Social Bookmarking Sites

Website traffic is not all about search engines. Yes, it is true that search engine typically brings in most of the traffic to a site. However, there is a portion of website traffic is due to social bookmarking and participation in social networking.

The number one social networking site that refers the most traffic is Facebook. This is not surprising since Facebook is the leader in social networking.

Second is Twitter. And third is most likely LinkedIn. These are the top three most popular social networking sites (in the United States) as reported by eBizMBA.com. These three in this order - Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn - is also what readers of an informal poll on BuildABetterBlog.com reported as the social networking sites that refers the most traffic.

After the third place social networking site, it is not so clear which social networking sites are next. It depends on who you ask and what reports you are looking at and what country you are referring to.

However, a new social networking site to watch is Google Plus which within a month of its launch has already have over 10 million users and 1 billion items shared each day. People share things with the Google +1 button which is integrated with Google Plus. So you can share links and other interesting web sites with your circle of friends on Google Plus.

The Google +1 button and the Facebook Like button is a social vote as to what is good on the web. These activities are considered social bookmarking because people can have the ability to see all the links that you have Google +1'ed on your Google profile or Google Plus page.

The classic social bookmarking site is delicious.com and claims to be the "biggest collection of bookmarks in the universe". Digg.com is a list of links that are hot and popular. StumbleUpon is a way for people to discover links and new sites. Many tweets on Twitter are essentially sharing links.

You may ask what is so special about sharing links. People share links all the time by posting links in blogs and so forth. The difference is that with social networking site, you are more apt to click on the links if they are shared from a friend that you know (either a real friend in real life or a virtual friend online). This is how news of your website spread.

In order to get the most traffic referrals out social networking sites, you have to participate on the social networking site and post quality comments on a regular basis. Then people will see your exposure and click to your profile page. This is where you want to configure your profile page with a link to your website so that people can then be directed to your website.

As you gain friends or followers, you can occasionally post a link to an article on your site. Some social networking sites allow you to self promote and others do not. For example, Twitter lets you tweet about your own site; but StumbleUpon does not like for you to "discover" your own site. Needless to say having a lot of friends and followers will be helpful in this regards.

Social networking and social bookmarking is going to be an increasing source of traffic in the years to come as the web becomes more of a social web rather than an information/search web

Some other well known popular Social Bookmarking sites (besides the above 3) are as follows;

• Reddit.com
• Technorati.com
• Blinklist.com