Social Bookmarking

Social bookmarking is a way for internet users to manage their bookmarks in organization, storage and searching purposes. Social bookmarking sites offer users resources that aren’t themselves shared online, but merely bookmarked and referenced for later usage. These site descriptions are added in the form of bookmarks and they provide metadata. Metadata allows users to understand the website content without having to download it again. These descriptions may be free text comments, the approval or disapproval rating by other visitors (“likes”, “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”), or tagging sites.

This form of social tagging is also referred to as folksonomy which is how users add metadata of shared content in the form of keywords or phrases. The process of social bookmarking includes saving links of websites that visitors want to remember and share with others. This benefits SEO because as an internet marketer you can save your own links to sites like Digg or StumbleUpon and pass them on later to others. The links are most often saved publicly, but they can be made private or shared only with a specific set of people. They can also be made visible only to certain networks.These links can be a combination of public and private domains. The people given permission can view the bookmarks chronologically, through a search engine, through categories or through tags.

Social bookmarking encourages their users to put their bookmarks into an organized manner through the informal tags provided by website instead of the more recognizable system of folders. This system also includes the stats associated with the bookmark including how many users have added them as a bookmark. There are also social bookmarking services that can form conclusions through similarities in tags and offer them as suggestions to users. These similarities also create groupings of tags or bookmarks.

The new wave of social bookmarking helps SEO by linking these sites together and suggesting them to others. Users who subscribe to the web feeds of bookmarks are made aware when new bookmarks saved, tagged and shared by other users.

This kind of SEO marketing will only grow and become more helpful to internet marketers especially through the grouping by tags features. You as an internet marketer should seek to take advantage of these social bookmarking sites for this feature and may even want to create and foster an account to increase the traffic to your sites.