Things we can learn from del.icio.us—for use in our marketing endeavors

May 20th, 2008 | Category: Heidi's Entries,Reviews,SEO,Search Engine Optimization,Social Networking,bookmarking,delicious,marketing
written by: Heidi Cool

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de.licio.us results for this blog

Last week, while catching up on podcasts, I listened to Can Social Networking Build Your Brand?, Jason Schwartz's presentation from SXSW Interactive 2007 (View his slideshow). Jason crammed a lot of interesting ideas into his 25 minute presentation (to which you should listen), but his references to de.licio.us, similicio.us and Technorati got me thinking about what a tremendous resource de.licio.us can be.

In addition to being a good place to share bookmarks and find sites in your areas of interest, de.licio.us can also provide some interesting information about your own site(s), specifically:

  • Who has bookmarked your site?
  • When did they bookmark the site?
  • What tags have been used for your site?
  • What other sites share those tags?
  • What tags are related to those tags?

This information intrigues me because it offers new opportunities for networking and search engine optimization.

Networking through de.licio.us

Given that de.licio.us includes a networking component, it's pretty obvious that we should look at the pages of those who bookmark our sites to see what else we have in common. If one of these people has bookmarked sites related to our topic, then we may want to add that person to our network.

Additionally, their bookmarks can lead us to sites that compete with our own (that we should follow) as well as sites that complement our own. If some of these sites are blogs, we can comment on them and begin to network with their authors and readers to share knowledge and draw traffic to our own sites. We may also want to follow/friend such people on social media services such as Pownce, Twitter, Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and the place where we began, de.licio.us.

de.licio.us tags can inform key word choices for SEO

If we've thought carefully about our topic and pay attention to our analytics we should have a good idea regarding the key words and phrases users choose when searching for our content.

When people search for a topic, they usually search for word combinations they expect to find on the type of site they are seeking. If they're detail oriented they'll try to fine tune these in such a way that they can narrow the results to very specific types of sites.

But when people tag a site they've bookmarked, they tag it with the word combinations they associate with the content—the words they'll be most likely to remember 6 months from now when they're trying to find the site they bookmarked on polymers that can change from hard to soft. They might search for the site using "hard soft polymer change" and tag it the same way, but they may also tag it under: polymerresearch, neuroscience, seacucumber, science, chemoresponsive, mechanicadaptability, casewesternreserveuniversity, macromolecular and so forth.

Some of these tags might be obvious or redundant, but others might give us some ideas for more key words we should include on our site.

Example: Putting the Web Development Blog under the de.licio.us microscope

If we look at the de.licio.us results for the Web Development blog, we'll see that 20 people have bookmarked it. That won't give us as much data as we'd find for a higher profile site, but it will still give us some interesting information.

The first thing we'll notice is that the most popular tags are: CSS, blog, development, web, webdesign, webdevelopment. That's not a big surprise; we know those terms already occur multiple times throughout the blog.

If we look below that we'll see the posting history. This lists, in reverse chronological order, the users who have bookmarked the page, the year and month they bookmarked it and the tags they used.

User Tags

Looking at these tags I see a few that vary from the Web focus, including: highered, uni_blogs, uni_webdev, ublog and academiccomputing. This is useful because while I may think of the Web as the primary theme of this blog, others are associating it with higher education and academia. Since they are classifying it in this manner, it may mean that others might be looking for blogs on such topics. Thus it might behoove me to include phrases like "college blog," "university blog," "academic computing," and "blogging in education" somewhere relevant within the site. If I add such terms this month I can check back over the coming months to see if they start appearing in my site analytics. While my writing on the topic automatically includes them in this blog entry, I'll also consider whether some are appropriate to my About Us page.

Bookmarking dates

Having pondered my keywords, I'm now curious about the dates the site was bookmarked. The dates could be meaningless—just random times when visitors found the site—but they could also indicate that certain entries sparked enough interest (at the time they were published) that someone felt it worthwhile to bookmark them for future reference. Nothing particularly exciting stands out for November 2005, but November 2006 includes the article, A writer's obligations: ethics, law and pragmatism, Part 3: Pragmatism, which my stats have shown to be one of the more popular entries on the blog. This may just be coincidental, but if you have a larger site that has been bookmarked more often than mine you may be able to find some more obvious patterns.

