What is Social Bookmarking

Definition from Wiki:

On a Social Bookmarking system or network, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists can be accessible to the public by users of a specific network or website. Other users with similar interests can view the links by topic, category, tags, or even randomly.

Other than web page bookmarks, services specialized to a specific subject or format - feeds, books, videos, music, shopping items, map locations, wineries,etc. - can be found.

In a social bookmarking system, users store lists of Internet resources that they find useful. These lists are both accessible to the public or a specific network, and other people with similar interests can view the links by category, tags, or even randomly. Some allow for privacy on a per-bookmark basis. They also categorize their resources by the use of informally assigned, user-defined keywords or tags. Most social bookmarking services allow users to search for bookmarks which are associated with given "tags", and rank the resources by the number of users which have bookmarked them.

Many social bookmarking services also have implemented algorithms to draw inferences from the tag keywords that are assigned to resources by examining the clustering of particular keywords, and the relation of keywords to one another.

Its increasing popularity and competition have extended the services to offer more than just sharing bookmarks, such as rating, commenting, the ability to import and export, add notes, reviews, email links, automatic notification, feed subscription, web annotation, create groups and social networks.

Why Social Bookmarking is important for marketers?

Suppose you just created your Website or Blog. Now What? Your site needs to be spidered and indexed in the search engines. One of the fast ways to accomplish this is via Social Bookmarks. By bookmarking your own sites, your site will be indexed and have an initial backlinks to jump up in the Search Engine Rankings.

Also in order to have a successful and profitable Blog or Website you need traffic. There are many sources of information regarding ways to bring traffic to your site, but Social Bookmarking is one of the easiest ways with multiple benefits.

These methods are perfectly ethical and you shouldn't have any concerns doing them.

Benefits of Social Bookmarking

Social Bookmarking can bring immediate traffic to your website, as web 2.0 community websites such as Technorati, Digg, Reddit and Tailrank provide almost immediate information on various topics. These type of Bookmarking sites index and categorize content usually faster than the major search engines. People looking for the latest information on certain topics usually refer to these types of services.

The benefit is two fold. They provide immediate traffic from like-minded targeted viewers but also powerful backlinks to your sites that bring positive SEO and Search Engine results.

In summary, social bookmarking has been created to bring upfront the relevant information created and uploaded to the internet. The beauty of the system is that users are the ones who ?vote? for the good content. In this way it's a sure way to find the best stories and the best content in the front pages of these sites. Therefore, the traffic bookmarking sites generate has exponentially increased during the last years. Savvy marketers are finding its way to get a share of this traffic.