An Understanding of Social Bookmarking Websites

Social Bookmarking is a method used by internet users to organize, tag, share, store, manage and search for useful links. Social bookmarking is not like file sharing; it does not share resources but shares bookmarks that reference them. Social bookmarking compiles all your favorite bookmarks online on a website so that you can access it from any computer. Bookmarks which you store on your browser are computer specific and can only be accessed through your system but social bookmarking makes your favorites available on any computer system.

To ease searching on search engines, bookmarks can be tagged. For example, you can tag a travel website with ‘travel’. You can either save your bookmark publicly, privately or shared with a group of people. So, if your bookmark is shared publicly, any user who searches for travel websites can read and access your bookmark too. Readers can mark the usefulness of a bookmark by giving it thumbs up or thumbs down. Different websites have different voting criteria. Social bookmarking can also be used as an SEO tool. You can improve the ranking and visibility of the website where the article appeared.

Social tagging, also known as folksonomy, is a process by which users can add metadata in the form of keywords to describe the content of the resource. Social bookmarking websites are useful for increasing the visibility of the lesser known websites. It is a useful tool to increase website traffic, especially so when bookmarks are shared on social networking websites. You can choose the social bookmarking platform to bookmark articles, news, videos, images and other content based on the nature of the content. The most commonly used social bookmarking websites are Delicious, StumbleUpon, Digg, Reddit, Pinterest and many more.