Social Bookmarking is an increasingly popular way to locate and classify websites. Instead of one editor categorizing sites in a directory, tagging takes a populist approach. The more people who tag a website with a keyword, the more likely it is that other people will see those tags and social bookmarks, and also visit the site.

Instead of paying to be listed at the top of search rankings, social bookmarking lets people decide what are the best websites associated with a certain keyword.

At least in theory.

The process can be gamed to some extent. Dozens of accounts at social bookmarking sites can be created for the purpose of creating tags listing a particular website.

There is also the problem with misspellings and people using misleading tags to associate with a web page.

However, since creating tags is still for the most part a manual, tedious process, athis greatly reduces the likelihood of widespread bookmarking spam. Moreover, a complaint from those using a service can cause such spam to be quickly deleted.

A tag is basically a keyword. It is a label that you categorize a website under.

The tags act as a way to quickly find your bookmarks without remembering where you put them. This is why the bookmark sites allow you to assign more than one tag.

You can also share your personal bookmarks with the public. This is where the term social in social bookmarking comes into play. When you bookmark a site other people can also find the site that you bookmarked if they enter the same tag that you classified the site under.

Tags can also be included in blog posts. This also helps the sites find web content that is being categorized by a certain keyword.

There are two general ways this increases traffic to your website.

First, people using social bookmarking websites search on a keyword. When your site, tagged with that keyword, comes back in the results, that link to your site can be clicked on to bring the person to your website.

Second, since the social bookmarking tags can themselves be tagged by others, some tag pages will become authoritative resources for the best websites. What this means is that a page of tags for sites about, for example, 'polar bears' may become so valuable that webmasters will link to that page on the social bookmarking website as a resource about 'polar bears'.

In short, this gives the social bookmarking tags page a good page rank. Being linked to, or tagged, from such authoritative pages increases the value of your website to some search engines, particularly Google. In turn, this will bump your website up the search listings.