Social Bookmarking - Store, Share and Search Favorites Online

Social bookmarking describes web sites which have created a community around sharing other people's favorite URLs on the Internet. This is a relatively new term for what was original referred as sharing bookmarks online as early as 1996. In response to the evolution of the Internet and the buzz of Web 2.0, Social Bookmarking arrived in 2004 revived with new life. The great thing is that anyone list their favorites online and then share those favorites with others which can be a great SEO tool depending on where and how your links appear.

Features and Benefits of Social Bookmarking

Many social bookmark services encourage informal tags as opposed to traditional browser based folders - this helps make them more searchable and increase search engine rankings when you use more specific tags that others aren't using as much.   Many bookmark services provide web feeds for your list of bookmarks including lists organized by tags.  As this industry has grown, more features were added such as ratings, comments on bookmarks, import and export from browsers and the ability to email bookmarks to other.

Social bookmarking helps to create a directory of highly popular content that is rated by humans instead of search engines.  Webmasters can use social bookmarking as a way to get one way links to their web site because it can help your rankings increase.  A disadvantage of social bookmarking is that it has no guidelines for keywords, tags or spelling errors.  Search engines are much more critical of the web sites they include in their index.  So the quality of web sites listed on social bookmarking sites are highly dynamic.

Using Social Bookmarking as an SEO Tool

New web sites can be made more visible and receive more traffic by being listed on social bookmarking web sites.  The more often a web page is submitted and tagged the better chance it is found.  Spammers bookmark the same page many times using many different keywords.  Some social networks have added CAPTCHA protection to prevent automated spam, but many users add their site manually still with some success.

There are several types of bookmarking services to include social, live, shared, and collaborative.  Social bookmarking can be a great way to organize your favorite web pages you find on the internet for your business use.