Those who own or run websites desire that they attract as much traffic as possible. The use of social media networks to market your website is in order as well as social bookmarking sites. Social bookmarking sites came to be in 1996 and they have since grown to attract a great following. In addition to the rising popularity of these sites, their usefulness has grown to accommodate the needs of their users.

Social bookmarking refers to tools which people use to store, organize, manage, and search for bookmarks of various web pages. As a user of a social bookmarking site, you are able to save links of web pages that you have visited or those you wish to share with other users. It is also good to note that users of the social bookmarking site that you have saved links through will be able to view, and even share your links. Some notable social bookmarking sites include Digg.com, StumbleUpon and Pinterest, to name just a few.

Most of the services in social bookmarking involves users who organize and apply tags or rather keywords to certain content in the websites they visit. This enables those users to conveniently involve other users who can view the content ascribed to a certain tag or keyword. For this reason, social bookmarking has also been referred to as collaborative tagging, folksonomy, social indexing, social tagging as well as social classification.

Ways in which social bookmarking can help in promoting your website

There are a number of ways in which your website being listed in one of the social bookmarking sites can help promote it, these include:

• This could be an avenue for your website to attract valuable traffic; with help of sites such as Digg, Pinterest and StumbleUpon you can get new traffic in a large capacity. These sites are quite potent and you will conveniently get new traffic from people who are directly interested in the content that your website offers. You can thus reliably and in a more simplified way connect with people you have common interests with.
  
  
• Social bookmarking sites are made use of by search engines in the listing of search results; it goes without saying that chances of your website appearing among the search results will be increased by having it listed in the social bookmarking sites.
  
  
• You will additionally get to be tagged in other bookmarking sites; chances are high that those visiting your preferred bookmarking site have also subscribed to other sites. Bearing this in mind, users who found your content to be useful are likely to tag you in other social bookmarking sites. This boils down to more and more traffic for your website, an easier and effortless way of promoting your site.
  
  
• Adding social bookmarking buttons in your website will aid in improving your traffic. By doing this you will simplify the process of others users who interact with your content to easily share it or tag you in other bookmarking sites.

Having looked at the way most of the social bookmarking sites could promote your business, it is good to know the right way to go about this. For starters, you need to find or rather try out quality bookmarking sites. You just need to build a complete user profile and abide by the 80/20 rule. The 80/20 rule requires ensure that 80% of the links you share are of other related sites while the remaining 20% are links to your own content. Create a portfolio of good bookmarks as well, ensuring that you are an active user.

Social bookmarking sites are a new and formidable means of promoting your website. They are popular and you will get to interact with people who are directly interested in the content of your business.

References: www.koozia.com/blog/search-marketing/top-quality-social-bookmarking-sites-penguin-world/, www.lifewire.com/what-is-social-bookmarking-3486501, www.brandwatch.com/blog/10-popular-social-bookmarking-websites-2015/, www.vmoptions.com/social-networking-list.php