Social Bookmarking: Jump to the Top, but Don't Cheat

As a quick side comment, it is important to note that those who try to deceive and cheat the existing systems usually find themselves in a situation that is worse off than they were to begin with. Easy as it sounds, cheating is really quite tempting, especially when dealing with a system like social bookmarking services, in order to attempt to manipulate the system to artificially get your Website to jump to the top.

The underlying problem about the potential for cheating through social bookmarking is simple: if you do find success in manipulating the system, but do not possess the content, much less a high-quality one to really earn a featured placement, you will certainly displease more Web visitors than pull towards you. If your content has ample quality to merit a featured placement, it should rise to the top naturally without any additional effort besides writing and publishing it yourself.

Social bookmarking is already becoming a very efficient approach that savvy Web surfers employ in order to search for the latest information concerning a particular subject. Social bookmarking simply has immense potential in reaching avenues where search engines cannot--by means of "viral" marketing and popular opinion, social bookmarking presents the capacity to discover what is important before any "bot" can spider the Website and rank it among the thousands of sites available out there. Nevertheless, social bookmarking will never replace search engines completely, but as its popularity escalates as time progresses, Web users are rapidly realizing a whole new way to dig up Web pages that they would never discover by any other means.

So take the time today to examine the various social bookmarking services available. There is no harm in trying out something for free. Yes! Fortunately, these services are free until now. Take a little more time to learn about the capabilities that social bookmarking services possess and find out if it suits your needs--in my opinion, it certainly does in a world that more and more relies on the Internet for information and for linkages worldwide. Social bookmarking Web sites offer features that seem to make users on these sites click more and more. One should grab the opportunity that social technologies are now providing. These are certainly here to stay, and there is no other way for their popularity to go but up. Right now is a golden opportunity for you to gain great exposure for your Website if you simply learn how to use social bookmarking services.

The potential power that a social bookmarking offers is truly phenomenal. Information is not only faster to transmit, but easier to find. As the popularity of social bookmarking services grows in due time--and for certain it will--the likelihood of having some users utilize the service for spamming and junk propagation also rises. If ever you intend in taking advantage of the power of social bookmarking, just remember that associated with high gains is a correspondingly immense responsibility. If you plan to induce your Websites and Webpages to jump to the top of the search rankings, be sure to provide high-quality content that the users need. With high-quality content, you certainly provide enticing information, thereby generating you a lot of traffic in return. The point is to not cheat on your way to the top.

Why Search Engines Like Social Bookmarking Sites

Social Bookmarking

A social bookmarking site is a website where many users can manage their own private bookmarks and share their favorite websites or web pages with a community of users. Del.icio.us, the most popular social bookmarking site, boosts over 3 millions of users. The early social bookmarking site itlist.com was launched in 1996, but the trend of socal bookmarking won't make the waves till 10 years later.

Many web surfers have hundreds or even thousands of items on their bookmark list. They often have hard time to find the items they've bookmarked and the idea of an online tool as such bookmark sites are born naturally to help millions of users to better organize their favorite web pages. A social bookmark site does more than that by allowing users to share their favorites with each other.

How Search Engine Rank Web Pages

All major search engines rank web pages by quality score and relevance score. The quality scores are calculated by the links from other page since the search engines don't know how to evaluate page content. The relevance score is calculated by both on-page content and the page content that link to the page. The idea is simple. A link from page A to page B is a vote to page B even though there's no way to know that vote is "for" or "against" page A. The number of links to a page is a good measure of popularity of that page. Assuming we naturally ignore bad pages, link popularity is a good measure of page quality. The problem with current search engines' ranking algorithms is that majority of web users don't know how to or don't want to create web pages. Even for those who've created hundreds of pages, they spend 99% of their time on quality of page content which the search engines will never know or figure it out unless you have a lot of links pointing to that page. They have no interests creating links to whatever good or bad pages. The web surfers of 2007 won't get excited by any sites they found (which was true in 1997). The idea of measure page quality by links is based on the observation of user behaviors ten years ago.

Search Engines Meet Social Bookmarks

If someone has the ability to collect bookmark files from all hundreds of millions of web users and process the billions of links in all bookmark files, the rankings of web pages derived from the bookmarks would be a more accurate representation of votes to the web pages. Of course, this would never happen. The closest thing to this scenario is the links on social bookmarking sites. Three million users on Del.icio.us is a statistically significant sampling of the entire web user universe which is estimated at a few hundred millions. It is reasonable to think that major search engines do consider links on social bookmarking sites a very important factor in their ranking algorithm at least while ranking pages for very popular keywords.

Social Bookmarking: A Paradigm Shift

The worldwide web has become a fathomless ocean of information available at the tip of your fingertips, where ignorance has no excuse. Access to seamless knowledge is easy, but retrieval of information relevant to a certain purpose can put your patience to a test. Where exactly do you start?

In a labyrinth of sites throughout the internet, to retrieve information at will is more difficult than finding a piece of needle among haystacks. Remembering specific location of information that need further study may pose a challenge as well.

Bookmarking was born out of these necessities.

