bookmarks available on Mr Wong and Delicious.com as a start.