Social bookmarking is not only a nice way to get more traffic and links. That’s a most effective method to explore what people think about your site. By tracking your content popularity at social bookmarking sites you will be able:
- to get an idea what people liked most of all in your post (to brainstorm for future posts);
- to analyze why one post was successful while another one was buried;
- to see how people describe your post (i.e. how they ‘see’ it) – that will enable you to look at your site “from outside“;
- to explore your competitor‘s social media success and learn a lot from that;
- to perform advanced keyword research (how people tend to tag shows how they are most likely to search).
The most powerful tool to do the above is del.icio.us URL search that shows you tags and descriptions people attached to a post when bookmarking. You will also see how many people saved this URL. So del.icio.us will provide you with very important information on:
- how popular the exact page is;
- how your readers defined your page.
How is the page defined?
The SEJ home page, for example, has been saved 783 times with SEO as the most popular tag:
What’s the site most popular page?
Of course, to properly analyze a website’s popularity, you will need to check each and every of its subpages. With SEOQuake FireFox plugin I’ve discussed earlier you can see all the statistics within search results. So:
- Set the plugin preferences to show you only del.icio.us stats;
- Run [site:yoursite.com] search in Google;
- Sort the results by the number of del.icio.us bookmarks for each sub page:
Who’s my site associated with?
This handy tool will show you other sites people tend to bookmark along with your site. Here are sites associated with Search Engine Journal:
