SEO professionals are constantly searching for ways to get sites ranked and indexed better. We all know that backlinks are “life blood” that get a site ranked higher in the search engines. The latest technique is using social bookmarking to get one-way backlinks.

What is social bookmarking?

Social bookmarking is utilizing a web service, where users create a public repository of bookmarks pertaining to sites that they like.

The concept of social bookmarking dates back to 1996 with the launch of itList, followed by services like Blink Search and others. But the popularity of Social Bookmarking increased with the advent of the most popular bookmarking site to date, del.icio.us.

To the uninitiated, these bookmarks may seem like geekspeak, but from an SEO standpoint these can build you a massive amount of backlinks which seem to originate from authority sites.

So how does one go about utilizing these social bookmarking services?

You simply sign up for an account and then post your URLs. Each post requires you to enter the URL, a title for the anchor text, a short description and of course the tags under which you want your link bookmarked.

A tag is a keyword which acts like a subject or category. Each user ‘tags’ a web page or image using his own unique tag. An image or web page may have multiple tags that identify it. Web pages and images with identical tags are then linked together and users may use the tag to search for similar web pages and images.

Most of these services give you a personalized bookmark page that has all your bookmarks displayed, and though when you start out the PageRank of your personalized page might be zero, it slowly builds up over time.

An additional important point worth looking at is that each tag page on the site has a PageRank which gets passed on to your site.

For example the page for the tag “advertising” has a PR of 3.

Below is a list of various services that you can utilize to boost your PageRank:

1) del.icio.us: This one of the most popular of all social bookmarking sites and has a huge PR of 8.

2) Digg: Digg, with PR of 7, is a technology news website where users submit stories for review, but rather than allowing an editor to decide which stories go on the homepage, the users do.

3) Reddit, PR 7

4) Blinklist, PR 6

5) Simpy, PR 6

A great way to get visitors to your sites to bookmark your website is using Socializer. This service provides a small snippet of code that when added to your site creates a special link on your site. When any visitor clicks on this link they are provided with a large list of social bookmarking sites which they can add your site to.

To make it simple for blogs:

1. Use this button:
2. Created your custom URL: http://ekstreme.com/socializer/?url=http://my url&title=my title
3. Use the image and URL to create a bookmark to your own blog.

A WordPress plugin called Sociable also enables social bookmarking in case your website is a WordPress blog.

Thus, using social bookmarking you can improve the ranking of your website and gain valuable PR.