Social bookmarking is an online activity where people are free to edit and manage web documents and pages by bookmarking them.
While reading a physical paper book you can use bookmarks to mark the page where you left reading. In the same way, when you find web pages that are important for your personal or professional uses, you can save them as a bookmark and come back to them where they will be waiting for you in the bookmarks section.
One of the most advantageous features of social bookmarking is you can easily find them and help others find them as well by adding the tags and keywords.
When you find an important web page that is not only helpful to you but you feel will also help the others, you can either add keywords as the hashtags or tag the page into a particular category.
The next time someone searches for the same thing you searched for, they will be spared the inconvenience of browsing through unnecessary web pages just to find the right one because thank you for your little efforts, search has been made easy and efficient.
To make it more convenient, you are also allowed to vote on the bookmarks on some platforms. And one inherent feature in the algorithm of all the bookmarking sites is related to the popularity of the web pages. The webpage with the highest number of tags and keywords appears on the top.
The entire system works on kind of ranking system like this to make sure users see the most popular tags and keywords first. Sometimes they work as better search engines than the actual search and that is why they are often described as Intelligent Search Engines.
As the tool for SEO, getting tagged and bookmarked on the bookmarking sites should be a priority because these sites are in trend right now and are considered to be the most trusted and independent tools for expressing personal views.
These sites are not as popular worldwide as social media but that is where their success lies. The leading bookmarking sites include Reddit, Pinterest, Twitter, Dribbble, and Digg.
What makes them an occasional alternative for web browsers is their ability to allow the user to share the bookmarks even externally which is not a regular feature on most web browsers.
Unlike local bookmarking social, where a link has to be prepared in the file before you can share a bookmark, social bookmarking allows you to share them without these inconvenient methods.