Social Bookmarking For Ranking

Net users are finally taking searching and finding into their own hands. The concept of saving, tagging and sharing bookmarks or “[tag]social bookmarking[/tag]” is not simply a Web 2.0 gimmick or just a convenient way to access your Favorites. Social bookmarking is poised to become the real social search and it promises to be the next frontier for performance marketing retailers and all Internet marketers. The term social networks is a fancy way of saying that real people connect with other real people online.

[tag]Social search[/tag] sounds like the greatest thing since Google if you’re a searcher who is sick of searching through spam. After searching through endless spam sites, it’s a breath of fresh air to zoom into those tag clouds where people and not search engine algorithms are considered the best judges of quality and relevancy. Quality sites far outnumber the junk and you find yourself wondering why you bother with dubious relevance and results from the Big 3 search engine powers.

If you’re an Internet marketer or a retailer with vision and imagination one look at the [tag]social bookmarking [/tag] scene reveals a map of a vast wilderness filled with frontier-style opportunities. Many of you know that there are online markets you can’t reach with PPC or organic search because even though they need your product, they don’t know it yet. They aren’t looking for it by typing query strings into a search box. Social bookmarking offers the possibility of tactfully and intelligently touching those markets without having to compete against SEQ-spam sites.

Many see thousands of people moving their Favorites from their local computer to social bookmarking sites as just another Web 2.0 fad, but when you visit sites like Technorati and Ma.gnolia.com, you see much more. It’s a shared environment in which word-of-mouth marketing can flourish in the ultimate human edited link exchange. At this instant, you can insert your online presence in a thousand different places and do it without interrupting or alienating consumers.

As a innovative retailer, you must penetrate into social bookmarking spaces to gain consumer trust in the future. Although Google, Yahoo and MSN would have you believe otherwise, typing words into a search engine query box is not the end-all when people make buying decisions. A recent study published by the nonprofit Pew Internet & American Life Project showed that close to half of respondents only use search engines a few times a week and two-thirds could walk away from search engines without upsetting their lives a great deal. Another study in January 2006 showed that 34 percent of respondents said the Internet helped them find advice and support from other people and concluded that: “The Internet helps build social capital and that it supports social networks.” Social capital means that human relationships can be a tangible business asset.