Social Bookmarking Explained

If you're marketing on the Internet then chances are you´re aware of social networks and web 2.0. Social networks are sites where tag clouds reign supreme and peer-to-peer recommendations replace blatant, in-your-face advertising.

But while many marketers are immersed in the social network scene, some don´t know what social bookmarking is all about. It´s an important viral tool that will take your networking in web 2.0 spheres to a whole new level.

With social bookmarking, websites are ranked and shared based on what real people have deemed worthy of touting to others in the online community. While a static sales site might rank high in Google because the owner maximized it for SEO, an information site might fare better in social bookmarking scenes because a human has visited the sites and knows that a sales pitch isn't as valuable as free information.

You´ve probably been bookmarking for as long as you've been using the Internet. Everywhere we go, we´re clicking on the icon that lets us add a website or page to our arsenal of sites we want to revisit or share with others.

When you add the social part to bookmarking, it just means you're sharing your favorites with others. Not only are you boosting a site because of the exposure you give to others in the community, but search engine spiders will also pick up on the list you create, boosting the ranking of the sites you claim are worthy.

As a marketer, you can leverage social bookmarking by setting up accounts at these sites and sharing the links to your sites with others. There are tools that let you submit a single page or site to dozens of social bookmarking sites with one click of the mouse, so you´re not entering them all by hand.

One popular tool today the social bookmarking site OnlyWire. It´s free to use and you can add a button on your browser so that when you find a website you want to add, the information is sent to 16 other major bookmarking sites.

Instead of identifying a website based on keyword density, like search engine spiders do, the social bookmarks will be ranked according to the tags entered by humans. You´ll notice some sites showcasing tag clouds, which is a glance at some of the most popular terms and phrases being used on that day or month.

Depending on what site you´re using, you may not be allowed to include certain kinds of pages. Make sure you evaluate their guidelines so that you´re not flagged for spamming the social bookmarking site and risk getting your account banned.

For instance, instead of bookmarking your sales letter page, create valuable content on another page of your domain, bookmark that, and then from that page funnel visitors into your sales copy.

Another perk of sharing your link with the social networking crowd is because each person who includes your links on their list of favorites is giving you a back-link to your domain. Eventually, with enough "votes of confidence" from the online community, your site could become an authority site on a particular subject within your niche, helping you rise naturally in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

If you´re using Squidoo, MySpace, and other social networks, then you need to expand your web 2.0 efforts and dip into the social bookmarking pool, too.

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