Social Bookmarking websites rely on the democratic nature of the web to structure information in such a way that is easily digestible and requires less effort than before. Such sites, including reddit.com, netscape.com and digg.com allow their massive user base to vote on web pages and as those web pages gain more votes, their position in the site increases. As a marketing tool, the power of such websites is threefold. On one level you gain direct traffic from the sites that are linking to you, on another level you gain brand exposure and acknowledgement that you are an accredited website, while on the third level you increase your websites position in the search engines through the links that you attain from the social bookmarking and other sites that may link to your webpage after seeing it there. The linking part is the most important bi-product of social bookmarking services; the other advantages are just ancillary.

A social bookmarking company will work with you to identify the most important pages on your website, then they will gain links for those pages from social bookmarking websites. They will ensure that your content gets submitted with appropriate anchor text to your website, and inside the correct category of the social bookmarking site, ensuring that you gain maximum exposure and optimum benefit from the links that they attain. A social bookmarking service provider will also maintain a list of social bookmarking sites through which to submit your website, and they will most likely update this regularly to ensure that your website and internal pages are always being submitted to the sites that pass the most link equity and that have large enough user bases to add value to your website.

When working with a social bookmarking provider, it is imperative that the company employs only manual techniques in promoting your website. Should you work with a provider that uses software as part of their process of promoting your site, then not only will your links be removed from the sites, your domain will also be banned; meaning that your chances of being able to leverage bookmarking sites will be removed indefinitely: giving your competitors a clear competitive advantage going into the future. Professional bookmarking companies will have registered and trusted accounts on bookmarking sites, and will not attempt to provide multiple votes from the same IP address in an attempt to game the algorithm of the sites.

When looking for a bookmarking service you should look for a company that has experience in either search engine optimization or submission services and find out if they have evolved their offerings to allow their clients to gain a competitive advantage through leveraging social bookmarking sites. Because social bookmarking is such a new and fast moving space; companies specializing specifically in social bookmarking sites have yet to gain any traction in the marketplace. Those that have thus far have attempted to use software to increase margins, however have done so at the detriment of their offerings.