Social bookmarking is a way for you, and all Internet users, to search, categorize, manage and share their favorite web sites. In a social bookmarking system, you save links to web pages you want to remember and/or share. Most social bookmark services encourage you to organize your bookmarks and annotate them with informal tags. Many services provide web feeds for their lists of bookmarks, including lists organized by tags. You get notified of new bookmarks as they are saved, shared, and tagged by other users.
Features such as ratings, comments, import and export, emailing, web annotation, and other social network features are being added daily.
And, you'll want to make sure that if your own company's site is bookmarked that each and every page on that site should be fully optimized for SEO. There are a variety of on page and off page optimization issues you need to address carefully to make sure your site is optimized for the best possible web traffic.
With the rise in popularity of social bookmarking sites, it's apparent that they need to be part of your marketing mix. Listed below are the top 20 Social Bookmarking sites. Together, these sites represent 60 million visitors a month, and you need to address that large and growing market.
(1) Twitter, Share and discover what's happening right now, anywhere in the world.
(2) Digg, Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web.
(3) Y!buzz, The best of the web -- chosen by you -- from breaking stories on major news to viral videos on personal blogs.
(4) TweetMeMe, TweetMeme is a service which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter to determine which links are popular.
(5) StumbleUpon, StumbleUpon helps you discover and share great websites. As you click Stumble!, we deliver high-quality pages matched to your personal preferences.
(6) Reddit, reddit is a source for what's new and popular online. vote on links that you like or dislike and help decide what's popular, or submit your own!
(7) Technorati, Technorati was founded to help bloggers succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the global online conversation.
(8) del.icio.us, The freshest bookmarks that are flying like hotcakes on Delicious and beyond.
(9) Kaboodle, Share recommendations and discover new things from our shopping community
(10) Mixx, Mixx is your link to the web content that really matters.
(11) Propeller, Propeller is a social news portal, meaning that it is programmed by users. Look it up. I bet we have it!
(12) Newsvine, Updated continuously by citizens like you, Newsvine is an instant reflection of what the world is talking about at any given moment.
(13) Fark, Fark.com is a news aggregator and an edited social networking news site. Every day Fark receives 2,000 or so news submissions from its readership.
(14) Slashdot, News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters.
(15) Twine, Twine is a new way for you to collect online content - videos, photos, articles, Web pages, so you can have it in one place and share it with anyone.
(16) ClipMarks, On Clipmarks.com, you can see clips of text, images or video about all sorts of topics that other people find while surfing the web.
(17) dzone, DZone is a free link-sharing community for developers.
(18) Favs, Faves.com's free website delivers recommendations personalized to each user's topics and people of interest.
(19) Blinklist, Easily view your links from any computer and save a copy offline.
(20) Diigo, Diigo is a research and collaborative research tool, and a knowledge-sharing community and social content site.