Social Bookmarking
Technorati, Del.icio.us, Fark, Furl, Digg. Web 2.0’s hottest trend has created over 100 of this new breed of “Tagging” websites in fact, where humans share their online bookmarks with each other. This is essentially just a way for us to duplicate Google’s work to the same end.
Why would we go through such trouble? Because computer algorithms still just don’t “know” their resources the way humans do. Having another person select a website and “tag” it as relevant to your keyword is much more intuitive for us to find resources with. It has its problems too, mainly when combining keywords, but overall it’s becoming an extremely popular way for people to find other websites. This of course means that you, too, need to be Tagging your website for others to find.
Essentially the way these things work is that you set up an account with each of the ones you want to use, add a little button or two to your browser bar, and “Tag” any website instead of bookmarking it the traditional way. Those tags could be kept for personal use (Who in their right mind would want to do that…?) but as a default they are shared on that bookmarking website for others who search for the term. The websites that have been tagged the most for a certain keyword come up the highest on the list when that keyword is searched. It’s actually a very simple & elegant system.
From a marketing standpoint, however, it is chaotic. First of all there are too many of these sites! Submitting to Google and Yahoo! is one thing, but could you imagine opening an account in all 100+ of these things and hitting the “tag” button for all of them? How about providing a review in each of them? Second, people still go to google.com to search unless you make it easier for them to search a Tag elsewhere. It’s still not quite worth our time. Finally, the problem it has with multiple keywords (Search engines handle keyword phrases as a single query… Bookmarking sites handle each word as a query and add them together) leaves a lot up to interpretation. The end result Is that you need to be supplying MUCH MORE keywords to a bookmarking site than you would to a search engine.
The best tool I’ve seen to date to alleviate these problems is a very simple web
application at:
http://www.socialbookmarking.marketersgiveaway.com/
There’s still no way to get around having to stuff in all those keywords, but at least this creates a way to allow everyone visiting your website to Bookmark your site in as many of these sites as possible.