What Is Social Bookmarking And Why Is It A Useful Marketing Technique?

By Author: John Tang
Total Articles: 512
Comment this article

Social Bookmarking is the flagship of the web 2.0 movement. The basic concept behind social bookmarking is similar to Add to Favorites or Bookmarks that you are most familiar with using your web browsers like Firefox or Explorer. The bookmarks you create are stored on your computer though. Social bookmarking allows you to store the information online, so you can access it anywhere, anytime. The difference is that when you bookmark a page within a social bookmarking system, you are allowing your bookmarks to be seen across the web.

Some of the best known web 2.0 bookmarking sites include Del.icio.us, Blinklist, Blogmarks, Furl, Kaboodle, ma.gnolia, Simpy, Spurl, StumbleUpon, Digg, and Wink.

Here's the concept: When a person bookmarks a page, they find the information useful. If two or three people bookmark the same page, the page might be useful to more internet users. There is a ranking system on these sites, which moves pages that have been bookmarked by several users higher in the ranking system. If several hundred or several thousand people bookmark a page, then that page is ranked even higher as it is deemed ...
... to have extremely useful information on it, and can find itself on the front page of the social bookmarking main page.

Listings on the main page of a social bookmarking site alone can send 10,000 to over a million people to that page in one day's time, since it is heavily viewed by users and their site carries serious ranking weight in Google, and the other major search engines.

Social Bookmarking is at least a decade old; with the advent of Web 2.0 technology, Del.icio.us brought it to an entirely new level of significance and sophistication. If you visit the front page of Del.icio.us, you will see the front end of social bookmarking in action. On the left hand side there is a column called hotlist. These web pages are the current hot web pages, which are receiving the attention of hundreds of thousands of people, not to mention the attention of Google and Yahoo.

So what's in this for me?

Social Bookmarking websites like Digg, and Del.icio.us represent the opportunity to get a log of traffic fast, with high value / high quality linking to your website. Social bookmarking sites offer the best type of web traffic VIRAL. Business owners know that the most reliable customers are the prospects that come from the referral of someone else. And that's what online bookmarking sites offer and that's what viral traffic or networking is all about.

In order to get views on a large scale from an online bookmarking site your content must be good enough to meet the approval of enough people to warrant the listing of your website on the front page. This amounts to a huge mass referral for your web page with the obvious ton of credibility that goes with it.

The amount of traffic that I am referring to can easily reach 8,000 to 10,000 visitors a day as a result of reaching the front page of Del.icio.us alone.

This does not take into account the bloggers, website owners, and regular search engine directed visitors that will post a link to your site from their site or forum, which in turn creates more and more compounding traffic. Now that's real viral marketing!!!
Social Bookmarking sites are very popular which is also reflecting in high page rankings by Google. This, in turn, means that the spiders visit these sites often to help index and rank the popular websites that are then reflected in the organic listings. When the spiders are directed to crawl your site more often, the results are always positive.

Backlinks (one way links directly to your site) are increased significantly and your organic rank in the Search Engines reflects this as well.

This snowballs as your site is seen by more and more people who also bookmark your site only adding to the popularity which is duly noted by the social site and the search engines of course.

Online bookmarking is a growing trend and successful online marketing strategies involve social bookmarking as a necessary, even essential component.