What is the Social Bookmarking?

The word Social Bookmarking consists of two parts: Social and Bookmarking. The Bookmarking means to save the link of a website on your computer for later use. In the browser Internet Explorer this is called as the ‘Favorites’ and in other browsers like Mozilla Firefox, this is called the ‘Bookmarking’. If you have added it means that you’ve already bookmarked! Adding a site to your ‘Favorites’ so that you can visit the site at a later date is called bookmarking. Social Bookmarking is exactly the samilar to the ‘local bookmarking’ except that you can save the link directly on a bookmarking website instead of saving the link on your computer.

Once you bookmark the sites, you can access them anytime by logging back into the social bookmarking site. So bookmarking is the saving of favorite websites to your computer, and social bookmarking is the saving of your favorite websites to your ‘account’ on a social bookmarking website. Your bookmarks can be shared by everyone as they are on the website instead of the computer. The website itself becomes a huge database of everyone’s favorite sites. These sites are then ranked by votes like how many times the site has been bookmarked by different members and will appear at the top when someone searches for that category or topic.
Why Social Bookmark?

When you search a major search engine for a keyword and find that 9 or the 10 sites are listed on the first search results page. You are just wasting your time checking every site on the list when only one is relevant. By social bookmarking you can search any information instantly rather than wasting a lot of time and efforts also.

Role of social bookmarking in business

• Managing portfolios - The bloggers can provide you the browsable copies of their eBooks, videos and links to the books on Amazon, links to the best content of blogs and the professional headshots all in single folder.
• Repository – Creating folders of the key content that they would like to become required reading for new employees, a training video, the industry trade journal article, or a popular slide presentation.
• Product promotion – The owners of the Small business are creating visual collections of content for the ease of promoting their products.

SEO and Social Bookmarking

When a search engine determines the ranking for a site, the ‘inbound’ links are also checked by this. The more ‘value’ or ‘weight’ the inbound links has, the more they will increase ranking. Value is determined by a number of factors but some main ones are the linking pages Page Rank and trust.

The large social bookmarking sites have the hundreds of thousands of members and all adding content to the site daily which gives them the incredible Page Rank. So, when a site is bookmarked, it has just received a high Page Rank inbound link. Further, if another member searches and finds this bookmark, they may bookmark it themselves thus creating two high Page Rank links to the site

Some of the popular Social Bookmarking Sites:
Blinklist
Bloghop
BlogPulse
Blogsearch
CodeCubed
Digg
Flickr
Furl
KB Cafe

Spurl

Related articles:

• Web Traffic Tips: Social Bookmarking (internetmarketingformommies.com)
• iCyte Creates Sharable Bookmarks from Highlighted Text (mashable.com)