What is Social Bookmarking?

Social bookmarks are a way for internet users to save, organize and share their favorite sites online.

In the same way that you can save a favorite, or bookmark, to your web browser, you can bookmark sites with free online social bookmarking tools.

Why is It So Popular?

For the web surfer, it is a easy way to quickly share a great website, blog post, etc with their friends with the push of a button.

From a website owner's point of view, it is a great way to get lots of free website traffic. That's why you'll find a lot of sites will have widgets on their pages encouraging you to share their site.

Digg is a popular bookmarking site. If enough people "digg" or recommend the same blog post and you get first place on Digg, you can expect to get tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors to your blog in one day!

What is the Best Way to Use Social Bookmarking?

Because there are a lot of bookmarking sites out there (e.g. Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit) it's best to use a service that will submit your website to all of them with the push of a button. A great free site that does this is Onlywire.

Of course you will want to promote your own site as much as possible but make sure you don't do this exclusively. This is not what bookmarking is about and you will be banned from the popular sites if you do this.

You'll want to keep to the following guidelines:

• Only 1 in 10 bookmarks should be to your own sites.
• Only bookmark webpages or posts that are fresh and genuinely interesting.
• Bookmark directly to a specific webpage or blog post instead of the domain home page.