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.
But do not 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 categorization 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 gauging the importance and relevance of the content and tags which are used on that site.
Bookmarks show how a site is perceived, and when these sites allow voting, they also show the engines or whatever classification system which monitors voting, how people feel about the quality of the site. Furthermore, social bookmarking can introduce a site to the search engines, as in some cases, people may find and bookmark a site or a site’s internal pages before a search engine can find those pages via another form of inbound link.
Social bookmarking is a web 2.0 phenomenon that allows users to create and share “bookmarks”. It is the equivalent of adding a website to your list of favorites, but you can use this set of bookmarks on any computer by logging into your account. The reason why it is called “social bookmarking” is because the users that create the bookmarks can also look at related pages created by other people.
Social bookmarking sites are search engine friendly and within seven days of submission, links start to appear in all major search engines. If you are serious about your sites Link Building, Ranking and Traffic Social Bookmarking is a must.
IBM’s Dogear provides an excellent example of an enterprise social bookmarking tool in action. The developers from IBM Research, David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr, optimized Dogear for intranet use, resulting in tagging capability combined with authentication of the tagger. You can tag intranet as well as internet material, and your corporate-directory presence can have your tags (as can your blogs).
You can see others within your firm with the same bookmarks as well as the bookmarks of individuals. IBM added collaborative filtering to infer stuff that people might want from their tagging activity and let them know about it. IBM has also integrated its enterprise social bookmarking system with its corporate search engines, giving the user access to the benefits of both.
So, the question,? Should you pay any attention to social bookmarking?? And the answer is, make your site worthy of bookmarking. Bookmarks appear to web crawlers 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?
So, visit some of the social bookmarking sites on the Internet. Learn how they work. And set up your own account. Then, create your own list of links that includes your web sites, as well as other web sites that users might find relevant or useful.
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 are looking for extraordinary content, not just run of the mill stuff. It doesn’t matter how great of a writer you are, every single thing that ends up on your blog or your web page is not “vote-worthy”. Social bookmarking has become so competitive that people are asking for votes for every single thing that they put up on the Internet, which entirely defeats the purpose of the entire social bookmarking industry.
With regard to creating a high-quality search engine, a social bookmarking system has several advantages over traditional automated resource location and classification software, such as search engine spiders. All tag-based classification of Internet resources (such as web sites) is done by human beings, who understand the content of the resource, as opposed to software, which algorithmically attempts to determine the meaning of a resource. Also, people tend to find and bookmark web pages that have not yet been noticed or indexed by web spiders.
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.”
Social Bookmarking websites are basically sites that categorize and store ‘bookmark links’ (links which take one to a specific website). Millions of visitors flood these Social Bookmarking sites to search for information.
The implications of social bookmarking are many, and some are not so obvious. Marketers can use social bookmarking sites to collect all kinds of demographic information from a users personal bookmarks, then personalize that user’s advertising experience (one can only imagine the companies advertising to those who have bookmarked the vanishing point site referenced above).
The result would be a much more effective advertising campaign by the vendor than the current scattershot methods, and those social bookmarking sites could in turn charge much more for their advertising space. An interesting proposition if you’re a company looking to target a niche audience.
But could social bookmarking work within the walls of an enterprise? Could a company offer social bookmarking as a reference tool on its intranet, allowing developers, sales executives, janitors, and engineers alike to create their own (or department) repositories for information relevant to their jobs? This could mean the end of the reference manual, as well as the three-hour meeting in which two of those hours are spent reviewing a projects progress. Make the project notes and reference manuals available as bookmarks on the intranet, and that meeting time and brainpower could be put to better use.
By: Todd AshAbout the Author:
