Social bookmarking websites provide a great platform for Internet users to catalog, save and share bookmarks. The social aspect of bookmarking comes into play when you share your bookmarks with the greater bookmarking community at large or even a few close friends, allowing them to view your favorite saved websites.
Backlinks and social bookmarking
Social bookmarking was never intended to be an extension of your search engine optimization, though many websites do let webmasters save their own websites as a bookmark, in effect creating a unique backlink, which may in turn help your website. Because many social bookmarking sites use a no follow tag in their backlinks, it’s debatable how much good can come of bookmarking. That said, adding your latest blog post as a bookmark can help your website garner fast attention and new eyes.
When using social bookmarking as an SEO tool, there are a few rules to keep in mind:
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Contribute to the community. Do not only save your own website in hopes of gaining a backlink or you will be considered to be abusing bookmarking services and your account will be suspended. Add all of the relevant bookmarks you can.
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Tag your bookmarks. Bookmarks tags are descriptive words used to describe the contents of the bookmark. If I were to bookmark a web hosting company’s website, I may tag it using words like web hosting, web hosting company, my web hosting company, and etc. Tags allow you to find your own bookmarks and also enable others to search and find other bookmarks that may be useful to them. By using good tagging techniques, you can implement your keywords into your own saved bookmarks, which may help others discover your website for the very first time.
Social bookmarking websites
The following websites allow you to create, store and share your bookmarks socially online.
Delicious: Delicious is one of the Internet’s most well known social bookmarking websites. Once you’ve tagged your bookmarks on Delicious they will automatically organize themselves and be available on any computer or mobile device with an Internet connection.
StumbleUpon: More like its own Internet channel filled with unique, fun content than a list of boring bookmarks, StumbleUpon is wildly popular with its user base, who votes on the bookmarks submitted. Websites that make it to the front page of StumbleUpon can expect big traffic numbers.
Social Marker: If the task of adding your bookmarks to multiple sites seems like a mind numbing waste of time, then Social Marker is perfect for you. Social Marker submits your bookmarks to the 50 most popular bookmarking websites at the same time. Social Marker also maintains a complete list of those social bookmarking websites that are do follow.
Diigo: More than just a simple bookmarking tool, Diigo lets user highlight text, save images and documents collected online, keep sticky notes and notepads, plus store and share bookmarks.
Search engine based: Two of the major search engines also give you space to keep and share your bookmarks. See Google bookmarks and Yahoo bookmarks. Google bookmarks is also capable of syncing with your Google Chrome based browser bookmarks.
Tagfoot: Still operating in beta, Tagfoot gives you a free place to capture and save websites, images, locations and contacts on your own private bookmarking webpage. If you want to share your bookmarks you can do that with a few simple clicks of your mouse.
Social bookmarking has become a well loved method of keeping bookmarks available to Internet users no matter where they are or what computer they’re working on. Social bookmarking may also be a good way to get new blog readers or increase your online presence.
What have you bookmarked today?