Bookmarking users

Finally let's look at the people who have bookmarked the page. Some of the names are familiar, they're people I either know in person or online. But others are unfamiliar. If I know them, I don't know them by their usernames. I don't recognize sandpetra, but he/she's tagged the blog as "clink." I'm not quite sure what that means, but when I go to his/her page I see that he/she has a lot of sites tagged under accessibility, accessiblewebsitedesign, webdesign, seo and other topics that interest me. Seeing this I've added sandpetra to my de.licio.us network. A Google search on the name tells me that sandpetra is the Web Marketing Director for Hobo-Web Ltd UK an SEO and design firm near Glasgow in Scotland. Hobo-Web also produces a well-written blog called Hobo News, to which I will now subscribe. (Check out their post, Why You Should Nofollow Your Blog Comments?) See, this connection has already proved useful—it provides content I think you would enjoy reading.

Conclusion: de.licio.us is useful in many ways.

If you're not already using de.licio.us as a bookmarking tool, I hope I've given you a few more reasons to do so. And if you're not sure what to bookmark first, feel free to start with this blog as well as this entry!

de.licio.us (and related) resources

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31 Comments »
  1. I have been trying to get into the groove of adding and properly tagging on delicious. It has worked out quite well recently. I didn't see the social merits until I read this though. I have to start adding people!

    Comment by ob81 — May 21, 2008 @12:23 am

  2. Howard, I'm glad it helped. I've not yet added enough people there either. I just need to take the time to do so. It took me awhile to get into the tagging habit. Delicious Bookmarks 1.5.44 helped with that. If I save to Firefox it prompts me to save to de.licio.us as well. That made a huge difference because my fingers were so used to the regular bookmarking menu.

    Comment by Heidi Cool — May 21, 2008 @12:41 am

  3. Thanks for linking through and glad you enjoy the blog :) Feel free to take part in any of the conversation :) You're correct abut Delicious, I use it to bookmark anything I find of interest, and go and have a look at those sites when I have time.

    Comment by Hobo — May 21, 2008 @5:53 am

  4. I use not only delicious, but also magnolia. Using flock greatly increased the number for links I put up. I also pull feeds of links submitted by my "contacts" or by tags via which I find really useful for finding information.

    Comment by rob hawkins — May 21, 2008 @7:40 am

  5. Hobo, You're welcome, I look forward to reading more of your blog. Rob, I'm on ma.gnolia too. I also have an account with Mister Wong, a bookmarking site started in Germany. Jodi Church-Wagner, another Powncer is involved with this one, so when they launched the English version I tried it on her recommendation. Each has different and useful features, it's just hard to keep up with more than one at a time.

    Comment by Heidi Cool — May 21, 2008 @5:08 pm

  6. Heidi, I've never thought about delicious tags for SEO, that's pure genius to help to go back and optimize old posts for better SERP results! Good stuff and thanks for the link. :)

    Comment by Kyle James — May 21, 2008 @7:56 pm

  7. Really good info. On our website I often link to an article in a peer-reviewed journal or something from the Times or Post. I've started using delicious to collect these links in one place that could become a useful resource for health disparites related research. Also, I read many articles that never make it into a blog post. I may experiment with the daily posting feature of delicious. note - this comment was initially denied when I used the proper address for del icio us.

    Comment by dave — May 21, 2008 @8:18 pm

  8. If you are searching for extensions in order to optimize your website I suggest you use http://tools.seobook.com/firefox/seo-for-firefox.html this extension. It provides you an easy summary of all relevant link sources and helps you to judge the value of a website. As social media optimization a paying into the SEO strategy any SEO consultant or marketeer has to be aware of the high relevance of social bookmarking and news aggregation systems. Always stay on top of the crowd ;-)

    Comment by Greencard — May 23, 2008 @6:08 pm

  9. I also have a great plugin for firefox SEO Quake. It will display already within the search results the most relevant key performance indicators. Also on every page you visit you will get the KPIs right away. The Plug in SEO Quake can be found at: http://www.seoquake.com/ I also run a small SEO project for the Greencard Lottery. If you have any comments or feedback I appreaciate all valuable input. Cheers, Daniel

    Comment by Daniel — May 24, 2008 @3:22 pm

  10. Every tool is good to select the right keyword.SEO Quake, Google Analytics, Social Bookmarking... More data and tool - more precision with selection and closer to success.

    Comment by msweb — May 24, 2008 @6:21 pm

  11. Delicious has been a great resource for traffic from like minded individuals. It is only as good as the data it has available to work from.

    Comment by Jeffrey Raval, MD, FACS — May 28, 2008 @2:43 pm

  12. Thanks for the thoughts I had not really thought about all the link checking I could do on delicious, that is good stuff...also I wanted to say that google alerts can also be good to track those linking to you. They send you an eamil with the information on predefined time frames. I use them for my SEO projects to see how our link candy is working.

