How Social Bookmarking Benefits Your Website

There are many great ways to market your website these days. Everyone knows about the importance of keeping your site fresh in the minds of readers online; social networking websites and microblogging tools like Twitter are commonly used means of doing so. If you are already using such sites, though, you might be overlooking another very effective way of promoting your website: social bookmarking. In this article, we will explain what social bookmarking is and how it can be used to effectively improve your site’s search engine optimization.

What Is Social Bookmarking?

When most computer users think of bookmarks, the handy function included with more Internet browsers comes to mind. This is where you can drop and drag the URLs of websites you’d like to refer back to within your web browser. These files are kept locally on your computer, and you can only access them while using your own PC. Bookmarks have been in existence for years, and are ubiquitous among the major Internet browsers.

Social bookmarking takes the traditional idea behind bookmarks and turns it into a social, inclusive experience. In the new world of Web 2.0, social bookmarking is one of the most popular phenomena around today. Sites like delicious.com and Digg.com are just a couple examples of this phenomenon at work. With social bookmarking, users create bookmarks that are shared with an entire community. With sites like Digg.com, the more users who bookmark a website, blog or other online entry, the more popular it becomes – and the more traffic that is generated.

How Can You Use Social Bookmarking To Your Advantage?

If a website reaches high ranks within a social bookmarking website, it is guaranteed a certain level of traffic. But how do you get your website attention on such bookmarking sites? Many of the most popular social bookmarking sites offer codes that place buttons on your blog or website. These buttons can be easily clicked by visitors to your site, allowing them to “digg” or otherwise bookmark your content. Using this type of code on your site increases the likelihood of it climbing to the top of social bookmarking websites.

The best part about using social bookmarking sites – and getting exposure on them for your blog or website – is that they are crawled by major search engines continually. This means that if your website gets cataloged on one of the popular social bookmarking sites, its search engine optimization will go up significantly – and it will achieve higher rankings among its relevant search terms.

But how can you get your site cataloged on a major social bookmarking site like Digg.com? Beyond putting a convenient button on your website, it is important to come up with a blog entry or an article that will generate a lot of interest. On sites like Digg.com, cleverly written “Top Five”, “Top Ten” and similar sorts of articles usually do quite well. Spend some time examining articles that have received a lot of “diggs” to get a feel for what is successful. All it really takes is one article on your blog or website to “break through” on delicious.com or Digg.com, and the benefits of social bookmarking will start swinging your way.

As part of a comprehensive website promotion effort and for search engine optimization purposes, social bookmarking sites are incredibly important. Make sure that you put in some time researching how they work, and put in a real effort at creating unique, compelling content that will pique readers’ interest. With any luck, your site will be “dugg” or otherwise bookmarked by a large number of people, and you will reap the benefits.

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