For the past several years the rise of social bookmarking as a versatile tool for SEO and marketing has had a huge impact in IM. There seems to be no let-up with their popularity, especially for off-page SEO purposes. However, there are long-term strategic methods that may be used at the more heavy weight bookmarking sites. So it all just depends on what you want to do in your business. Yes, bookmarks can be kept in your account at bookmarking sites, although they have become social centers for lots of people. Plus you can tag your bookmarks with your unique search phrases which can help with some search engine optimization but it tends to be temporary.

A few of years, or more, ago social bookmark sites were ranking very highly in the Google results, and so many sites altered the link attribute from dofollow to nofollow - blame Google. The more well-known bookmarking websites were able to just kill the search results for their bookmarks. No, I don't have any secret knowledge about the real reason those sites changed to nofollow. It does make for interesting speculation but not terribly important at this point.

But you can gain exposure when you take a more responsible approach to using social bookmarking sites. Most people who use them for backlinking tend to make very thin profiles that provide no value to the particular community. You'll find a few more strategically minded marketers who take the time and create high quality bookmark profiles. Profiles that have looks of being legitimate will do a better job for you and have a good chance of passing a review. This truly is the best way to go for many reasons, and you will have the opportunity to use them for powerful bookmarking for a long time.

When you do create a useful profile with content material, then of course you can produce an RSS feed from that. There is certainly SEO value with a great RSS feed; not to mention RSS directory submissions you can do. Consider the added benefit of more coverage for your links in those feeds. But you do have to be careful and exercise caution so you aren't over-promoting because that could cause loss of members to your feed.

Just look at your feeds, and you can know when you're going too far with promotional links, etc. The more often you do that and actually do a little bit of networking, you will gain more exposure and trust-rank, so to speak, at these sites. You can take a few minutes each day to distribute your good will at these sites, and that will not take very long plus it is a good investment decision.

There is freedom inherent with dealing with bookmarking sites; so how well you use them is your business. The truth is a lot of IM marketers do not want to spend time with long-term strategic approaches. The better quality profile strategy is something you ought to check out, and you might like the results.