Social bookmarking is a way for Internet users to organize, store, manage, and search for web pages and content of importance to them. Users save links to these web pages through a social bookmarking service and they are either private, public or shared only with a certain group. Many social bookmarking services provide features such as web feeds, ratings, comments, and emailing of bookmarks. People can view their bookmarks chronologically, by category or tags, or via a search engine and can give access to others who can view them in the same manner.
Businesses should not only focus on SEO, but combine it with social bookmarking as well. All tag-based classification of Internet resources is done by real people who understand the content, compared to software-generated spiders that crawl and index web pages based on algorithms. Businesses can use social bookmarking in order to increase brand awareness and traffic to their websites. Different ways to do so are by curating information on the web and sharing testimonials. Curating information such as news and sharing that content through a social bookmarking service can show that your business is a resource of information and gives it credibility. A business can also organize all their testimonials in one place through a social bookmarking service, which makes it easy for potential partners to look up.
A few examples of social bookmarking services:
Digg
People on Digg can vote stories up or down by giving stories thumbs up or down and the most popular ones are featured in Top News on the Digg website. Each Digg user can find stories chosen specifically for her/him in a personalized area called My News. These stories are based on past news read by the user and also include articles that were tagged by people the user chose to follow.
Newsvine
Newsvine is a collaborate journalism news website where readers can read stories from large media organizations as well as individual contributors. Newsvine users can write their own articles that other users can vote on and popular stories can appear in the Top Wire, Top Seeds, or Top of the Vine on the site.
People using Reddit, “Redditors,” can vote on user generated news links and the most popular stories are promoted on the Reddit front page, which makes way for viral marketing and link building.
Reddit is a great tool for businesses to boost their website or blog traffic and search ranking performance if they can deliver fresh quality content.
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon also lets its users rate a site by giving it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Here the user can write reviews of stories for her followers to read. When indicating a story as a favorite, the user automatically recommends it to her entire network.
Anna