    Comment by Dayne — May 30, 2008 @4:06 pm

  13. "But when people tag a site they've bookmarked, they tag it with the word combinations they associate with the content..." Yet more weight to argument for making the first paragraph the one that contains most if not all of the keywords & phrases you want the article to be found for. Extra points for using the word: "behoove" which is just groovy...

    Comment by Wayne Smallman — June 1, 2008 @5:27 am

  14. Very nice read.. Since most of the people are concentrating on social media websites to boost their SEO / SERPS ranking (Yes Serps), it's going to be a great tip for them in regarding to working with tags. MoiN

    Comment by MoiN — June 3, 2008 @5:23 pm

  15. Thanks for this education on delicious. I now feel I at least have a smattering of understanding how it can be used for much more than I had realized. I just need to find some time to properly use the sites that make the most sense for me!

    Comment by Ann Cummings — June 8, 2008 @5:48 pm

  16. In addition, I like to use Scuttle and Pligg sites!

    Comment by Alvin Spinner — June 9, 2008 @5:06 pm

  17. Wow, so many comments about content being king yet we see so many comments here with anchor text. I'll be blunt, we are all here because we all know that one way linking is KING, isn't it? That's why I entered SEO Services rather than Mark or John... we all know how this game works... let's admit it. Linking is KING!

    Comment by SEO Services — June 10, 2008 @10:54 pm

  18. Well it s an nice article but some things i should know before like starting the website and should just use a bookmark site to see if i did it correct. Like use Tags for Search Engine keys, if i build a site i should know tags users will porobbably use and just check if user really used the ones i thought before.

    Comment by Johny — June 11, 2008 @7:45 am

  19. Thanks for this education on delicious. I now feel I at least have a smattering of understanding how it can be used for much more than I had realized. I just need to find some time to properly use the sites that make the most sense for me!

    Comment by Joe Smith — July 2, 2008 @1:22 am

  20. Great post Heidi! Delicious is definitely complimentary to SEO and i believe an absolute neccessity, if i may say. At the rate SMM (social media marketing) is exploding, i forsee that more developers will be producing open source app's for Search marketing or SEO.

    Comment by Seo singapore — July 18, 2008 @10:10 am

  21. I use many other social bookmarking sites along with delicious and that has brought me good amount of traffic and also helped increase backlinks to my site.

    Comment by Rayz — July 22, 2008 @7:47 am

  22. Good Article! Keep it up :)

    Comment by Web Sack.Net — July 27, 2008 @4:48 am

  23. Thanks for this. I always knew that digg was helpful for traffic, but never knew this about delicious. Thanks again!

    Comment by Steve — August 10, 2008 @11:56 pm

  24. Thank you for sharing, great article

    Comment by Tiger balm — August 16, 2008 @10:07 pm

  25. Thank you very me for this article. I live in Thailand, and i like to read same article.

    Comment by Tiger balm — August 16, 2008 @10:10 pm

  26. When people search for a topic, they usually search for word combinations they expect to find on the type of site they are seeking. If they're detail oriented they'll try to fine tune these in such a way that they can narrow the results to very specific types of sites.

    Comment by Alvin Spinner — August 17, 2008 @4:41 pm

  27. I use delicious myself. I think its one of the best bookmarking sites so far. But I didn't know how powerful it is until now. I've been using services of technorati, reddit and others too.Now I guess i will have to study delicious more and understand its concepts.

    Comment by website design — August 20, 2008 @2:27 pm

  28. Delicious is one of the best social bookmarking sites today. But I never thought how powerful it is until now. But as the others have commented, content is king. Nobody will bookmark your site if you dont have good content.

    Comment by web design and seo — August 20, 2008 @2:32 pm

  29. Twitter Comment... Reading: Things we can learn from del.icio.us—for use in our marketing endeavors | Web Development Blog: [link to post] - Posted using Chat Catcher ...

    Trackback by NavyCS (Tom Goering) — May 28, 2009 @12:59 pm

  30. Twitter Comment... Good stuff RT @hacool I'm always amazed at how much I rely on Delicious - already referenced several times this a.m. - [link to post] - Posted using Chat Catcher ...

    Trackback by blogbrevity (Angela Dunn) — May 28, 2009 @3:11 pm

  31. [...] year, in Things we can learn from del.icio.us—for use in our marketing endeavors, I covered this subject in greater detail, but here's an overview of what I've just accomplished by [...]

    Pingback by Marketing, monitoring and sharing via delicious | Welcome to Social Media — June 30, 2009 @6:07 pm

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