Want to improve your rankings with the search engines and with real people? Here's what can happen. Social bookmarking sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and others, are online communities. These sites didn't start out that way. The community of friends was a case of serendipity. Social Bookmarking didn't start out as an internet traffic generating strategy. It started out as, well, an online book marker. But now it has become a powerful tool for generating internet traffic. But, you have to have good content and equally important, you have to have friends.

Social bookmarking sites were designed to help log, file, and categorize favorite sites by "marking" them. Otherwise how would we find them again. After a while we would have too many to remember. Then the practice of sharing your bookmarked favorites with your friends began and the rest is history. Now if we really "dig" a website or an article online and want to share it with, say, the whole Digg community of friends we have there, we can. And presto! We've just added internet traffic to that site.

A word of caution, there's a right way and a wrong way to get involved in social bookmarking. The last thing to do, is to "share" an article of yours that you posted on, say on Squidoo, that has nothing but hype. Don't bookmark anything for others to review if it is not quality content. Even the search engines hate that. And real people will take you off their friends list.

Also, be sure to promote content other than just your own. That's being sociable. Being sociable online is the same as business networking meeting. Pretend you are visiting at a fundraiser dinner or at the Chamber of Commerce meeting, sharing and getting to know real people. Whether online or not, networks made up of real people tend to ignore those who are not socially acceptable. Online, hype and ongoing self-promotion is considered spamming.

You can bookmark your own site and share your own articles but not exclusively. For example at Digg you can Digg your own articles, your own blog, etc. creating a link to your content elsewhere on the Internet. Asking your friends there to visit a recent blog article is fine. Almost everyone who uses social bookmarking now uses it to generate traffic and free leads. And high traffic to your content from a high traffic site like Digg and others will definitely get search engine attention. It is a great way to help build your prospect list and ultimately it helps build your business.

Also, add all the bookmark widgets, the icons, to your websites. Most social bookmarking sites have cute little icons that you can copy the code for in raw HTML and then put it on your websites. That way, people can bookmark your work by clicking on the icon If they are a member of Digg, or StumbleUpon, etc. When people do that, now you have an outgoing link from your site to a high traffic site. We need both, incoming and outgoing links to high ranking sites, in order to show up on the front page of search engine sites like Google. Join bookmarking sites, socialize, bookmark sites including the work of others, and networking will build your business just like it always has.