Social bookmarking is a method for Internet users to share, organize, search, and manage bookmarks of web resources. Unlike file sharing, the resources themselves aren’t shared, merely bookmarks that reference them.

Descriptions may be added to these bookmarks in the form of metadata, so that other users may understand the content of the resource without first needing to download it for themselves. Such descriptions may be free text comments, votes in favor of or against its quality, or tags that collectively or collaboratively become a folksonomy. Folksonomy is also called social tagging, “the process by which many users add metadata in the form of keywords to shared content”.

In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are usually public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. The allowed people can usually view these bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine.

Most social bookmark services encourage users to organize their bookmarks with informal tags instead of the traditional browser-based system of folders, although some services feature categories/folders or a combination of folders and tags. They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Some social bookmarking services also draw inferences from the relationship of tags to create clusters of tags or bookmarks.

Many social bookmarking services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. This allows subscribers to become aware of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.

As these services have matured and grown more popular, they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, web annotation, and groups or other social network features

A lot of people are using the Web for a number of reasons. Some use the Web in order to find certain information that are related and relevant to their field of expertise and specialty, while others merely just search for particular subjects that they want to save for themselves, which could later on be viewed again, and maybe be used for whatever purpose that the user had in mind. You can even get the information that you are seeking from e-mails of other people, or from subscribing to several newsletters, as well as use search engines to uncover the resources that you may need.

Back then, people would organize their bookmarks of online resources using folders in the Web browser, an inefficient way of organizing since people may need to save a resource that is relevant to a number of categories, thereby saving the bookmarked online resource in a number of different folders.

This can be a bit difficult to handle, especially if people need to find the references that they have saved in order to send it to other people through e-mail. Now that social bookmarking is possible, people are now able to create a web of resources and connections without being limited in its applications and operations in the same way as people would be when they did not use social bookmarking.

Social bookmarking, in this case, allows its users to easily and efficiently direct people to the resources or references that they have been able to search, locate, tag and saved. By using only relevant keywords, the user who was able to tag the social bookmarked website can direct people to the website or Web page that they have saved and bookmarked just by looking at the keywords used by the user.

Social bookmarking has been developed based on the bookmarking capabilities of certain websites, thereby making it a whole lot easier for people to not only organize information and categorize resources, but also make social connections with other people who may be interested in the topics or subjects that they have tagged and bookmarked for themselves.

In social bookmarking, people can see who created each bookmark on a particular topic or subject in a particular Web page or website, as well as allows the other person to have easy access to that other person’s bookmarked resources or references. Aside from this, its users can also see all the other users who have used a particular tag or keyword, allowing them to search for all relevant resources and references about the same topic or subject.

Social bookmarking opened a lot of doors for its applications. Nowadays, people not only use social bookmarking for saving and categorizing resources and references, but they take advantage of social bookmarkings web of social connections, using it as a vessel for online marketing for a lot of online businesses, which is proving to be a very effective tool. People also use social bookmarking as a means to improve and boost their site’s traffic, as well as a way to improve their ranking in search engines.

Vanessa Arellano Doctor

http://wirefan.com

Social bookmarking has been around for as long as the Internet has existed. If you found a website or resource that you really liked and wanted others to know about it, you told your friends. The quickest way to tell them was to send them an email or post a message on a forum containing the link to that website so they could look at it and add it to their browser favorites list.

This marked it so it could be found again in the future. That was the old way to spread the word about the things that were new or exciting on the Internet. Now, there are some easier and much more effective social bookmarking tools you can use to get the word out about new things.

Social networking involves “tagging” a website of particular interest so that it can be easily accessed. The tag shows up in two places; one being the user’s profile or website, the second being the original homepage of the tagging bookmark. The tag can appear on a list of favorite websites posted on a blog or website, or it can be a special website designed specifically for these tags, called a bookmarking network. Examples of popular bookmarking networks are twitter, facebook, squidoo, flikr, and wetpaint.

Visitors to those sites can then rate the URL value according to how often a search occurs or that link is clicked on. Popular bookmarks remain at the top while less favorable links and spam are lost to new searches. Social bookmarking can be monitored for trends in the market and is used to introduce new and better products and ideas.

