Website Design Blog

You may have noticed the recent increase in social bookmarking sites, tools, and those that use them. There are a reason they are so popular. Websites like Digg, Technorati, and Del.icio.us (to name a few) are providing a means to mass distribute your links, keywords, and content free of charge. Even better, getting your information into the hands of those that want to read it. It's a beautiful thing.

What Are Social Bookmarking Sites?
In a nutshell, social bookmarking sites are places people can go to share bookmarks, news articles, and a lot of other noteworthy pages. Technically there are huge differences between say a website like Digg and Del.icio.us but I'm going to group them together for the sake of this post. All of these sites have one very important key feature – they allow anyone to post anything they've found, heard, like, dislike, etc. This is an extraordinary opportunity for website owners.

How Can Social Bookmarking Websites Help Me?
If you see below this post there is a button to 'Bookmark' this blog post. Anyone who visits this post, or any other post on this blog, has the opportunity (assuming they like what they read) to share it with the world. Now think if 10,000 people visit your website... and out of them 100 or so decide to bookmark your page to share with others. Thats a lot of exposure! It may sound like a small number, but it can quickly grow. Millions of people visit popular social bookmarking websites every day. They are excellent resources for finding new, exciting, informative information. By having your site submitted to these you are also generating a link back. My post about Using Forums and Blogs to Drive Traffic To Your Website gives a few examples of how important link backs are. Basically these high ranking websites, with the immense traffic they get, can really help to boost your websites prominence on the internet.

Will This Work For My Website?
That all depends. One important piece to this puzzle is your content. It's not very hard to find people to look at your website. The hard part is getting people to like your website and motivated to share it with others. This part can be tricky. There is no substitute for helpful, informative, original information. This is something that is invaluable. Do you provide a service? Do you offer tips or advice? Do you think you write funny stories or comics you want to make popular? This is very important. You can do all the SEO tricks in the world, have a beautifully coded website, but if you don't' actually offer anything useful... sadly everything you do may be in vain. I should rephrase that... most people who have websites believe in what they're doing and have a service of some kind they wish to share, but what is most important is how your visitors perceive your website. Do they find it useful, helpful, informative? Do they find it interesting, fun, etc? Do they want to come back and tell their friends? Rhetorical questions of course, but very important. So in closing, this can work for your website but its important to captivate your audience in someway once they arrive. And that will be saved for another post.