There are scores of social bookmarking sites, each with their individual quirks, slight differences and varying degree of active users. However the one piece of online marketing gold which most popular services possess is the potential to significantly increase web traffic. Web pages that are entered onto social bookmarking sites are indexed on popular search engines; in turn your socially bookmarked web page will appear in search when queried by potential customers. Also, ultimately the increased frequency of your sites web pages on social bookmarking sites will lead to an increase in your sites ranking for relevant search terms.

How?...Backlinks. While many companies happily pay for quality backlinks in order to increase their search visibility, top social bookmarking sites get high-quality links indexed for free! Essentially the more social bookmarking sites your content can be found on, the more positive the effect on your web presence.

Using social bookmarking as a marketing tool can be likened to hiring a tireless content seeder. The services work around the clock, continuously feeding search engines newly added links. Even better news is that content referred from social bookmarking sites are placed at higher priority than other websites in order to index new content.

Strengthening of business relationships can also be achieved through social bookmarking or alternatively, taking the idea a step further new business relationships can be formed. Use of social bookmarking as a collaborative effort between your company and partners or resellers can help to collectively spread the word about your businesses and help assert your respective brand identities.

The highly organised nature of content which is socially bookmarked will be of benefit to businesses which are diverse or offer a number of services. Due to the manner in which search engines index information, the likelihood of your content being found from specific search terms will increase. In effect social bookmarking not only increases the amount of traffic to your web site but also helps to ensure that the ‘quality’ of traffic you attract is high.

If you are looking for web traffic use of social bookmarking is highly recommended. Popular bookmarking services include StumbleUpon, Digg, del.icio.us and Yahoo! My web.