Many consumers, whether they realize it or not, use social bookmarking everyday to decide what products are worth investing in, where to shop, where to eat and other consumer decisions. This is because when they do a search online, the most popular searchable things that have had multiple tags come up first in the list. Tags can be a good way for consumers to gauge whether or not a product or company is legit by who manages the feeds and how often the website is tagged.

Here is a list of some great social bookmarking tools you can use today to boost your website visits and get the word out about new items of interest:

Twitter. Do you twitter? This seems like the most asked question recently by social networking people. This free social networking site works by people who become members and post short updates as they wish on anything in general. It’s advertised as a “service for family, friends and co-workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick , frequent answers to the questions; What are you doing” (Twitter.com) The update feeds can then be posted on the person’s blogs, websites or anyplace else where they want people to know about what they’re doing and talking about. People often post their articles or other tidbits about their businesses with links included to get others to visit their website.

Facebook. This is an international social networking site whereby members sign up free and can post messages and updates whenever they wish. If they include links to their websites or other online items, members can go there to read more about them. Feeds are then available for adding to blogs or websites for real time updates. Facebook is growing in popularity among people who were typically participating in other social networking sites like MySpace, but its attracting more career- and business-oriented people.

Squidoo. This neat little social bookmarking site has nothing to do with sealife. In fact, not only is it a great way for people to interact and post updates, but it allows users to create simple websites called “lenses” for others to read about their special interests or topics. So if you are promoting a certain niche interest, an idea or something related to your business, you can create a page to promote this idea and include links back to your sites. Squidoo offers its members additional tools like forums to come up with ideas to promote their pages and highlights popular lenses all over the Internet.

Flikr. If you’re into sharing more than words and like to include images as part of your networking efforts, then you may like Flikr. This social bookmarking site allows users to post images for others to review. Users can also talk about their experiences by joining either private or public groups. So families can use Flikr to share personal photos, or public groups can share images and talk about things of interest. Each photo is assigned a tag which can be placed on user’s websites and blogs. Flikr rates images according to how many times they’ve been viewed and this list is posted on the community section for all to see.

Wetpaint. This is a Wiki format social bookmarking site that allows members to create a website about anything they are interested in or want to promote. It’s a similar concept to Squidoo, except that it is expanded to include the ability to integrate popular feeds into both your Wetpaint site and your blogs or other websites seamlessly. Wetpaint is supported by not only all the major search engines, but also by all primary news feeds and searches conducted by Internet users. This opens up the possibility that someone who may just be doing a general search will land on your Wetpaint site.

There are so many great tools out there that you can use to get the word out about your ideas and share your blogs and websites more effectively. In just a few minutes, you can be signed up and hooked into the best of what the Internet has to offer. Be sure to check out the above social bookmarking sites to get the most out of these services and increase your website’s searchability.

