The web is connected through links. Ongoing and managing links gave way to the concept of bookmarks. Links which are registered and tagged by different users form a library of information for the user to be able to retrieve. If this library gets shared with other users on the web then each user with their own library of information provide a wealth of information for you to share and retrieve at will. Coupled with this is the possibility of rating information so that the better rated bookmarked webpages become more popular than the poorly rated ones.
These links are tagged using keywords or labels (can be referred to as a form of meta data) assigned by the user. Users tag content for ease of retrieval. The ability to draw out tags from a like minded social network as against a web based search engine provides more value to the information or research at hand.When a number of users bookmark their favourite pages and apply a tag to each page they bookmark, the most popular pages rise to the top.
Social bookmarking sites allow you to tag and share information. The more they are used the more is the value added to them and all those who are a part. Each site is its own variant in what it offers to the user community.These range from giving information on the number of users that have bookmarked the webpage, option to rate and rank a page,draw inferences from the tags, provide web feeds etc. These also vay in the quality and type of audience they serve.
flickr users generally manage their own digital photos for sharing; Technorati uses tags supplied by users.These tags describe their blogs so that they can be discovered by others; del.icio.us aggregates tags, links, photos from within the social community and is designed to allow you to store and share bookmarks on the web, instead of inside your browser; Digg aggregates news and so on……
How do these social bookmarking sites really help your website?
If you have good unique content that can be accessed by anyone your site will meet with approval from users and gain popularity. Social bookmarking can reach where search engines may not reach as quickly. If your webpage has something of value to offer, you do not have to wait to get your webpage ranked so that it can get viewed by other people - within the right network your content gets circulated fast - enough to drive traffic to the site directly.
Tags: online marketing, social bookmarking, Social media, web marketing, web traffic