As you probably know; the trend these days is towards user-driven indexing systems and away from conventional search engines. One of the most popular user-driven indexing systems, and what I can personally consider as the heart of the next generation of marketing strategies, is social bookmarking websites.

Social bookmarking may be a relatively new concept, but it’s something that’s not really difficult to understand.

Surely, your browser has a “save to favorites” feature, right? Saving a particular URL under your My Favorites folder is called bookmarking. Hence, when a web page asks you to bookmark such a site, it simply means that it’s inviting you to save it under you’re my Favorites folder. Social bookmarking websites allow you to, well, bookmark your favorite URLs on the web server instead of your hard drive. What does this mean for the typical Internet user? It’s more convenient. He can bookmark any website on the fly via some proprietary systems employed by most social bookmarking websites.

Furthermore, the user can also classify his bookmarks according to tags or keywords. So, what do these things mean for the Internet marketer?

We must also remember that social bookmarking websites allow the users to share their bookmarks with other people, along with the tags they have used to categorize the URLs they have chosen. Hence, if you have gathered links and indexed them according to their appropriate tags, you can share such categorization with other people, either publicly by allowing anyone to access your list of bookmarks or privately by sending your list of bookmarks to the people you know.

Imagine the possibilities then.

It’s like having your very own search engine wherein you have arranged the results beforehand!

Eventually, people will prefer social bookmarking websites over their browser’s built-in function. Social bookmarks remain on the web; hence, people can access them wherever they are on the globe. No need for a laptop or an external hard drive. Simply log into the social bookmarking website of your choice and you’ll be able to review your favorite URLs.

Eventually, people will prefer social bookmarking websites over search engines as well. It is more reliable for all the reasons we have mentioned in the previous chapter.

Let’s have a rundown on the important benefits that social bookmarking can bring to your marketing campaigns:

• Direct traffic. Since social bookmarks can be shared, you’ll be able to expose your links to more people.
• Best marketing strategy for webmasters who are operating a lot of websites. Social bookmarking will allow them to categorize each and every website they have under appropriate tags. No website will be left behind.
• Increased link popularity. Link popularity refers to the number of websites linking to yours. Off page SEO techniques are geared towards increasing your link popularity. You can check out your current link popularity by using the free tool that can be found at www.linkpopularity.com . Since other websites can access social bookmarks, they can use the links therein and eventually, you’ll find your pages to have more favorable positions in the search engine results.

Even established search engines are realizing the growing significance of social bookmarking websites. Yahoo, for example, has launched such a service despite their reputation as a search engine company. MyWeb is a Yahoo subsidiary that will allow its users to bookmark websites through its web server.

The number of social bookmarking websites is sure to increase in the coming months. This is testament to how potent and exciting this strategy is, not only from a marketing perspective, but also from a general utilitarian perspective as well. And much like the tag and ping method that only a few marketers are using these days, social bookmarking is a tactic that has yet to be fully exploited.

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Now is the best time to use this method, well ahead of your competition.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 8th, 2008 at 10:58 pm and is filed under Videos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.