Social Bookmarking For Online Business

2008 February 5

by admin

Have you ever visited a site and thought you might like to come back to it, so in order to find it again, you saved it to your browser’s “favorites” or “bookmarks” category? “Social bookmarking” is a term that describes a method in which Internet users can store, classify and share their Internet bookmarks.

There are many sites that allow users to share the sites they feel are useful and want others to know about. Other users can view these sites by category, topic or randomly, if they choose.

While this concept actually began in 1996, it started to get very popular in 2005 and 2006 when sites such as http://del.icio.us, http://simpy.com and http://furl.net started to take off.

As more and more of these websites pop up, new features such as allowing users to rate and comment upon the bookmarks, add notes, receive RSS feeds and even create social networks have popped up. The RSS feeds in particular allow users to receive up to the minute information on certain tags that they “subscribe” to. They are able to receive up to the minute information and resources on any given topic.

Since the information is being ranked by humans who are reading the information, the web pages with the most helpful content are receiving higher rankings. This is in comparison to a search engine’s spider that crawls the Internet and has its own way of measuring what pops up in the search engine results.

If you were searching for information on planting soil in a social bookmarking site, you may have very different results than which would come up in a general search engine search.

What does all of this have to do with your business? Basically, social bookmarking is the new “word of mouth” advertising. The more people that bookmark content on your site increases the chance of new users finding your site as they search through various users’ bookmarks.

If a site provides quality content that users find helpful and a little time is spent networking within these social bookmarking sites, a site could have a much higher ranking within the social bookmarking site than it does in general search engine traffic.

Social bookmarking is another avenue of receiving web traffic. With many people taking hits from the search engines, this is another way to receive traffic. This doesn’t mean to ignore search engines or discontinue any search engine optimization efforts. This is simply another method that can increase traffic flow.