Social Bookmarking Can Drive Traffic to Your Website

Having an Internet-based business is all about getting traffic to your website. There's a relatively new way to get better SEO (search engine optimization) as well as more visits to your website: Social Bookmarking.

Social bookmarking is simply another tool you can use to drive potential customers to your website. If you rely on affiliate marketing for much of your income, this can be a valuable and completely free tool that can give you more hits, more clicks, and ultimately, more money in your pocket.

What is social bookmarking? Everyone knows how to bookmark sites you want to keep and find quickly. But for many people, bookmarking becomes unwieldy. Popular social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Digg allow Internet users to bookmark their favorite sites, places keywords and identifying tags on them to make them easier to find later.

Those tags are public, which is the "social" part of social bookmarking. Your bookmarks can be found by others. If they like the site, they bookmark it, adding one of those vital links you need to improve your SEO. Every time you add a bookmark to one of your pages, you create a back link to your site.

To get started, you have to go to a social bookmarking site and simply register your information. Two buttons will come up on your toolbar, including a tag button which contains all the sites you have bookmarked.

The best way to learn about social bookmarking is to visit the sites and take a look around, because while they all do basically the same thing, they are slightly different. Not everything works on every bookmarking site, and if you're trying to promote your website, you need to know whether you'll be wasting your time registering there.

One of the best ways to increase the number of people who bookmark your site is to encourage people to do so on your site and on all business-related items you send out, such as newsletters or articles. Simply adding your website to every social bookmarking site available on the web probably won't get you the long-term results you're looking for. You can easily find a list of the most popular social bookmarking sites on the web.

You can share content from your website, such as articles and blogs, but remember that the information must be useful or interesting or you won't benefit by tagging it. Some bookmarking sites can recognize when someone is abusing the system and simply throwing up bookmarks for purely marketing purposes. You'll get thrown out and lose any benefits you were hoping to gain.

Keep in mind that this is not a magic bullet, simply a tool you can use to drive traffic to your website. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn't. Not every bookmark will increase traffic to your website, but when one does, you'll definitely notice. Keep in mind who your audience is and who is using social bookmarking sites.

Typically, young, computer savvy, educated Internet users tap into social bookmarking, something you should keep in mind when bookmarking your content.