Killer Social Bookmarking Tactics You Need to Know About

Social bookmarking has become a great way for webmasters to get traffic to their sites. People see your Digg, StumbleUpon, or Reddit vote and they're intrigued. They want to come to your site and see what you have going on that will interest them. Bookmarking sites are a kind of search engine for folks looking for specific information or for simply surfing the Web.

The difference between Google and Digg is that Digg and the other bookmarking sites are user-driven, rather than spider-driven. People vote on the sites and information they like best, and they share it with other folks so they can vote for it, too. Of course, people also have the option of burying stories, so you want to be sure that you're pursuing social bookmarking in just the right way.

First off, the title of your bookmark doesn't have to be the title to your article, website, or video. In fact, it probably shouldn't be, unless you have a really curiosity arousing title devised for it. That's the key. You need to get people interested enough to click through. Remember you're competing with millions of other sites and other bookmarks online.

Here are some titles skimmed from Digg today:

"A Dangerous Dysfunction "The Drinking Man's Guide to the Hangover" "Russian Cat Theater" I mean, come on... Who wouldn't want to see cat's perform? But do you get the idea? It's all about getting people to click through to your bookmarked site, whatever it is.

You also want to write a great description for the bookmark. This extra bit of information should be designed to increase the curiosity that you began to arouse in your title. Don't give away the whole summary, just enough to make people click. This works for articles, websites, videos, or blog posts.

However, when it's a blog, people make the mistake of bookmarking the entire blog, which happens when you bookmark the root domain. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, but you can only do it once.

What you want to do is bookmark the post. To do that, you simply click on the title of the post. The URL in your address bar should then look something like this: http://blogaddress.com/post number/post title or it can have a p=number at the end, if folks haven't changed their permalink structure. But that's what you want to bookmark, not the whole blog.

The last thing to remember is that you need to bookmark more than just your own content for your bookmarking to be effective. You need to become part of the community and offer sites of interest or you'll be considered a spammer. You really don't want that. So, when you find a site you really like, be sure to add it to one of the bookmarking sites that you frequent and give value to the community at large, as well as offering your own information for their consideration.