What is Social Bookmarking? – Social Bookmarking is similar to social networking in the sense that you have a profile but with less social interaction. Main focus is for users to store, organise, search, and manage bookmarks of web pages on the Internet Websites – Digg, StumbleUpon, Delicious, Reddit & More.

The idea being that if you like a website then you can bookmark it and write a description of the content, feel or just why you like it, this is then available to others who can see what has been written about the site and they may then choose to visit it themselves and can in turn add their own comments on the site to the ever growing list.

Using Social Bookmarking to promote your business – Social Bookmarking can be used in one of two ways depending on the features of the social bookmarking website. You can either bookmark your website as a whole, where you can write a short review of your website or promote specific pages such as news articles and blog posts about your business, in the hope that others interested in the same things will visit your site and leave a positive review about it.

How Does This Benefit Me? – Most popular news stories are placed on the main pages of the website for all to see and in RSS feeds. You can benefit from the viral marketing effect, where a news story grows online before eventually making it to the normal media outlets.

Social Bookmarking users put web pages in different categories by tagging them. Users can then browse these categories and share bookmarks with friends, both of which increase traffic to your website. Web pages that haven’t been found by the search engines can be added to social bookmarking networks and start receiving traffic immediately.

The Internet has meant that academics can now have their work published quickly and easily either on article websites or on blogs.  Which is a good thing right?  Well apparently not.  An article featured in The Guardian has reported that search engine optimisation is killing the creativity of these articles because of the need to be found in search engines like Google. 

When writing articles it makes sense to include keywords and phrases in the title and the text to help it be found by the search engines but this doesn’t mean you have to repeat the same things over and over again.  Yes, you will need keywords in there but as long as everything you write is related to the topic then you don’t need to have a boring, wordy title.  The article uses the following quote to show this point.

“SEO can, however, make articles tedious to read. A headline that once read “Of mice and men” for a study that discussed the suitability of mice when testing drugs for humans might now say “Suitability of mice for in vivo drug testing” or something even more jargon-laden.”

Well I have already come up with a title that is creative and suitable for the SEO.  Man or Mouse? Are Mice Really Suitable For In Vivo Testing?  The other complaint mentioned in the article is that social bookmarking is being used as a method for the articles to gain popularity and this has turned it into more of a popularity contest, where as it used to be about the best report.  This is just a sign of the times and I know people fear change but yes, you are going to have to market your academic reports online if you want to be found in the search engines.  This may take add a bit of time to your report and may require some prior planning but as long as you use the SEO work sensibly then it shouldn’t effect your creativity or originality.

It has been reported in the last couple of days that there has been an increase of teenagers trying to hack into websites and to collect credit card details.  It has been said that the teenagers have been exchanging ready made hacking and phishing kits in online forums as well as credit card numbers and have been using basic search engine optimisation skills to.

Most of the malware that these teenagers have been producing is used to try and gather data from social bookmarking and networking websites like Myspace, Facebook and StumbleUpon.  The teenagers then tend to move into making phishing software in order to try and create their own scams to make money.  The only problem the teenagers have been facing is that most of their programming skills are really bad, making it easy to find out where the virus have come from and to put a stop to them.   It is a shame that these teenagers are using SEO to try and make money by breaking the law when they would probably stand a better chance using their SEO skills to make money from online advertising and affiliate deals.