Social Bookmarking:

The term Social Bookmarking describes a web membership service in which people not only can save their own bookmarks on a website for their own reference (as a kind of a backup) but also can share those of their bookmarks with others which they consider especially interesting and helpful. The user has the possibility to tag his bookmarks with one or more keywords to describe the content of the bookmarked site. The different bookmarks are categorized by these tags and users can browse and search for interesting sites via tags.

Popular Social Bookmarking Services are del.icio.us , del.lirio.us , digg.com , technocrati.com , StumbleUpon.com and many others.

Screenshot of de.icio.us , one of the most popular Social Bookmarking sites. It displays the most recently posted bookmarks. They are presented with link, a brief description, who posted the link, what tags did he use to categorize the site (framed in red) and how popular the bookmark is, i.e. how many users found it interesting enough to save it.

In the times of web 2.0 the importance of Social Bookmarking for Internet marketers is increasing. No wonder as the popularity of this kind of web service as a competition to search engines is increasing. In the opinion of more and more internet users the commercialisation of search engines makes search results less reliable. This does not only refer to sponsored links but also to the fact that companies with financial power can invest enough in their SEO  actions that they get a high ranking even if their site is not that relevant. So users start to look for alternative ways to find the information they are looking for and they can do so on Social Bookmarking Sites.

Therefore, to profit from this trend webmasters are looking for ways to get their site bookmarked and tagged on as many Social Bookmarking services as possible and thereby generate a lot of traffic . As an additional bonus, most bookmarking sites have a high Google PageRank and placing a link there will help ranking better in the search engines.

[Social comes from Latin socialis = living with others, united;

Book comes from Old English boc = beech, as at that time writing was done by cutting runes into beechwood tablets;

Mark goes back to Gothic marka = boundary, frontier; meaning then extended to describe a sign which indicates a boundary]

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