Social BookMarking

It used to be that when you came across a website that you thought you may like to revisit, you added that web site to your favourites.

That was and still is good enough for most. However in the world of the brave new web (web 2.0) it's only the beginning!

Sharing Favourites

Bookmarking a web page by adding it to your personal favourites in Internet explorer or Firefox etc only allows you to access that link if you are on the same PC.

 However it is possible to make your favourites available from any machine using a social bookmarking site. Adding a site to your favourites on a  social bookmarking site basically stores the favourites on the web. Because it is stored on the web, and not on your PC, it can be accessed from any internet connected  machine.

Social bookmarking is becoming very popular as evidenced by the growing number of "add to" images on websites. Images like these:

   are everywhere.

Clicking on the image adds the blog or web page to the appropriate social bookmarking site where it can be accessed, by you at a later date, from any machine.

Not only can you access your own bookmarks, but bookmarks can be shared, and you can access other peoples favourites, and they can access yours. It is very much like the links page on most websites where you can find links to other sites that  the site owner thinks are good/relevant. Thus saving you time by not having to find them yourself.

Tagging

In the early days of the web the keywords meta tags were used by web page designers to tell search engines what the web page was about. It wasn't long before it got abused, and the search engines started to ignore it, and rely on other mechanisms.

Today's tagging takes the meta keywords concept and re-uses it. Again the page designer adds the tags to the web page but this time they are not hidden. The tags are clearly visible, and are themselves links to other items that share that keyword tag.

There are sites that have been specifically designed to use tags. The two most common ones are Technorati and Del.icio.us.

Tagging and Traffic

For most website owners the number one source of traffic is the search engines. However with the rapid growth of social bookmarking sites, many site owners are finding that they are receiving more and more traffic from these sites.

However this traffic doesn't just happen. You need to do certain things in order that your site will receive this traffic. You can learn more about social bookmarking, tagging and how it can increase you website traffic in Tagging for traffic (free pdf report)

Related articles and Resources:

• Understanding, creating and using meta tags
• Blog and Ping
• Blogging
• Tag and Ping
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_bookmarking

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