In order to create social bookmarking exchanges through LavaLinx, you will need to first set up your social pages.

Let’s begin by navigating to the Social Pages section. (If you missed that tutorial, you can review the social page navigation instructions). Here is a screenshot of the page you will be viewing.

Click on the add button and you arrive on to the area where you will input your page data.

You’ll notice there are two sections on this page: Add Social Page and Link Information. Let’s take a look at each of these individually. Here we have the Add Social Page information box.

First is the “Name” field. It is important to keep in mind that this is NOT the name of the page you want bookmarked. That section is the “Title” which we will get to later. The “Name” field is for your own personal records, so you can easily track and manage different pages without the need to put in a full title.

You may have the Name and Title fields be the same, or different. That is all personal preference. The example we are going to use will use a different name.

Next, we move down to the URL. LavaLinx will pre-populate the URL based on which account you are in, so all you need to add is the last segment of the URL.

For example, instead of adding:

http://www.lavalinx.com/seo-links/easy-ways-to-gain-reliable-twitter-followers/

We simply add

seo-links/easy-ways-to-gain-reliable-twitter-followers/

The “Expiration Date” is a feature that we’ve added exclusively for those posts that may be time sensitive. You will want to use this feature on a holiday post for example, to make sure that users don’t bookmark this page past the time it is relevant for. To set an expiration date, simply click on the calender image and select the end date. When the time runs out, LavaLinx will automatically disable the page from receiving bookmarks.

For the page we are adding, the content isn’t time sensitive so we’ll just leave the expiration section blank.

The Status is where you select if you would like the page enabled or disabled for social bookmark trading. You can always come back to this page and modify the status at any time.

Tags are one of the most important items to add. These are the tags that users will add to their social accounts when bookmarking your page, so it is important that these tags be relevant.

Last, we have the Social Bookmark Type. Shown with a dropdown box, this feature is more complex than it appears. By selecting one of the options listed, you are giving our system the information it needs to know which sites will or won’t accept that article. This could keep you from being banned in social sites that might not accept that type of article. Here are the options you have to chose from.

Let’s choose Article/Blog Post as our social bookmark type.

Now, we have all of the first section filled out properly. Take a look for grammatical errors and add any information you may have left out.

You are now ready to move onto the next section. If you look below the Add Social Page section, you’ll see the Link Information segment.

There is a sentence above the Title. This is to remind you that the information you put for these fields will be the details that other people use to bookmark your page. The Title will become the hyperlink. One thing to note about the title is you want it to be viral. Try to write something that people will want to click on. If the original post title was boring, this is where you can change it up a bit and make it more interesting.  Questions seem to do well, but you can also use hints, put “quick tips” or anything denoting a list that people might be interested in.

Now, we’ll move onto the description. You will find more benefit from a short, intriguing description, than you would from a long informative one. Remember, you want the reader to click on and vote up your page, so it needs to look as appealing as possible. By not giving away all of your details, the reader will then have to go to your page if they want to know more.

You’ve now filled out the entire form. It should appear like this:

The last step is to hit the Add Page button at the bottom right of the screen.

You’re finished! Now you can go back into your list of social pages and your new page will show.

In order to monetize the benefits that LavaLinx can bring to your websites, it is important to understand how the system works and how to use it effectively. These tutorials will assist you in navigating the site, adding social and link pages, creating trades, modifying trades and troubleshooting issues. One of the more popular features of LavaLinx is our Social Bookmarking Exchange tool. Let’s start with some simple navigation that will get you familiar with common phrases and help you become comfortable using the social pages section of the site.

To begin, login to your LavaLinx account. This will bring you to your “My Account” homepage. You will notice that there are three sites in this account. If you only have one site in your account, it will only show one box.

We want to navigate to the “Social Pages” section, so click on the “Manage” tab of one of your sites (highlighted in yellow).

This now brings you to the site admin, where you can manage link and social trades, get an instant look at stats on incoming links, and edit your site details. One main thing to notice from this page is the orange question marks directly to the right of area titles. These are quick help boxes that you can hover over to learn what that section is about. We will cover all of these unique features in another help tutorial.

To get to the “Social Pages” section from here, we want to go to the upper right corner of the page and click on “Manage” (highlighted in yellow).

You are now viewing your social pages,which are the pages you entered that you would like to point social bookmarks towards.

You can view your pages in whichever way suits you. If you would like to view all of your social pages on one page, click the “List All” link. You may also click on a specific number of page, or hit “Next”.

