The benefits and drawbacks of social bookmarking

Every website owner wants one thing: traffic. With traffic comes money and increased value for your website. Social bookmarking has become a phenomenon in the world of search engine optimization. The more links people have to go to your website, the higher your ranking in search engines like Google and Yahoo. With this in mind, it is essential that everyone is aware of the benefits and also the pitfalls that can arise with social bookmarking.

1. Accessibility – The best thing about social bookmarking sites is that they are not restricted to one computer, you can access them from anywhere you access the internet.

2. Human interaction: Everyone who surfs the net loves to find the latest funny video, saying or joke that they can share with their friends. Users can share the latest website they found funny or exciting.

3. Trust – Many internet marketers over the years have built a strong reputation, so when they recommend a site through social bookmarking, people tend to follow them. It has incredible benefits in terms of generating revenue because it will help drive traffic to the site and increase sales for the owner. Best of all, you don’t have to own the site to make money, which brings us to the fourth benefit.

4. Affiliate Sales – These days many people who cannot create products or web pages choose to become affiliates as they can simply promote a product without having to worry about inventory, site maintenance or associated costs. By promoting the product with your affiliate link on social bookmarking sites, affiliates can earn commissions on products they never see.

5. Search Engine Optimization – Social bookmarking creates powerful backlinks to your website that will help you rank higher on major search engines. Bookmarking systems clearly have an advantage for external link building, as major search engines favor sites with such links directing them.

With all these advantages, unfortunately like most things, there are disadvantages:

1. Tag Structure – There is no standard in this medium that governs how social bookmarking sites tag links. Examples include: should people only capitalize at the beginning of a sentence or for each main keyword?

2. Collusion – Like most things in the world today, a scammer can devise a way to try to wreck the system. If people join large groups and submit bookmarks and monitor their votes, they are hurting other users who rely on the general public to vote on their submission.

3. Search Engine Optimization – Due to the benefits of helping your rankings, many people use this to build links back to their site without creating unique content rich submissions. Instead they just create garbage and add your link and hope it will help their ranking.

With all this in mind, properly done social bookmarking is highly beneficial to both the individual and the Internet community as a whole.