What is Social Bookmarking?

Social Bookmarking is much like the same from the bookmarking concept on a web browser where in you save or bookmark sites that you deem interesting or important to be able to access them at a later time. Social bookmarking however is more social in the sense that you could share the sites that you have bookmarked to other people and others could view and access the sites that you have bookmarked. Social bookmarking also allows you to organize and categorize your bookmarks into common groups using tags or keywords instead of categorizing them through folders which is the case for browser bookmarking.
Social Bookmarking is done through registering to social bookmarking sites in the internet such as Digg, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, and Reddit, to name just a few. Once you have registered, you could already bookmark sites and categorize them by filling in details such as the description of the site and its tags or keywords. This helps in keeping track of what the site is about. You could also choose whether you prefer the bookmark to be public – viewable and accessible to others- or private where in you are the only one who could view and access the bookmark. You could also browse through the site to check interesting and useful information bookmarked by others.
Social bookmarking sites also serve as intelligent search engines. Users of bookmarking sites can search for resources or sites by keywords, names, or popularity. Since the tag based classification is done by humans who understand the content of a site, the relevancy is increased as compared to search engines spiders who tag relevancy based on algorithms. The popularity and votes of a bookmark also helps in classifying whether the site is relevant or not. Recently added bookmarks are also shown which helps in looking for up to date information.
Social Bookmarking and SEO
Search Engines have a high regard for Social Bookmarking sites. These sites are crawled often, some large sites are even crawled multiple times in a day. Some bookmarking sites also have high PageRank.
Social Bookmarking can be used to gain high rankings in search engines. This is done by bookmarking the pages of your site and placing your keywords in the bookmark tag. This can help in increasing your ranking in search results for the particular keyword because search engine spiders also rely on the tags to determine the content of the bookmark. Each bookmark is also a back link to your site. However, some bookmarking sites are no follow. To be able to gain a good amount of back links from bookmarking, you would need to bookmark your page/site in various social bookmarking sites.
Another benefit of bookmarking your site is that it helps in easier and faster indexing of your site. Bookmarking new posts in your blog or new pages in your site could help index the page quickly.
Bookmarking also helps in gaining additional traffic to your site. It makes your site and pages visible to a wider audience. If your bookmark is deemed interesting, other people may vote for your bookmark or also bookmark your page. This means an additional back link to your site and a favorable vote for search engines. The more popular your bookmark gets, the more visitors your site receives, and the more relevant your site becomes for search engines.
Including a social bookmarking plugin in your site is also beneficial in gaining bookmarks for your site. The plugin allows visitors of your site to bookmark your site with just a click of a button- no need to login to their accounts just to bookmark your site. This increases the chances of getting your site bookmarked is it is easy and hassle free.
For your social bookmarking to be successful, you should keep the content of your site interesting and well written. Interesting and well written pages gain more traffic and have more chances of being bookmarked and linked to. Another thing to keep in mind is to participate in the voting and bookmarking of other sites. If bookmarking sites discover that you are only using their site to promote your pages and sites, your account may be closed down.