All pages are numbered and alphabetized by title for convenience. The magnifying glass to the left of the title can be used to open up the page in a new tab.

Next, you’ll notice there are “Self” and “Trade” bookmark statistics. Self bookmarks are those done by yourself to your own pages, and trade bookmarks are those done by others through social trades.

The status of a page states whether the page is “Enabled” which is open for trading, or “Disabled” which is closed to trading. It is important here that if you wish to stop trading on a page, you need to disable the page, not delete it. Otherwise, the stats of bookmarks received for that page will be deleted as well.

The “Social Type” categorizes which type of format your page is. When adding a page, you may choose from the below options:

Internal Page

Current Event

Video

Site (i.e. Index Page)

Article/Blog Post

Image

This helps our system determine which social sites will or will not accept your site for bookmarking. Some sites may only accept articles and blog posts, but not videos. Some may only accept sub-pages instead of the home page. This feature is built to keep our users from being banned for adding the wrong type of content to a social site.

Say you are interested in bookmarking some of your own pages instead of trading bookmarks, but you want to keep track of how many trades you do. This is the Self feature you are looking for. You add your social page, navigate to this section in LavaLinx and hit “Bookmark”. Every bookmark you do from this link will be counted in the self bookmarking section. We will go over self bookmarking more extensively in another post.

The “Actions” section is probably the most useful section in the entire post. It is from here that you view page details such as title, desciption, key words, edit any of those details, or delete the page entirely. Again, this will be fully covered in a tutorial.

Last, we have the “Add” button in the top right corner of the screen. You have now navigated through the Social Pages section in LavaLinx, learned the terms and meanings of each section, and you’re ready to start adding your pages.

This concludes the navigation section of our tutorial. Please let us know if this was helpful to you, or if you have any suggestions for future posts. Thank you and good luck!

Let’s round up some general guidelines for LavaLinx users and social bookmarking…

Tagging. This is not referring to graffiti lettering on the side of trains or abandoned buildings. Tagging is a great way to spread out the information you want to share with a wider variety of people within the social site. Think about it. With every ‘tag’ page, someone will be able to find your bookmark on that page. Basically the more relevant and descriptive your tags are, the better your site will be found by those who are looking for your product or information, and thus the more traffic you will see from social bookmarking.

With that said, sometimes for work we’ll slip in our keyword phrases we want to optimize the site for. This isn’t always the case, but yes sometimes we do it. We’re trying to work with the system. Now I’m not saying everyone should flood the tags with all of the keywords they are going after. Please don’t do that! Too many tags listed is a pain for the other users, whereas some bookmark sites will only allow a certain number of tags. Please keep this in mind.

Make sure to give at least a few tags when adding a new social page in LavaLinx. Plus, including the proper title you want and description helps everyone out as well.

I’ve been noticing more and more websites allowing you to auto-bookmark your pages into social bookmarking sites. The SEO world is finally catching onto our idea. Well, none of them introduce “exchange” into their websites. LavaLinx still has the trump on exchange. We need more users in our pool to create social exchanges from.

We will continually improve LavaLinx into the most successful SEO-management tool. Constantly, we research new social sites to include in our growing list of bookmarking sites. Please check the list of sites often, after logging into LavaLinx.com, click on Social Bookmarks, then click Social Bookmark Accounts. Any sites you have signed up for and saved in LavaLinx will show up there. With any new sites you may not have a profile yet for, we will have a sign-up link for that social site.

For whatever reason, we come across social sites that work for some time and then encounter problems within their own site, or change their URL (we have to update LavaLinx to this fact), or that site simply is down one day. All these reasons can create issues for all of us users where we might not be able to complete a social trade right away. The LavaLinx team is out on the front lines, making social trades, so hopefully we will become aware of the issues as soon as they happen. Please be patient with us if you have to wait a bit longer than expected. Or shoot us a quick email letting us know your issue. We are happy to receive feedback from our users. With all of that said, I hope we continue to gain more quality LavaLinx users, just like the ones we already have.

LavaLinx will no longer be providing Page Rank as part of its trading functionality. We feel that Google’s ability to give a quality score to a web page has diminished to the point that it is no longer of value to our users. Although there are still a fair number of webmasters that look to Page Rank as a measurement of a valuing a web page, we decided that supporting a flawed system is not in the best interest of webmasters seeking successful link trading. Successful link trading should be focused on a cached, content page that is relevant and user-friendly.

We are looking into other services that determine the value of a web page and will implement one that best serves this purpose.