Social bookmarking offers an easy and convenient way to store all of your favourite websites and blogs in one place.

By utilising one of the growing number of specialist Social Bookmarking websites you can organise all of your bookmarks and easily share them with others. Millions of individual web pages have been bookmarked in this way which represents a rapidly growing trend. In order to make the bookmarking process as simple as possible, many websites now include links to the most popular sites to encourage their visitors to bookmark their web page.

Bookmarking your individual web pages offers an excellent opportunity to improve your Link Popularity, by creating quality, one way links to your site from the various social bookmarking websites. The majority of social bookmarking sites are ranked highly by the search engines, including Google, who consider them as authority sites. This means that your bookmarks will be indexed fairly quickly and the search engines are much more likely to recognise these type of one way links to your website.

How does social bookmarking work?

Firstly you will need to register with each of the social bookmarking sites you wish to use. It is sensible to register with as many social bookmarking networks as possible as this will increase the opportunity to develop a greater number of one way links. However bear in mind that although bookmarking is not necessarily an arduous task, you will need to invest a reasonable amount of time to set up all of your bookmarks. Therefore the actual number of individual bookmarking sites you aim to use should be manageable.

Once your accounts have been set up, your links will be created via a social bookmarking submissions page. These links should point to the web page you wish to promote. If your web page contains interesting content it is possible that other users will add them to their own personal list of social bookmarks. Each time a web page is bookmarked an additional one way link is created to your website.

To maximise your bookmarking efforts it is essential that your keywords are included in the anchor text.

However, for these links to be successful and recognised by the search engines, it is vitally important that the chosen title for your bookmark (anchor text) contains at least one, relevant, targeted keyword. Your targeted keyword must also be present, a number of times, within the text of the web page you are bookmarking and should also be included in the Title Meta Tag. If you fail to do this you will find that your bookmarks will not be as effective at improving your link popularity.

If you are prepared to invest the time, social bookmarking offers a cost effective method to improve the link popularity of any website and should be part of your overall link building strategy.

Lists of social bookmarking websites are widely available via a relevant internet search, however here are few popular sites to start with:

• StumbleUpon
• Squidoo
• del.icio.us
• Technorati
• BlinkList
• Spurl.net
• Wink
• Google Bookmarks
• Kaboodle
• MyLinkVault
• Simpy
• reddit
• Twitter
• Digg.com

Please share your social bookmarking experiences using the comment box below.