First of all, let’s understand what social book marking is. Social book marking is a service that lets a web surfer bookmark their favorite sites, pictures or pages and store them all in the one convenient place online.

Book marked sites are tagged with certain keywords and when surfers are looking for saved sites, they only need to put in the associated keywords and instantly have their favorite sites at their fingertips.

Some social book marking services allow surfers to vote on how helpful the tagged pages of others are, so that people looking for the same information can see the most popular picks from other people. That probably has a lot to do with why they are called ‘social’ bookmarks, because other surfers can interact or choose what is good and what isn’t.

There is also an added option in social book marking that allows you to make all of your favorites public to others, and that is the interesting part about social book marking for marketers or webmasters.

What This Means For Marketers and webmasters If you are a marketer or Webmaster looking for free targeted traffic, then social book marking is the new way to generate it. With search engines dictated by which website has the most keywords or score well with search engine criterion, but have nothing in them for their readers and customers, means that, often, surfers are left to look for other ways to get quality useful information about a subject of interest.

This need for quality information has paved the way for social book marking. Surfers can make their favorite picks public, vote on how good the pages are and allow other surfers to look at their picks. This service is available to anyone, even those who are looking for traffic rather than information.

Marketers or website owners who have quality information, great products and are willing to play by the rules by not making the system spammy, can sign up for social book marking. They can make their picks public and place all of their links to articles, blog postings and website pages in their bookmarks, with targeted keywords as the tags.

If your tagged pages are interesting and useful, other surfers will tag the same pages in their bookmarks. This means that your book marked site or page will continue to increase in popularity.

Social book marking is very effective, but some patience will be needed with them, as results can vary. But, on a good day, you could be well rewarded with your efforts as you watch a stream of free-targeted traffic flow onto your site complements of your social book marking efforts.

Paul Heitman is a recognized authority on social bookmarking. Set up your own free account at http://www.optimiz.us and start driving traffic to your site(s) today!