Web Marketing and its offspring, search engine optimisation, is certainly getting more interesting. Beyond the optimisation of your own site, and traditional link building, new opportunities are making a big impact, and in my humble opinion, for the better.

Social bookmarking sites, and the list is long indeed, allow you to consolidate, aggregate and sort user nominated websites. They also allow you an opportunity to promote your own. This creates a new pool of opportunities to not only build links, but more significantly, get the good word out to people who care.

So, beyond the technical opportunity to raise link count (and perhaps more honestly, based upon some of the link building techniques I’ve seen) you can supplement the organic search results from the big search engines with a more positioned, focused and optimised audience - real golden opportunity you want in the first place.

Search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the like are no longer the only way to put your site up-front before new users. With their gazillion listings, I think often that even they do not know what to do with all the data. It gets harder and harder to get what you want out of them, even using complex boolean search techniques.

Many social bookmarking sites offer key word tagging and other sorting options, as well as user reviews of one sort or another, giving users a good clue to the validity of the content, and not simply the skill of the optimisation team, or the budget for keyword advertising.

Have a look at this incarnation “Hey Nielsen!” and give it some thought.

Here’s an article in Trend Hunter on the same topic, adding Brands as Friends.

Matthew

Tags: Marketing, SEO //