What is Social Bookmarking? |
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Social bookmarking is a way for people to save their favorite webpages online. By using social bookmarking online people can access their favorite bookmarks from any computer and share them with other people. Bookmarks are usually stored with tags, single words that describe a page, making it easy for people to search for similar bookmarks or find bookmarks they have saved.
Many of these social bookmarking websites offer unique services and ways of using the submitted bookmarks:
- Del.icio.us users store tags for each bookmark, or words that describe the page's content. Users can browse through their own bookmarks by searching their tags, and other people can find cool new websites by searching all of Del.icio.us's tags.
- Digg.com uses a popularity system, where site members can vote the submitted pages up or down and only the most popular stories make it to the front page. Large numbers of people keep a watch of Digg's top stories and visit the links that look interesting. The websites that make it to Digg's front page benefit from a better Google PageRank and a sudden burst of traffic (this is known as the Digg Effect).
- Technorati.com stores bookmarks for blogs and keeps a close watch on blog updates.
- StumbleUpon.com has a unique system that takes users to random bookmarks based on their popularity.
That's great, but how does this relate to my website?
Social bookmarking is important for any website because it can generate traffic several different ways:
- Browsing - People browsing the social bookmarking websites can come across your site and click in if it looks interesting.
- Searching - People searching social bookmarking websites can find your website. People search social bookmarking sites instead of regular search engines because the bookmarks have been submitted by other people. Somebody searching one of these sites knows that the results will probably be more interesting than results from a search engine and would be more likely to click into your site.
- PageRank - Whether it is Google, Yahoo! or any other search engine's PageRank, it is calculated by the number of links pointing to your website. What's even more important is the quality of the link. Links from social bookmarking websites usually have have more credibility because the social bookmarking websites generally have a higher PageRank and are trusted more than other websites.
- Search Engine Traffic - If you have more links higher PageRank you'll get better rankings in the search results. This means more people finding your website instead of your competitors.
How can I submit my articles to these social bookmarking websites?
Login and submit your own articles!
You could submit your pages one at a time to several of these websites, but that is time consuming and submitting your own content is generally frowned upon. What you really need to do is to make it easy for your visitors to bookmark your pages by adding social bookmarking buttons to each article you write. Every social bookmarking website has a URL that new links can be submitted to. You make it easy for your visitors to submit your webpages by adding buttons that submit your pages to those URLs. There are several scripts you can install on your website that create these buttons for you. If you have a Joomla! website then you can install the Ultimate Social Bookmarking Plugin. It is the best solution available because it is easy to set up, easy to configure, easy to manage and submits the correct link every time. You can see it in use right here on this website. It can place the Digg.com JavaScript badge at the top and several small glossy buttons along the bottom of each article, but you can choose any configuration you want.
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