How to Use Social Bookmarking to Drive Traffic to Your Website Many corporations and small businesses have one or more websites catering to their products or services. Individuals also tend to maintain their own personal websites, whether it is for personal branding or preserving celebrity status. Times have changed in regards to website discovery. It used to be that you were able to build a website, and you would find visitors with relative ease. Now, it is much more difficult, and search engines have incorporated various algorithms which require your website to be relevant to a keyword search. A website is also ranked by the number of credible, relevant websites that are linking to it(backlinks). Although these are only two factors that determine the discovery of a website, they are an important “jump start” to get your website exposed. In order to maximize the exposure of your website, social bookmarking sites are fastest way to gain a considerable amount of backlinks in a short period of time. What are social bookmarking sites? They are websites found online where people store or “bookmark” their favorite websites and share them with others. Are you familiar with the “favorites” folder on your web browser? Well, social bookmarking sites work the same way, except your favorite sites are stored online. Social bookmarking sites allow you to store your favorite sites – in this case, your websites – categorize them, and share them with the millions of visitors to the bookmarking site. Some of the most popular sites are digg.com, technorati.com, mixx.com and reddit.com. How can social bookmarking sites help to promote your website? Well, all you need to do is register an account with one of these sites, and start bookmarking. All you will need to do is enter in the URL you want to promote, provide an enticing headline and keyword-rich description, fill in some keywords or tags and that's all. Some sites even let you categorize your entry, so if you have a website about weight loss, you could file it under the relevant category.  Simply put, social bookmarking can bring a considerable amount of traffic to your website faster than a user finding it in a search engine. What makes social bookmarking sites so powerful, you may ask? Search engines use algorithms and other criteria in order to make your website appear on the front page. Even with the best SEO(search engine optimization), it can take up to a few years for your website to be discovered.  With social bookmarking, your website is voted as relevant by others. If your website is informative and relevant to the subject matter, other users will bookmark your website, and the trend will go viral. If your website catches on, you will be on the first page for your category in much less time than it would be in a search engine.