Social bookmarking is the habit or practice of saving bookmarks to a web site and “tagging”. Social bookmarking sites are a popular way to store, classify, share and search links. Social bookmarking started as a method for Internet users to keep bookmarks that can easily be accessed online and shared with other users in the Web. These bookmarks are given tags to label as well as organize them and the tags illustrate a glimpse of the main content for easier access.
In a social bookmarking system, internet users save links to web pages that they would like to remember and/or share. These social bookmarks are normally public, and can be saved privately, shared only with specified people or groups, shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains. Only the allowed people can view these social bookmarks sequentially, by category or tags, or via a search engine.
But don’t let the use of NoFollow fool you, the search engines are looking beyond the incoming links from social bookmarking sites to gauge their value to their search indexes. The external metadata compiled via user generated descriptions, tags, titles and classification is incredibly valued by the search engines, as in the same philosophy as anchored backlinks, descriptive content about a web site defined by the users of that site who are not associated with the marketing or coding of that site, can be extremely powerful in judging the importance and relevance of the content and tags which are used on that site.
Social bookmarking brings to the equation something that search engines can’t compete with the human touch. Just as the internet has millions of pages, so it also has millions of users, and if even a fraction of those users share the sites they’ve found interesting, useful or just plain bizarre with each other, there is suddenly a vast resource for anyone searching the web to tap into.
Social bookmarking allows you to share your bookmarks with other Internet users in a collaborative sort of way. Normally, social bookmarking takes place on sites where the users can create an account to add their bookmarks to. It’s also helpful to do it on sites that allow you to insert keywords for the types of bookmarks you add. That way, they all can be organized and set into categories that other users can easily search through.
Social bookmarking is a grassroots process that allows users to establish the value of a specific web page, article, podcast, or video. By bookmarking an item, individuals are casting a vote to endorse that specific resource. The idea is that social bookmarking gives a resource credibility; the more users who bookmark a specific item, the more valuable the resource is considered to be. Social bookmarking is all about the collective voice. Most of the social bookmarking networks increase the profile of items that receive a lot of bookmarks. It probably won’t be long before the major search engines begin to include social bookmarks as a part of their ranking algorithms.
Once you become a part of a social bookmarking site, you become a member of that community. You and all the other users are there for the same thing and you can help each other out in finding sites that will benefit all of you. It also makes searching the Web so much easier and quicker. Another great thing is that once you’re part of a site, you can access it from any computer and any browser. That way, you’re never limited in seeing the social bookmarks you’ve been waiting for.
So, the question, “Should you give any attention to social bookmarking?” And the answer is, make your site worthy of bookmarking. Bookmarks appear to web spiders as links to your page, and that makes them very valuable SEO tools. For some search engines, the more bookmarks that lead back to your site, the more “votes” you get! Links which are bookmarked by lots of users on social bookmarking web sites are effectively been “voted for” In fact Google has already started to feature StumbleUpon Reviews in its search results.
On the web-site side, be sure to include the code snippets provided by social bookmarking organizations that allow users to tag your site easily. Then, maintain it all. Don’t just forget your account completely. If you do, eventually it will disappear and all the advantage of having one will go as well. Instead, continue using social bookmarking. Over time, the rewards will be increased traffic to your web site.
Social bookmarking sites help you find great content on the internet. These websites allow users to post content that they like. They also allow them to list and share this content with other users. You need to become a member of these sites first. Some of them are very particular about admitting the right people to their sites, but generally it is quite easy to sign up. The best part is that these sites are free for all internet users.
Social bookmarking leverages the popular social software phenomenon of tagging. Users can apply tags, or keywords, to the bookmarks they save. In social bookmarking, tagging creates a grass-roots taxonomy for the shared bookmarks. Users can search by tags to find bookmarks relevant to their interests. Taxonomies created through bookmarking are called “folksonomies.”
The majority of Web users nowadays are familiar with the term bookmarking — formally known as social bookmarking. Every time you save a Web Site to your list of favorites, with the intent of visiting it again in the future, you are actually bookmarking it.
Social bookmarking is also a way of bringing additional traffic to your site as there are many users who look at the ‘what’s new’ page and decide what to click on. An easy way of tackling social bookmarking is to use Onlywire or Diigo, both of which submit to multiple social bookmarking sites. Once you’ve signed up, this will submit to all the sites except reddit and digg.
Social bookmarking is a way for people to store and organize bookmarks of certain web pages on the Internet with help of metadata. Social bookmarking is done by saving your links to particular web pages that you want to remember or perhaps, share with other users. Social bookmarking is an all-out phenomena and is growing at a sonic boom clip. Understanding social bookmarking gives you the ability to reach millions of users you might otherwise miss. Properly utilizing social bookmarking gives you an additional edge in more traditional search engine marketing.

Through a social bookmark, an Internet user can bookmark his or her favorite website or an online article and store, organize and share it with other users online. These social bookmarks are open to public and may be accessed by all who are interested in seeing what you have bookmarked. With the maturity and popularity of these services, various features have been added to them like rating and commenting on the bookmarks, importing and exporting them from browsers and e-mailing them. As far as creation of high-quality search engines is concerned, the system of social bookmarking provide various advantages over the traditional programmed classification and resource location software like a search engine spider.

