Social Bookmarking is when you use social networking or media sites such as furl to find relevant websites based on your interest. This is essentially an alternative to your typical method of web surfing which consists typically of using search engines such as Yahoo and Google to find relevant websites. The sole different is that search engines tend to display commercial interests over totally targeted relevant information due to methods such as link buying by webmasters. Social media sites allow users to find highly relevant and unique material, many of which allow the user to vote on certain material such as Sphinn and Digg, while others such as Del.Ico.us are used purely for bookmarking your own material or sites of interest.

Social bookmarking has developed as a result of Web 2.0, these services (Web 2.0 based) specialise in harnessing the power of social bookmarking mechanisms to drive traffic and backlinks to a website. By using Social Bookmarking purely for building backlinks, many websites have been able to achieve excellent search engine ranking with minimal costs. I typically utilise the power of social bookmarking via freelancing this responsibility. The cost is virtually nonexistent especially when comparing it to the amount of traffic and backlinks that can be drawn from harnessing this method. People are constantly infused to know why I don't do my own social bookmarking if my primary intentions are to use it so often, and the answer is pretty simple, specialisation. As a network administrator the one thing you should keep in mind is knowing when and where to apply abstraction. By having other people that specialise specifically in social bookmarking do the services for me, I am then able to focus on writing the content and selling the products increasing my overall profit margins. I've realised how they deploy the tactics that they use, but I make substantially more money paying them to carry out the task. The simplest way to sum up abstraction would be to apply it to a car mechanic; does a car mechanic have to know how and why the electrons work within the transistors of the circuit board on the internal computer of the vehicle? No. This is because if we try to be too broad, we simply won't have enough time to carry out all the tasks required single-handedly.

So what exactly is there to obtain from social bookmarking as a webmaster? Backlinks, Web Traffic, Search engine results placements (SERPs), increased visibility and enhanced indexing. Typically web pages I make are indexed within a 3 ? 5 day period after their creation; the average webmaster can wait anywhere from a month to several months for specific pages to be picked up by the major search engines. This discrepancy is caused by a huge influx of high PR (Page Rank) backlinks brought in via the Social Bookmarking/media sites. Each respective bookmark counts as a backlink and each backlink increases your chance of being picked up and indexed by the major search engines as well as providing alternate traffic and helping your search engine results placement. Social Bookmarking is the cheapest method of SEO, yet highly critical. My current link strategy entails a combination of social bookmarking/media and article marketing in order to create a large web of backlinks, all of which enhance my sites index-ability by the top search engines resulting in more traffic. This traffic garnered is then used to sell products, exactly what products I choose to sell and how I sell them is another discussion altogether.