Social Bookmarking is a rating tool site visitors use to share their favorite websites, blogs, articles, and web content with others and help their off page SEO. This social aspect makes bookmarking a terrific way to promote a business to a highly targeted niche audience as part of a social marketing campaign all while link building.

What is social bookmarking and how does it work? Social bookmarking is when a user creates a bookmark that tags a website with keywords and sometimes ratings that are user created and shared with others in a bookmarking site. Social bookmarking lets users organize and categorize internet resources as well as provide differing perspectives on content. This creates a collaborative content filter on another website resulting in excellent website promotion for your content.

The beauty of social bookmarking is that content posted on a social bookmarking site that is highly relevant and resonates with readers can spread like wildfire on the internet. Social bookmarking of your web content, blog posts, and articles can result in a highly effective cheap marketing method to reach your target audience. If you find the social bookmarking sites that provide “dofollow” for your links you can rapidly build your web presence and promote your business.

Social bookmarking helps search engines find and rank content that is ‘tagged’ by users. If you provide opportunity for readers to easily bookmark your content you will build links faster, increase web traffic and improve your Page Rank as well.

The more you submit fresh relevant content with links to your site to social bookmarking sites the greater the likelihood of attracting a steady stream of qualified leads and customers to your site. The more people who share a website’s link the greater the webpage’s ranking with the search engines. Most of the social bookmarking sites have a high link value with the big three search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo).

When you create a social bookmark to your page or article you also create an external link to your website or blog. Make sure you use relevant keywords in that link. If someone else bookmarks that same page they are also creating one way links and that increases your site’s ranking with search engines. There are many social bookmarking sites to choose from to help your search ranking:

· Digg

· Del.icio.us

· StumbleUpon

· YahooMyWeb

· Furl

· Reddit

· Blogmarks.net

· Ma.gnolia

· Spurl

· BlinkList

Don’t forget to use social bookmarking to comment on other related sites. A well placed relevant high quality keyword rich comment with a link back to your site can be just as important for SEO and someone linking to you. Aside from the longevity of your site and onsite SEO techniques, getting back links from high authority sites is the primary way to attain high rankings. Without links to your site you can’t stay in the rankings even with great keywords and continually fresh keywords in most cases.

When creating your web site be sure to add the tools to allow your visitors to easily add your site or page to one of the many book marking sites. For WordPress sites there are dozens of plug-in tools and most are free.

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