Social bookmarking is one of the hottest Web 2.0 online trends. The concept of social bookmarking is about 10 years old, but due to it's recent explosive growth, it has just now become one of the new internet "buzz words".

It's important for internet marketers to understand social book marking and how it can help them promote their products and services.

So, what is social bookmarking? What is social bookmarking's purpose? Why is social bookmarking important to internet marketers?

What is Social Bookmarking? You are probably already familiar with bookmarking web sites, that you want to visit again, using your Internet Explorer or Firefox web browser. The bookmarks you create to these sites are for your personal use and are stored on your computer.

Social Bookmarking is the next step in bookmarking, where you and others can share bookmarks to web sites you think may be of interest to others. This is done via Social Bookmarking services. After you have signed up for the Social Bookmarking service, you will be allowed to register a website, site description and tags (keywords) with the service - this is a bookmark. You will also be allowed to share this bookmark, or you can keep it private (depending on the service). This information is stored by the Social Bookmarking service, and is not stored on your computer.

What is Social Bookmarking's Purpose? There are really two major purposes behind social bookmarking.

1. The main purpose of social bookmarking is to have people with like interests bookmarks sites that they think would be useful, or interesting, to others who have the same interests. For example, I love fly fishing. Let's say I find a site that contains some great custom-built fly fishing rods for an inexpensive price. I would bookmark that site with one of several possible bookmarking services. I would give the site I'm bookmarking a title, a description and tags (keywords) related to inexpensive custom built fly fishing rods. I would make sure the bookmark is set to public so others could find it, and would then have have created a social bookmark.

Now when people search the social bookmarking service, using the tag words used to define the bookmarked sites, they are presented with a list of related sites. Using our fly fishing example above - When someone searches for "fly fishing rods" they would be given a list of related sites, including the custom fly fishing rod site we bookmarked. Most bookmarking services also have a rating system so the most popular sites are at the top of the list.

2. Another great benefit of social bookmarking is, once you have social bookmarked your favorite sites, you can easily find those bookmarked sites from any computer connected to the internet. You simply log into the online social bookmarking service and find the website you bookmarked. This can be very helpful if you have many websites you like to monitor, when you are away from home and you are not at your primary computer.

Why is social bookmarking important to internet marketers? Since social bookmarking sites are generally very popular sites that get a lot of traffic, they have high Google page ranks and are visited often by search engines. Submitting your site to the social bookmarking services, increases the chance your site will be crawled by the search engines. I have seen my sites crawled by Google only one day after registering my site to social bookmarking services.

Submitting to social bookmarking services is also a great way to get one way, incoming, high page rank links coming to your website which helps increase your page rank.

But most importantly, if your website is seen as having value to a group of people, your bookmark can be rated highly and can create a ton of very targeted traffic to your website.

Social bookmarking is growing at a phenomenal rate and if you want to market on the internet, you need to add social bookmarking to your set of internet marketing tools.