All the tag-based classification of websites is done by humans and not by software programs who generally do not understand the resource content. Web spiders notice and index only popular web pages but people can find those who are not even found by the web spiders. In addition to that, software programs rank the web pages depending upon the number of links pointing to them but social bookmarking is done depending upon the number of times the users have bookmarked the web pages, the feature which can be extremely helpful for the end users.

For the Internet users, social bookmarking system can be extremely useful as a means to access consolidated sets of bookmarks through different computers, organize various bookmarks and share them with user contacts.

Some of the great ways of social bookmarking are:

• Choosing a network: Selecting a network of social bookmarking only after proper and extensive research can be really useful. You must choose one of the popular networks only as it will attract more web visitors in comparison to the less popular ones.

• Signing up: After selecting a popular network of social bookmarking, sign up on it and take advantages from it. In order to avoid problems in future, read the basic rules and strictly follow them.

• Categorizing: Categorize your bookmarks depending upon their group like hobbies, recipes and science. Keeping them clean and simple can help in preparing right takes on your bookmarks.

• Tagging: Tagging the websites that you visit can be helpful in providing useful information to the network. Therefore, it will make your bookmarked page popular and well known in your entire network.

• Adding social bookmark links to the website: This will attract visitors to the site and help in getting more web traffic.

• Making it popular: By bookmarking interesting and important information and allowing the readers to make use of them can really make your website extremely popular. The more useful the content of your website, the more popular it will be.

• Using it as search engines: Social bookmarked web pages can also serve as a search engine and may work even better than web spiders.

• Submitting the website to the social bookmarks: This will be helpful in getting more web visitors on the bookmarked website.

• Helping the visitors to re-visit: You can help your visitors to come again to your site by allowing them to bookmark your website.

If you are new to Internet marketing you might not be aware of how much social marketing sites can do to boost the traffic coming to your Internet marketing start-up business. You may not even be aware of what social networking and social bookmarking sites are, or how to utilize them.

Sure, social sites give you a lot of interactivity and allow users to personalize their sites, compile a list of favourite links, videos, music, photos, documents and share it all with friends and visitors, but how exactly does that help you develop your Internet marketing start-up business?

Above all, you should be aware that social media marketing sites fall into two basic categories, bookmarking sites and networking sites, so you need to be clear about what you want to do?

Social Bookmarking Sites

Social bookmarking sites allow you to build and organize your favourite links (i.e. bookmarks) AND you can choose to restrict them to selected friends or make them public and share them with everybody on the Internet.

The big advantage of social bookmarking is that your favourite links are no longer tied to one specific browser accessible from just one computer in one location.

Social bookmarking services enable users to save bookmarks on a remote web server which can be accessed anywhere where there is an online connection.

Social bookmarking sites usually categorize links with a “tagging” system which allows users to choose keywords with which to “tag” their bookmarks. Sites can then be retrieved via the tags.

You may invite visitors to bookmark your posts. You can do this by adding a button to your page that links through to Stumbleupon, or Digg, or TwitThis and so on.

However, there are so many social bookmarking services, that if you added all their buttons you’d end up with more buttons than content on your page! Instead, use a service like addthis.com, which places one button on your site for a wide range of social bookmarking sites.

Social Networking Sites

Social networking sites offer a convenient method of connecting with people who share similar interests to you.

Sites like Facebook and MySpace allow you to post your advertisements and promote your products, as long as you do not simply (and stupidly) send out spam. Traffic will build on any site that has original, good quality, regularly updated content.

MySpace or Facebook?

It has recently been noised abroad that MySpace is no good for Internet marketing, but that is not so. It was simply a case of too many Internet marketers not knowing who their audience was.

The point is that MySpace tends to attract a younger age bracket with less money to spend than does Facebook. Get to know the sites and adapt your content to each one, don’t simply post the same stuff to both.

One other reason why social networking sites are sometimes dismissed as not being any good for business is that some people do little more than set up a profile. Then they get stuck, don’t know what to do, do nothing. Merely being there is not enough! Find ways to communicate with the people who are there on their terms, not yours.

