Social bookmarking has been around for a couple of years, but for me, it's a whole new concept as I learn more and more about internet marketing and how best to get traffic to my site and blog. It is a process that is becoming more and more popular as a means of generating traffic and page rank, so it's something I want to get started with right away! Most of us who own a PC know that when we come across a website that we like, we can add that site to our list of favorites or bookmark it for our own future use. Social bookmarking takes that organizational process a step further by making public the list of sites you frequent. This article will discuss what social bookmarking really is, its advantages, and how it can help your website.



What is social bookmarking? As mentioned above, social bookmarking is a system of organizing websites that you want to re-visit, but rather than bookmarking them in a folder on your computer, you bookmark them on a special social bookmarking website. If you do a Google search for "social bookmarking websites" you will find a list of the top social bookmarking sites that you can join to add your favorite sites to. The way you go about this is to use keywords that represent your favorite site's content, or in other words, you "tag" it. You can then make your entries public or private. The ones that you make public can be seen by anyone who visits the social bookmarking sites and looks up the keywords you used to describe your bookmarked sites. The public display will also show who created the bookmark, when, and how popular those keywords are.

There are many advantages of using social bookmarking as opposed to simply bookmarking. By making your list of popular sites public, you have the ability to share information with others who are looking for the same type of information. They will be able to find a list of sites that display exactly what they want just by logging into a social bookmarking site and typing in some relevant keywords. This is a tremendous way of helping others find useful information, or sharing resources with a group of people. For example, a group of network marketers may want information on prospecting, so they would log in, type in "prospecting" and receive a list of bookmarked sites on "prospecting", and other related topics, just like that! Not only will you find links to sites that you are interested in, but you can find out who has bookmarked your own site and how popular it is. Also, if you want to contact others who are interested in the same topics and sites as you, or know more about it than you, you can easily make a new connection with someone! How handy is that?

Aside from the benefits of resource sharing, social bookmarking can help generate traffic to your site and blog. You can set up your blog to link to your favorite tagged sites, and allow your blog visitors to easily bookmark your site. This will result in more traffic, possibly a better Google Page Rank, and potentially more sales! Some of the social bookmarking sites that you join allow you to add your bookmarks to your blog. In this way, your blog can be updated with tags and links on a daily basis! If you know how important it is to update your blog frequently to get the search engine spiders and traffic over to your site, then you will appreciate this feature! Not only that, but you can use your social bookmarking sites to post links to your website, thereby increasing your traffic and PR with a backlink from authority sites!

I have yet to discover the disadvantages of social bookmarking, but its advantages, as listed above, are enough to get me excited about this relatively new way of marketing my website and blog! I hope you are excited too, and will take action to improve your websites and blogs! You never know, you may even connect with an expert in your specialty area that can help you achieve your goals and dreams!