By : Nidhi Gupta

What do you do when you find a great website while surfing on the net and would like to visit back frequently for more details? Yes, you will “Bookmark” or “Add to Favorites”.

This can be done on your web browser – the short cut is “Ctrl + D” But imagine if you have some sort of problem with your web browser and all your favorites are deleted! In today’s world of 24 hour Internet, there is a new form to add these sites to your bookmark list. It’s on the web server itself. There are a great number of sites that allow you to add your bookmarks on their web server. They can be either private (for personal use) or public (viewable to people who visit these sites). Welcome to the world of Social Book marking.

Social Book marking:-

These websites allows users to create account with an option to bookmark their favorite websites under various categories. Users have total control over which category to place websites in. These are stored on their web servers. So how are they useful to webmasters??

It is predicted that in the near future Social Book marking will take the place of Search Engines. To date, people relied on Search engines to find their content. As clever as search engines are, they rely on crawlers/ spiders that crawl automatically through each and every page on the web and rank them according to their own algorithms and index them accordingly. This process is completely automated and involves no human intervention. Hence if there is relatively little information on a web page but it fits the search engine criteria then it may be indexed higher than another website or web page which may be more informative to the user and more specific on the topic. Social Bookmarking is totally user driven. Actual users and not any automatic spiders or crawlers do all the bookmarking. They turn out to be more reliable and more credible as they are from actual people who visit the website and tag them if they find the site credible enough. Due to this factor, people can rely more on these pages for the sort of information they want and can get relevant information and share them with other users.

Though Social bookmarking has been around for more than couple of years, it is receiving immense popularity in recent times. People are becoming more and more conscious about this concept. The more the users getting involved in Social Bookmarking the more Human Indexed sites will be there on these sites. A Webmaster can place their sites under the relevant categories and if the website is really informative they are bound to get more users book marking their site. These sites not only help people find or share useful sites, they also are great tool for link building. There are many webmasters looking for content for their websites or who may like to share the information with their visitors, hence linking to your site for the relevant information. This Link building again helps in terms of SEO and improves your search engine ranking.

All the Social Bookmarking websites are interconnected. This again helps to increase your traffic and get placed in other Social Book Marking arenas.

For Example:

Say your website has been Bookmarked on Del.icio.us or Digg, more people find it useful and hence your site gets popular on Del.icio.us / Digg. The users again may also bookmark on other Social Bookmarking websites and you can get dedicated traffic from multiple sites. Search engines very easily pick up many social book marking websites. Hence if your website is placed under a popular category then the possibility of that link getting picked up is quite more and may result in huge traffic plus a high number of back links which further contributes to your page rank.

Here are some suggestions to take best advantage of getting on popular charts on Social Bookmarking sites:

Once you find that your site has been on the popular chart of these sites like del.icio.us or Digg, you should immediately add something else to your site that may be again found interesting to the visitors. You want to give the impression that your site is constantly updated, so they will feel like coming back and checking it out again tomorrow. For example, writing a follow-up to the first article and linking to it from the first could keep people on your site longer. - Make it easy for them to bookmark you in del.icio.us / Digg or other book mark services.

Make it easy for them to subscribe to an RSS feed.

If you have a mailing list makes it easy for them to sign up. You probably won’t get very many people from this, but it is worth making available.

Mention the fact that you are using Digg / Del.icio.us etc.. These communities like attention, adding a few sentences at the bottom thanking them for visiting your site and maybe suggesting a few other articles they might find interesting is worthwhile.

Add something useful to the community comments or reviews. Usually you can clear up a misunderstanding from other commenter’s / reviewers or something like that. Having the author of an article comment on these sites makes them see you as being “one of them”.

Make sure your site can handle huge traffic from these sites. If you are using some type of content management system on a shared server, they may shut you down for using too many CPU cycles. You can tune things to get rid of extra hits to the database or enable some type of caching. Maybe even just creating a static version of the bookmarked page and using a Redirect to serve it instead of the version from the DataBase (Wordpress often makes 10 to 20 calls to the DataBase per page - this adds up fast for 50,000 visitors. The caching module works very well when properly configured.

Make sure your links are optimized to take advantage of an increase in page rank on the page that was bookmarked. For example, if you probably don’t want to have 100 outgoing links on the bookmarked page - you are better off distributing the page rank to your other site pages.

In my experience, being on any social bookmarking site will have a positive impact on your traffic indefinitely. It won’t stay as high as it was when you are on the front page, but it will probably always be higher than the pre-book marked number of visitors. Usually in a few days you’ll start getting hits from other social bookmarking sites too, people who have blogged about your page from these sites, and even some large sites linking to you.

All of these links will give you an increase in traffic.

Spread the word: related/bookmark it/readit