Thousands of people have put social bookmarking to powerful use for off-page optimization plus various marketing strategies. Bookmarking is seriously in use by online marketers for acquiring backlinks and more traffic. Yet the smarter IM businesses will use certain bookmark sites as they are meant to be used which is also a strategy for continued growth and development. On the other hand we do realize people are all different, and some people prefer certain methods over others. Yes, bookmarks can be stored in your account at bookmarking sites, although they have become community centers for lots of people. You can designate tags (keywords) to your bookmarks, and that basically has SEO benefits but a lot depends on the particular site.

Several years ago the more popular bookmark sites made all their links to nofollow which had a huge effect on bookmark rankings. Seems people were able to rank highly from places like Digg and a few others. No, I do not have any secret information about the real reason those sites modified to nofollow. It does make for fascinating speculation but not terribly significant at this point.

Even so there is a lot you can do with certain approaches at these highly trafficked sites. What can result in issues with so many profiles for backlinking is those profiles are not properly written or anything resembling high quality. You’ll find a few more strategically minded marketers who take the time and create high quality bookmark profiles. Profiles that have looks of being legitimate will do a greater job for you and have a great chance of passing a review. This really is the best way to go for many reasons, and you will have the opportunity to use them for effective bookmarking for a long time.

Furthermore, a good profile with solid content is often used for RSS feed creation which is great. You can market your RSS feed at other places and RSS web directories. You can include your various links plus targeted content in your feeds, too. Just make certain you provide exceptional content in your feeds and avoid being spammy with the links in them.

Just look at your feeds, and you will know when you are going too far with promotional links, etc. You can achieve a lot if you have solid associations in place at bookmarking sites. You can have a few minutes every day to distribute your good will at these sites, and that won’t take very long plus it is a good investment decision.

Ultimately, how you approach making use of bookmarking sites in your own business is your call. We all possibly realize most marketers only desire the off page SEO value with bookmarking sites, and that is cool. Perhaps you can try it at just one powerful bookmarking site and see how you like the results.