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Social bookmarking sites are an extremely valuable tool for those who are looking at all of their small business marketing options. Of course, in order to fully take advantage of the results that social bookmarking sites can yield, it is important to look into social media optimization, and to understand that it is up to you to make it easy for your site visitors to bookmark your articles, news, press releases, blog posts, podcasts and images.

Of course, before you will find that you are able to take advantage of both the results of social bookmarking for directing traffic to your website and making sure that you will be looking into the appropriate social media optimization of your site, you need to have a sense of which sites are the big players and of why social bookmarking sites are important.

When you’re talking about social bookmarking sites, there are a few sites that will almost immediately come to mind. The first of these sites is Digg.com. When someone Diggs your story, your press release or blog post, they will be able to bookmark the site, include a description of what they read and to include some keywords to characterize the post. Another common social bookmarking site is Propeller – a site that is connected with the AOL network.

Perhaps the greatest advantage to social bookmarking sites is that, because they are used so frequently by so many people, they are an important part of a solid search engine optimization strategy; social bookmarking is an opportunity to get one way, incoming links to your site from websites with a high Page Rank. Add to that the importance of appropriate tagging, and what you’ll find is that the more your pages, articles and posts are bookmarked, the more likely it is for your prospects to find and visit your site.

Simply put, social bookmarking is not just about making a list of your favorite sites and news so that you can find them again later; social bookmarking is a chance to connect with others who have similar interests, to network with others in your field and – at least to some extent – to see what your competitors are doing well.

There are a number of reasons why you should include social bookmarking sites when you are thinking about what small business marketing steps you should be taking. Likewise, there are a number of key things that you can do to take advantage of social media optimization for your website.

First, if you do not have a blog, start writing one – and working to drive traffic to it. Take advantage of search media optimization for your website by making an effort to make it easy for your site visitors to add a link to your site to the social bookmarking site of their choice. Likewise, when you have a strong profile on a social bookmarking site – whether you focus your efforts on Delicious, Propeller, Digg or even Stumbleupon – make sure that your site visitors can find and join your network.

The key to benefiting from social media optimization and social bookmarking sites is simple: make it as easy as possible for your site visitors to help you out by bookmarking your information. When you do, you’ll find that more of your visitors will bookmark your site and that you will be able to benefit from the attention you get.