Why Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking systems are web-based services that allow users to bookmark all manner of web based resources, ‘tag’ those resources with meaningful keywords, and share their bookmarks with others. Ever since my PC Magazine days, I have been using social bookmarking tools such as Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Newsvine, and more.

Social bookmarking is especially important if you want to promote your business online. You really need to get into the routine of bookmarking any new content that you create on as many of them as you can. Over the last few years, they have become a major and incomparable tool for companies to enhance their Internet presence.

I personally believe that the three reasons why everyone should use social bookmarking tools are:
1. More links
2. More traffic
3. More credibility

More links are always a good thing. Think of links as the road traffic that moves through the web. If there are no roads to where your business “lives” online, namely your website, it’s far less likely that the visitors you want will end up getting to you. That’s true whether you’re talking about search engines or links from other sites. Search engines use a mysterious cross between the number and quality of links to your site in their determination of whether you should be number one or number 701 for your desired keyword.

In addition, the “nicer” the road, the more traffíc will flow through it – think of an authority site linking to your site as a highway that leads directly to your site, and one from a reciprocal link or link exchange scheme as a back street in a sketchy neighborhood full of potholes. Improved traffic, also good. From social bookmarking, this traffic is often targeted.

Through tagging, the description someone writes, or the title they assigned to your link, the person who discovers the submitted link on a social bookmarking site knows exactly where they’re going, and why they’re interested in getting there. It’s like seeing the cover of a magazine on a rack. That’s what pulls them in, they see a headline – and to get to the story they are compelled to take another action. The more credibility thing is a bit harder to explain, so we’ll go with another analogy.

The benefits of social bookmarking is plenty. If you look on a bookmark as a one-way back-link, I know that part of Google’s algorithm is to count the number of back-links to assess your Page Rank, and will probably help you get higher rankings on the search results page. Google and the other search engines send their robots to the social bookmarking sites many times a day – so, subsequently your new pages are likely to be indexed extremely fast.

You should also use sites such as digg and delicious as search engines in their own right, as they can find many links to blogs, videos and other content that is classified by user-generated tags, avoiding what Google decides to serve up. Social bookmarking sites cannot only be used to send traffic to your blog, but also to other content that you have submitted to other Web 2.0 platforms – such as YouTube and other video sharing sites, podcast directories, squidoo lenses, hubpages, and many more.

Another important benefit to consider is that the visitors that arrive on your landing pages are highly “targeted”, as they find you from tags and keywords that you have selected, and content that you have created. Social bookmarking sites are a great way to “announce” your fresh content and make your content available to a wider audience, but probably the greatest benefit is that bookmarks (along with micro-blogs) can open the door to building relationships with your prospective clients.

Having said all that, the 10 things you can do with social bookmarking: