You are starting to see these icons popping up on blogs and websites that take you to place like del.icio.us (now delicious.com) a Yahoo! social bookmarking website and others like twitter.com, myspace.com, facebook.com and more. What are they? Not a simple question to answer but let me talk about delicious.com. This is essentially the heart of social bookmarking. You probably have a sense of creating a bookmark or favorite to the websites you like which makes it easy to go back to them without having to remember the website address or URL (Uniform Resource Locator). But you probably have figured out that when you book mark a website, the bookmark is only on your computer. If you go to a friends house and want to show them the website or want to find it at work, then you still have to remember the website address or URL.
With the problem of finding these websites from other computers led someone to think it would be a good idea if their bookmarks were on the Internet. With that thought social bookmarking was born. This was not only a way to find your favorites away from home but also a way to share them with your friends or social circle. Yahoo! has made social book marking a science. On delicious.com you can save share and private bookmarks as well as search through the shared bookmarks of other people similar to searching on the search engines. The difference is that you only get the websites people have bookmarked as their favorites.
Having said that, these bookmarks are not without their flaws. The social bookmarks are also one way links to those “favorite” websites. People wanting to promote their website quickly caught on and realized that these one way links were important to building their link popularity on the Internet. So not all are true favorites, but it is a good way to promote your business through visitors to your website who like what you have to offer. Some of the first people bookmarking your website might be friends and family trying to help you get established.
Visit delicious.com and create an account for yourself see how valuable social bookmarking can be for you. See the article on www.seoexpertpro.com entitled Firefox and your SEO Tool-kit and download the delicious bookmark for Firefox. If you don’t have Firefox and you should, you can download it right from the article. It’s a great browser and very useful for your SEO efforts on you website.
