Origins of Social Bookmarking And How Websites Benefit

Before it was that if you liked a website, you had to save it in to your computer, ofcourse crowding an already cluttered hard drive.Not to mention the nightmare of trying to find a page you bookmarked last month once you had over 100 pages.Then someone smart decided to include a bookmark button on the browsers like Firefox, then the more popular Internet Explorer followed suit.

So in the recent past, if you liked a website and wanted to keep it for later referencing (bookmarking), you had the better choice of simply clicking a button.This made the bookmarking a littler easier.But it still did not catch on until the delicious.

Progressively online social bookmarking has since been growing.And with this growth out went the cluttered computer disks and multiple folders to organize bookmarks.Now you can simply click a button, tag a webpage of interest and later on access it from any computer that is connected to the internet anywhere in the world.

According to wikipedia, the concept of online bookmarking dates back to April 1996 with the launch of ItList.The concept floundered in its money making model and so like many other pioneer internet businesses, it went belly up in 2000 during the dot--com bubble bust.As entrepreneurs wrapped their mind around the concept of internet business, viable models of making money surfaced that could support online bookmarking sites.

Enter delicious in 2003 and a market was established.Today there are no less than 100 social bookmarking sites with a couple of million users.And as usual, where people go, marketers follow.Infact there is already a buzz word coined for marketing such sites -- Social Media Optimization (seo) or more appropriately Social Media Marketing (SEM).

Social bookmarks are a target for internet marketer for two main reasons.First is the direct traffic it can generate.For example, Delcious, the largest social bookmarking site according to ReadWriteWeb, has over one million users.Getting your website within reach of these people can be a viable business propostion.For example, if a page in your website was bookmarked by a critical number of people it becomes popular and displayed on the Delicious hopmepage where it is view by thousands of people driving them to your website.

Secondly and probably a major attraction currently especially for the niche site is the backlinks from socialbookmarking.The internet runs on hyperlinks or links.This the text usually underlined and in blue which you click to take you to another webpage.Search Engines (SE) have mainly based their ranking algorithms on links.For example google has a concept discussed here some time back called PageRank (PR).This is a metric that estimates how popular a webpage is, based on how many other webpages link back to it (backlinks).Consequently a page with a high PR will out rank a page with lower PR all other things constant (Note that SEs take much more into consideration apart from PR).

Social bookmarking sites tend to have high PR due to the publicity and reviews they receive online.And since anyone can have an account with them, website target them to increase their own PR.Essentially with socialbookmarking you can target some direct traffic, and increase your sites PR, which in turn increases you sites PR consequently increasing your search engine ranking position which ofcourse drives you more traffic from SEs.

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