Social Bookmarking - Increasing Qualified Traffic to Your Site

Social bookmarking is a perfect example of how to generate web site traffic, increase market presence with your personal branding and create quality backlinks. The Internet has by far been one of the most effective ways to create business opportunities and expand. The social aspects of the Internet allow people from all over the world to have access to the same information, interact and share. This has resulted in the world becoming a much smaller, multicultural community. There are several advantages to using social bookmarking sites in addition to other marketing methods to increase qualified traffic to your site.

In case you are not familiar with the term, social bookmarking is a method that allows Internet users to create site bookmarks, tag them with specific key terms that describe the content and share what they have found with others. It has the advantage over the old method of bookmarking in that they are located on a public web site, rather than being located on a single computer. Instead of trying to sort through hundred of book marks that were created weeks, or even months earlier, this method allows you to sort through the tags you assigned. Only the list of sites relating to that topic will be shown.

The advantage of social bookmarking is the human element. When users search the Internet using a search engine, the results are automated. The descriptions are pulled directly from the content of each site based on relevance. This doesn't tell the searcher how useful the site is, they actually have to go read it to see if the rest of the data is valuable. However, when bookmarking is used, the links that are shown are created by like minded people who found the information useful and who want to remember the address for later reference and share with others.

This results in bringing a larger percentage of qualified leads to your site. When joining a social bookmarking site, there is an option that allows you to create a profile, which generates a page of your own. On this page, you add the links for all of your sites in addition to those that you find interesting. This increases visibility and your reputation as an "expert", which in turn helps you build a stable, more active foundation for your social network. The more popular your sites, the more links will be created to them. This increases your standing in the search engines. This improves your ranking faster than search engine optimization alone.