Social BookMarking And Why It Is So Important For Ranking Your Web Site

Social bookmarking has become popular in the last few years. This article has been written to outline the history, what it is and why it is important today.

What is bookmarking?

Many of us use bookmarks or favourites on our own computers to store web sites that we use frequently. This is very useful but today many of us access the Internet from many devices such as laptops, tablets and mobile phones. In these situations, bookmarks stored on our computer are of little use if we are using one of the other devices.

Very often new products and services are invented or introduced to overcome a limitation with existing offerings, as has happened with social bookmarking. Because of the introduction of so many Internet enabled devices and increased mobility, there was a need to enhance the flexibility of traditional bookmarking.

History of social bookmaking

In 1996 social bookmarking was introduced. Put simply users save their favourite web sites to web pages, which means they can access these “social bookmarks” from any Internet enabled device. You may well ask why this apparently simple solution is so important these days.

Very often new products take on a new life as people realise the potential of them. One classic case is text messaging, which originated in December 1992 when a test engineer used a personal computer to send a Merry Christmas via the Vodafone network to a friend. From a simple act, text messaging has now become so popular that it is estimated 200 billion text messages are sent per month.

It cannot be claimed that social bookmarking has grown to such an extent but it has become very important in Internet marketing.

Why Social Bookmarking is So Important

The importance of social bookmarking has become important because of the importance of backlinking. One of the factors that search engines use to rank web sites is the number and quality of backlinks.If your site is linked to a high ranking web site, then the search engines believe that your site is important. One of the factors in determining the importance of a web site is it’s page rank.

Page rank varies from 0-10,10 being the most important.

For example YouTube has a page rank of 9.

Thus if you have backlinks from sites with high page ranks, that will help your rankings in the search engines. The importance of social bookmarking is that you can write an article or record a video and submit it to a social bookmarking site with a link back to your own web site.

The Most Popular Social Bookmarking Sites

It is easy to find the most popular sites by entering the term into the search engines.

Apart from the obvious ones like Facebook, Twitter, pinterest and Google+, there are some less obvious ones.

These include Tumblr, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Digg.

You may be getting concerned that you cannot easily post to all these sites,to which I reply:

1. You do not need to post to them all-do some research and find the ones to which you are best suited.

2. If you use a product like WordPress there are plug ins that will enable you to automatically post to these sites.

3. You don’t just have to post your own articles to these sites as you can also post news.

I will look at sites like Google news and find some interesting articles,and once you click on them many of these will have the ability to share the article. At a minimum I do this for Facebook and Google+, which will frequently be read as the articles are interesting and topical.

Conclusion

I hope you found this article interesting and that you will make use of some of these social bookmarking sites.