When you send a link to a website that you find interesting, to your friends it means that you are taking part as social bookmarking. Actually, social bookmarks are those sites that you are saving for later. It is very much like tagging websites and saving them to your browser’s list of bookmarks, with the difference that this time you are saving them to the web from where you can easily access them and share them with your friends and family. Besides the obvious advantage of having access to your favorite websites from any computer and the possibility to share them with everyone, you can also check other people’s bookmarks in order to see what websites they found interesting. Most of this social bookmarking websites give you the opportunity to search by different selection criteria, such as recently added, most popular or certain categories like news, shopping, sports, technology etc.

Social bookmarking sites are usually being used as intelligent search tools because you can even browse through what other people have tagged by typing the exact keyword that you are looking for in the search box. An interesting and useful division of social bookmarking is consisting in social news. Social news means politics, technology, sports etc. that have breaking headlines which are discussed by different bloggers or users. The websites which are entirely dedicated to social news differ from common social bookmarking sites through their focus on certain blog posts and articles and not websites. Therefore, they can be a good informational source of news and will also offer you the opportunity of participating to different discussions and posting comments on various news items.

Social bookmarking services can bring you a lot of benefits, such as giving you the opportunity to specifically target the things that you are interested in so that you can easily short the list of results in the search engines and find what you are looking for easy and quick. Most sites will show the most recently added lists and popular links so you will see relevant information and be updated at the same time. For instance, if you are looking for information about social shopping, you can search on these sites and get two articles, one with two votes and one with 70 votes. Thus, it is quite easy to see that the article with more votes is the most relevant for you. Therefore, searching for whatever you need on social bookmarking sites is much more efficient that using the search engines and browse to hundreds or thousands results.

Finally, if you run an online business, you definitely need to use social bookmarking services in order to achieve success and make yourself noticed amongst your target audience. Moreover, the process of social bookmarking submission should be done manually even though the temptation of using an automated form is very big, because it takes significantly less time. However, manually social bookmarking submission will bring better results and you can ensure that your articles are properly submitted and to the right web directories. Through submitting your social bookmarks manually you will ensure that you don’t alienate users, avoid being banned by the search engines as they will perceive you as spam and you will be able to continuously expand your social network by visiting different websites and reading various articles.