Social Bookmarking

Bookmarking allows you to bookmark or save the address of a particular web page that you like, so that you can access it with ease later.  Social bookmarking also works on the same concept, but here it is socially oriented, which means your bookmarks are shared with others, so that they can also access your bookmarked sites.

When you bookmark in your browser, you are able to categorize the different web addresses in various folders; whereas, in the other bookmarking you can categorize and organize bookmarks using keywords or tags.

Description and Keywords

There are certain websites such as Reddit, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Digg and many more where you need to register, if you want to do social bookmarking. After registration you can immediately start bookmarking by including the sites you like and categorizing them by including a small description, some keywords, and tags.

When you provide a description, it helps people get an idea about the website, so that they can decide whether they would like to visit the site or not. You also have a choice of keeping your bookmarks private, which can be viewed only by you, or you could make them public where they are fully accessible to others. Secondly, when you are at these sites, you can also check out interesting stuff that others have bookmarked.

Sort By Popularity, Topic Or Keyword

A website where you bookmark socially can also serve as a search engine, which can function more intelligently.

The site enables you to search for websites or resources by popularity, names, or keywords.

Since tag classification is done by a human being who has good understanding of the website's content, it becomes more relevant.

On the other hand, in a regular search engine, spiders crawl through various websites and classify relevancy according to programmed algorithms. Secondly, in a bookmarking site the classification is also based on votes and popularity of bookmarks, which promotes better relevancy. Additionally, you can also search for current information, by searching for bookmarks that are recently added.

Improving SEO

The major search engines hold social bookmark websites in high regard, and their spiders crawl through such sites often. The PageRank of certain of these sites is high, and they are crawled several times during a day.

Therefore, to gain higher rankings, bookmarking on these sites is very useful. The important pages of your website can be bookmarked on these social sites, by using the relevant keywords and correctly classifying the bookmark tag. This will improve your search result ranking for that keyword, as the spiders of search engines will also be relying on tags for determining the bookmark's content.

This brings us to what is backlinking, as each of your social bookmarks that you have placed will serve as a link, back to your website. However, first make sure the site does not have a no-follow policy. What is backlinking efficiency you are able to achieve will depend on the number of bookmarks you are able to create for your website pages at different bookmark websites.

Get Your Site Indexed

One more advantage of socially bookmarking your website is that it facilitates you website being indexed faster and in a more easy way. When you bookmark your new web pages or your new blog posts, they will be indexed quickly.

Placing social bookmarks will also generate more traffic to your website. A much wider audience will be able to view your website and its various pages. If other people find your bookmark interesting, then they too might bookmark the page and vote for it as well. This creates additional back links to your site, and search engine will pick on the favorable voting. As your bookmarks become more popular, search engines are able to make your site more relevant in their results, which will result in more visitors to your website.

For obtaining bookmarks from visitors, you could include a plugin on your site that facilitates social bookmarking. This enables your visitors to bookmark the particular page with one click, and they do not have to go through the lengthy login procedure. Such a plugin will improve the chances of your site being bookmarked.

However, success of social bookmarks will depend mainly on your content being interesting and valuable. You also need to participate in bookmarking and voting other websites, as these websites keep a close watch on who is trying to promote sites, and could close such accounts.