You may have noticed a lot of SEO blogs featuring a cute little cog-wheel logo with ‘Sphinn it!’ at the top of their pages. Sphinn, which has gained popularity in the last year, is another community in a growing crowd of social bookmarking networks, and it’s popular in SEO circles for a reason. All the same, smart site owners might consider getting into the Sphinn of things when they’re looking into the optimization of their site.
Any internet user who doesn’t frequent many internet marketing sites might well ask, what is Sphinn? Sphinn is the creation of the people at Search Engine Land, an internet and search marketing community. The community that uses Sphinn tend to be internet marketing professionals, commentators, or devotees, and they can be a hard crowd to please.
The bookmarking community at Sphinn is relatively new, having been founded only in 2007. The community’s members tend to be quite outspoken but provide some solid advice when it comes to social media, internet marketing and SEO. They’re also not backward about saying what they don’t like, as more than one internet marketing newbie has discovered when first joining the community.
According to its creators, ‘Sphinn’ is another kooky name creation that came about because of the decreasing choice of domain names on the net. The people behind Search Engine Land intended to launch a community that could put a new spin on topics, and put forward articles that they thought others might like. By the time its creators got around to founding the community, however, ’spin.com’ was long gone. The creators tried a few variations, allegedly stopping just short of ’spinnn.com’, before stepping back and deciding to add the somewhat confusing ‘h’. While it has led to the company constantly having to explain that the community is simply pronounced ’spin’, it has resulted in a distinctive brand that gets recognized.
Finally, though, we get to the most important question: how does Sphinn’s growth affect the average site owner? The answer is, not much, or at least not directly. If your industry is outside the circles of internet marketing, then putting a Sphinn bookmarking button on your pages is not going to be of a lot of help, at least until the community expands a little more.
At the moment, Sphinn is important to the average site owner because of the wealth of knowledge the community contains. Every site owner involved in search engine optimization does well to tap into the online marketing community, and Sphinn is a good place to do it. What’s more, the social media aspect of the site means that the information presented in the community is up to date, right to the minute, and therefore generally more reliable.
Sphinn is not a general SEO resource in the way that other bookmarking sites can be. The main people who gain marketing benefits from Sphinn are marketers and SEO pros. However, the community is definitely something worth keeping an eye on when marketing your site.
