The name is the concept; it's about having your own set of bookmarked sites and sharing them with others. The point is to help people find great sites or pages on sites. The more people that agree or have the same bookmark as someone else the more 'popular' it is.

This can be really great for the purpose of getting higher up search rankings as they view a social bookmark as an independent vote of confidence in your site. They also help to drive people to your site, or more specifically a certain article. You can bookmark your own sites, though be clear about why you are bookmarking them in the sentence you are often required to give and don't sound too promotional.

Where does it happen?

There are a lot of these sites, some are more flash-in-the-pan trying to copy more popular sites with their own little twists, while others are more specific to a certain area of interest.

Popular sites are listed below

• Bebo
• Digg
• Delicious
• MySpace
• Reddit
• StumbleUpon
• Twitter (slightly different)
• Facebook

How you can make it happen

Links like 'Share it on Facebook', 'Digg it' can add a lot to a site and be quite confusing. Fortunately a very simple solution has been provided by addthis.com which is a button which pops out collating them all together. Alternatively sharethis.com has other options.

It is always good to have your site listed in any many places as possible, which helps to improve your visibility. The main key is to keep checking over time, eg. once a month, and going from there.

Search Engines

Some are powered by the same set of results, but essentially the more listings the better. All FreshSPRING CMS powered sites automatically submit to the main Search Engines (marked with a *)

• Altavista
• Ask/ Ask Jeeves*
• Lycos
• Bing* (formerly MSN Search)
• AOL
• Teoma
• Yippy
• Gigablast
• Yahoo*
• Google*

Online Directories

Sites that are edited/ checked by humans and often require some form of verification or even a waiting period to be listed. However they are high value to search engines, considered a direct 'vote' for your site.

• Yahoo! (this is not the search engine)
• Yell (both UK & USA)
• Open Directory Project (DMOZ)
• Librarian's Internet Index
• Thompson Local
• Top Local Listings
• UK Small Business Directory
• 192 Directory
• UK Local Services

Christian-Specific

• Christian Websites Directory

Link Sites

These are 'lower value' than a search engine or directory, but you can basically add any link to these sites. Some may require a 'reciprocal link', i.e. you put a link to their site on yours, and you should really consider whether this is worthwhile or might damage your brand to do so.

Suggest Sites

The list of sites on which you can list is nearly endless but if you know of particularly good ones then please let us know by sending the URL and a description to us - thanks!

This might seem like a bit of a minefield, but it's really not too bad. Essentially these three items make up a good proportion of what appears in a search engine and how it's listed.

An example listing in a search engine looks broadly something like:

Title of the Page
a short sentence, which could be up to 400 characters...
describing the content of your webpage

The listing appears for particular keywords, which may be those set in the page, the text of the page, the title or the description. Keywords are never shown directly to the user but set on each page.

Titles

Ideally these should be unique to each and every page. On each menu or page you can edit the Search Engine details (see Help for more details) though it automatically will output a unique name like Your Site :: Page Name until you replace it with something more specific.

Descriptions

Search Engines can read up to 400 characters but will only display two lines. What you want to write here is just a simple summary of the page, ideally one line with a more general summary of the site.

Keywords

It can be difficult to tell whether or not these really help anymore. The keywords should be written on the page, especially in anything considered a 'header'. Up to 20 or 30 keywords are fine, just don't overdo it and go crazy, keep to normal keywords that people are likely to type and don't write too many.