How Social BookMarking Affects The OnLine Business

There are sure to have been occasions when you have visited a website and thought it would be useful to come back and have another look at some point in the future.  In this instance you are likely to have simply stored it in your browsers “favorites” or “bookmarks” category.   “Social book marking” describes a way in which Internet users can store up, categorize and share their Internet bookmarks.

There are a lot of sites allowing visitors to share the ones they consider to be helpful with other users. These sites can be viewed by topic, category or on a random basis.

The idea of social book marking began in 1966 and became very popular in 2005 and 2006 when sites such as http://del.icio.us, http://simpy.com and http://furl.net began to take off.

As more of these sites appear, new features, for example, allowing users to rate and remark upon the bookmarks, insert notes, receive RSS feeds and even form social networks have popped up.  RSS feeds in particular allow users to obtain up to date information about any given topic on certain tags to which they “subscribe”.

As the details are being graded by people reading the information, the websites containing the most useful pages will receive higher rankings. This is as opposed to a search engine’s spider crawling the Internet, which has its own way of determining what comes up in the results of the search engine.

If you were looking for information about planting soil in a social book marking site, you are likely to receive completely different results to those produced with a general search engine.

You may well be asking what this has to do with your business.   Well, social book marking is the new form of advertising by “word of mouth”.  As more and more people bookmark the content of your website, the chance of your site being found by new users in search of information will increase dramatically.

As long as a site offers quality content found useful by the visitors, a much higher ranking will be established within the social book marking network, than that provided in a general search.

With many people taking hits from the search engines, this is yet another method to receive more traffic on your website.  There is no need to ignore or stop using search engine optimization; - social book marking is just an additional way to increase the flow of traffic.