The Buzz About the Term Social Bookmarking

You might have heard all the buzz about the term Social Bookmarking. Why is it so powerful and different from other web promotion tactics? 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. So the idea of bookmarking is to post links back to your web page from these Social Bookmarking websites. You need to specify some keywords (we call them TAGS) which categorize your bookmark. This allows others to search and even vote for your bookmark. Social Bookmarking is in a league of its own because of its ability to generate traffic by sharing links.

Let's see what some benefits of Social Bookmarking are .

*More Targeted Traffic Since your bookmarks are categorized into different TAGS, you will get very targeted traffic from people searching within a particular TAG. They will click on your bookmark link and visit your site.
*Faster Search Engine Indexing Most of these Social Bookmarking sites have high PR, ranging from 5PR to even 8PR! Therefore, search engine spiders visit these sites so often that your links will be crawled almost immediately!
*Higher Search Engine Ranking Getting quality one-way incoming links is the main factor to higher search engine ranking. With Social Bookmarking, you can get unlimited 'keyword' links to your site. Having more keyword links that are relevant to your site will result in higher ranking.
*Better PageRank Having high PR Social Bookmarking sites linked to your site will improve your site's PR. With a higher PR, you can link to your new/existing sites and improve their ranking too! You can even monetize on it by selling links from your site! It sounds almost too perfect but it is not without its downside. If you run a lot of sites, you might end up getting exhausted!

Social Bookmarking Is Time Consuming... In order to bookmark your sites, you need to manually create your accounts at Social Bookmarking sites. Creation of accounts doesn't take much time because you only need one account. So what is the problem? The problem lies in bookmarking your pages. You have to manually login to your account at each of these Social Bookmarking sites and add your page's url, keywords and descriptions. It will be crazy if you need to bookmark everyday! In my case, I needed some kind of automation real quick and I bought most of the Social Bookmarking tools out there. You know what? There are 3 big problems with these tools:

1) Most Are Spam Tools. Most of the tools are designed to spam the Social Bookmarking sites. These tools will auto-create random account login names and passwords. Their main function is to create multiple accounts and have them bookmark the same url. Having hundreds of accounts created from the same ip address and having terrible randomized usernames will raise a red flag. The Social Bookmarking sites will ban your accounts for sure. Worst of all, they might even ban your ip address!

2) Most Are Over Priced With Monthly Fees. Some of the tools are very limited. They are not designed to bookmark any sites. Some are only made for RSS feeds while others are just plugins for wordpress blogs. I have many landing pages selling affiliate products and they do not have RSS feeds or a blog. I cannot bookmark those pages with these limited tools.

3)Some Are Only Designed For Certain Sites. These tools are sold at cut-throat prices. They know most people are desperate for an automation solution and will pay almost anything to get them. Some even charge ridiculously steep monthly fees for easy upgrades. They make it sound complicated but it isn't! They just want your money!

All Have Duplicate Content Problem.

When you bookmark your sites, you will be bookmarking the same Title, Tags and Description across multiple bookmarking sites. This will create duplicate content issues which will result in the search engines ignoring your bookmarking links. I would not be honest if I said all of them are no good. Each tool has its very own unique feature and I have always wished I could have all those features combined in one software. there are tools out there, you just have to pick what you think will work for you, good luck! and thanks!

I have a good blog with some more info on blogging and other related topics such as social bookmarking. check out my blog here