First, let’s get up to speed and cover social bookmarking. Social bookmarking is the process of storing your bookmarks or (websites added to your favorites) on a publicly accessible website. This allows people to essentially store their bookmarks on a website that will be available wherever they are and from any PC they access the Internet from.
Social bookmarking sites are predicted to make huge gains in popularity in the near future as user-generated content booms and the size of the Internet increases, making it harder to find quality sites. Yahoo acquired del.icio.us in December 2005 and has seen a 300% increase in its user base since then, demonstrating the growth of these sites.
So now to the main point, can social bookmarking sites be used for website promotion? In an attempt to stop marketing and promotional SPAM, most social tagging sites have implemented the now famous nofollow attribute tags (like Wikipedia), which means link popularity from these sites cannot be passed on .
However, despite attempts to avoid gaining link popularity and SEO benefits, there are still great benefits to be gained from submitting websites to the social plethora of social bookmarking sites. Most enjoy good search engine rankings and appear high for a large number of search terms, this can provide excellent search engine visibility by population for listings linked to their sites.
This as long as the searches of the bookmarking sites can provide good traffic. This can work especially well if used in conjunction with link bait or viral marketing, as a site’s exposure increases exponentially the more “bookmarks” it gets.
Increased traffic and search engine listings can increase brand awareness and can be especially helpful when launching a new site. So even though nofollow social tagging sites can produce very impressive results, especially when used in conjunction with other SEO and link building methods.
Look for the following article that will explain the best way to submit content to social bookmarking sites and what content to use for maximum benefit.