What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is the process of saving bookmarks (web addresses) to a third party site such as Digg or Del.icio.us in order to be able to later find these bookmarks from any computer connected to the web. Because by the nature of these sites you soon build up a network of others using the same service who liek similar content, your bookmarks are visible to them and in this way you can quickly establish the presence of a new web page to a group of your peers. In order to conduct your own social bookmarking, you must first register with a social bookmarking site and create your profile. Now you have the ability to store bookmarks, label your bookmarks, and share with your social network. This is actually quite easy, but the effectiveness of any social bookmarking campaign will always be magnified exponentially if your social group is larger, and it is this process of expanding your network which is the time consuming part of the process.

How we use social bookmarking

There are a couple of ways to leverage social bookmarking, and with our established accounst on the big social bookmarking websites we are able to use the methods to maximum effect without risk of “spamming” or using unethical approaches. The first and most obvious usage is to bookmark your web pages. Depending on the size of your site we throttle this bookmarking so that new content is being published daily until the entire webiste has been bookmarked.

The second usage is to bookmark your satellite sites and web 2.0 properties that we have created on your behalf, and the third usage would be to bookmark pages where we have embedded a link to your main website.

Why we use social bookmarking

As well as being useful ways of driving human traffic to your website (remember our established profiles have large social networks built around them so our bookmarks are visible to a large number of people), the social bookmarking websites are very frequently trawled by the search engines, and new content is therefore found and indexed by the search engines incredibly quickly. The downside of social bookmarking is that the effect tends to be very short lived as sheer volumes of bookmarks mean that each link posted tends to be replaced by newer content very quickly. However, as a way in which we can drive the search engines to new pages, articles and content they are invaluable and by bookmarking our links as we build them for you we make sure that the proper credit for those links is passed to your site in a quick, reliable and effective way. As an extra tool to be used within your overall search engine optimisation, the social bookmarking element of social marketing is a vital ingredient.

Hopefully you can see the value and power of social bookmarks. You can think of it as viral or guerrilla marketing in a way. It can be a powerful grassroots method of marketing your site. We need to be careful though, similar to other methods of search engine optimisation you can be accused of spamming these sites and this can make your list of bookmarks appear unappealing or an obvious marketing ploy which will therefore not positively affect your campaign.
While we don’t want to build your entire SEO campaign on this single method it is an important element to be in our SEO toolbox of tasks.

Our favourite social bookmarking websites are as follows:

1. Digg
2. Del.icio.us
3. StumbleUpon
4. Reddit
5. Squidoo
6. Furl
7. BlinkList
8. Blogmarks.net
9. Ma.gnolia
10. Simpy
11. Spurl
12. BlinkBits
13. Shadows
14. Raw Sugar
15. Yahoo MyWeb

It should be noted that there are a wide variety of other social bookmarking websites available and this list is not exhaustive.