Social bookmarking is taking its rightful place next to other SEO techniques such as article and/or video marketing, social media presence and blogging, and all the other marketing tricks including email marketing, forum commenting and other strategies designed to get good links and traffic. Social bookmarking is nothing new – it’s been around for almost ten years now – but many internet marketers haven’t realized its worth until recently.

Quality social bookmarking can get you high end links on websites that attract the search engine spiders. Google and other search engines simply love the bookmarking sites. There have even been reports that a registered with a top social bookmarking service can get a significant boost in the search engine rankings in just a few days instead of having to wait for weeks and even months to see results.

It’s not hard to get into the habit of using social bookmarking. The hardest part is choosing which online sites you want to target. If you are doing the bookmarking yourself, you may have to limit your exposure based on the time you can spend. If you hire a social bookmarking submission service, you can spread the net wider.

The top sites for social bookmarking stay fairly static, with a new one popping up ever so often and either hitting big or failing in the face of more established social bookmarking sites.  The following ten have established a decent reputation, and have fairly good marks for boosting traffic and PR.

Digg.com
Propeller.com
StumbleUpon.com
Reddit.com
Del.icio.us.com
Newsvine.com
Fark.com
Blinklist.com
Clipmarks.com
Shoutwire.com

Social Bookmarking Tips

Start with two or three of the main sites, and insinuate yourself into the community carefully, not just posting links to your own content, but participating fully in the community. Reddit members in particular can turn on you in an instant if they feel you are being too self promotional, and can cause your whole IP to be banned if they don’t like you, so tread carefully.

Digg is a great place to start and has a button you can add to your site and many content sites as well to boost interest. StumbleUpon is also a good starting point, as is Del.icio.us.

When you submit your site, article or webpage to a social bookmarking site, the search engine spiders will follow the link and crawl your site. Your site is then more likely to get a higher PageRank, as well as a boost on the SERPs, and the exposure can bring you extra traffic.

Try to target niche areas. Many bookmarking sites have categories where you can target people interested in the same things as yourself. Make sure you take advantage of these categories. If your website is deemed to contain desirable information about a topic that is of interest to a particular group, your website will also be rated highly inside the social bookmarking site.  This leads directly to traffic from high converting searchers who follow the link.

A professional social bookmarking submissions service can help kick start your social bookmarking venture, and lay the groundwork for ongoing interest in your website.