Bookmarking For Popularity The concept of Social Bookmarking developed from the idea that regular Internet users would automatically bookmark their favorite websites on their own PC as a way of making sure that they kept all their favorites in the same place.
But, what could they do when they were not at their own PC? How were they to find or access their favorite websites then?
So, according to Wikipedia:
“Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to store, organize, share and search bookmarks of web pages. In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public……”
So, the first important thing to note is that these bookmarks are ‘usually public’, so that if you do decide that a website is a favorite of yours, then other people can see that, and they can check it out too.
Furthermore, when the first social bookmarking sites became popular, they did so by coming up with a different way of classifying the site that people were listing, according to a relatively informal system of tags, rather than the more traditional ‘folders’ system that most people were using on their home or office computers.
So, a user could (and still can) add a favorite to their social bookmarking site list of favorites, and then choose their own tags for that site.
This tagging system allows sites to be found by social bookmarking site members by searching on a chosen tag, and the sites often include information about how popular a particular site is as judged by the number of people who have already bookmarked it
Some sites even provide web feeds (RSS) for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags, so that subscribers can automatically become aware of how many new viewers a site has, or how many sites have been added to the tagged group in question.
Some of these social bookmarking sites have become very popular indeed, with the more established sites like Del.icio.us and even relative newcomers to the ‘game’ like StumbleUpon having achieved Google Page Rank of 8.
Now, there are many sites already out there on the web where you can access fairly exhaustive lists of Social Bookmarking sites. The important thing is not a long list of site URL’s. The important thing is to really grasp and understand what these sites can do for you and your blog.
The first thing that you must do with these sites is to register for an account with each.
Then, every time that you make a new posting to your blog, you simply submit the post to the site in question.
Your posting and site address will generally appear on the home page of the site in question immediately after you submit it.
How long it then stays there is entirely dependent on the popularity of the bookmarking site itself, and to at least some extent, also on the time that he posting was submitted.
Will this drive masses of traffic to your site?
Well, it is certainly possible.
It is certainly feasible that someone might see your post and add it to their favorites, and the more people that do that, the longer your posting is likely to remain visible.
This is a particularly important factor on Digg
If enough people ‘digg’ your story to keep it on the top pages, then it is almost impossible to imagine just how many visitors that this can drive to your site or blog!
I have literally seen websites use their whole allocated monthly bandwidth in one day as a result of a story really making it big on Digg!
But, in the vast majority of cases, the truth is, no, using social bookmarking sites is not likely to generate masses of traffic for your site.
But you should still do it for the simple reason that what it will do is create incoming links for your blog, and these links, as I have mentioned many times before are one of the two most important factors that help you achieve good search ranking.
These bookmarking sites are also very popular with the search engines themselves, and the spiders tend to visit them many times a day, so by making sure that your site is featured, you are making sure that your blog is going to achieve maximum levels of what is sometimes called ‘search engine love’.
