Social bookmarking is the practice of saving bookmarks to a public Web site and “tagging” them with keywords. Bookmarking, on the other hand, is the practice of saving the address of a Web site you wish to visit in the future on your computer. To create a collection of social bookmarks, you register with a social bookmarking site, which lets you store bookmarks, add tags of your choice, and designate individual bookmarks as public or private. Visitors to social bookmarking sites can search for resources by keyword, person, or popularity and see the public bookmarks, tags, and classifications that registered users have created and saved.

The most popular social bookmarking sites are Digg, Reddit, StumbleUpon and Delicious. They are all free to join and can create powerful backlinks to your own sites as well as sharing your resources with millions of other people.

Activities like social bookmarking give users the opportunity to express differing perspectives on information and resources through informal organizational structures. This process allows like-minded individuals to find one another and create new communities of users that continue to influence the ongoing evolution of folksonomies and common tags for resources.

If you are looking for information about sailing, for example, you might find that other users saw a connection between sailing and boat repair, taking you in new andvaluable directions.

These kinds of tools also encourage users to keep coming back because the collections of resources are constantly changing. This fresh and constantly updated content is good for search engine results as well.

People search for information every second – information that involves what you are writing or teaching about. Social bookmarking gives you yet another connection to potential customers and media through increased search results and networking opportunities.

In our romantic fascination with Facebook and Twitter, a very powerful online social tool gets often overlooked: social bookmarking sites such as Reddit, Digg, and Delicious.

Social bookmarking is a simple way to share your favorite sites with the world. Very similar to bookmarking or ‘favoriting' a website in your browser so you can find it again, Reddit and Delicious are online repositories of your favorites all neatly placed together in your social profile. Why is this important? Now you have the ability to become the ‘go-to' expert in your field, supplying people all over the world with the most important and informative links.

Of course, a lot of these links can be sites that you own: blog posts, articles, files like PDF's and MP3's, webpages, Youtube videos and anything else you want to send more traffic to. Google loves social bookmarking sites. Why? Because it's always fresh content that's hot off the press. Often, news appears on bookmarking sites faster than regular online media like Yahoo. For this reason, Google gives “link juice” to the sites that are posted and submitted to bookmarking sites. When you post a link to a website from Facebook or Twitter, Google does not count those as a quality incoming links to that site.

The more incoming links to your website that you have, the higher in the search results you'll get. Facebook and Twitter can't help you with that. In addition, Google does not put Facebook posts or Tweets in search results – social bookmarking posts and submissions come up high in searches, giving you more traffic to your site.