Go careful, though, that you don’t go overboard with the crazy applications and the “late night partying confessions” stuff if it is not the sort of thing you want your clients to see!

Whereas social bookmarking sites are simply sites for you to collect and organize your favourite links, social networking sites, being more sociable, require more time and regular fresh content updates. With social networking sites you have to work on your image!

Search Engines Love Web 2:0!

Another reason why Internet marketers should build a presence on both social bookmarking and social networking sites is because search engines LOVE them!

Links posted on such sites are regularly followed by search engine spiders. So, by building up your links on these sites, your website backlinks will grow, and so will your search engine rankings, which is what you need if your Internet marketing start-up is to survive, grow and thrive.

Make the Promotion Accessible and easy

I was in Las Vegas on business recently and found myself checking the foursquare promotion and I wandered up and down the strip and found that my foursquare app was working overtime with all the offers. Whilst in the Wynn I noticed that they were offering free champagne at Blush Nightclub for all check-ins.  I also got 2 VIP tickets for Moon from the Palms and plenty of offers for free drinks, slot credit and food offers everywhere I went.

Educate Your Staff

So you go to all that effort in sorting out a really special offer for local clients and a foursquare customer walks in and asks for his free coffee or whatever and the floor staff look blankly at each other. You must get everybody on board and enthuse you staff to know about foursquare and your offers to them.

Educate Your Customers

Foursqaure is different from other social networking sites as it offers its users local quality discounts on products and services they are actually looking for. Its only by encouraging your clients to embrace all that your store or business has to offer that they will fully understand exactly what you can do for them and this is the key to building customer loyalty.

Be Smart

It is never a good idea to make your offers too hard to achieve or too difficult to redeem. The old story about keep it simple stupid (KISS) is as relevant today as its ever been. You need customers to drop by and check in and the will keep on coming if the deals are there and if the mayorship is constantly changing hands. The very last thing you ant is that the mayor is someone that works there, it will appear as a swizz and that will come back and bite you.

Follow-up

One of the best ways to get your clients to come back is to engage with them. Don’t spam them and that will drive them away but a nice thanks for stopping by tweet after a meal or a visit to a club is always welcome.

Addition information on Foursqaure Markets is available from Freelance SEO Gareth

I thought about this question long and hard over a cup of well deserved Columbian coffee before immersing myself into the article. He went on to discuss that with all that today’s web masters/minions have to do is the time and effort actually doing social bookmarking really cost effective?

It’s a discussion I had with a college of mine recently and he like the author had doubts to the effectiveness of all that time tweeting , Digging etc. The author went on to say “ If it turns out that Social Media Marketing is not for you or your business just don’t do it. There’s nothing wrong with passing up on the trend. Do however keep social media marketing on the back burner for the future. It might not be right for your company today but it may be worth evaluating again. “

It was refreshing reading an article where the writer was advocating that just because others do it and there is a huge band wagon driving down Main Street it may not be the best use of time or budget for each and every company.

He finished on another point that is well overlooked and that it’s fun to engage with your clients in this manner and sometimes you can’t quantify this huge plus point in terms of dollars alone… I for one agree that for this reason alone SMM is not just another piece of the jigsaw and its importance cannot be overlooked…

Ezra Silverton can be reached at the well known 9th Sphere SEO Company Toronto

But of course, this isn’t just a matter of simply submitting your website to an online bookmarking site. There are certain considerations that need to be taken. The first of which would be the online bookmarking site itself. It has to be one of the more reputable and popular ones. After choosing the social bookmarking websites, you would then have to think up a fitting description for your website. It has to be informative yet enticing. It has to be just long enough to let the reader know about what your website is about but at the same time, short enough to make them curious as to what you might be able to offer them. Last but not the least; you should definitely tag your website properly. This is because a good majority of these social bookmarking websites sort and organize the submissions through these tags. Basically, you wouldn’t want your website getting lost in the mix and ending up in the wrong classification. So there you have it. Just a few tips and reasons to get you started on using social bookmarking websites to help promote your own blog or web page. Good luck!