Social Bookmarking: Ins and Outs

What Is Social Bookmarking?

If you are an avid surfer of the ocean called the Internet, you will frequently come across some really interesting links that you might want your friends to know about. There are some websites that allow you store these links, tag them, and label them for public or private viewing. This is known as social bookmarking. People who visit these websites can access these links. These websites provide the space to store, organize, and access the links of other websites. People search for resources on the social bookmarking sites via public bookmarks, tags, and classifications that have been created and saved by the users of the social bookmarking sites. Examples of social bookmarking sites are del.icio.us and Stumbleupon.

Is Social Bookmarking Helpful?

Social Bookmarking is a process that you cannot ignore in the present day cyber-world. Some of the prime advantages of this feature are

• Accelerated indexing: The web pages that are bookmarked on the social bookmarking sites are selected by popular search engines and indexed high to present a higher page rank. Therefore, these websites stand a good chance of getting a good rank in the search engine listings.
• Web traffic: The links that are listed on the social bookmarking websites generate a lot of web traffic and this in turn makes them even more popular.
• Personalized web pages: Many social bookmarking websites give the opportunity to develop personal web pages and profiles on their sites. Many medium and small start up business utilize this as a marketing option and to develop a brand identity.
• A link can get a good page ranking which in turn can generate quality back links for the website thus enhancing its popularity.

Who Needs Social Bookmarking?

Every website owner wishes to make his/her website the most popular one of the entire Internet community. Therefore, almost all websites will benefit from social bookmarking. But specifically those websites that are meant for advertising or business purpose compulsorily need social bookmarking. Even personal websites and social websites are in need of social bookmarking in the online community to get noticed. It serves to promote your website and its content very well. It is being popularly used as a very effective online marketing technique.

Popularity of some well-known Social Bookmarking websites

Source: www.problogger.net/…/

What are the commercial implications of social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is an effective technique for marketing your website online. If you want to promote any of your new blogs or websites you bookmark the link in one of the social bookmarking websites. As a result, your website will receive a lot of back links. This will generate a lot of awareness about your websites and your products and services that you offer through the website. Many E-commercial websites are popularly using social bookmarking to project their services. The commercial implication of social bookmarking is that it is one of the major players in promoting your business.
What Is Social News? Is There Any Difference Between Social News And Social Bookmarking?

A social news is a website in which you can submit the link to an article or a blog post or any other information source. People can vote up or down on the links displayed on the social news depending upon which it gains popularity. The link that gets the greatest number of votes gets the maximum exposure. Digg, Buzzflash, and Redit are examples of social news sites.

Social news websites differ from social bookmarking websites in the following ways:

• The links in a social bookmarking website might be very interesting and useful but not necessarily the latest. They may be informative but might not be news oriented. The links in the social news websites are totally news oriented and the links that gain popularity are prioritized according to their importance and newness. The popularity also depends upon the number of votes it gets.
• Social news websites are more focused on serving the community rather than the individual news provider. A social bookmarking website, on the other hand, is more focused on the bookmarker and his/her preferences for placing and organizing his/her bookmarks and tags.
• Social bookmarking websites generally contain links that are visited for a longer time than the social news links because they are bookmarked according to their worth and not according to their newness.

How To Get Started?

Here are some tips that you can follow to get started with social bookmarking:

• In the first step, you should be a good web browser. Then only you will be able to locate links with good content. Do not overlook websites, such as, YouTube and Slideshare as they are proving to be important video sources of information these days. You can also locate some good video tutorials and articles in these sites.
• Do not forget to rate good content wherever you come across as that will help it in rising above the rest and getting popularity which will help you in socially bookmarking it.
• Make an online library of these bookmarks on social bookmarking websites.
• Do not just be a passive visitor at blogging websites. Post comments on the blogs and take part in discussions on the posts.
• Subscribe to RSS feeds from the blogs that are of interest to you. This way you will keep yourself abreast with the latest and the most useful information links always.
• Write good content and form an online social network of your own.

Social Bookmarking Elements

One of the most important elements of social bookmarking is the usage of tags. These tags are different from the browser-generated tags that are normally used in the traditional web page writing systems. They are informal and attractively termed with keywords that people follow to click on the links. Some of the social bookmarking websites interrelate the tags according to their similarity in some criteria to form clusters of tags so that visitors find similar topics based on a particular criterion listed together.

Moreover, search engines list the URL for all the tags attached which increases the chance of it being indexed more than once.

Another important element of social bookmarking is the short description. If you add a crisp and attractive description of the URL it will enthuse readers to explore the site. A short, punchy description is therefore extremely important for social bookmarking.

The descriptive tags are immensely valued by the search engines as they can gauge the worth of a link based on these descriptions. The other elements that divert network traffic to a link worth being socially bookmarked are the title and categorization.

Social Bookmarking for SEO

Social bookmarking is one of the latest trends for enhanced search engine optimization of a given website. It is proving to be a major online marketing tool. Social bookmarking enhances search engine optimization greatly because it is tag-based. Popular search engines index the links based on their tags that have attractive keywords. People click on these tags generating a lot of web traffic to the links that have been socially bookmarked.

Also by changing the tags and interesting description one can have multiple links to a single website that is bookmarked. As search engines crawl the socially bookmarked websites very frequently there is a huge chance of your bookmarked link being crawled.

Conclusion

Social bookmarking is one of the latest trends to make your website popular on the Internet. There are a lot of advantages that this trend offers. It has a great commercial implication and is used as a major marketing tool and it also greatly helps in search engine optimization. It is a very user-friendly method of attracting visitors to a particular website. Above all, it proves that content is the most important determinant for the popularity of any website. Realizing the potential of social bookmarking, search engines are also paying more attention to this newfound phenomenon.

Tags: Buzzflash, del.icio.us, Digg, Metatags, Redit, SEO, Social Bookmarking, Social description, Social news, Stumbleupon