Social Bookmarking and Reasons to Use It

What is Social Bookmarking?
Social bookmarking is a way which enables users to add, annotate, edit, and share bookmarks of web documents. Internet users save web links of pages they like to share, using a social bookmarking site to store these links. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be viewed by other members of the site where they are stored. There are many advantages for submitting your content in social bookmarking websites and the main being increased brand awareness. Some examples of social bookmarking sites include Del.icio.us and Digg.

Reasons to Use Social Bookmarking Sites

Drive Targeted Traffic:
There are hundreds of social bookmarking sites on the internet. Adding your site to a social bookmarking site can trigger thousands of quality traffic to your website. Most of them are targeted traffic specific to your topic. Pages saved in social bookmarking sites are organized by applying tags or keywords to it. This implies that any user searching for a specific tag can find bookmarks that are associated with it and see the number of users bookmarked them. Some also allows commenting on the same.

Improves Page Rank:
Social bookmarking sites have great value in the eyes of search engines. The most popular ones among them have page ranks within 10. Search engines will list results from social bookmarking sites. So if your site is bookmarked, this is an extra opportunity to show up in search results. It also improves search engine ranking for the website.

Boost Popularity of Website
Social bookmarking improves the popularity of your website. These are edited by real people who search for these websites, check the content and rank up or down as they like. If people rank well your content/link it can go viral, they may also share it on a different social media or bookmarking platform generating additional traffic. This is the main reason why social bookmarking is so powerful and interesting.

Popular Social Bookmarking Sites

StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking and discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to its users. Its features allow users to discover and rate Web pages, photos and videos that are personalized to their tastes and interests using peer-sourcing and social-networking principles. Stumbleupon is an excellent source of free traffic to specific website, a page within a site, an image or a video.

Pinterest
Pinterest is a visual discovery, collection, storage tool. Users can upload, save, sort, and manage images (pins) and other media content (e.g., videos) through collections known as pinboards. Pinterest acts as a personalized media platform. Users can browse the content of others in their feed. Users can then save individual pins to one of their own boards using the “Pin It” button, with Pinboards typically organized by a central topic or theme. Users can personalize their experience with Pinterest by pinning items, creating boards, and interacting with other members. The end result is that the “pin feed” of each user displays unique, personalized results.

Delicious
Delicious is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks. Delicious uses a non-hierarchical classification system in which users can tag each of their bookmarks with freely chosen index terms. Its collective nature makes it possible to view bookmarks added by other users.

Reddit
Reddit is a source for submitting and accessing new and popular content on the web. Reddit’s registered community members can submit content, such as text posts or direct links. Registered users can then vote submissions up or down to organize the posts and determine their position on the site’s pages. The submissions with the most positive votes appear on the main page or the top of a category. Content entries are organized by areas of interest called “subreddits”. The subreddit topics include news, gaming, movies, music, books, fitness, food, and photosharing, among many others.

Scoop.It
Scoop.it is a content curation service. Scoop.it caters to professionals, business and non-profits, and corporations. The site has over 1 million registered users with free or paid plans, depending on how many topics you want to post about.

Digg
Listing in Digg will help to improve your website’s search ranking listing for certain search term. If your site is featured on the Digg home page, you will get the benefit of a lot of traffic and a lot of new readers, since plenty of bloggers read Digg posts regularly.
Social bookmarking is a great way to publicize a web page. But always remember the social part. Engage bookmarking other user’s pages, voting and commenting, so that you will reach more people and chances are that you will create a lot more traffic than any other marketing methods.