Social Bookmarking Sites - What Are They?

Social bookmarking is a way to organize bookmarks of the web pages on the internet that you use in the form of tags or metadata. It helps users to add metadata as keywords to shared content. You can save links to web pages that you want to remember or share. Social bookmarking sites make using the internet a lot easier and a lot faster. This is why so many people are now using them.

The bookmarks can be shared publicly or privately. People that are allowed to view these pages can see them by using a search engine. Social bookmarking sites can really help you find what you are really looking for.

Most social bookmarking services help people organize bookmarks with informal tags, not the normal folders. You can view them and they will include information about the amount of users that have bookmarked them. Many services actually offer web feeds for bookmarks.

Basically, this system calls for you to add certain tags, or keywords to the social bookmarking part of your web page. Anyone that is searching the web for those particular tags will see your web site show up in the search results.

A drawback to this method is that people, of course, take advantage of it. They add tags that have nothing to do with the content to help their webpage get higher in the search results. Many people even tag each page of their web site which is a kind of cheating. It is not an honest way to use social bookmarking.

But not only can you save your favorite websites and send them to your friends, you can also see what other people find interesting and tag. Most of the social bookmarking sites let you browse through the sites that other people like and tag. Most sites also allow you to browse certain categories like politics or news.

There are many social bookmarking sites like Digg, Reddit and Propeller that are news oriented. They have the newest news headlines and also have blog that discuss these issues. You can benefit from social bookmarking by allowing you to specifically target what you want to see. You won't have to go to a search engine and spend time trying to find what you are looking for. Basically, it simplifies using the internet. So if you get frustrated sifting through endless results on the web, next time try social bookmarking sites.