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Chapter 6: Driving Traffic To Your Blogs

What Is Social Bookmarking

The best way to get a good grip on social bookmarking is to start with the most basic of questions. Why do people use the Internet? If you are like many online marketers, you probably haven't given that a second thought for years, but considering that question is the springboard to understanding social bookmarking. People use the Internet to obtain information. They are looking for something when they get online.

They may be looking for the takeout menu from their local Chinese restaurant. They might be trying to find helpful hints on how to fix their electric garage door opener. They might want a movie or book review. A student might be trying to find out the date of birth for Ralph Waldo Emerson. A new Internet marketer could be looking for the perfect business opportunity.

All of them want something. They want information. Even when people are just surfing for the sake of undirected entertainment, are looking for interesting information.

Now, ask yourself another easy question. How do they get that information? Your instinctive answer might be "a search engine." In many cases, you'd be right. Search engines are still the most popular way of finding information online.

However, if you were asked the same question ten years ago, you may have said "a directory." That would have been a good answer once upon a time, but it isn't anymore. What happened? Why was there a change? More importantly, what will the answer to that question be in the future?

A disorganized, but organic, series of links here and there wasn't a good means of categorizing information, so some enterprising people started to build directories. They wanted to make it easier to connect users with information. It seemed like a potentially workable solution, but before too long it became clear that applying an old organization model to the new Internet wasn't going to cut it. Human bias, human error and the sheer growth of the net rendered most directories unsatisfactory. Meanwhile, developers started working on an automated means of discovering and cataloguing information.

Their pre-programmed "robots" started scouring the web, finding information, and reporting it back to a master database. Eventually, a simple interface would be attached to the mechanism, and we'd have search engines as an alternative to directories.

It was a seemingly perfect solution. It was objective, comprehensive and automated. Making the search engine results meaningful required the creation of complicated algorithms to help users identify authoritative and important sites, but it sure beat relying on questionable directories as a means of finding information. The web, however, continued to grow. That growth, of course, led to increased commercialization. In turn, webmasters began to have a very strong monetary motive for finding out how to climb to the top of the search engine results.

Search engines like meta-tags? Stuff them with keywords. Search engines reward inbound links? Start buying, trading and creating links. Search engines like content? Let's create content heavy sites, regardless of the real value of the material. Redirects, cloaking, scraping, hidden text and a variety of other strategies have had varying levels of popularity at different times, too. Some are still used today.

However, they aren't used to make search engine results better for the user. They are used to create results that benefit the webmaster. The webmaster wants the traffic in hopes of converting visitors into buyers, after all.

This constant game of cat and mouse between webmasters and search engine programmers might be a lot of fun to watch from a distance, but it can be a real aggravation to end users. Many of them, looking for some more reliable and less commercially "polluted" means of finding the information they want are moving away from search engine reliance and are spending time with social bookmarking.

That's right. Social bookmarking is the natural progression of the most basic justification for the Internet--information acquisition.

Moreover, unless you think Google will somehow outsmart every genius SEO specialist (white hat or black) in the very near future, you better be prepared to make social bookmarking work for you.

So, What Are Social Bookmarking Sites?

You may be more familiar with the names of some of the already-hot social bookmarking sites than you are the actual mechanics of the phenomena. Stripped down to its core, social bookmarking is a means by which a group can categorize and locate information based on its own evolving taxonomy. In other words, it's very collaborative and a little unstructured.

Users "tag" content and the content is "bookmarked" for all to see based on those tags. That kind of information categorization is sometimes referred to as "folksonomy," a hybrid word referring to regular "folks" and "taxonomy," a method of organization.

The whole process is incredibly democratic. Whereas the search engines use top-down approach to sorting and filing data (the program algorithm shows people what it "thinks"), social bookmarking is a bottom-up, grassroots system wherein users tell other users what they think and something of a consensus eventually forms.

To those new to the idea, that may sound like information organization anarchy. In a way, it is rather chaotic. That's its greatest pitfall, in fact.

However, social bookmarking systems actually perform quite well over time. Organizational patterns naturally develop and the constant human editorial "touch" creates a level of certainty and is grounded in user expectations.

Social bookmarking works as a method of organizing, and providing access to, information. Remember, in the end, that's what it's all about. It provides users with a way to see through the search engine games and to avoid individual biases that wither as part of a greater collective whole emerges.

Its popularity, however, isn't just in its ability to make information retrieval easier. There is also an almost subconscious attraction to the community participation and the very human nature of the entire process. Although people use social bookmarking as a way of finding what they want, they also develop an interest and attachment to the process that makes them less likely to utilize other methods.

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