Social bookmarking has become popular in recent years. This article has been written to describe the history, what it is and why it is important today.
What is bookmarking?
Many of us use bookmarks or favourites on our own computers to store websites we use frequently.
This is very useful, but nowadays many of us access the internet from multiple devices such as laptops, tablets and mobile phones.
In these situations, the bookmarks stored on our computer are of little use if we are using one of the other devices.
Very often, new products and services are invented or introduced to overcome a limitation in existing offerings, as happened with social bookmarking. With the introduction of so many Internet-enabled devices and increased mobility, there was a need to improve the flexibility of traditional bookmarks.
History of social bookmarking
Social bookmarking was introduced. In other words, users save their favourite websites on web pages, which means they can access these ‘social bookmarks’ from any Internet-enabled device. You may be wondering why this seemingly simple solution is so important these days.
Very often, new products take on a new life as people realise their potential. A classic case is text messaging, which originated in December 1992 when a test engineer used a personal computer to send a Merry Christmas message over the Vodafone network to a friend. From a simple act, text messaging has become so popular that it is estimated that 200 billion text messages are sent every month.
We can’t claim that social bookmarking has developed to such an extent, but it has become very important in Internet marketing.
Why is social bookmarking so important?
Social bookmarking has become essential because of the importance of backlinking. One of the factors that search engines use to rank websites is the number and quality of backlinks. If your site is linked to a high-ranking website, the search engines think your site is important. One of the factors determining the importance of a website is its page rank.
Page rank varies from 0 to 10, with 10 being the most important.
For example, YouTube has a page rank of 9.
So if you have backlinks from sites with high page ranks, this will help your web referencing in search engines. The importance of social bookmarking is that you can write an article or record a video and submit it to a social bookmarking site with a link to your own website.
Off-page SEO strategy
It’s easy to find the most popular sites by entering the term in the search engines.
Apart from the obvious ones like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Google+, there are some less obvious ones.
These include Ridplace
You may be concerned that you can’t easily publish to all these sites, to which I say:
I hope you’ve found this article interesting and that you’ll use some of these social bookmarking sites.
