We all use bookmarks quite frequently either by using the browser bookmarking tool or use the keyboard short cut ^D. (control+D) These favorites of ours are stored only on our browsers to visit again. Simply put, Social Bookmarking means storing and sharing the bookmarks stored in your browser in free, public websites that allow you to do it based on tags. Whatever you have stored publicly is sharable by other users of the same social bookmarking websites.
Social bookmarking is an action for bloggers, Internet marketers and researchers to store, organize, search, and manage web pages as favorites on the Internet.
In a social bookmarking system, users save links to web pages that they want to remember and/or share. These bookmarks are:
- usually public,
- can also be saved privately,
- shared only with specified people or groups,
- shared only inside certain networks, or another combination of public and private domains.
The other users can view these bookmarks organized mostly chronologically or by category or tags.
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.
All the users of any social bookmarking site can search for any information by keying in the appropriate label or tag to find your bookmark along with other related results.
They also enable viewing bookmarks associated with a chosen tag, and include information about the number of users who have bookmarked them. Majority of the social bookmarking sites create a tag cloud that denotes the popularity of that particular tag,
Bloggers use social bookmark sites to post the permalinks of their blog posts to drive traffic and getting one way backlinks.
Using social bookmarking sites can be tricky at the beginning but you will get used to it over a period of time. It is advisable to use the ‘bookmarklet’ provided by most of the social media sites to bookmark your blogpost. These bookmarklets are dragged and dropped on your browser’s bookmark toolbar.
All the social bookmarking sites provide a button to vote beside each article. If you vote other people’s sites and they vote your site and you each comment on other’s posts, then you will soon have a network of links pointing back to your site.
Social media sites are already dime a dozen and every now and then, a new social bookmarking site will be launched. There are general social bookmarking sites as well as niche social bookmarking sites that focus on certain topics only such music, old age, education etc.
The popularity of social bookmarking sites varies from time to time but Digg and Delicious are all time favorites.
Google Vs Social Bookmarks
To get to the first page of search engines like Google, you need to worry about your incoming links, your page title, meta tags, the text on your page, and more. Whereas with Social Bookmark sites the only thing that matters is that people like your site, and that you have useful, unique content. This simple rule means that the good pages, articles and links rise to the top, and the useless, repetitive or uninteresting pages sink to the bottom. This concept is what has catapulted Social Bookmarking into the spotlight as the new best thing and why such a large, continually growing number of people now use them.
Social Bookmarking sites are simply another way of finding web pages and information on the internet. The difference being that instead of searching by keywords, or by categories, sites are organized by tags and ratings.