Social bookmarking is a way to save your favourite web pages online on social bookmarking sites. By social bookmarking you can save links that you want to remember and access them from any computer, anywhere in the world and share them with other people. Bookmarks are usually stored with tags or categorized according to content etc. Now social bookmarking has become so widespread that it is looked upon as the ‘alternate search engine’.
Social bookmarking has become essential for search engine optimization of a website because it is fast becoming the preferred vehicle for searching the internet. Search engine spiders are software, used to locate and classify information whereas in social bookmarking all classification is done by humans. As someone comes across an article, blog or a website and bookmarks it, it is stored with similarly tagged web pages. Since the content has been scoured by a fellow human, the segregated information so collected under different tags offers a more concentrated result of relevant content when one types in the search keywords.
Social bookmarking is a great medium for SEO of your website but the trick to doing it correctly is to get others to bookmark your site/blog. Bookmarking your own site is against SEO ethics. What you need to do is to make your webpage really interesting and add a ‘Bookmark me’ button to each page. Once a page or website gets bookmarked, it becomes a strong contender for high page rank, because search engines really trust social bookmarking sites.
Your website becomes very visible once it is socially bookmarked because browsing social bookmarking sites is becoming more and more popular and the chances of your website being found increase manifold. The more your website is visited the more back links it builds, thus compelling the spiders to put the website in the 1st search engine result page.
Each Social Bookmarking site is a hub of different types of activities for e.g. Digg and Propeller are social news sites for current affairs, TechNet is for IT professionals, Del.icio.us, Simpy and Backflip are some other popular bookmarking sites. So for successful SEO of your website by social bookmarking, select the appropriate sites.
To make social bookmarking easier, you can use social bookmarking tools like ‘AddThis’ and ‘ShareThis’. They are integrated into a website by using a web widget. AddThis allows a visitor to your website to bookmark a page through popular sites like Facebook, Myspace and Google bookmarks. Similarly ShareThis lets a visitor share any content including photos, text across sites like Digg and Facebook. These tools can be used on any site to drive traffic and enable your website to go viral. Customized versions are available for leading blog publisher sites including Blogger and WordPress.
Just as manual directory submission is preferred for directory submission, social bookmarking too can be made more effective by manual submissions. Indiscreet submissions can do more harm than good and expose the website to the risk of being banned as spam. Social bookmarking can be a great SEO technique if employed correctly.



