What is Social Bookmarking?
What do you do when you find an interesting or comical website? Do you share it with family and friends? Have you ever sent an email with a link to a useful or beneficial website to someone you know? If you answered yes to the above questions then you’ll probably be able to understand the following explanation of social bookmarking. If your answer was no, you have no business being on the world wide web or this website…please leave now (unless you are here to learn and promise you will start interacting and sharing with others). The beauty of the world wide web is that it has brought people closer and made interactions with others extremely easy to do.
Social bookmarking is the act of tagging a website and saving it to view later. Instead of saving them to your favorites in your internet browser you are saving them to the web. Since they are on the web, your bookmarks are online and can be viewed by others or only select friends (depends on the social bookmarking site).
What Social Bookmarking Can Do For You
Bookmarking intriguing and interesting websites to a social bookmarking site enables you to, at a later date, sign in and view your bookmarks. Some social bookmarking sites even let you tag or otherwise categorize your bookmarks. Instead of saving the website to your favorites on your internet browser they are stored online and shared with others, hence the word “social”. I am a big believe in social networking online and offline. Using social bookmarking sites will help you identify others with similar interests and when you locate people with similar interests you can see websites that they’ve found useful or interesting. They can do the same. It is sort of a pay it forward type method of sharing and educating.
Most social bookmarking sites allow you to browse through the bookmarked sites based upon most popular, recently added, or belonging to a certain category like sports, politics, technology, world news, etc. There is even the ability to search through what people have bookmarked by typing in what you are looking for in the search feature of the website….one reason why these sites are being referred to as intelligent search engines” because they are submitted and rated/ranked by humans not the typical search engine’s mysterious algorithm.
What Social Bookmarking Can Do For Your Website
Social bookmarking sites can help drive targeted traffic to your website. In the same way that you would submit your website to an online directory you can submit your website or certain pages or articles to social bookmarking sites. Be careful not to spam…if you submit the same websites over and over again you will be flagged and that site will be blocked. This feature helps keep the integrity of the service. That being said, it is still a great way to promote your website online.
Just like you would any other site, you can bookmark your own website and submit it to specific, targeted categories to share with others who might be interested in your site. It is important to build a network of contacts on the social bookmarking site because if you share your site with them, and they share it with their contacts, and their contacts share it with their contacts…well…you get the idea right? It’s viral. You could submit your website or article to a social bookmarking website and within just a few minutes see your web traffic increase by the hundreds or thousands.
The impact of the added traffic to your site not only builds awareness amongst humans, but the search engines will notice the traffic as well and it will help with your search engine rankings. The process works best when multiple people bookmark the same website or page. Bookmarking is similar to voting and those websites or pages that have the most votes are viewed as the most useful or credible and will be viewed and voted on by others…it can become exponential.
Watch the Video Below for a Great Visual Demonstration:
A Few of My Favorite Social Bookmarking Sites:
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