Social Bookmarking Sites: How They Can Help the Webmaster

Social bookmarking is quickly becoming one of the many popular aspects of what we know as web 2.0.  It is becoming a very effective way for web surfers to find the latest information and news on any subject they want.  Social bookmarking sites use viral marketing and popular opinion and have the ability to discover what is important before any search engine bot can spider the site and rank it among the thousands of sites out there on the internet.  It is becoming a crucial part of any business’ online presence and is a source of traffic for your site that should not be ignored.

Social bookmarking is a powerful tool in promoting a website and may just be the best way to boost the traffic to your site.  Webmasters now have the ability to display a variety of bookmarking buttons on their web pages and the surfer can then easily bookmark the site or specific page.  One little click on the relevant button that is being displayed, the surfer will be taken to their favorite bookmarking account.  Multiple social bookmarking sites are combined on one page into one button to make it easier for the surfer and no work is required by the webmaster.

Optimizing your web pages for Google and all the other major search engines is not enough anymore.  The only way to be successful at online marketing is to include the online community as part of your marketing efforts and to not ignore the effectiveness of web 2.0.  Social bookmarking can help you get your sites out there on 47 of the best social bookmarking sites in under 15 minutes.  The more people that bookmark your site, the more organic traffic you will get, as well as backlinks which will give it authority in Google.  Now keep in mind that social bookmarking alone will not give you a top search engine ranking, but it will definitely not hurt your marketing efforts.

If you are going to try to reach the social bookmarking audience, then make sure you include Digg on your pages because the audience is so large.  Digg is a high power authority and a listing will rank highly on Google and other search engines for certain terms.  Searchles is loved by Google, Yahoo and the other major search engines.  StartAid bookmark pages rank highly in Google and other search engines as well.  Listing your sites in Furl will lead to traffic from organic rankings and its popular page drives traffic.  Best of all, StumbleUpon can send major traffic with its user base of around 3 million and currently brings in more traffic than any other social bookmarking site.  A great place to find a button to add all of these services to your site is www.addthis.com and is free.

Free exposure is always going to be the best alternative for the webmaster, and social bookmarking services like these as well as other web 2.0 sites are great ways to get a lot of free exposure and traffic.  This isn’t only good for building backlinks, but people search on bookmark sites to find information as well.  Do not ignore the major bookmarking sites, or you are ignoring some of your potential subscribers or customers.

If one of your main concerns is getting repeat traffic, then you must make it easy for your visitors to add your web pages or site to their social bookmarking services.  Word-of-mouth advertising is often underestimated and overlooked, but this can drive a lot of traffic to your content and create buzz.  Web 2.0 sites like bookmarking services get millions of hits a day, so it would be wise for you to start utilizing them on your site to increase both real traffic and get long term incoming links.