Some people access the internet on "borrowed time" - during a coffee break, in the course of research, or in the middle of a conference session. Information they want to keep either for reference or for keepsake find a special place in the bookmark, the most convenient place to store valuable information while in haste.

Bookmarking can be done on addresses in the internet that you frequently visit. This aids you in locating valuable information, at once. News items you wish to read further, or do lengthy research on, can also be put in this special repository. Bookmarking is highly functional - almost anything can be saved for later.

But there are disadvantages as well.

Ordinary bookmarking in your PC's browser may allow you to save valuable information but restricts your access to this information in your PC alone. Accessing it from an internet café, your school's library or from the workplace is futile.

When you have overloaded your browser with stored information, retrieval may slow down, then you are back on square one - you will be finding pieces of needles among haystacks again.

Don't despair. Social bookmarking is now here.

Social bookmarking has definite advantages and features, alien to ordinary bookmarking. For one, it has gone public.

Social bookmarking is shared by individuals belonging to a similar bookmarking service like Wirefan. It allows them access to their personal bookmarks anywhere, share these among their friends, or boost their collection with additional bookmarks coming from online friends, as well.

In short, social bookmarking transforms the concept of a once-private activity into a progressive interchange of information among people sharing what they find and gather from their virtual existence.

Every bookmark falls under a classification labeled with "tags". Retrieval of select information becomes easier since tags describe what's in store in the bookmark. Organizing and sharing of bookmarks among friends become hassle-free.

Browsing bookmarks belonging to other people, as well as allowing other people to view yours is made possible by social bookmarking, in fact, this feature defines what is "social" in social bookmarking.

Bookmarks do not merely define your preference, they tell your story. Remember, you are what you hold most dear to your hearts. Therefore, bookmark only what is good, fair and inspiring. We are directly responsible for the kind of influence we put on others.

Christiene S.C. Villanueva

Social Bookmarking For Internet Marketers

Social bookmarking is one of the hottest Web 2.0 online trends. The concept of social bookmarking is about 10 years old, but due to its recent explosive growth, it has just now become one of the new internet "buzz words".

It's important for internet marketers to understand social book marking and how it can help them promote their products and services.

So, what is social bookmarking and why is it important to internet marketers?

What is Social Bookmarking?

You are probably already familiar with bookmarking web sites, that you want to visit again, using your Internet Explorer or Firefox web browser. The bookmarks you create to these sites are for your personal use and are stored on your computer.

Social Bookmarking is the next step in bookmarking, where you and others can share bookmarks to web sites you think may be of interest to others. This is done via online Bookmarking services. After you have signed up for the Social Bookmarking service, you will be allowed to register a website, site description and tags (keywords) with the service - this is a bookmark. You will also be allowed to share this bookmark, or you can keep it private (depending on the service). This information is stored by the Social Bookmarking service, and is not stored on your computer.

What is Online Bookmarking's Purpose?

There are really two major purposes behind Web 2.0 bookmarking.

1. The main purpose of Web 2.0 bookmarking is to have people with like interests bookmarks sites that they think would be useful, or interesting, to others who have the same interests. For example, I love fly fishing. Let's say I find a site that contains some great custom-built fly fishing rods for an inexpensive price. I would bookmark that site with one of several possible bookmarking services. I would give the site I'm bookmarking a title, a description and tags (keywords) related to inexpensive custom built fly fishing rods. I would make sure the bookmark is set to public so others could find it, and would then have have created a social bookmark.

Now when people search the bookmarking service, using the tag words used to define the bookmarked sites, they are presented with a list of related sites. Using our fly fishing example above - When someone searches for "fly fishing rods" they would be given a list of related sites, including the custom fly fishing rod site we bookmarked. Most bookmarking services also have a rating system so the most popular sites are at the top of the list.

2. Another great benefit of Web 2.0 bookmarking is, once you have social bookmarked your favorite sites, you can easily find those bookmarked sites from any computer connected to the internet. You simply log into the online social bookmarking service and find the website you bookmarked. This can be very helpful if you have many websites you like to monitor, when you are away from home and you are not at your primary computer.

Why is bookmarking important to internet marketers?

Since online bookmarking sites are generally very popular sites that get a lot of traffic, they have high Google page ranks and are visited often by search engines. Submitting your site to the social bookmarking services, increases the chance your site will be crawled by the search engines. I have seen my sites crawled by Google only one day after registering my site to social bookmarking services.

Submitting to Web 2.0 bookmarking services is also a great way to get one way, incoming, high page rank links coming to your website which helps increase your page rank.

But most importantly, if your website is seen as having value to a group of people, your bookmark can be rated highly and can create a ton of very targeted traffic to your website.

Social bookmarking is growing at a phenomenal rate and if you want to market on the internet, you need to add online bookmarking to your set of internet marketing tools.

Social Bookmarking, Anyone Can Do It - Even You

Social bookmarking is an online tool that allows anyone to easily bookmark their favorite sites into an online archive. The bookmarks can be categorized and even organized with subject tags. By far the greatest advantage of having an online bookmark is that, up until now, when you saved a bookmarked site on your PC; it was only useful when you were using that particular computer. This meant you couldn't easily share or take the bookmarked sites with you, unless you dragged your PC along as well.

