Everyone knows bookmarking as a method of saving the favorite links as bookmarks in a web browser. Instead of storing the bookmarks in web browsers, one can use websites like delicious, stumbleupon, digg, mix, ning, propeller, technorati, reddit etc. In these social bookmarking websites anyone can follow the bookmarks already placed by other users or they can place a bookmark of their own.
How to Bookmark
Generally the social bookmarking sites allow adding bookmarks along with a small description and a title to give an idea about the linked resource. When the user searches for bookmarks, they get listed based on keywords that are in the description and title. If the user feels that the bookmark, from a list of bookmarks is worth a look can go ahead to follow the bookmarks. Most of the bookmarking sites have options like "public" or "private", so a bookmark can be seen by others only if the bookmark is given permission to be a public one. So people started bookmarking to promote their web pages using these social bookmarking sites.
Visitors from Bookmarks
Even though the traffic got from these bookmarking sites is comparatively less. The effect of social bookmarking on SEO is that the visitors from these sites are closer of becoming a probable customer or an eager visitor needing a specific content to that of a bookmarked website. The main reason for this is that many visitors trust these bookmarking sites, just because the bookmarks listed are considered to be the favorites or hand picked web pages of the user.
Advantages of Bookmarking
Visitors feel easy to follow the bookmarks than searching the list of hundreds of links a SERP can give out. The trust the user has on these bookmarks is that it is already been visited by the user and has felt the importance of bookmarking that website. Most webmasters bookmark their websites for visitors, another reason is the link popularity got in another website. Now social bookmarking have grown more popular as they have added extra features such as ratings and comments on bookmarks, the ability to import and export bookmarks from browsers, emailing of bookmarks, groups or other social network features. So, most webmasters adopt social bookmarking as a mandatory task for their website promotion campaign.
