Bookmarking Social Tools

By Charles Hamel

The old way of getting traffic to your website was getting on the first page of Google or Yahoo and waiting for people to search for your websites subject. Less emphasis is being put on search engines, nowadays and more emphasis is being put on social bookmarking sites. What is a social bookmarking site you ask.

Social Bookmarking sites are a system where users store lists of Internet resources, which they find useful. These lists are accessible to the public and others with similar interests. The lists of subjects are tagged with keywords that relate to the subject of the content called "tags".

This system has many advantages over traditional search engine methods. All information and websites that are classified with tags is done by human beings who understand the content and not some search engine trying to figure out subjects of content through computer algorithms.

To emphasize the importance of social bookmarking sites I want to give you a real example and testimony that actually happened to me. I wrote an article a few months back on the subject of lucid dreams and submitted the story to the social bookmarking site Digg.com. The story became very popular with over 2000 votes, and it made the front page of the site.

Some of the results I received for the story making the front page of Digg:

• 18,000 visits to my site in one day (I normally averaged 85 per day).
• $80.00 in adsense revenue that same day.
• number 11 in Google for a keyword with over 1.2 million competing websites within two weeks.

The next thing that you need to become familiar with is Tag and Ping. Tagging is a fairly new way to categorize information on the Internet. A tag is a simple but brief description of what the content within that tag is about. For instance if a user goes to one of the social bookmarking sites and searches for the tag "dog training", then all of the content on that site relating to dog training will appear.

Now the ping part of tag and ping comes in after you write your new content and tag it with a relevant tag, you need to let the social bookmarking sites that it is ready to be indexed. This is done different ways. There is bookmarking social tools on the market that will automate this process. Some social bookmarking sites will visit your website randomly and index anything new automatically, others will have to be submitted manually.

So you can see the power of social bookmarking sites, also nicknamed Web 2.0 for it's emphasis on the collaboration and sharing of the users of the sites. If you have a website or Blog that you would like to drive traffic to, don't underestimate the power of social bookmarking.

Charles Hamel lives near Houston, TX with his wife and 2 sons. He is an avid technology junkie always staying up on the latest tech trends. To learn more about social bookmarking, tag and ping and bookmarking social tools visit His Website