Social Bookmarking

Are you ready for the next evolution of search as we know it?

Thousands and thousands of people all over the planet are turning to a new way to find relevant information that does not rely on a stuffy search engine algorithm to serve results.

Instead a new system is in place and it is growing exponentially. Enter the beginning of the web 2.0 era - Social Bookmarking.

What is Social Bookmarking?

It is basically a system that allows Internet users to bookmark a site without storing it on their local computer. Instead it is stored at another location that is publicly accessible. The bookmark is "tagged" with keywords that the user decides are relevant to the content of the bookmark.

For example: Lets say I find a site that I really like about Playstation 2 games. I want to bookmark it but not in the old way. I want to be able to find my bookmark later but I may not remember where I put it or what I called it, so I assign it keywords (tags) that will help me to find my bookmark later.

I might tag the link as: video games, playstation, cool games, games, gaming

Using tags, I can easily find my bookmark at a later date without having to remember where I put it. Even better, my bookmarks are not stored on my local computer so I can access them from anywhere.

I can assign one bookmark to multiple categories so I have the comfort of knowing that I can easily find that bookmark later.

Not only can I find my bookmarks that I "tagged" with certain keywords but so can anyone else. This is social bookmarking.

The group effect of this is amazing. You don't have to waste your time looking for relevant and on topic information. You can go to any social bookmarking site and do a search using tags (keywords) and find relevant, human reviewed, content that was important and relevant enough for another user or users to bookmark it and tag it under your category of interest.

You no longer have to waste your time searching for quality information. This is how search engines should be. Your results shouldn't be decided by a search engine algorithm but by real people who have voted for (bookmarked) relevant content.

More and more savvy Internet users are moving their searches away from the big impersonal search engines to the warm and friendly, user contributed, searches that are made possible through social bookmarking.

The biggest appeal of these social bookmarking sites is that they are organized by humans and for humans.

Social bookmarking is growing fast. You need to learn it and use it because the old search engine way of finding information is not going to remain the primary way that Internet users find information. Social bookmarking sites are starting to pop up all over the place.

Another interesting aspect of tagging is the fact that tagging results are starting to appear in the major search engines.

Go to Yahoo and do a search for the keyword "wordpress". At the time of this writing Technorati's wordpress tag appears in the number 3 position. If you just posted a blog article about wordpress and tagged it under the tag "wordpress" then your link would show up in position one if someone were to click technorati's wordpess tag link off of Yahoo.

The traffic on demand possibilities are huge!

Another aspect of social bookmarking is the fact that you can easily get relevant one-way backilinks from high pageranked social bookmarking sites whenever the mood strikes you.

How are Tags Different than Keywords?

Tags are the way that socially bookmarked sites are categorized. They are no different than keywords.

The only way that tags are different is that they are a browsing tool and not a searching tool. You use keywords to "search" for new information and you use tags to "find" relevant information.

Keywords = To search for relevant information

Tags = To find relevant information that has already been found

Social Bookmarking Sites

Here is a list of popular bookmarking sites. You will want to sign up with a few of them and get familiar with their interfaces. There are quite a few more bookmarking sites but I don't want to overwhelm you (yet ;-)

In the next article, I will be discussing how to add automatic tagging and pinging to your blogs and I will also discuss how to use the social bookmarking sites to gain exposure, traffic on demand and relevant one-way backlinks to your websites.

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