Online bookmarking allows you to do all of these things, for example you can share favorite sites with friends, family and even complete strangers. You even can access your bookmarked sites from anywhere in the world, provided that you have Internet access, without dragging your PC along for the ride. This is ideal if you travel or if you use more than one computer.

Never again do you have to risk losing important sites or trying to scribble down sites that you want to visit again when commuting from one computer to another. Even worse, having to search for a site all over again because you don't have access to the computer where your favorites are stored.

Some of the benefits of using a social book-marking site include being able to access sites from anywhere. You can also share your favorites and let others share their favorites with you. When you are exploring other people's bookmarks or favorites, you may find that there are sites that you would like to include in your favorites list as well. You can also get information about popular websites from other users or find out what other people are interested in. Social bookmarks are an ideal resource for bloggers

To add to the usefulness of social bookmarking, you can give your website a boost in the search engine page rankings. The reason that it is possible to boost your search engine ranking by using a social bookmarking tool is because the social book-marking site usually has a very high search engine ranking. These websites are obviously going to attract so many links, traffic and content that it would be hard for the search engines not to notice them.

By being added to the bookmark site, you have linked or pointed to your site from the bookmark site. This means that, in essence, a highly ranked site is linked to you and this will do wonders for boosting your search engine rankings.

Introducing Social Bookmarketing

Marketing a website can be quite difficult and expensive. As technology and the internet advance, new forms of marketing arise. The latest, which I will coin, is bookmarketing.

Social bookmarking allows users to submit a website url to their list. The website url is then viewable on their website and will start receiving traffic almost immediately. There are many different social bookmarking website, from digg.com which is mostly article related, to del.icio.us which is pure url. Submitting multiple times and extensions of the same url to these websites can be considered spam, but one submission is fine.

To maximize bookmarketing, post a link on each of your pages to increase bookmarks sites. This makes it much easier for your visitors to bookmark your site on numerous social websites. The most popular social bookmarking sites are stumbleupon.com, myweb, digg.com, and del.icio.us. Instead of manually placing links to each social bookmarking site, socialize-it.com allows you to place a small piece of code on your website, which automatically creates links to many bookmarking sites.

Our tests have shown that significant traffic can come from social bookmarking sites, namely digg.com and stumbleupon.com. In fact, our test site went from 220 unique visitors per day to over 350.

For more information on this subject matter, visit [http://www.websiteblog.org]

'Social Bookmarking' As An Aggressive and Acceptable Blog Marketing Tactic

Social bookmarking websites are becoming more and more

popular. They allow you to save bookmarks online and

Tag/Categorize them with keywords instead of saving them

as bookmarks in the favorite's list of your browser.

This is particularly useful when your browser based

bookmarks have become unwieldy. It's also help since

you can access your bookmarks from any computer where

you have an internet connection.

I have compiled a list of Social Bookmarking websites from

a number of sources. You can find it here:

[http://www.blogmarketingtactics.com/social-bookmarking/social-bookmarking-top-links.html]

Once you have bookmarked them, you can view them, sort

them by category/keyword as well as see links from others

that have been categorized like yours.

You also establish RSS feeds for each category (tag) that you

'subscribe' to. This alerts you to new links in your areas of

interest. Your bookmark collection/RSS Feed becomes

viewable to others who can also copy your bookmarks to their

own collection. So now you can aggressively promote your

RSS feed to the RSS Directories and Search engines,

syndicate them and make them available to a much wider

audience.

Social bookmarking sites also help you to meet other people

who are interested in the same topics you are and who may

also have knowledge of web resources that you don't.

On Social Bookmarking sites, you first create an account.

Then you bookmark interesting and useful things in the area

of your interest or expertise. By doing so you create a

useful Feed. Once you've done that you intermittently,

(or aggressively), add useful and interesting items, (that

could use additional exposure), from your own content.

Make an honest effort to contribute USEFUL information

and links. This is all about sharing and exposure. Done

properly, you can be as aggressive as you want to be about

sharing information. You can share your blog(s), links to

your informational/resource sites etc. Think about the fact

that when you share links to other's resources, you're also

effectively promoting their content as well.

This is a way you can aggressively and ethically promote

your content and the content of others. I personally

have hundreds of gigabytes of my own information and

information of others, connected to my notebook. In the

final analysis, it's doing me no good what-so-ever just

sitting there. But by organizing it, online, I can help

myself, (getting organized, getting my content exposed,

etc.) and help others at the same time.

If you spice up your feed with too much sales and

marketing related or self promotional stuff, people

can and will easily drop their subscription to your feed.

And instead of gaining good will and doing a service

to the internet community you could get labeled as a

spammer and suffer the consequences.

So while being aggressive is possible and acceptable,

being careful to consider the best interest of the

community is certainly warranted.

Balancing being ethical and providing a useful service

to others with promoting your own content enables you

to be as aggressive as you like. But remember, in the

final analysis, others will make the decision on whether

it's ethical and useful or spam.