What Is Social Bookmarking and What Can It Do For Me?

If you’ve been using the Internet for very long, you probably have a few links in the Bookmarks folder of your browser. Social bookmarking is the same thing–you mark a web page–but instead of keeping the web page to yourself, you share with others.

To start doing this, you first set up a user profile, with your interests, and then connect yourself with other users who have similar interests. This is typically called “friending” someone. The power of your bookmarks increases as you gain more friends on most of these sites.

Making friends makes you more likely to be taken seriously by the site and its users. It helps to prove that you’re an actual member of their web community and not a spammer. Go ahead and become part of the community and build some trust.

This is the second reason you want plenty of friends: they can see what you’ve been looking at, and also bookmark the same things you have, if they’re interested. Not only does this keeping pushing up your bookmark/link’s popularity on its own, but then their friends can notice the link, and so on.  It’s good to have friends.

But why bother getting your sites socially bookmarked? For one thing, it gives you backlinks, and that helps you rank better in the search engines. For another thing, lots of people use social bookmarking sites. Besides generating backlinks, you can also drive traffic from these sites.

This can mean a lot of traffic coming to your website. Even one person’s recommendation on a site like Stumbleupon.com can give you a couple of dozen visitors a day. If several people mark your site as a favorite, the traffic can really add up.

All you need to do now is try out a few sites–say, Stumbleupon or Digg.com–and see where they take you!