I don’t know how many of you have heard about Delicious or seen their little logo on blogs out there, but I thought for this post I would try to explain Delicious and how it can help. Then you will start looking at sites and say, “That is a Delcious site!”
Delicious is what is referred to as a social bookmarking site. It is one of the many Web 2.0 trends that are coming about online. A brief history and understanding of the traditional search engine will very quickly help you understand how much more superior that Delicious and other social bookmarking search engines can be.
Traditional search engines use more of a scientific method using algorithms to calculate and determine rankings. They base a lot of results on many different things. Most of use users could care less about the elements that they rank their results off of. We are looking for good quality content and information. We could care less how long it has been on the internet and how many times certain words were used. Search engines continually are having to modify their spiders and robots because SEO’s/spammers are finding ways to cheat the system. Next thing you know the results are watered down again and you can’t find what you are looking for.
Well the approach that Delicious and many other social bookmarking services do it is helping to get back to the content as it is interpreted by the reader and not the robot. There are 5 main elements of social bookmarking that make it effective.
- Online Favorites/Bookmarks
- Tags
- Shareable
- Searchable
- FREE and Easy
First I’ll address the online favorites or bookmarks whatever you prefer. Using a modern browser, excluding any browser produced by any company based in the beautiful state of Washington, you can integrate your online experience and sychronize your favorites with Delicious. With Delicious you put your favorite sites online rather than keep them restrained within your local browser. This way you can check the site you found at home the night before at work the next day. This is one of the greatest features of Delicious in my personal opinion.
The next feature I am going to address are Tags. In order to help Delicious with better results and help it become a more effective tool, you need to make sure that you Tag all of your bookmarks. Tags work like keywords. Since Delicious is searchable, Delicious needs to know what a site is talking about. Every individual will tag every site the throw into delicious. Looking at the similar tags that users submit can fine tune the spammed words and get real legit results.
Sharing is the element that makes Delicious function. Without you giving Delicious users the ability to share your bookmarks, there would be no results. Don’t keep your favorites to yourself, share them. The more you share the better Delicious becomes. As you bookmark one site and share it and as others bookmark and share that site it receives better credibility and better search results within Delicious. Others can even search your favorites if you give them permission.
Another key and great feature I touched on briefly earlier. That is the ability to search. You can search the entire Delicious database or even just search your favorites alone. How many of you find your favorites list unmanageable? I know I do. What a great feature to be able to search through my favorites.
Last but not least is the idea that it is FREE and Easy. OK, I could have made like 6 points but I’m sick of writing. All I can say is if you can’t figure it out after playing around with it for a half hour, you need to climb back up into the tree you evolved out of. You can sign up for FREE so go check out Delicious and see for yourself what it is all about. Before long you will be referring to websites as “Delicious”!
I have been using http://del.icio.us for over a year now and almost use it to find what I am looking for more then Google because the results are so much more relevant when it is based on “tags” … If you have not used this technique to enhance what you are doing marketing-wise or “SEO-wise” then you are missing out on a huge part of the potential traffic your website could be getting. Great post!