We discussed a bit about how you tag Squidoo pages or blog pages. This is a form of indexing to make that information more easily categorized and ranked by search engines. Bookmarking is very similar in that you are storing web page links to interesting sites and most of the time, that bookmark gets added to your web browser to make it easy for you to retrieve that site later.

But, what about if you want to share your bookmarks? There are ways to share your bookmarks online, on the WWW, so that what you find interesting can be bookmarked on a social networking site and made available for everyone else to see too. This makes that content highly visible because it isn't being rated as interesting by a search engine, but rather by human beings. If you provide valuable bookmarks then people start to see you as someone who can point them to great content and you become the expert on that topic through pure association. It doesn't even have to be your content you are bookmarking to make that sort of leap in prestige and recognition.

How Bookmarking And Indexing Works To Get You Free Traffic... Bookmarking works because people are much better at identifying spam or commercial solicitations than search engines. They are also better at knowing what might be of interest to another human being. So, you begin to see more people using social bookmarking sites to locate information and even some use them more than big search engines, like Google or Yahoo! It's content that is highly specialized and reviewed by a number of people to make sure it's not spam.

There are several characteristics of bookmarking and indexing that you want to be familiar with: creating and saving links, web feeds, and voting or rating the bookmarks.

Creating And Saving Links, When you bookmark a page online, a link is saved to a shared storage area on the web where other people can view it. Each social bookmarking site will have a way to easily save through their sites using a button on your browser that you install, or by clicking buttons available in the content that others post. Some social bookmarking sites give you the option to save some links as private and other links as public. If you are doing this to increase the traffic on your sites, then you need to use the public option for others to view the content you post.

When you insert the bookmark to the site, it will ask you to index or tag it with words that best describe that link. Some sites can show recommendations for that link, if others have saved the link before you too, but all will allow you to put your own keywords, whether they be one or two words or more. It's generally better to put in as many tags to index the content as you can think of because that will determine how visible that link is on the social networking site.

Social bookmarking sites will categorize the links based on the indexes that you chose and people can search for them using the site's search engine too. So, be sure to be as descriptive as possible when you post the link. Include a brief, but thorough description of the link and tag it with indexes that can put in into multiple categories for people doing searches.