Another use of social bookmarking is for research. You can go to del.icio.us and enter a search tag and find the sites that other people have tagged for that term. This way you are tapping into the research that many others have done before you.



This article will concentrate on using social bookmarking to drive traffic to websites.

We previously used the term "tag". Just what is that? A tag is the word or term that you would use to search for the topic on a search engine. On most of the bookmarking sites, it is a single word separated by spaces. This makes it difficult for the search terms that are multiple words.

It seems there are several ways that people are creating multiple word tags. Some are just running the words together "retirementjobs". Some are using hyphens between words "retirement-jobs. And some are using periods between words "retirement.jobs".

Experiment with this and see what works best for you. Just remember to try these different combinations when you are searching tags.

There are many social bookmarking sites (I read the number of approximately 75 during my research) with del.icio.us being the "gold standard". If you want to create traffic to your site, you should post your web pages on each one of them... I thought that might slow you down. You say to yourself - "Self doesn't have time to post to all of those sites".

Well, enter technology to save the day. A site has been created named www.onlywire.com that helps automate this task. It will distribute your post to 13 bookmarking sites. It actually lists 16 sites, but Maple is being closed down and Jots and Linkroll would not accept registration.

In order to use Onlywire, you must go to each bookmarking site and register with a user name and password. Once you have registered in all the sites on which you want to post, go to Onlywire and enter the user name and password in the input box for the particular bookmarking site.

Next, to make it easy to tag a page, Onlywire has a link tool that you can drag to your link tool bar on your browser. When you are on a page and want to send it to all your bookmarking sites, click on the icon for the Onlywire link. You will be asked for your Onlywire user name and password. The Onlywire page will open with your desired page URL in the input box. You add the tags that you want for the page, enter a comment if desired, and click the enter button. At the speed of the Internet, your page has been bookmarked on as many sites as you have listed in Onlywire.

Just consider the implications of this. Each time you add a page to your site, you post it on Onlywire. Onlywire sends it to the thirteen bookmarking sites and thirteen more links to the page (and to the website) appear on the Internet. You know that the search engines use links to a website as a factor in ranking it. This is a great multiplier to do this.

The other implication is that people actively use the bookmarking sites to find information. This will create traffic to your site.

When I discovered Onlywire, I set up an account and listed the bookmarking sites on it. I then entered every web page in retirement-jobs-online.com (RJO) as a favorite. Within a day, I started to see hits on the RJO website from some of the social bookmarking sites so it works quickly for driving traffic. The increase in the search engine ranking will take time.

Some might say that this borders on SPAM, but consider that some people have a favorite bookmarking site and only use that site. You want to make certain that your information is available to them and posting to multiple bookmarking sites is the way to do this.

Onlywire is not the most intuitive site on the planet so I made a short video about it and how it works. Click the link below to view the video.

http://www.boomer-ezine.com/Videos/V1I39Video/Click-To-Play.html